Chapter Eleven: Damnatio Memoriae

Abstract

At this point, I need to resume my thinking through the active transmutation of body politics and the formation of the posthuman body together as the site of corporeal contestation and examine the manner in which the trauma of torture is encountered as evidence of this bodily transmutation into fragments and ruins. On the site of that broken body, the tortured body of a state violence, the site of a bodily transmutation of political resistance, I propose the Reconstruction of an emancipatory conception of the nation and its politics. The evidence of torture in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic dismantles the ruling regime from within with the broken and abused body as evidence. The tortured body of one here becomes the tortured body of all, and if we are to think through the decupling of the nation from the state, on the site of these tortured bodies we are witness to the unhinging of any claim to political legitimacy.

An earlier draft of this chapter appeared as “Damnatio Memoriae” in Julie A. Carlson and Elisabeth Weber (Eds), Speaking about Torture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012): 140–161.