Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic by Erin Graff Zivin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic by Erin Graff Zivin Rolando Pérez Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic Northwestern UP, 2014 by Erin Graff Zivin Reading Erin Graff Zivin's thought-provoking book, Figurative Inquisitions, made me recall my own ghosts from the past: teaching Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, Edward Peter's Torture (from the same year, 1985), and of course Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the inspiration of much of the discussion of the topic at the time. And who can forget Foucault's description of Damiens, the "regicide's" torture and execution on the second of March of 1757, a horrific public event that went on for hours when the horses were unable to finish the job of drawing and quartering Damiens, and his limbs had to be hacked off at the sinews one by one. Then there was the famous photograph of the leng-tch'é (the death by a thousand cuts) performed on a Chinese man in 1905, and reproduced by Georges Bataille in The Tears of Eros. I mention these texts, writerly and visual, because in some ways they mirror Graff Zivin's objects of study in Figurative Inquisitions: from the productive side of the ontological problem of torture. I will explain shortly, but suffice it to say, that for now Graff Zivin's opening words to her Introduction, frame the way in which she articulates her notion of torture vis-à-vis, the [End Page 310] "marrano." She writes: "The main rationale offered by those who defend the practice of torture is that the use of physical and psychological abuse as part of the interrogation of prisoners guarantees the extraction of the truth" (3, my italics). Supporters of torture, as Zevin Graff reminds us, often argue that "it would be unethical to refrain from using torture if it were to save the lives of millions" (4); that is to say, if the truth (a-lêtheia) extracted from the prisoner was to save us all. And here, of course, the emphasis is on the definite article. With respect to the signifier "marrano," an invention of the Inquisition, the marrano or converso is suspected of withholding a truth, a secret; and his identity as a "New Christian" becomes the epistemological problem that torture seeks to solve. In short, the marrano's indeterminateness is what ballasts the paranoiac machine. "It is not possible to uncover the 'essence' of the New Christian, just as the 'true beliefs' of the political prisoner under Southern Cone dictatorships or the alleged terrorist in Abu Ghraib remain outside the grasp of the torturer, not because of the stubbornness of the prisoner or inefficiency of the torturer, but do to the indeterminacy of 'belief' itself," explains Graff Zivin (8). In this light, torture is a product of the seventeenth century philosophical transition from metaphysics to epistemology. Through torture, the question of being and appearance becomes a political and social problem. For after all, how can the torturer know, with any degree of certainty (clearly and distinctly) when the truth has been revealed? The torture of the marrano, argues Graff Zivin, "responds to the identitary instability of the New Christian subject, which eludes the established socioreligious categories of 'Jew" and 'Christian'" and "it aims to produce the identitary purity lacking in both New Christian and Old" (8). To that end, "Chapter 1: Aporias of Marranismo" begins with the following ideogram from Derrida's Aporias (1993 81): "[T]he secret keeps the Marrano even before the Marrano keeps it" (17). Yet, more importantly, what precedes Derrida's conclusion, is precisely what explains Graff Zivin's use of the term "figurative." In other words, figuratively speaking, a "marrano" is an signifier, a place holder (x +1) for the Other who, wittingly or not, withholds a secret, simply because he or she has been deemed the impure Other. And that is precisely why for Graff Zivin the truth extracted from the "marrano," is the truth extracted from anyone--be it Jew, Christian, or Muslim--who has historically been deemed "Other": from the Jews of the Spanish and...