The remains of an empire in ruin: Remembering torture and the colonial state of exception in Jérôme Ferrari’s Où j’ai laissé mon âme

Abstract

Abstract Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the use of torture during the Algerian War of Independence has been the subject of renewed controversy in France, raising questions about the traumatic reverberations of France’s colonial past in the present. While scholars often address the violence of torture by analysing what it accomplishes, this article is concerned with the cognitive, discursive and ideological conditions under which torture becomes permissible. This article suggests that the systematic practice of torture is contingent on the construction of a perceptive reality in which the normative dictates of law and morality have been suspended or no longer apply. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, this article seeks to understand the progressive normalization of torture under the historical paradigm of the state of exception. Thinking paradigmatically about the past not only reveals the concealed sociopolitical coordinates underlying a specific historical experience, but also constitutes a broader historical context, producing forms of intelligibility that cut across temporal and territorial boundaries. Through a reading of Jérôme Ferrari’s novel Où j’ai laissé mon âme (2010), this article addresses the ethical and epistemological issues that arise when torture is remembered as a paradigmatic rendering of the state of exception.