Torture, Exile, and the Citizen

Abstract

Machiavelli wrote The Prince and the Discourses in exile, after three weeks being imprisoned and tortured because he was falsely suspected of being involved in an assassination attempt against the Medici. Reading those works, and particularly the former, through the light cast by torture, casts a new light on Machiavelli’s argument about new regimes and on the use of torture in the US foreign policy in the twenty-first century. Drawing on Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, the chapter argues that torture is designed as an ideological process, a way to disrupt potential political communities and to replace them with audiences for the “fiction of power” and authority that new regimes create through physical torture and the displacement of populations.