Testimony, Violence, and Silence – An Examination of Agamben and His Critics

You’re not allowed to speak much, and you don’t know which language to speak when you can. Recovery from trauma is finding the words.”
– Rebecca Mott (2021), writer, poet and survivor of prostitution

A philosophical investigation on ‘unspeakable violence’

In 2021, thanks to Canadian feminist nurses and activists Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald, I discovered the grim reality of torture in a domestic setting: not domestic violence, but domestic torture committed by fathers against daughters, men against women. Learning that a feminist publisher refused to edit their book because it was ‘too brutal to read’, made me want to investigate the expression ‘unspeakable violence’.

What is it about violence, and male violence against women and girls more specifically that makes it so difficult to talk about? How come the most recent and memorable feminist ‘moment, the #MeToo movement, started with a simple tweet? Why do men resort to guns for ‘liberation’ while us women’s slightest opening of our mouths suffices to send shockwaves around the world?

You can read my master’s thesis on the subject on Dignity’s webpage — the feminist journal edited by Donna M. Hughes. Below are extracts.

Full article available here: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol7/iss2/5/.

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I

Why is it difficult for a survivor of a man-made atrocity to testify? The survivor lived a near-death experience. She could have died, but she did not. The near antinomy shows what the survivor needs to bridge: death and life.

Why am I scrutinising the survivor of atrocity and not survivors of a mishap? While survivors of disease or natural catastrophes are harmed, they are not necessarily wronged. Briefly, harm is not always the result of an immoral act—wronging is. Harm can be reduced to a matter of well-being, while wronging relates to morality and justice. The state of survival discussed here directly results from someone else’s voluntary immoral action. It relates to matters of agency and human responsibility.

The atrocity under scrutiny here, torture, is an extreme form of desubjectification—the removal of the person’s subjectivity—and dehumanisation. Sophie Oliver (2010) understands the process of dehumanisation as one of loss of identity and exclusion from the community of humans. The two are at play with torture.

…

A typical exclusion from the community of humans is through animalistic and mechanic metaphors (Oliver, 2010). A tortured woman testified: “I didn’t even feel human; I felt like an animal, I felt like a pile of shit. I was only a thing to my torturers” (Sarson & MacDonald, 2021, p. 82). Another survivor was told she was “a nothing, worthless, stupid, ugly, bad, fucking shit, fat, or a slut” (Sarson & MacDonald, 2021, p. 231).

Some women did not even know they had skin when Sarson and MacDonald first met them. One was “interested to see what living in [her] own skin feels like” (2021, p. 233). The process of dehumanisation is such that it brings about the annihilation of the women: they barely know they exist. Women are turned into nothing from a fully fleshed (and skinned!) being. The difficulty for the survivor of atrocities should be evident now: how can “a nothing” speak?

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If we do not bear in mind the oppressive conditions under which atrocities are enacted, we risk forgetting that loss of the ability to speak is not collateral damage but part and parcel of the process of dehumanisation. Sophie Oliver (2010) demonstrates that exclusion from the community of humans is enacted by exclusion from the “speech community” (p. 92). Torture does that through the infliction of pain.

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II 

“There are no words for it” is used metaphorically but it is in fact, quite literal. That is the idea behind the concept of hermeneutical injustice developed by Miranda Fricker (2007) which could be defined as unfair interpretations. Her core idea is that there is an injustice in not being able to convey a significant aspect to one’s social life. This happens because the powerful structure the world according to their own needs. They shape what she calls collective social understandings (p. 147) or the way we make sense of events. The powerless on the contrary, do not own what I would call the “means of expression”: they lack the verbal capacity to analyse the world on their own terms and express it accordingly.

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Having the right intelligible words will not solve the problem. To understand why we must return to Rae Langton’s (2009) thesis. The ability to do specific speech acts, the “authoritative illocutions” depends on the speaker’s “position of authority in a rel- evant domain” (p. 37). For example, the slave cannot order her master. She can tell him to shut up as much as she wants, but she is not in a position to do so. I suggested earlier that female torture survivors are deprived of authority because of identity. power. “Some speech determines the kind of speech there can be, ” affirms Langton (2009, p. 53). If the relevant authority/ies state/s that there is no such thing as torture, then there is no torture: there can be no space for a subaltern speech undermining the dominant one. His word against hers. His word does not have the same weight as hers because of hierarchical positions of authority in both speech and sexual politics. The voice of authority does not “speak for her”, it speaks over her. What does a little girl know about torture? We know that in reality, it is in her quality of superstes that she is in thebest position to tell what happened, but her audience would have to believe her to recognise her authoritative position.

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Rebecca Mott (2021), writer and survivor of prostitution, who inspired this section, perfectly summarises it: “you’re not allowed to speak much, and you don’t know which language to speak when you can. Recovery from trauma is finding the words”.

The victims of annihilating atrocities are thrown in the ditch, and they keep falling on the way up. The linguistic exclusion that put them there in the first place keeps them captive. Unable, not allowed to tell, and not heard, survivors are further excluded from humanity. Disbelief, as we will see now, isolates them even more.

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III

Survivors bring to the “normal world” (Agamben, 2016, p. 54) “the atrocious news” that it is possible to be degraded “beyond imagination” (p. 63). David Rousset (1965) correctly talks about the “Concentration universe” (emphasis mine). Susan Brison (2003) poetically asserts that “rape victims face the cataclysmic destruction of their world alone, surrounded by people who find it hard to understand what is so distressing” (p. 15). Annette Wievorka (2013) explains the Yiddish hurbn (p. 45), destruction, to denote the crumbling of the world of Jewish victims. Similarly, Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson insist on how much helping victims of torture heal changed their “worldview forever”, saying that discovering torture was “crash-landing” into a new “criminal co-culture” (Sarson & MacDonald, 2021, p. 17).

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Refusal to believe can also take place because of a clash of worldviews. “Some [beliefs] determine the sort of [beliefs] there can be” (Langton, 2009, p. 53). In his philosophical inquiry on testimony, Robert Audi (2006) observes that “we all have background beliefs that constrain what we can accept” (p. 27). As I see it, the dominating belief today, which makes it so difficult to believe female victims of male torture, is Voltaire’s Candide: “everything’s going for the best in the best of possible worlds” (Voltaire, 1759, n.p.).

C. A. J. Coady (1994) is guilty as charged when he writes in Testimony: A Philosophical Study that “one need not be persuaded that child abuse is as universal as often claimed” (p. 36) to admit that children’s testimonies should be given more credit. This sentence could feature in Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1978), for Coady simultaneously recognises and minimises male sexual violence. It is easy to acknowledge some sexual violence, but if we acknowledged all of it, we would realise that being a victim of male sexual violence for a woman or a girl is the norm, not the exception (Terragni, 2018).

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IV

Given the role of ideology, I would like to return to the discussion on hermeneutical injustice, which we can frame as the product of an ideology. Coded language, in particular, is not limited to the individuals personally involved in the torture but is prevalent in the wider culture dominated by the same ideology that renders torture both possible and taboo: this is the influence of Planet Atrocity. Female survivors of torture evolve in a culture where Marquis de Sade is a “writer,” not a “torturer”, where leather/whips/chains are part of a “lifestyle”. A culture that condemns torture in Donbas, Ukraine, but welcomes “fetish” societies in universities. “I’ll let you lick the lollipop,” sings the rapist rapper 50 Cent (2005). What fathers do to their daughters is masqueraded as “BDSM”.

In this context of widespread ideological hermeneutical injustice, there is another way the illocution of female survivors of torture misfires: it becomes pornography. Everything Rae Langton (2009) says about Linda Boreman—Linda Lovelace in the pornographic film Deep Throat—who was violated in/through pornography is entirely applicable to torture. Linda Boreman’s testimony misfired because a woman who has been in pornography that tries to denounce pornography at the time of pornography is saying something pornographic. Her illocution—denouncing, warning, testifying misfires completely—never mind the perlocution. It is “replaced by a force that is its antithesis” (Langton, 2009, p. 59). (…) In a patriarchal context, pornography is the “secret sharing of a collective delusion” (Felman & Laub, 1992, p. 83): the product and vehicle of an ideology that makes it impossible to see things for what they are.

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Violence is like tectonic plates: it is the foundation of the Earth’s crust, and it becomes visible only when it erupts to the surface. Only acute episodes of annihilation are given historical status. Antisemitism has a long history, but the lagers can be dated. What can be dated can be historicised: history is, after all, “a written narrative constituting a continuous chronological record of important or public events” (emphasis mine, (Old English Dictionary, n.d.). “Dated” and “history” also mean over: what has begun can end.

Torture is too unknown to be dated. Rape is too old to be dated. What cannot be dated hardly becomes history. Moreover, male violence against women is too repetitive to be deemed historical. When one man is raping one woman (aged 16-59) every six minutes in England and Wales alone (Rape Crisis, 2017), rape is not an acute historical atrocity but the norm, as mentioned earlier. The routine nature of male violence confers the appearance of tolerability. Its silent erosion of women covers the explosions resounding in our heads. Too widespread to be afforded special status, male violence against women and girls is reduced to anecdotal occurrence. Hence, Shoah historian Annette Wieviorka’s (2013) statement that rape is an “individual mishap” as opposed to “a historical event” (p. 178) comes as a punch in the guts. It hurts to read. Male violence against women is too diluted in time and space to gain the status of historical atrocity it deserves.

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