Está en la página 1de 31

+(,121/,1(

Citation: 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 2006

Content downloaded/printed from


HeinOnline (http://heinonline.org)
Wed Jun 3 17:54:10 2009

-- Your use of this HeinOnline PDF indicates your acceptance


of HeinOnline's Terms and Conditions of the license
agreement available at http://heinonline.org/HOL/License

-- The search text of this PDF is generated from


uncorrected OCR text.

-- To obtain permission to use this article beyond the scope


of your HeinOnline license, please use:

https://www.copyright.com/ccc/basicSearch.do?
&operation=go&searchType=0
&lastSearch=simple&all=on&titleOrStdNo=1320-0968
A NOTE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRIME
OF TORTURE

Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg'

'All questioning is a forcible intrusion. When used as an instrument of power it is like a knife
cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants
to touch it and bring it to light. He sets to work on the internal organs with the sureness of a
surgeon. But he is a special kind of surgeon, one who keeps his victim alive in order to find
out more about him, and, instead of anaesthetizing, deliberately stimulates pain in certain
organs in order to find out what he wants to know about the rest of the body.' - Elias
Canetti1

'Torture is senseless violence, born in fear. The purpose of torture is not only the extortion
of confessions, of betrayal: the victim must disgrace himself, by his screams and his
2
submissions, like a human animal.' -Jean-Paul Sartre

1. TORTURE AND CRIME


Let's be clear.3 Torture is an international crime under all circumstances. Countries in which
torture is sanctioned are considered states that violate human rights - to the extent that they

Justin Clemens teaches in psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University. He is a member of the Lacan Circle of Melbourne,
and has published extensively on psychoanalysis and philosophy. Russell Grigg is a member of the Lacan Circle of
Melbourne, the Ecole de la Cause freudienne and the New Lacanian School. He lives in Melbourne where he practices
psychoanalysis and teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University. He is the translator of Lacan's
SeminarXtII, The Other Side of Poychoanaysis(Norton, 2005). Mailing address: Faculty of Arts, Deakin University, Burwood
Highway, Burwood VIC, 3125.
Canneti Elias Crowds andPower Stewart Carol (trans) Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1984 p 284.
2 Sartre Jean-Paul 'Preface' Alleg Henri TheQuestion CalderJohn (trans) Braziller New York 1958 p 23.
3 This article originated in a forum on 'The Crime of Torture' organised by the Psychoanalytic Studies program at Deakin
University, and held 25 June 2005 at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, the day preceding the International Day for
Torture Victims. Speakers included politicians, lawyers, civil rights activists, philosophers, sociologists, mental health and
other professionals working with the victims of torture: Lindsay Tanner, Patrick McGorry, Robert Sparrow, Paris
Aristotle, Brian Walters, Marius Smith, Stan van Hooft, Geoff Boucher, Matthew Sharpe, Lynne Alice, Ian Weeks, Les
Thomas and Max Charlesworth. The presentation dealt with a variety of issues thrown up by the recent revivification of
the alleged 'goods of torture.' Political, psychological, legal, philosophical and pragmatic questions were discussed in
detail, from a number of professional and personal perspectives. We would also like to thank Juliet Rogers for her help
and encouragement with this article, as well as our two anonymous referees, whose comments have enabled us to sharpen
our points, clarify our language, and, in some cases, saved us from errors.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 161 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAwJouRNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

may well be vernacularly denominated 'criminal states.' Every country has a legal and moral
obligation to prevent the use of torture. This includes prosecuting those who have engaged in
torture or otherwise supported its practice, discouraging other states from the use of torture, and,
if the acts have been committed outside their jurisdiction, to extradite the alleged perpetrator to a
state that has such jurisdiction.
The prohibitions against torture are so foundational that the states which sanction it are
sometimes pursued by a range of extra-legal measures, such as military intervention, economic
sanctions, ideological or humanitarian exertions. If torture does not in itself provide adequate legal
grounds for intervention by such extraordinary means, there is no question that evidence of
torture provides one of the strongest possible public supports for such intervention. If torture is
an individual criminal offence and not a state offence, the distinction has shown itself to be
difficult to maintain, one of the places where the difference between strictly legal concerns and
broader political ones is unavoidably blurred (for reasons we will examine below). There is no
distinction between sins of omission and sins of commission where torture is concerned; to
prevent the circumstances under which torture is carried out is a duty every bit as much as to
desist from torture itself.
For a long time even to discuss publicly the possible uses of torture - under any
circumstances whatsoever - has been close to unthinkable in Western states. Torture has been
understood as archaic, ineffective, antidemocratic, a sign of barbarity and a falling away from the
ideals of a civilised society. In the discussions leading up to the 1948 UniversalDeclarationof Human
Rights, the strictures dealing with the prohibition of torture were accepted without any dissent.
Article 7 of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Polifical Rights interdicts torture absolutely,
as well as certain other 'cruel, inhuman or degrading' practices from which torture is often legally,
conceptually and pragmatically distinguished. Unlike almost all other Articles of the Covenant,
Article 7 is 'non-derogable,' that is, there are no circumstances, however extreme, under which its
dictates might be circumvented or mitigated. 4 If the UN Convention against Torture introduced in
1984 was not ratified by all democratic nations, many of these nations had led the way on
promoting the letter and spirit of its articles. Moreover, the prohibition against torture is such
that it is considered a norm of customary international law, binding even states that have not
ratified the Convention. Human rights abuses, including the use of torture (e.g., in countries such
as China and Iraq) have frequently been grounds for considering democratic countries as morally
superior to non-democratic regimes. Moreover, when democratic states have themselves covertly
resorted to torture, this has been publicly considered an assault on democratic values and grounds
for pursuing those responsible.
Yet the prohibition against torture now appears not to be absolute. Today virtually all
Western states endorse this absolute prohibition, even as - as official images and documents
attest - some of them are prepared to entertain situations under which the prohibition is at best
relative. The denial of human rights and the failure to seriously investigate allegations of torture in
such places as Guantinamo Bay and Abu Ghraib suggest that torture may now not only be

4 As one of our anonymous referees added, this stricture also applies 'to some other articles in the ICCPR art 4(2) lists the
non-derogable provisions arts. 6, 7, 8(1) and (2), 11, 15, 16 and 18, and also non-discrimination art 4(1).'

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 162 2006


A NOTE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CIME OF TORTURE

considered acceptable under certain circumstances - but that it would almost be some kind of
dereliction of duty not to torture surpects.5 It is clearly not a matter of a 'few bad apples,' as the Bush
Administration claimed of torture allegations. 6 The U.S. academic Alan Dershowitz has engaged
in high-profile debates about torture, in which he has offered what he believes to be adequate
justifications for its limited but official use as a security measure; he has recently been supported
in an Australian context not only by other academics, but also by major legal, administrative and
political figures. 7 We believe that this tendency must be seriously resisted, not primarily on moral,
but on psychological and political grounds.

2. TORTURE, DEMOCRACY AND FREE SPEECH

There is an unbreakable link between democracy and the prohibition of torture. This link is at
once historical, political, and philosophical. Historically, the emergence of modern Western
democracies in the eighteenth century was bound up with a concerted international struggle
against the power of the sovereign to torture his subjects. Emblematic in this regard is a very
famous incident from eighteenth-century France. Damiens, convicted of the attempted murder of
Louis XV (with a small rusted penknife, mind), was publicly torn apart by horses after being
mutilated, burned with sulphur, and disembowelled. 8 In Michel Foucault's reconstruction of the
event, such spectacular torture had the function of exemplifying and legitimating the power of the
king. Torture for the Ancien Regime was at once an indispensable epistemological tool, ritual
observance, punishment, dissuasion and a show of justice - a sort of (negative) advertising
campaign pour encourager les autres.9 Torture was essentially a public device, whether pursued in
dungeons of interrogation where professional torturers would ply their trade and clerks would
note every unavailing scream, or inthe open execution grounds attended by large crowds.
Damiens's horrific execution would barely have raised eyebrows even a few decades
previously. Stephen Greenblatt memorably writes that Shakespeare's London.

5 See Greenberg Karen J and Dratel Joshua L (eds) The Torture Papers:the road to Abu GhraibLewis Anthony (intro)
Cambridge University Press New York 2005. For commentary, see Greenberg Karen J (ed) The Torture Debate in America
Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2006; Harbury Jennifer K Truth, Torture and the American Wa Goodman Amy
(foreword) Beacon Press Boston 2005; Strasser Steven (ed) The Abu GhraibInvestigationsWhitney Craig R.(intro)
PublicAffairs 2004.
6 'When the Abu Ghraib photographs were released, President Bush, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and others initialiv
condemned the abusive acts they depicted as the work of "a few bad apples,"' Bowker David W 'Unwise Counsel: The
War on Terrorism and the Criminal Mistreatment of Detainees inU.S. Custody' in Greenberg Karen J (ed) The Torture
Debate in America Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2006 p 194.
7 See Dershowitz Alan 'The US Military need not obey the Geneva Conventions when dealing with suspected terrorists' in
Head Tom (ed) Is torture everjustified? Greenhaven Press Detroit 2005; also 'fortured Reasoning' in Greenberg Karen J (ed)
The Torture Debate in America Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2006 pp 257-280.
8 The event was so horrific that even Sanson the chief executioner was incapable of discharging his duties, and offered 100
Louis to a subordinate to help with the job (i.e. plying the red-hot pincers).
9 See Foucault Michel Disciplineand Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison Sheridan Alan (trans) Vintage New York 1979.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 163 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAWJOURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

was a nonstop theater of punishments. Shakespeare had certainly witnessed corporal


discipline before he came to London... but the frequency and ferocity of sentences meted
out on public scaffolds at Tower Hill, Tyburn, and Smithfield; at Bridewell and the
Marshalsea prisons; and at many other sites both within and outside the city walls would
have been new. Almost daily he could have watched the state brand, cut, and kill those it
deemed offenders. 10

Yet only a few years later, in the turbulence that preceded the Civil War, England would ban
torture, the first European state to do so. But what the rest of the seventeenth-century accepted,
even craved and enjoyed, the eighteenth abominated. Many of the greatest political activists and
intellectuals of the day weighed in. It is no accident that Voltaire, the century's most vocal
1
advocate for free speech, also led the most energetic attacks against judicial torture. Jeremy
Bentham - despite the distortions inflicted on his work by over-enthusiastic commentators -
clearly directed his attentions to minimizing physical coercion. If one cannot a priori exclude the
possibility of torture for utilitarians, Bentham resists the temptation to support the use of physical
violence for infractions, and indeed becomes a brilliant designer of institutions that encourage
12
non-violent responses to criminal acts.
Despite their brevity, the above remarks can serve to clarify some of the confusions
surrounding 'torture.' Certainly, what 'torture' is, its function, regulation, and value change over
time. For example, the uses of torture have included: torture as an 'information-gathering device';
torture as punishment; torture as a tool of terror; torture as a pedagogical method; torture as a
scene of perverse enjoyment for its perpetrators and spectators (indeed, the knowledge that the
torture is being recorded, let alone broadcast, can often be part of the torture itself); torture as a
kind of ritualised practice; torture as an experiment with the body; torture as an index of a sense
13
of loss of authority (e.g., when you're desperate, you torture as a last resort).
Only the first of the above points has (so far) proved explicitly admissible as part of the
contemporary 'argument,' even if it has commonly been confounded with the others. Indeed,
what was crucial about the eighteenth-century critique of despotic power is that it identified,
isolated and separated features that had previously been fused in torture's deployment by the
Ancien Rfgime (or, in England, by the pre-Civil War monarchs). But the eighteenth-century
theorists also recognised that, while it could serve a number of functions, the nature of torture
was such that it invariably confused such functions, to the point where it was practically useless as a
method for getting at the truth, and positively harmful for the cause of free speech. The Italian
theorist Cesare Beccaria's very influential On Crimes and Punishments of 1764 (it struck Thomas
Jefferson as strongly as it did Voltaire) notes that a man is either guilty or not guilty of the crime
for which he is charged; if guilty, he should suffer the punishments ordained by law, but if he isn't

10 Greenblatt Stephen Uillin the World: How Shakespearebecame ShakespeareJonathan Cape London 2004 p 178.
11 See Gay Peter Voltaire'spolitics:thepoet as realistYale University Press New Haven 1988.
12 See Bentham Jeremy The Panopticon FiitingsBozovic Miran (ed) Verso London 1995.
13 See the articles collected m Crelinsten Ronald D and Schmid Alex P (eds) The Politics of Pain:Torturersand their Masters
Westriew Press Boulder 1995. Though now outdated in several ways, Scott George Ryley A Histor of Torture Senate
London 1995 [1940] provides some substantial background material.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 164 2006


A NOTE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRIME OF TORTURE

guilty, then it is itself a terrible crime to torture the innocent. 14 And since it is empirically the case
that people have shown themselves capable of resisting torture, those strong or lucky enough to
hold out against it may then be acquitted for lack of evidence though they are guilty. Evidence
5
produced by torture is irredeemably unreliable and in itself unjust.'
The public struggle against torture therefore involved the identification of torture's
manifold aspects, as well as showing how these are at odds with the justifications for its use. The
Enlightenment writers thereby also demonstrated that an essential part of torture's harm consists
in the pragmatic impossibility of ever thoroughly separating these elements, e.g., is torture a tool

14 See Beccaria Cesare On Crimes and Punishments and otherwritings Bellamy R (ed) Davies R et al (trans) Cambridge University
Press Cambridge 1995.
15 For a completely different view of how and why judicial torture disappears from European law, see Langbein J H Torture
and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancen Regime University of Chicago Press Chicago & London 1977. Langbein
persuasively demonstrates that the public and political outcry against torture in the 18th century relied on arguments as
old as judicial torture itself. Moreover, the little the abolitionists had to add to these ancient arguments was based on
ignorance if it was not simply irrelevant - to the point that Langbein charges them with holding back a struggle that had
in fact already been quietly won. It is not the abolitionists who we should thank for the abolition of torture, but certain
changes internal to the law itself, that is, what Langbein calls 'a revolution in the law of proof' regarding the admissibility
of circumstantial evidence. It is because weaker forms of evidence than those available through torture become admissible
in certain sorts of cases that the law gradually shifted toward the use of such evidence, relying less and less on torture as a
result. This is a strong thesis, as far as it goes. Langbein, however, makes certain initial delimitations which thereafter lead
him to misrepresent the real problem; indeed, he refuses to admit the fact that politicalstruggles against sovereign power
were fought within the restricted domain of the law itself - and in such a way as to cipher their wider intent. The legal and
the political cannot be separated in the way which Langbein presumes, and especially not when it is a question of torture.
Let's take just one instance of Langbein's misrepresentation of the historical evidence. In Chapter 7, Langbein notes that
Sir Francis Bacon completely fails to mention torture in his tract on the kingly prerogatives, adding that Sir Thomas Smith
and Sir Edward Coke also 'deny the existence or the legality of torture.' For Langbein, all this suggests why the crime of
torture in England was ultimately just let drop, because the stakes were now elsewhere. However, it is possible and, we
believe, necessary, to read these very documents in the opposite sense to Langbein. First, we need to remember that the
struggle against despotic power at this time dare not speak its name, that those seeking to restrict the unlimited power of
monarchs had to be chary of saying so directly. Thus, second, this struggle had to be prosecuted in more 'esoteric' or
covert ways. The place at which sovereign power expresses itself most forcefully, most clearly and most unjustly is in the
domain of torture. This is why Coke and his allies - crucially, in this context, the committed enemies of Bacon - deny
the legality of torture. By doing so, they are directly seeking to limit sovereign power. So Bacon's refusal to mention
torture in his tract really does demonstrate that he is the perfect royalist he claims he is, because he is writing in a context
in which everyone knows that it is torture that is helping to render the exceptional claims of sovereign power suspect.
Bacon's strategy is therefore of the genre 'best not mention it under the circumstances,' at the same time that, in his
allegedly protoscientific works, he is urging that nature herself be 'put to the question' (i.e., tortured). So when Langbein
continues '[w]e suggest that the power to torture did inhere in the prerogative, not affirmatively but defensively. It derived
from the doctrine of sovereign immunity. The sovereign was immune from suit in his own courts. Not only were King
and Council immune, they could immunise their agents'(pp 129-30), this confirms our own analysis, not his. Torture and
unrestrained sovereignty are integrally bound, so it is no surprise, then, that 'King and Council kept tight control over the
use of torture'(p 131). This is why we would like to stress the irreducible ambivalence of Langbein's position: he can only
make the advances that he has because he has so carefully restricted himself to a study of the legal documentation, but it is
also because of this restriction that his claims that judicial torture simply 'fell into desuetude' miss the concerted political
struggle that was going on behind the scenes. Langbein's revisionism underplays that there was such a struggle, and how
this struggle was played out. As Langbein phrases the position he contests, The abolition of judicial torture was both a
juristic and a political event.' We agree with this (Langbein doesn't), for it is precisely the indissociabiliy of law and politics
on just this point that must not be missed in any discussion of torture.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 165 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAwJoURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

apparatus or the
of truth or a punishment for an infraction? Is it part of a bureaucratic
or vengeful satisfaction? And is it intended to have
entertainment of justice? Pedagogical principle
concerned in an act of torture, or for their
these consequences just for the individuals directly
revolutionaries and reformers like
communities as well? What the eighteenth-century democratic
it impossible in principle to
Beccaria and Voltaire realised is that the very threat of torture makes
distinguish interrogation from punishment, speech from being, the individual from the coercive
authority. Aside from all its other features, torture invariably confuses these operations - and
therefore, too, what people can say about these operations - and consequently this confusing
aspect of torture is an integral part of its harm. Torture by definition mixes up act, knowledge, the
victim, the voice, the official and truth in such a way that they thereafter cannot be adequately
distinguished. 16 As a tool of interrogation, torture is tantamount to a forcing of speech, but it is
then no longer clear who is really speaking, the torturer or the victim, and nor is it clear whether
what is being said is true. As a punishment, torture is barbaric, and its utility dubious. Moreover,
that the abolitionists made their claims very publicly is part of their point: these issues should no
longer be restricted to a technical language and a cadre of professionals.
So it is crucial to note that the present discussion about torture is about the legitimate
powers of the state. No one contributing to the discussion is arguing for the rights of individual
torturers to do so (murderers, serial-killers, terrorists, etc.). The modern democratic disgust with
torture is based on moral grounds; we are not dealing with a question of squeamishness or of
faintheartedness, but of what is impermissible on moral grounds. However, it is not pure# a moral
issue; the argument also needs to be made that whatever might be said about a given, individual
situation (the 'ticking bomb' scenario), the futility of torture is its greatest political weakness. Why
is it, then, that this simple point has to return again and again? Moralizing about conflict does not
help here. As the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour notes, talk of the 'Axis of Evil,' the
'War on Terror,' or World War III' will have damaging consequences for polities if allowed to
continue unabated. A War on Terror' is not a war in any traditional sense, because 'there is no
7
frontline, no territory, no camps, not even two parties."1 This inability to identify the 'war' and its
perpetrators has undoubtedly fuelled the anxieties that have led some to suggest that torture may
be a useful device in our brave new world. The 'shadowy and obscene' nature of our new enemies
(to invoke John Howard's words) is being used to legitimate extreme measures. Surely, this
demonisation of the enemy evokes the strategy of the 'beautiful soul' whose outrage at the
immorality of the world around belies the disorder within his own heart.

1 Let us praise here - of all things - quotation marks for their role in safeguarding our democratic freedoms. As Magreta
de Grazia writes 'Lax use of quotations summons up the grisly shadow of compulsory self-incrmination, of being forced
to bear witness against oneself, in this instance by being made to speak (or, more precisely, by being made to look inprint
to speak) self-condemnatory words... Lurking behind the Courts' dread of misquotation is, I would like to suggest, a long
history of the gruesome inquisitorial procedures deployed in Europe and England to exact self-incriminating testimonies.
Defamatory misquotation and coerced confessions are both procedures for putting self-incriminating words into
another's mouth,' de Grazia M'Sanctioning Voice: Quotation Marks, the Abolition of Torture, and the Fifth Amendment'
inJaszi P and Woodmansee M (eds) The Construction ofAuthorship: TextualApproprialioninLaw and LiteratureDuke
University Press Durham &London 1994 p 286. De Grazia immediately continues: 'The Fifth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution was drafted to guard against the juridical horror of coerced confessions and testimonies,' p 286.
1 Latour Bruno 'In Terror there is Error' Dmus May 2005 p 71.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 166 2006


A NOTE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRIME OF TORTURE

If modern democratic states have in part been founded on the official banning of torture
(or, at least, the drive to ban torture), this ban is not simply due to a revulsion about the
mutilation of bodies. Neither is it simply due to a desire to place limits on the arbitrary reign of
monarchs, although this is indeed an ideal for modern states. It is also linked to a new
commitment to the powers of speech. Take the very famous declaration of the philosopher
Immanuel Kant: 'For enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in
question is the most innocuous form of all - freedom to make public use of one's reason in all
matters. ' 18 (It is no accident that Frederick the Great, who Kant cites admiringly in this essay, and
who at one point provided refuge for Voltaire, was one of the first European rulers to ban torture
in 1740). The founding eighteenth-century theorists of modern liberal democracy are very clear
on this point.
It is through speech that actions will be commenced, evaluated, commended or punished,
and such speech permits an ongoing re-evaluation of actions and their grounds. 19 What happens
with the panopticon is that punishment will no longer involve torture (i.e., direct and intrusive
physical coercion ratified and dispensed by the state), but will be in and of itself a re-education
camp that suggests appropriate forms of action through the interiorisation of the gaze of
authority. In other words, speech itself becomes a central activity in democratic moderniy; statements under
this condition are never absolute, but always exploratory, experimental. 20 Punishments come to
have less and less to do with incursions into the body, and more and more to do with regimes
that focus on a criminal's physical containment and retraining. 21 In a democracy, one can (and

18 Kant Immanuel 'An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?' in PoliticalWritings Reiss H (ed) Nisbet H B (trans)
Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1991 p 55. Again, this is why, if many of the arguments offered by the 18t h
century critics of torture have a long history, it is the very fact that they offer them to the public for its response that
renders their contribution democratic.
19 In this context, see the very interesting work of Frances Ferguson, especially Pornography,the Theoy: What UtilitarianismDid
to Acion University of Chicago Press Chicago & London 2004, a book whose argument uses pornography to exemplify
some key, if usually overlooked, features of modem social systems. As Ferguson phrases her argument, 'The utilitarian
perspective of both Sade and Bentham moved discussion from individual identities to actions and highlighted the uses
that even fictitious representations came to have in encouraging people to feel that they can see actions, which are by their
very nature less conspicuous than persons themselves. In utilitarian systems, power does not, as Foucault puts it, come
from everywhere as a contribution of all the participants in a social group. It is also continually being redistributed,' p xv.
20 This is another crucial point, and one which will be missed if one sticks purely to a 'moral' or a 'legal' framework for
examining the discourses of this era. The very ways in which the Enlightenmentphilosophespromulgated their doctrines
attempted to maximize the values ofpubc, open and ongoing debate - which makes the transformations they effected upon
the media an integral part of their message. As Dena Goodman puts it, 'Through the circulation of letters, a network of
intellectual exchange was defined that was the first circle of expansion beyond the walls of the salons. As letters and
correspondences became the bases and models for print media of broader circulation, these networks expanded and went
truly public,' Goodman Dena 'Letters into print: correspondence and communication in the French Enlightenment'
Transactionsofthe Eighth InternationalCongress on the Enlightenment Alden Press Oxford 1992 Vol II p 884.
21 Even a brief glance at the dates at which European states banned judicial torture is revealing- England, 1640; Scotland,
1708; Prussia, 1740; Austria, 1776; Italy, 1786; France, 1789; Russia, 1801; Spain, 1812. We take these dates as indices that
major democratic upheavals (even if 'unsuccessful) have something to do with the interdiction or cessation of judicial
torture. If the specific preconditions for such a development go back a lot further (e.g., immanent legal developments), it
is notable that it takes real political agitation to get things moving along. Moreover, though it took a lot longer for physical
torments to disappear from the education system altogether (e.g., floggings), this banning of torture is accompanied by a
welter of arguments condemning the use of physical coercion in schools.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 167 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAwJoURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

sometimes should) bepunished for what one has said, but must not be tortured for such - neither
at the point of interrogation nor after conviction. In fact, this is one hallmark of democracy tout
court the ban on judicial torture. Everything else is up for grabs.
Aside from disgust at the horrific mutilation of bodies, then, the ban on state torture not
only aims to ensure freedom of speech but, paradoxically, it aims at ensuring a perhaps even more
important freedom: the freedom not to speak. An alleged criminal will no longer be forced to
implicate him- or herself in a crime at the point of interrogation; rather, trials will now have to
rely upon evidence that is not based on extorted testimony. This is undoubtedly why one of the
most utopian moments in TV cop shows is not the jury's verdict, but when the arresting officer
announces 'You have the right to remain silent'. The representatives of the law can no longer do
what they will, and have to begin by telling their subjects just that.
Thus it is with the struggle for democracy that the previously 'indispensable' uses of
torture lose all justification. It is also why any real affirmation of 'free speech' doesn't mean 'the
right to say anything whatsoever no matter how offensive.' In fact, democracies need to affirm
restrictions on speech; when they do so, they have not thereby become non-democratic. On the
contrary, the necessity of civil suits for defamation as well as racial vilification laws is evidence
that 'free speech' doesn't mean the right to say whatever one likes. Rather, 'free speech' means: the
state shalt not torture. Not even a little bit. If there is even the suspicion that a speech has been
coerced through torture, or has taken place under the threat of such coercion, we no longer have
democracy; true debate is rendered impossible wherever there is a suspicion that what was said
may have been said unfreely. One is no longer in a democratic frame. So democracy is not about
passing laws once and for all for or against, say, racial vilification. It rather entails an intense
anxiety about the legitimacy of any such laws, and the possibility that they may have to change
again - because a certain number of people have said so, and have said so without the threat of
bodily mutilation. This is why the central liberal distinction between "public' and 'private' is
inherently unstable (and no doubt why modern democracies, which began by giving a political
voice only to a tiny fraction of the male population, have now extended this franchise to an
unprecedented range of persons). In any particular political matter, participants might be acting
according to economic interests, they might well be deluded, they might be lying, and they might
have less easily-comprehensible reasons for their opinions. But the democratic state has to listen,
as it has to punish; and it has to keep on listening. In fact, if the democratic state has certainly
shown itself capable of acting, and acting ferociously, it has also shown itself capable of vacillating
and recanting,except on one point: torture. It is extraordinary how often this fundamental point is
missed by the contemporary liberal defences of (or, for that matter, attacks upon) democracy,
though it was a staple for the eighteenth century radicals fighting against arbitrary power.
Given this state of affairs, the contemporary pressing necessities to rethink security issues
may, if improperly handled, result in some very unpleasant political consequences. It seems that
the consequences of a return to torture in today's geopolitical context will include: fishing for
evidence; disavowed extrajudicial punishment; a presumption of guilt; a legitimation of sadistic
acts and affects; a signal that there are now no limits to the power of state officials and secret
agencies; and, perhaps, an expression of an obscure drive for destruction. Given this context, the
new proselytizers for torture add their voices to those who are demanding the vitiation of existing

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 168 2006


A NOTE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRIME OF TORTURE

democratic bulwarks against arbitrary detention, habeas corpus, presumption of innocence, open
and transparent legal procedures (including appeals procedures), etc. As many humanitarian
organisations have argued with respect to present US governmental practice, disappearing people,
22
or holding them in arbitrary detention is close to if not indistinguishable from torture.
It might further be suggested that this does not only involve tampering with certain
particular laws, but is tantamount to an assault on the foundations of law in general, i.e., by treating
23
prohibitions as if they were merely guidelines, and principles as if they were merely techniques.
The routinisation, the naturalisation, of allegedly exceptional measures is only one aspect of such
a process. Ultimately, such developments tend to devolve absolute power to a sovereign executive
that no longer needs submit to any restraints on its actions - not even to the restraints of a
Hobbesian monarch, to whom one submits because he is the only agency capable of preserving
one's life in the war of all against all. Any state that sanctions torture has already neutralised
democracy.
So one of the most disturbing aspects of this 'debate' is that it is not and cannot be a debate
at all. On the contrary, as soon as one believes that this issue can be debated and discussed just
like any other, one is already lost. Once one starts arguing in such a fashion, then all that can be
expected is the escalating intensity of claim and counter-claim, a slippage from legal and political
concerns to moral problems of affect, the proliferation of distinctions without difference (for
example, those allegedly 'clear eyed reexaminations' of the evidence which insist on
discriminating between, say, 'sleep deprivation and amputation or burning or some other horror'
in Jean Bethke Elshtain's words) - and a concomitant occlusion of the real issues at stake. 24 It is
not that such distinctions may not have their place; it's that they do not have a place here, other
than as obscurantist rhetoric. As we noted above, it is this confusion power of torture that the
eighteenth century recognised as one of torture's primary harms to the democratic state.
Does the polity you live in guarantee democracy qua freedom of speech? If it does, then it
must, by definition, in intention, in spirit and letter, prohibit torture as a tool of state. This is so
because the exclusion of torture (we might even say physical coercion more generally) constitutes
the conditions for free speech - and thus for free debate - anyone who tries to act as if torture
might be reintroduced (even 'a little bit,' as it were) is already lost. Pragmatically, yes, states will
undoubtedly always try to torture in one circumstance or another (e.g., the French in Algeria, the
British in Northern Ireland, the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq), but this 'fact' in no way vitiates
the necessary absolutism of the principle. On the contrary: without such a principle, there will not
even be any possible recourse or restitution for the victims of torture. Lest we forget: in principle,

22 For a discussion of the very public ongoing issues around detainees in American detention centres, see McCoy Alfred W
'The Outcast of Camp Echo: The Punishment of David Hicks' (June 2006) The MonthLy 20.
23 On some of the consequences of a permanent 'state of exception,' that paradoxical situation in which laws are suspended
by the sovereign at the same time that they are fully maintained, see Agamben Giorgio Homo Sacer. Sovereign Powerand Bare
Life Heller-Roazen Daniel (trans) Stanford University Press Stanford 1998. For Agamben, this 'suspension of law' is the
'orginary operation of law' rather than its perversion. See also Agamben Giorgio State ofException Attell Kevin (trans)
University of Chicago Press Chicago 2005.
24 Elshtain Jean Bethke 'Reflection on the Problem of "Dirty Hands' in Greenberg Karen J (ed) The Torture Debate in
America Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2006 p 86.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 169 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAW JOURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

well-
anyone who wishes to abrogate the absolute prohibition on torture, no matter how allegedly
how much of a hard-nosed realist they would like to think of
meaning or pragmatic, no matter
kind. They are simply the inhabitants of one or another
themselves as being, is nothing of the
anti-democratic frame of reference.

3. TORTURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Why have psychoanalysts become involved in this experience at all? What interest could
psychoanalysis have in the crime of torture? What expertise could psychoanalysis bring to this
political, legal and moral question? As very many commentators have shown, the claims made by
the proselytizers for torture are for the most part inaccurate and unfounded. To take only the
most extreme of these here: to hold, as have several local Australian legal academics, that torture
is an 'excellent information-gathering device' is plainly wrong. No one acquainted with the
extensive body of psychological evidence could make such a claim. Donald Rumsfeld has himself
admitted that the extensive information acquired from years of prisoner abuse at Guantinamo
Bay has been 'low-grade.' The claims that torture can provide useful information are not only
empirically false, but fit rather uneasily with other claims often made as part of the same
argument; for example, that hypothetical 'thought-experiments' are effective tools for thinking
about the possibilities for torture. Perhaps this latter claim is true. But it is difficult to maintain a
declared allegiance to 'hard-nosed realism' on the one hand even though you provide no facts
(there aren't any), and, in their place, proffering only extraordinary imaginary scenarios of 'ticking
time-bombs.' 2 (Note here the desperate anxieties about 'speeding up the process,' and ensuring
'efficiency,' themes that seem to have been exported from the rhetoric of business-management).
There has also been a notable absence in the discussions of those in favour of torture around the
sorts of institutions, regulations and personnel which would be necessary to run state-sanctioned
torture chambers. How does one train government torturers, for instance? In special schools?
With what tools? And with what subjects? Very disturbingly, empirical evidence tends to suggest
a kind of 'slippery slope' aspect to the naturalisation of torture. In Kate Millet's words, 'Once
established, the practice of torture seems to become applicable to any group or situation. A
convenience, a way of dealing with certain elements, certain social problems, a brutality that
26
establishes itself as expedient.'
In this context, we were particularly struck by Michael Ignatieff's 'acknowledgement' that
the 'argument that torture and coercion do not work is contradicted by the dire frequency with
which both practices occur.' 27 What's false about such an acknowledgement - which tries, in its
otherwise exemplarily liberal fashion to contend rigorously with the objections of such fellow-

25 For an excellent account of some of the problems with such scenarios, see Klemig John 'Ticking Bombs and Torture
Warrants' 10 2 Deakin Law Review 614.
26 Millet Kate The Poliiesof Cruel{: An Essay on the Literatureof PoliticalImprisonmentNorton New York & London 1994, p 291.
'7 Ignatieff Michael "Moral Prohibition at a Price" in Roth Kenneth and Worden Minky (eds) Torture: Does it make us safer? Is
it ever OK? The New Press London & New York 2005 pp 25-6.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 170 2006


A NOTE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRIME OF TORTURE

travellers as Richard Posner - is that it participates in the misrepresentation that Posner and
others continue to promulgate. The misrepresentation is this: that those who torture know that it gets
results. The problem here reduces to this: what constitutes 'results' under those conditions must remain
obscure and confused. Enjoyment of brutality, the abuse of power, generating terror in a subject
population, and so on, are all unquestionably 'results' generated by torture - they're just not the
results that are being claimed for it. Torture, yes, terrorises, but there is little evidence that it
provides the 'crucial information' that is currently the alibi for its revivification as a tool of state.
Nor does torture ultimately make states safer. We find it difficult to believe that any of the South
American dictatorships that used torture as an integral part of their statecraft were any more
secure as a result (they were certainly more violent, iniquitous and corrupt); it doesn't seem that
the current U.S. policy of 'rendition' will ensure a better result.
Yet to have disproved a claim or a theory is by no means to have vanquished it. Nor does
undermining the justifications for a practice necessarily hinder the continuance of that practice.
On the contrary, it seems unlikely that proponents of torture will be swayed by any calls for a
reality-testing of their ideas. This 'force of the incoherent,' that is, the force of fantay, is a
particularly important phenomenon for psychoanalysis. 28 Indeed, psychoanalysis properly begins
when its founder, Sigmund Freud, realised that, although patients do in some way know the truth
of their situation, their sickness derives from their inability to recognise or acknowledge that it is
essentially self-sustained. Resistance to (one's own) truth is as much a feature of large political
movements as it is of individual pathologies. 29 Much more important than truth in the
motivations and behaviours of individuals and groups are primal affects - shame, fear, loathing,
envy, panic, anxiety - and the socio-cultural rituals that have developed to master them.
In the case of torture, this feature should give us cause for concern. The very weakness of
the claims for reinstating torture as a tool of state security organisations, the inconsistency of the
arguments for doing so, and the resolute rejection of the historical, political and psychological

28 This is the title of a well-known book, in which the origins and uses of individuals' fantasies are discussed in detail. See
Person Ethel By Force of Fantagy:How we make our lives Basic Books New York 1995.
29 Though psychoanalysis as a clinical practice has for the most part restricted itself to the treatment of individuals, work
with groups is not unknown. Clinical group-work has, most famously, been practiced at the Tavstock Clinic in London,
just as there continues to be a flourishing trade in group analysis, group therapy and family therapy of a psychoanalytic
inspiration. Moreover, psychoanalysis has not hesitated to theorise the workings of larger groups, and though it may be
that the categories appropriate to individual psychopathology (such as 'hysteria,' 'obsessional neurosis' or even 'the
Oedipus complex') are inapplicable in their pure form to larger human groups, there are nonetheless shared processes that
psychoanalytic interventions have revealed. Freud himself opens his Group Pycholog and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) with
the statement, 'he contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may
seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that individual
psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his
instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to
disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a
model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in an extended but
entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well,' Freud Sigmund The StandardEdition of
the Complete Pyychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVIII Strachey J et al (eds) The Hogarth Press London 1955. In Group
Psychology, Freud himself examines such cases as the Church, the army, wild street mobs, and a teenage girls' boarding
school; since Freud, psychoanalysts have extended their analyses to a wide range of groups and their dynamics.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 171 2006


THE AUsTRALIAN FEMINIST LAWJOURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

evidence in the name of 'realism' are indices of a very dangerous contemporary political fantasy.
One should not believe that the best way to disarm such a fantasy is by simply pointing to
empirical evidence, to logic, to morality, or even to existing legal provisions - because these are
what this fantasy (or bundle of fantasies) is attacking. Certainly, one must continue to argue by
recourse to empirical evidence and the rest, but such a recourse remains insufficient on its own to
neutralise the manifest drive to reinstate torture as a necessary, desirable and viable governmental
defence against 'the global terrorist threat' in 'the wake of September 11.' The fact that these
scare-quoted phrases, and others like them, have so quickly become such familiar slogans - in
and of themselves supposedly adequate to justify the abrogation of existing legal systems - is
itself disturbing, symptomatic of just such a fantasy. A fantasy is almost never corrected by the
truth, as it has very little to do with any state of affairs in the 'real world'; rather, a fantasy is a
kind of frame through which the 'real world' can appear at all.
This may require some further explanation. Certainly, every psychoanalytic orientation
agrees on the crucial importance of fantasy in subjective life. As Ethel Person puts it: 'Fantasies
- daydreams, castles in the air, mental scripts, and scenarios - filter our experience of the inner
and outer worlds to a surprisingly large extent .... in truth, fantasy is as essential as air, forming the
medium or the ether in which all the other activities of mind take place. Fantasy also impacts on
the world outside our mind.' 30 Such a sweeping statement is relatively uncontroversial; on such an
account, fantasy is just a name that we can apply to almost any of the aspects of mental life that
don't simply correspond to reality and can be equated with a kind of spontaneous fiction-making
in which one cannot help but indulge, often without knowing it.
There are of course intra-psychoanalytic disagreements about what fantasies are, their
aetiology and function, and how they should be analysed. This is in some ways a consequence of
Freud's own ambiguities. As J. Laplanche and J-P. Pontalis put it, Freud's doctrine of fantasy
seems to be located 'exclusively within the domain of opposition between subjective and
objective, between an inner world, where satisfaction is obtained through illusion, and an external
world, which gradually, through the medium of perception, asserts the supremacy of the reality
principle.' 31 The 'reality principle,' however, is not the same as what is commonly taken for
'reality'; the point for Freud is that everything that comes to be denominated 'reality' is the
consequence of later psychological 'secondary revisions' of infantile experience. Human
consciousness begins with fantasy, not reality, and reality itself is built out of the often-brutal
interactions between an individual's fantasies and external events.
Freud's basic positions were further developed by practitioners that came after him. For
Melanie Klein and Susan Isaacs, fantasy remains an immediate and primordial fact, operative in
the infant from the beginning, incorporating a relation - indicatively, sadistic or mortificatory -
to an object of some kind. This relation is irreducibly 'sexual,' in the expanded sense that Freud
gives to this term. Moreover, fantasy is linked to trauma (one might almost say torture): 'Freud's
view that sexuality itsefis traumatic; and Lacan's contribution has been to theorise how it is that

10 See Person, op. cit., p 1.


31 Laplanche Jean and Pontalis J-P 'Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality' in Burgin Victor et al (eds) Formationsof Fantay
Methuen London & New York 1986 p 6.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 172 2006


A NOTE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRIME OF TORTURE

trauma is related to a lack.' 32 So what's absolutely central for almost all psychoanalytic
orientations - despite their notorious differences - is, first, the conviction that fantasy
underpins what counts as reality; second, that fantasy is based on a lack (of reality); third, that
fantasy is the name for the operations that try to canalise traumatic experience. Fantasy is
therefore 'fictional' (not being 'really real'), but it is not simply one fiction among others; rather, it
is tied directly to psychic drives and, as such, is not susceptible to the sorts of interpretation and
'reality-testing' to which one might submit fictions that we can recognise as such. 33 Fantasy
thereby defends against both reality and other fantasies. Indeed, once the aetiology and role of
fantasy is taken seriously, 'reality' itself can no longer be considered an 'objective situation' on
which we could all agree if we were just serious about the thing, but will instead be something like
what it is that forces humans to keep inventing new ways to sustain their inability to give up on
infantile experience. Humans only become acquainted with reality through experience, but this
experience is itself integrally shaped by (erotic and aggressive) drives which are never quite
overcome, but whose modes of expression instead become more and more insidious and ramified
with time.
There are therefore a number of interconnected reasons why material evidence is never
enough on its own to shift a fantasy. First, a fantasy indiscernibly shapes in advance the world
within which certain events can appear as evidence at all. What counts as evidence in one
framework may not even be able to be registered at all in another. It may not even be possible to
point out this incommensurablity to either of the parties. It is difficult, almost impossible, to see
the limits of one's own fantasies (though they may be only too clear to others). Second, a fantasy
emerges to canalise and redirect a subject's otherwise unspeakable feelings. Attempts to
transform such a fantasy, however minimally, may therefore be experienced as (and, indeed, may
well be) an attack on the subject itself.34 A fantasy is not an optional extra, but a necessity for a
subject. We are all fantasists. Third, fantasy involves a certain misdirection: to respond to what
the fantasy seems to be addressing is to misunderstand what the fantasy is actually doing. What
fantasy makes possible for the subject's activities may have little or nothing to do with the
apparent content of the fantasy itself. Fourth, a fantasy may well feed on opposition as part of its
mechanisms of self-stabilisation. Certain sorts of fantasy - take, for instance, the popular

32 Grigg Russell 'Signifier, Object, and the Transference' in Bracher Mark and Ragland-Sullivan Ellie (eds) Lacan and the
Subject ofLanguage Rouriedge New York 1991 p 111.
33 In addition to the texts already cited, for a range of further reading on the topic of fantasy, see Akhtar S and Volkan V D
(eds) The Seed of Madness: Constitution,Environment, andFantay in the Organizationof the Pychotzc Core International Universities
Press Madison 1997; Grolnick S and Barkin L with Muensterberger W (eds) Between Reality andFantasy: TransitionalObjects
and PhenomenaJason Aronson London & New York 1978; May R Sex and Fantasy:Patternsof Male and Female Development
W W Norton & Co New York & London 1980; Segal H Dream, Phantay andArt Tavistock/Routledge London & New
York 1991: Shengold L SoulMurder The Effects of ChildhoodAbuse and DeprivationFawet Columbine New York 1989;
Zizek S The Plague of FantasiesVerso London & New York 1997.
34 Indeed, some psychoanalytic theorists have gone so far as to suggest that what torture ultimately aims at - beyond its
only-too-familiar uses as information-extraction, prejudicial punishment, and a warning to others -is the total destruction
not only of the sufferer's physical being, but of his/her fundamental fantasy, the frame that structures his/her entire way
of life. This brings in the problem of enjoyment, of the affective bases of human action. See also Zizek S The Metastasesof
Enjoyment Verso London 1994, esp. p 75.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 173 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAW JOURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

doctrine of 'the enemies of the people' - may actually gain in plausibility when attacked. After all,
the
who would attack those who attack the enemies of the people, except of course
difficult to budge: if the
aforementioned enemies of the people? This sort of fantasy is particularly
people themselves protest, they must have been infiltrated by the enemies of the people.
This is where psychoanalysis can be of use. Psychoanalysis - unlike many other
comparable accounts - insists that a substantial part of human psychology involves the desire to
dominate and torture others. Indeed, every society is founded on physical violence, and this
35

violence must find its support in the human body, its pleasures and pains, its emotions and
thoughts. The surprise for psychoanalysis is not that people torture, but that people don't torture,
that they sometimes refrain from and even abominate the practice. Sadistic drives are integral to
human life. As Freud famously writes in Civilisation and its Discontent.

men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend
themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual
endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their
neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who
tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without
compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate
36
him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.

Psychoanalysis, moreover, insists that we all, in some way, suffer from infantile traumas, even in
the best of cases; furthermore, that we continue to inflict this suffering on others, in a variety of
self-deceiving ways. No one is exempt from this state of affairs; there is no way in which we can
make an absolute break either with our own formative pain or with our own self-deceptions.
When the tension between self-deception and reality becomes too great, illness may ensue. Yet
psychoanalysis aims to counteract the worst ravages of such illnesses through a non-intrusive
process of listening and talking. 'Free association' means: keep talking, about anything whatsoever
that comes into your head, no matter how apparently irrelevant, stupid or obscene, and know that
you will not be judged by your interlocutor (the analyst) - and certainly not punished - for
anything that you might say. If drugs are sometimes unavoidable in the treatment of

35 This also holds for the institutions which humans build, and into which they are born. As Eric Santner affirms, building
on the work of Michel de Certeau, 'Torture is the way an institution simultaneously confesses and represses its deepest
secret: that its consistency, its enjoyment of recognition as a really existing social fact, ultimately depends on the magic of
performative utterances, on the force of their own immanent process of enunciation. The abjection produced in the
torture victim, his betrayal of everything that matters and is dear to him, his confession of his own putrescence, is, as it
were, the 'substance' that stands in for the lack of substantial foundations to which the institution might appeal for final
and ultimate legitimation,' Santner Eric My Own Private Germany: DanielPaulSchreber'sSecret History ofModernipy Princeton
University Press Princeton 1996 pp 42-3.
36 Freud Sigmund Ciliisazon andits Discontentsin The StandardEdiion of the Complete Pgychological Works of Sigmund FreudVol.
XXI (1927-31) Strachey J et al (eds) The Hogarth Press London 1961 p 111. It is also worth noting Friedrich Nietzsche's
remarks that 'In the act of cruelty the community refreshes itself and for once throws off the gloom of constant fear and
caution. Cruelty is one of the oldest festive joys of mankind. Consequently it is imagined that the gods too are refreshed
and in festive mood when they are offered the spectacle of cruelty - and thus there creeps into the world the idea that
voluntary suffering, self-chosen torture, is meaningful and valuable,' Daybreak:Thoughts on the PrejudicesofMoraity Hollingdale
RJ (trans.) Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1982 p 16.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 174 2006


A NOTE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRIME OF TORTURE

psychological disorders, psychoanalysis (as well as many other forms of psychotherapy) reminds
us that such dispensing can also be experienced as a violent incursion into the body of a patient
- a foreign substance with often quite disturbing physiological-mental side-effects, allegedly
delivered for the patient's 'own good,' by a powerful authority figure. 37 This is also why anyone
who insists on 'doing good' for others, even with the best of intentions, may be irremediably
compromised in advance.
For such reasons, added to the wealth of clinical evidence, budging even an individual's
fantasy is an extremely difficult and volatile affair (let alone the social fantasies that traverse larger
agglomerations of people). It requires not only listening closely to what people are saying - no
matter how apparently obscene, irrelevant or incoherent - but slowly working, often over
extended periods of time, to reattach these utterances to their lives in a less damaging way. (This
was part of the justification for organizing a forum on 'The Crime of Torture' in the first place.)
The work of listening must go on, even if all it ultimately gathers is mere information about why,
for example, torturers themselves today insist that they are the real victims (e.g., that their nations
are threatened as never before by suicidal terrorists, that security forces cannot be hamstrung by
restrictive laws, that any attempt to restrict new measures plays directly into the hands of enemies,
38
etc.).
As Brian Stagoll once put it in an article entitled 'Epistemology and Torture,' 'torture is the
antithesis of the therapeutic process.' 39 The therapeutic process requires the testimony of victims,
the (often public) listening to and inscription of their stories, over a protracted period of time. If
torture drives at the hostile takeover of a victim's entire existence, to the point where even the
very words they speak are no longer permitted to be their own, psychoanalysis depends, above all,
on 'free association,' on the patient talking and talking about anything whatsoever - until the
patient is finally able to assume responsibility for his or her freely-uttered words. As
psychoanalysis suggests,you are often the unfree state of which you complain. What such patients
often need is not to be told what to do, what they 'really think,' or what's (allegedly) best for
them, but simply to be listened to, to find somewhere to deposit their thoughts, the residues of
experiences, that continue to torment them. Psychoanalysis, perhaps scandalously, would insist
that the torturers as much as the victims are worthy, needy of such attention. But attention is not
tantamount to affirmation.
So, perhaps unexpectedly, torture and the psychotherapies are inextricably linked. The
long-term consequences of torture are an insistent refrain throughout Joseph Schwartz's recent
history of psychoanalysis, Cassandra's Daughter, in which he mentions the child-torturers of

37 In this context, Kate Millet notes 'the medicalization of torture,' op t, esp. pp 311-12, and Elaine Scarry gives a
particularly chilling example: 'In Uruguay, doctors assisted in the administration of drugs causing hallucinations and acute
sensations of pain and asphyxiation; those who refused to assist the torturers disappeared at such a rate that Uruguay's
medical and health care programs entered a state of crisis,' The Body in Pain:The Making and Unmaking of the Vorld Oxford
University Press Oxford 1985 p 42.
38 For an exemplary case-study of the extraordinary powers of murderous fantasies, see Theweleit Klaus Male Fantasies
Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History Conway S with Carter E and Turner C (trans) University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis 1987; Male Fantasies Volume 2 Male Bodies: Pychoanalzng the White Terror Carter E and Turner C with
Conway S University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis 1989.
39 Stagoll Brian 'Epistemology and Torture' (1986) 2 7 Australianand New ZealandJournalofFamiy Therapy 97.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 175 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAW JOURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

do you do
Nicaragua, who had been taught to pluck out the eyes of the regime's enemies. What
terror finally stops? These children are being treated by
with such children when (i) the
40 and psychoanalyst Michel de Certeau has suggested how
psychoanalysts. The French historian
torture subsists at the heart of modern democracies as a routine and indispensable administrative
practice. 41 And there is now a vast psychological literature on the long-term effects of the traumas
suffered by torture-victims, effects that have consequences for families, communities, health-
42
systems, and so on, far beyond the immediate context of the crime.
But if, in this context, psychoanalysis might function as: a diagnostic tool (e.g., in the
analysis of political fantasies); an organisational procedure (e.g., a way of getting people to speak
to each other in unfamiliar or hostile circumstances); a therapeutic activity (e.g., helping to treat
victims of torture); and an early-warning device (e.g., human beings find torture desirable, and so
any attempts to legitimate the practice must be strenuously and immediately combated), it must
nonetheless remain marginal to this so-called 'debate.' It must take a back-seat (or couch) to those
forms of legal, ethical and political activism now concerned to protect our democracies from
sliding into an authoritarianism prepared to torture suspects on principle. As the South
Vietnamese torturers used to say, 'If they are not guilty, beat them until they are.'
We do not pretend to offer a definition of what democracy is. But it seems to us that an
absolute, necessary condition for any democracy, whether in its ancient Greek form of
participatory democracy or the varied modern forms of representative democracy, is: an absolute
interdiction upon torture as a tool of state. We have already presented some of the unexpected
consequences of such an interdiction. Theorists of democracy, undoubtedly puzzled by the
manifold ambivalent and shifting forms that democracy has historically taken, have found it
difficult to say exactly what constitutes a democratic polity. To pick any particular state of the
system as representative is already to have missed what's essential. We believe that what is
essential to democracy is that what can and can't be said, what can and can't be done, must be in
ceaseless mutation, simply because the separation and tension between 'authority' and 'voice,'
between 'action' and 'being,' that is at the heart of democracy constantly presses at all actual
psychological, social, political and legal limits. As we have argued here, torture is one limit it must
not cross.

40 See Schwartz Joseph Cassandra'sDaughter:A History of PsychoanalysisViking New York 1999. One shouldn't forget that,
when torture becomes an option for states, children are routinely tortured and 'disappeared.'
41 As de Certeau writes, 'The goal of torture, in effect, is to produce acceptance of a State discourse, through the confession
of putrescence. What the torturer in the end wants to extort from the victim he tortures is to reduce him to being no
more than that, rottenness, which is what the torturer himself is and knows that he is, but without avowing it. The victim
must be the voice of the filth, everywhere denied, that everywhere supports the representation of the regime's
'omnipotence,' in other words, the 'glorious image' of themselves the regime provides for its adherents through its
recognition of them,' Certeau Michel de Heterologies: Discourse on the OtherMassuriB. (trans) University of Minnesota Press
pp 40-41.
Minneapolis 1986
42 'Politically driven torture may not seem a likely factor in the course of much conventional clinical work, but the
unfortunate fact is that the consequences of barbarity inflicted elsewhere are increasingly to be encountered within
resettlement populations here and throughout the world,' Gorman William 'Refugee Survivors of Torture: Trauma and
Treatment' (2001) 32 5 ProfessonalPyehoogy: Research and Practice443.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 176 2006


A NOTE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRIME OF TORTURE

Democracy, like any other form of human community, cannot avoid violence, and is
perhaps even founded on violence. But, unlike every other form of political organisation to date,
it has constitutivey forbidden itself the possibility of torturing its subjects. Given that one necessary
condition of democracy is an absolute interdiction on state torture, when the state seeks to
reintroduce official torture, on whatever grounds, this is tantamount to a constitutional assault.
What the practice of psychoanalysis enables us to say is that 'free association' and torture are
political antitheses; whoever speaks up for torture as a tool of state under any circumstances is,
consciously or not, assaulting the foundations of democracy. And they do so because, as
psychoanalysis has demonstrated in any number of ways over the past century, human beings
love torture but can't always admit to it; the drive to reinstate torture, to be anti-democratic, is an
insistent temptation for human beings. If we wish to continue to live in a democratic polity, such
a drive must be resisted at all costs. 0

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 177 2006


HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 178 2006
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

AIMS AND SCOPE

The Australian Feminist Law Journal is seeking articles for publication. Articles may range from
longer, academic pieces from a critical, feminist perspective (which will be refereed) to shorter
pieces on issues confronting women in their interactions with the law. The length of an article is
variable, but normally ranges from 8000 to 12,000 words. We particularly wish to encourage
cross-disciplinary writing and writing by women in grassroots organisations. Praxis notes are also
welcome and normally have a focus upon a local practice which will be of interest to readers.
Praxis notes are not refereed although considerable feedback is usually provided to an author on
their contribution, and an Editorial Board member may, on occasion, assist a contributor in
planning and executing a praxis note. The length of a note is variable, and depends upon the
topicality and significance of the practise under scrutiny. If you wish to discuss a proposed article
or praxis note please contact the General Editor, Judith Grbich, email
Judith.Grbich@bigpond.com Articles may be submitted to the Editorial Board, Australian
Feminist Law Journal, PO Box 516 Northcote Plaza, Victoria 3070, Australia, or to the General
Editor electronically. Where a volume of the journal has guest editors as announced for any
Special Issue, manuscripts should be submitted electronically to those editors.

MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION

The Australian Feminist Law Journal prefers submission of works for publication in electronic
Form. A diskette may be requested only after a paper has been accepted for publication, and the
author has done any final revisions. For refereeing of articles, an electronic version is required.
The journal prefers papers to be submitted in word processing packages such as MS Word,
WordPerfect, running under operating systems MS DOS or Windows.

REFEREEING OF ARTICLES

Australian Feminist Law Journalreferees all manuscripts submitted for publication as an article and
follows the double-blind refereeing procedure. Referees will be selected with expertise in the
author's area of scholarship. Authors are requested to place their name and affiliation on a
separate page, and eliminate any self-identifying citation of one's own work. This can be done by
leaving such citations or reference material blank or otherwise referring to the work in a way
which disguises the name of the author. Please do not forget to correct any such omissions where

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 179 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAWJOURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

an article is subsequently accepted for publication. Authors should specify whether they wish
their work to be considered for the articles or praxis notes section of the journal. The journal will
not accept manuscripts for consideration which are already under consideration by another
journal. We are reluctant to ask scholars who volunteer their skills in the refereeing process to
undertake this often difficult and time consuming task if there is any possibility the manuscript
may be withdrawn from publication in the journal on acceptance elsewhere. The Editorial Board
aims to provide an author with their publication decision within three months of submission of a
manuscript.

MANUSCRIPT STYLE AND PRESENTATION

Manuscripts should be submitted double spaced leaving adequate margins for comments by
referees. The journal style should be followed as closely as possible, to eliminate delays at the time
of printing where an incorrect style would necessitate changes. Authors should ask for an
electronic version of the journal style guide before fmalising their paper for submission to the
journal. A Style Guide is available on the journal website at http://www.griffith.edu.au/
publication/aflj

COPYRIGHT

Authors will be asked to license copyright in their work to Australian Feminist Law Journal Inc.
the publisher of the Australian Feminist Law Journalto publish and sell their work in hard copy and
electronic form throughout the world for the legal term of copyright.

PERMISSIONS
Authors will be asked to obtain permissions in writing for the quotation of any material to be
published where they are not the owners of the copyright, to make a contribution to any fees
payable for such texts and to indemnify the publisher of the journal for any losses or damage
arising out of any claim that publication of an article or material constitutes an infringement of
copyright or contains libellous, defamatory or blasphemous matter. 0

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 180 2006


AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAW JOURNAL
CONTRIBUTORS' STYLE GUIDE

GENERAL STYLE CONVENTIONS

Please note the following recommendations:

Words are spelled with -ise, -sation (not ize, etc) where appropriate.
Single set quotation marks are used throughout, with double quotation marks for a quote within a
quote.
Quotations of more than 30 words are indented within the text without quotation marks.
Numbers are written as words up to 9, then as figures. However, numbers are always expressed in
words when opening a sentence.
Dates are written as 19 February 1921.
Dates are written in figures eg 1890s (no inverted comma).

Autobiographical note
Please provide a brief autobiographical note with your contribution and ensure that a full mailing
address is included.

TITLE
Author*
* [Autobiographical note as first footnote]

Abbreviations
No full stops to denote abbreviations: eg, CJ, US, CLR.

Quotations
Use single quote marks: eg, She wrote, 'Blah, blab, blah'. Use double quote marks only inside
quotations: eg, She wrote, 'It is common to say "blah, blah, blah".' Indent quotations longer than
four lines; these do not require quote marks.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 181 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAWJOURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

Omissions
Use ellipsis to indicate where words have been omitted from quote:

She wrote 'blah ... blah'. (Note use of space before and after ellipsis.)

Alteration/additions to quotes
Use square brackets to indicate where alterations/additions have been made to quotes.

CITATIONS

Footnotes
All references should appear as footnotes, not in the text. The footnote number should be
inserted after the punctuation mark. If a footnote contains several references they should be
separated by a semicolon.

Books
[Author] Surname first name Tide publisher place of publication year of publication page
number/s.
Note lack of commas!

Silverman Kaja The Subject of Semiotics Oxford University Press New York & Oxford 1983 p 126

Chapter in book
When an article appears in a book or collection of papers, cite both by joining the two citations
with 'in'. Also include the page at which the included authority begins, preceded by 'at'. [Chapter
Author] Surname first name 'Tide of chapter or essay' in [Book Author] Surname First name Title
publisher place of publication year of publication first page number/s at Page number.

Morris Meaghan 'At Henry Parkes Motel' in Frow John and Morris Meaghan (eds) Australian
CulturalStudies. A ReaderAllen & Unwin Sydney 1993 p 140 at 142.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 182 2006


CONTRIBUTORS STYLE GUIDE

Articles
Surname first name 'tide of Article' (Year) Volume Number Journal Tide first page number.

Pahuja Sundhya 'Trading Spaces: Locating Sites for Challenge within International Trade Law'
(2000)14 Australian FeministLaw Journal38

Cases
Provide as full a case citation as possible, cited in the style required by the original source.
For example, Universiy of Wollongong v Metwaly (1984) 158 CLR 447.

In US citations a comma follows the names of the parties and the year is included in round
brackets at the end of the citation, not after the name of the parties as occurs in Australia, the
UK, Canada and New Zealand.

Chicago Board of Trade v United States, 246 US 231 (1918).

Unreported decisions
Name of Case Date (unreported, Court, Judge).
Smith v Brown 12/6/92 (Unrept, Vic SC, McDonald J).

Statutes

Short Title ofLegislation Year ofEnactment (jurisdiction) section No.


Sex DiscriminationAct 1984 (Cth) s 3.
Bills are cited similarly, but are not italicised.

Newspapers

Surname first name 'Article tide' Newspaper Title date page:


Ugg U 'It's Da Law' The Sydney Morning Herald23 January 1965 p 53.
Include place of publication of the newspaper if it is not apparent from the tide:
Ugg U 'It's Still Da Law' The Age (Melbourne) 23 February 1968 p 12.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 183 2006


THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAW JOURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

Reports
Author Title Report no (year) page and/or para:
Law Reform Commission (NSW) Evidence Report No 38 (1987) 54 para 144.

Conference papers
Author, Title of Paper,paper presented at ... [Name of conference}, Place, Date [day/s Month
Year]
Deflem Mary Social Control and the Theoy of Communicative Action, paper presented at the
50t'h Anniversary Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Francisco,
20-23 November 1991.

GENERAL FOOTNOTE POINTS

Latin terms should be avoided.

Ibid or supra: for anything other than case citations, use 'as above' if the reference is directly
above. For example:

1. Inanus A J 'A lawyer's life is not usually dull' (1935) 6 UNSW Law Rev 53 at 54.
2. As above at 55.

For case citations, a further reference directly following the first simply gives the page/paragraph
number:

1. (1998) 324 CLR 42 at 47.


2. At 49.

Op cit: for anything other than case citations, subsequent references which do not follow directly
on from the first reference should be styled as follows:

1. Inanus A J 'A lawyer's life is not usually dull' (1935) 6 UNSW Law Rev 53 at 54.

23. Inanus above note 1 at 63.

For case citations, subsequent references which do not follow directly on from the first reference
should repeat the complete citation.
Use 'compare' rather than cp.
Use 'contrast' rather than cf.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 184 2006


AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAWJOURNAL
BACK ISSUES

Volume 1, August 1993


Tery Threadgold on Critical Theory, Feminisms, the Judiciary and Rape, Larissa Behrendt on Black
Women and the Feminist Movement. Jude McCulloch and Lou Schetzer on Brute Force: Affirmative
Action in the Police force. Maggie Troup on Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law. Renee Leon on
W(H)ither Special Measures: How Affirmative Action can survive Sex Discrimination Legislation.
Kathleen Mahoney on International Strategies to Implement Equality rights for Women. ChiefJusice
David Malcolm on Judicial Education on Gender Equality. Praxis Notes on Women's Access to
Legal Aid, Marital Rape, Violence against Women; Book Reviews.

Volume 2, March 1994


Pat O'Shane on the Launch of the Australian Feminist Law Journal. Pheng Cheab on The Limits of
Critical Race Theory. Isabel Karpin on Reimagining Maternal Selfhood: Transgressing Body
Boundaries. Roxanne Mykitiuk on Fragmenting the Body, Stepbanie Milrqy and Paula Baron on To
Speak as a Judge. Renata Alexander on Practising Feminism: Painting Pictures of Lives in Law.
Praxis Notes on non-English speaking Women, Private Prisons, the Ethics of Company Law,
Administration in the Family Court; and Book Reviews.

Volume 3, August 1994


Keny Carnington andAndrew Johnson on Representations of Crime, Guilt and Sexuality in the Leigh
Leigh Rape/Murder case. Mag Heath and Ngaire Naffine on Feminist Dilemmas about Rape law
Reform. Margaret Thornton on discord in the Legal Academy: The Case of the Feminist Scholar.
Anne Oxford on Liberty, Equality, Pornography: the bodies of women and Human Rights
Discourse. Vivienne Muller on Transsexualism, the Law, Sexual Identity. Bridget Gilmour-Walsh on
Approaches to Discrimination on the Basis of Same-sex activity. Moira Rayner on Practising
Feminism: Middle Aged Ways. Praxis Note on Victim Impact Statements; Book Reviews.

Volume 4, March 1995


Michael Dobber on The Law, Power and the Sexual Saboteurs. Linnell Secomb on IVF: Reproducing
the 'Proper [Family] of Man'. Luy Sussex on Cultural Attitudes, Infanticide and Representation of
Frances Knorr. Larissa Berendt on Aboriginal Identity in Non-Traditional Settings. Adrian Howe on
White Western Feminism meet International Law. Nicola Howell on 'Sexually transmitted Debt'.
Helen Durham on Practising Feminism. Keny Carrington on Executive and Police Sexism in the
Leigh Leigh Case. Therese McCarthy on 'battered women's Syndrome'. Amanda George and Sabra
Lazarus on Private Prison. Book Reviews.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 185 2006


THE AUSTRALAN FEMNIST LAWJOURNAL 2006 VOLUME 24

Volume 5, August 1995


Gayatri Chakravor0y Spivak on Culture. Nina Puren on Hymeneal Acts: Interrogating the Hegemony
of Rape and Romance. Margaret Davies on The Heterosexual Economy. Sarah Zetlein on Lesbian
bodies Before the Law. Anne Else on Legal Fictions: Women, Family Relationships, History and
the Law. Helen Koureskas on the Prostitute's Voice. ChristopherKendall on Gay Male Pornography:
An Issue of Sex Discrimination. Praxis Notes on The Family Law Reform Bill, Interpreting the
Figures on Violence, Some Justice for Leigh Leigh and book Reviews.

Volume 6, March 1996


Sharon Jones Images, Dianne Otto on World Conference on Women. Beijing World Conference
Praxis Notes by Chilla Bulbeck, Janey Hunt, Gillian Moon, Jackie May, Fiona Strahan, Raquel Carvajal
and Debbie Georgopoulos.Anne 0ford on the Uses of Sovereignty. Elizabeth Sheehy on Rape Reform
in Canada. Helen Stacey on The Feminist Political Economy. Rosemajy Hunter on the Essentialism
Debate. Weiping Wang on Practising Feminism. Book Reviews.

Volume 7, October 1997


Special Issue: Law and Literature. Barbara Milech on Aboriginal Women's Life Writings. Joseph
Pugliese on The Barbarism of Western Law. Peter Hutchings on Modern Forensics: Photography and
Other suspects. Penelope Pether on Constitutional Law and the Crucible. Regina Graycar on Legal
Stories about Violence. Judith Resnik on Changing the Topic. Nancy Marder on Feminist Voices.
Praxis notes on Criminology Meeting, Affirmative Action Report, Crimes Compensation
Tribunal, Women's Memories of Child Sexual Assault, Sexual Assault and Disability, Papers from
Women and Law Workshop in China by Xia Yinlan, Zeng Ershu and Zhang Zhijing, Tian Lan, Chang
Jianying.Book reviews.

Volume 8, March 1997


Alison Young on law, film and violence. Rose Lucas on sex and crime in "Dorothy Porter's writing.
Irene Watson on law and Indigenous communities in Australia. Adrian Howe on incestuous assault.
Judith Grbich on taxation law and psychoanalysis. Praxis notes on Justice for Women who kill,
One Woman's Experience of the Criminal 'Justice' system. Abortion before the High court, the
Miss World Beauty Pageant. Book Reviews.

Volume 9, September 1997


Ruthann Robson on the codification of lesbian relationship. Kane Race on bodies and legal borders
in rape and AIDS discourse. Magy Heath on Catherine MacKinnon. SPECIAL ISSUE: SEXUAL
ASSAULT PRAXIS AND CHANGE: The Model Criminal Code on Sexual Offences Discussion
Paper. Liz Olle on Community Debate. Peter Rush on Being Legal. Melanie Heenan on Sex Crimes.
Nina Puren on Defining and Hymen. Pete Rush and Alison Young on a Crime of Consequence.
Survivor Experience of the courtroom and the compensation process. Further Praxis notes on
Cuts to Legal Aid, and Feminism in the face of angry men. Book Reviews.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 186 2006


BACK ISSUES

Volume 10, March 1998


Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese interview Jacqui Katona on Jabiluka, Native title and Politics.
Jonathon Morrow on the Literary Imagination. Kieran Doin on Caroline Norton's Pamphlets on
Laws for Women. Adam Geary on The Female Messiah and Finnegan's Wake. Lawrence
McNamara on Racial Slurs and Football. Melanie Williams on Law, Ethics and Aesthetics. Praxis
Notes on women lawyers and Equal Opportunity Act practices. Book Reviews

Volume 11, October 1998


SPECIAL ISSUE: LEGALISING THE SOUL, NATIVE TITLE RIGHTS AND
COLONISATION. Elizabeth Povinelli on The cunning of Recognition in Settler Australia. Irene
Watson on Power of the Muldarbi. Mitchell Rolls on Cultural Colonisation. Valerie Kerruish on
Kruger and the Consitutionality of Genocide in Australia. Jennifer Nielsen and Images of the
Aboriginal. Sangeetha Chandra-Shekeran on Mabo, Bringing Them Home and the nation. Praxis
notes on Jean Martin v Homeswest. Teaching Indigenous Australians and the Law. Book
Reviews.

Volume 12, March 1999


Marett Leiboff on The Embodiment of Culture. William MacNeil on the Monstrous Body of the
Law. Melinda Mawson on Whores, Witches and the Law. Fiona Campbell on the Refreshingly
Disabled. Julia Grix on Law's Truth and Other Lies. Llyd Davies on Protecting Paedophiles. Fiona
MacLeod on Equality of Opportunity for Women at the Bar. The HonourableJusticeMay Gaudron on
A Happy Coincidence of Self-Interest and the Public- Interest. Marda Neave on Women at the
Victorian bar. Adrian Howe on Reforming Provocation. Helen Brown on Provocation as a Defence
to Murder. Book Review.

Volume 13, September 1999


SPECIAL ISSUE: LAW, CULTURE AND THE QUESTIONS OF FEMINISM. Nina Puren and
Alison Young on Signifying Justice: Law, Culture and the Questions of feminism. Hilagy Byrne-
Armstrong et al on Feminist Criminology. Mehera San Roque on Popular Trials and the
Bernardo/Homolka Case. Danielle Tyson on An Anatomy of Provocation. Suzanne Christie on
Judge Judy. William MacNeil on Beyond Governmentality and Great Expectations. Rebecca Scott
Bray on The Narrative Body. Praxis note on True-crime fiction. Book Reviews

Volume 14, March 2000


Qudsia Mirza on Islam and the Laws of Marriage. Andrew Shape on Transgender Jurisprudence
and the Spectre of Homsexuality. Sundhya Pahuja on International Trade Law. Fiona Campbellon
Eugenics, Law and the 'Problem' of 'Disability'. Janet Galbraith on Whiteness and Stories of Rape.
Practising Feminism by Lisa Sarmas. Praxis Notes: Jeannine Purdy on Racism and Administrative
Law. Margaret Thornton on Feminism in the Legal Academy. Shannon Taylor on Defense tactics in
Intrafamilial Sexual Assault Trials. Book Reviews.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 187 2006


24
THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST LAWJOURNAL 2006 VOLUME

Volume 15, December 2001


AND LITERATURE
SPECIAL ISSUE: WRITING AGAINST LEGAL RACISM: LAW
Patton on Reconciliation, Aboriginal
EXPLORATIONS. Mieke Bal on literary litigations. Paul
on: Bringing them Home and
rights and constitutional paradox in Australia. Anthony Uhlmann
in Pascoe's Fox, Ruby-eyed
Benang by Kim Scott. Alisoun Neville on reading heterotopic spaces
of trauma. Stephen
Coucal, and Shark. Sandra Rudland on reading the law through the narrative
Grbich. on
Gray on the 'authenticity' debate and protection for Aboriginal culture. Judith
Colonialism, Mabo and Legal Racism.

Volume 16 June 2002


Poem by MTC Cronin. Hannah Robert on Cubillo v Commonwealth. Sandra Berns on Australia's
new 'deserving poor' Rosemary Hunter on women and the shrinking state. Simona Goy on assisted
insemination in Queensland. Wendy Larcombe on false complainants in sexual assault. Belinda
Morrissey on why feminists don't talk about Myra. Sonya Sceats on the legal concept of obscenity -
a genealogy. Praxis Note on Women in the law - what next? by the Hon Justice Michael Kirby.
Book Reviews.

Volume 17 December 2002


SPECIAL ISSUE: REIMAGINING THE GLOBAL SPACE: FEMINISM, GLOBALISATION
AND LAW. Bronnyn Winter on women's rights, globalisation and the nation-state. Angela Barns
and Alison Preston on women, work and welfare. Sam Horfteld on globalisaiton and prostitution.
Belinda Bennett on women's health in the global village. Isabel Karpin and Karen O'Connell on law,
genetics and globalisation. Book reviews.

Volume 18 June 2003


Miranda Stewart on Taxation, Fairness and Peter Carey's The Tax Inspector. Jennifer Beard on
International Development Programs and Christian Theology. Connal Parsley on Australia's
Judgment of Unauthorised Arrivals at the Airport. Amanda Alexander on Sex , Crime and Buffy.
Juliet Rogers on Female Genital Mutilation Act 1996. Sandra Berns on Women, the Public Sphere
and Ethical Sensibility. Praxis Notes: Mararet Thornton on The Legal Academy. Shannon Keebaugh
on Shared Care and Social Security Policy in Australia. Book Reviews.

Volume 19 December 2003


SPECIAL ISSUE: DIVINING THE SOURCE: LAW'S FOUNDATION AND THE
QUESTION OF AUTHORITY. Jennfer Beard & Sundhya Pahuja,editors. Jennifer Beard & Sundhya
Pahuja on A Disclosure of Law's Foundation. Sara Ramshaw on The Cixousian Feminine and the
Quest for Law's Origin. Jill Stauffer on Sovereignty, Order & Anarchy in Positive Law. Peter
Fit.patrick on Savage Sources and Feminine Law. Lee Godden on A Proper Account of Property
and Native Tide. Ambreena Manji on Commodifying Land in Uganda. Bradley Bgyan on Haraway

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 188 2006


BACK ISSUES

and Cyborg Emancipation. Mark Antaki on Peter Fitzpatrick's Modernism and the Grounds of
Law.

Volume 20, June 2004


SPECIAL ISSUE: FEMINIST LEGAL ACADEMIC WORKSHOP. Margaret Davies & Kathy
Mack, editors. Margaret Davies & Kathy Mack on Legal Feminism. MargaretThornton on Neoliberal
Melancholia and Feminist Legal Scholarship. Reg Gracar and Jenny Morgan on Examining
Understandings of Equality. Susan Armstrong on Feminist Law Reform. Rachael Field on A
Feminist Model of Mediation. Irene Watson & Marv Heath on Nunga Women and White Women.
Matthew Loader on Recognition of Same Sex Relationships. Susan Magarey on Sex Discrimination
Act 1984.

Volume 21, December 2004


Anna Szorenyi on Identity, Authenticity, Technology and the Representative Refugee. Josqph Pugliese
on Subcutaneous Law, Embodying the Migration Amendment Act 1992. Nina Philadelphogf-Puren
on Dereliction, Women, Rape and Football. Adrian Howe on Provocation in Crisis. Amanda
Whiting on Women Petitioners of the 17th Century English Revolution. Kate Gleeson on The Pimp
in Law.

Volume 22, June 2005


SPECIAL ISSUE: MAPPING LAW AT THE MARGINS: POSTCOLONIAL THEORY. Ian
Duncanson and Nan Seuffert, editors. Ian Duncanson & Nan Seuffert on Mapping Connections. Irene
Watson on Being Aboriginal in Occupied Space. Elizabeth Povineli on Without Shame, Australia,
United States and New Cultural Relativism. Sandra Rudland on Pilgrimages of English Law. Trish
Luker on Postcolonising Amnesia, Reconciliation and Stolen Generations. Fiona Campbell on the
Otterley Text, Genealogy and Sri Lankan Burghers. Stewart Motha on Failure of Sovereignty in
Australia. Judith Grbich on Postcolonial Theory, Native Tide and Charles Harpur.

Volume 23, December 2005


Joseph Pugliese on Biometric Proxies, Civilian Life, Border Security and Counter-Terrorism Laws.
Marett Leiboff on The Monstrous Regiment, Assisted Reproduction and Sperm harvesting. Mark
McLelland on Yaoi, Censhorship and Boys' Love Fandom. Gemma Edgar on Transsexual narratives
and resistance. Alecia Simmonds on Breach of Promise of Marriage and Colonial Australia.Tanya
Serisier on Rape and Commemoration. Jane Maree Maher, Marie Segrave, Sharon Pickering and Jude
McCulloch on Culture, Terror, Provocation, Law.

HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 189 2006


HeinOnline -- 24 Austl. Feminist L.J. 190 2006

También podría gustarte