--- /dev/null
+[[!meta title="The Death of Nature"]]
+
+## Topics
+
+* Bohm's process physics.
+* Ilya Prigogine new thermodynamics.
+
+## Excerpts
+
+ Between the sixteenth andseventeenth cerfturies the image of an or-
+ ganic cosmos with a living female earth at its ceriter gave way to a
+ mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and
+ passive, to be dominated and controlled by hufuans. The Death efNature
+ deals with the economic, cultural, and scientific changes through which
+ this vast transformation came about. In seeking to understand how people
+ conceptualized nature in the Scientific Revolution, I am asking not about
+ unchanging essences, but about connections between social change and
+ changing constructions of nattlre". Similarly. when women today attempt
+ to change society's domination of nature, 1:\1~¥.,~e acting to overturn
+ moder_n constructions of nature and women as culturally passive and
+ subordinate.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Today's feminist and ecological consciousness can be used to examine the
+ historical interconnections between women and nature that devel-
+ oped as the modern scientific and economic world took form in the
+ sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-a transformation that shaped
+ and pervades today's mainstream values and perceptions.
+ Feminist history in the broadest sense requires that we look at
+
+ [...]
+
+ My intent is instead to examine the
+ values associated with the images of women and nature as they re-
+ late to the formation of our modern world and their implications for
+ 'our lives today.
+
+ In investigating the roots of our current environmental dilemma
+ and its connections to science, technology, and the economy, we
+ must reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that,
+ by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living or-
+ ganism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women. The
+ contributions of such founding "fathers" of modern science as
+ Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes,
+ and Isaac Newton must be reevaluated. The fate of other options,
+ alternative philosophies, and social groups shaped by the organic
+ world view and resistant to the growing exploitative mentality needs
+ reappraisal. To understand why one road rather than the other was
+ taken requires a broad synthesis of both the natural and cultural
+ environments of Western society at the historical turning point.
+ This book elaborates an ecological perspective that includes both
+
+### Terminology
+
+Nature, art, organic and mechanical:
+
+ A distinction was commonly made
+ between natura naturans, or nature creating, and natura naturata,
+ the natural creation.
+
+ Nature was contrasted with art (techne) and with artificially cre-
+ ated things. It was personified as a female-being, e.g., Dame Na-
+ ture; she was alternately a prudent lady, an empress, a mother, etc.
+ The course of nature and the laws of nature were the actualization
+ of her force. The state of nature was the state of mankind prior to
+ social organization and prior to the state of grace. Nature spirits,
+ nature deities, virgin nymphs, and elementals were thought to re-
+ side in or be associated with natural objects.
+
+ In both Western and non-Western cultures, nature was tradition-
+ ally feminine.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In the early modern period, the term organic usually referred to
+ the bodily organs, structures, and organization of living beings,
+ while organicism was the doctrine that organic structure was the
+ result of an inherent, adaptive property in matter. The word organi-
+ cal, however, was also sometimes used to refer to a machine or an
+ instrument. Thus a clock was sometimes called an "organical
+ body," while som~ machines were said to operate by organical,
+ rather than mechanical, action if the touch of a person was in-
+ volved.
+
+ Mechanical referred to the machine and tool trades; the manual
+ operations of the handicrafts; inanimate machines that lacked spon-
+ taneity, volition, and thought; and the mechanical sciences. 1
+
+### Nature that nurtures and thats also uncontrollable, replaced by "the machine"
+
+ NATURE AS NURTURE: CONTROLLING IMAGERY. Central to
+ the organic theory was the identification of nature, especially the
+ earth, with a nurturing mother: a kindly beneficent female who pro-
+ vided for the needs of mankind in an ordered, planned universe. But
+ another opposing image of nature as female was also prevalent:
+ wild and uncontrollable nature that could render violence, storms,
+ droughts, and general chaos. Both were identified with the female
+ sex and were projections of human perceptions onto the external
+ world. The metaphor of the earth as a nurturing mother was gradu-
+ ally to vanish as a dominant image as the Scientific Revolution pro-
+ ceeded to mechanize and to rationalize the world view. The second
+ image, nature as disorder, called forth an important modern idea,
+ that of power over nature. Two new ideas, those of mechanism and
+ of the domination and mastery of nature, became core concepts of
+ the modern world. An organically oriented mentality in which fe-
+ male principles played an important role was undermined and re-
+ placed by a mechanically oriented mentality that either eliminated
+ or used female principles in an exploitative manner. As Western
+ culture became increasingly mechanized in the 1600s, the female
+ earth and virgin earth spirit were subdued by the machine. 1
+
+### Mining and the female body
+
+ The image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing
+ mother had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of
+ human beings. One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her en-
+ trails for gold or mutilate her body, although commercial mining
+ would soon require that. As long as the earth was considered to be
+ alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical
+ behavior to carry out destructive acts against it. For most tradition-
+ al cultures, minerals and metals ripened in the uterus of the Earth
+ Mother, mines were compared to her vagina, and metallurgy was
+ the human hastening of the birth of the living metal in the artificial
+ womb of the furnace-an abortion of the metal's natural growth
+ cycle before its time. Miners offered propitiation to the deities of
+ the soil and subterranean world, performed ceremonial sacrifices,
+ · and observed strict cleanliness, sexual abstinence, and fasting be-
+ fore violating the sacredness of the living earth by sinking a mine.
+ Smiths assumed an awesome responsibility in precipitating the met-
+ al's birth through smeltin,.g, fusing, and beating it with hammer and
+ anvil; they were often accorded the status of shaman in tribal rit-
+ uals and their tools were thought to hold special powers.
+
+Is there a relation between torture (basanos), extraction of "truth" and
+mining gold out of a mine? See discussions both on "The Counterrevolution"
+and "Torture and Truth".
+
+### Hidden norms: controlling images
+
+ Controlling images operate as ethical restraints or as ethical sanc-
+ tions-as subtle "oughts" or "ought-nots." Thus as the descriptive
+ metaphors and images of nature change, a behavioral restraint can
+ be changed into a sanction. Such a change in the image and de'-
+ scription of nature was occurring during the course of the Scientific
+ Revolution.
+
+ It is important to recognize the normative import of descriptive
+ statements about nature. Contemporary philosophers of language
+ have critically reassessed the earlier positivist distinction between
+ the "is" of science and the "ought" of society, arguing that descrip-
+ tions and norms are not opposed to one another by linguistic sepa-
+ ration into separate "is" and "ought" statements, but are contained
+ within each other. Descriptive statements about the world can pre-
+ suppose the normative; they are then ethic-laden.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The writer
+ or culture may not be conscious of the ethical import yet may act in
+ accordance with its dictates. The hidden norms may become con-
+ scious or explicit when an alternative or contradiction presents it-
+ self. Because language contains a culture within itself, when lan-
+ guage changes, a culture is also changing in important way~~ By
+ examining changes in descriptions of nature, we can then perceive
+ something of the changes in cultural values. To be aware of the in-.
+
+### Renaissance: hierarchical order
+
+ The Renaissance view of nature and society was based on the or-
+ ganic analogy between the human body, or microcosm, and the
+ larger world, or macrocosm.
+
+ [...]
+
+ But while the pastoral tradition symbolized nature as a benevo-
+ lent female, it contained the implication that nature when plowed
+ and cultivated could be used as a commodity and manipulated as a
+ resource. Nature, tamed and subdued, could be transformed into a
+ garden to provide both material and spiritual food to enhance the
+ comfort and soothe the anxieties of men distraught by the demands
+ of the urban world and the stresses of the marketplace. It depended
+ on a masculine perception of nature as a mother and bride whose
+ primary function was to comfort; nurture, and provide for the well-
+ being of the male. In pastoral imagery, both nature and women are
+ subordinate and essentially passive. They nurture but do not control
+ or exhibit disruptive passion. The pastoral mode, although it viewed
+ nature as benevolent, was a model created as an antidote to the
+ pressures of urbanization and mechanization. It represented a ful-
+ fillment of human needs for nurture, but by conceiving of nature as
+ passive, it nevertheless allowed for the possibility of its use and ma-
+ nipulation. Unlike the dialectical image of nature as the active uni-
+ ty of opposites in tension, the Arcadian image rendered nature pas-
+ sive and manageable.
+
+### Undressing
+
+ An allegory (1160) by Alain of Lille, of the School of Chartres,
+ portrays Natura, God's powerful but humble servant, as stricken
+ with grief at the failure of man (in contrast to other species) to
+ obey her laws. Owing to faulty supervision by Venus, human beings
+ engage in adulterous sensual love. In aggressively penetrating the
+ secrets of heaven, they tear Natura's undergarments, exposing her
+ to the view of the vulgar. She complains that "by the unlawful as-
+ saults of man alone the garments of my modesty suffer disgrace
+ and division."
+
+ [...]
+
+ Such basic attitudes
+ toward ·male-female roles in biological generation where the female
+ and the earth are both passive receptors could easily become sanc-
+ tions for exploitation as the organic context was transformed by the
+ rise of commercial capitalism.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The macrocosm theory, as we have seen, likened the cosmos to
+ the human body, soul, and spirit with male and female reproductive
+ components. Similarly, the geocosm theory compared the earth to
+ the living human body, with breath, blood, sweat, and elimination
+ systems.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The earth's springs were akin to the human blood system; its oth-
+ er various fluids were likened to the mucus, saliva, sweat, and other
+ forins of lubrication in the human body, the earth being organized
+ "'. .. much after the plan of our bodies, in which there are both
+ veins and arteries, the former blood vessels, the latter air vessels ....
+ So exactly alike is the resemblance to our bodies in nature's forma-
+ tion of the earth, that our ancestors have spoken of veins [springs]
+ of water." Just as the human body contained blood, marrow, mu-
+ cus, saliva, tears, and lubricating fluids, so in the earth there were
+ various fluids. Liquids that turned hard became metals, such as
+ gold and silver; other fluids turned into stones, bitumens, and veins
+ of sulfur. Like the human body, the earth gave forth sweat: "There
+ is often a gathering of thin, scattered moisture like dew, which from
+ many points flows into one spot. The dowsers call it sweat, because
+ a kind of drop is either squeezed out by the pressure of the ground
+ or raised by the heat."
+
+ Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) enlarged the Greek analogy be-
+ tween the waters of the earth and the ebb and flow of human blood
+ through the veins and heart
+
+ [...]
+
+ A widely held alchemical belief was the growth of the baser met-
+ als into gold in womblike matrices in the earth. The appearance of
+ silver in lead ores or gold in silvery assays was evidence that this
+ transformation was under way. Just as the child grew in the
+ warmth of the female womb, so the growth of metals was fostered
+
+### Matrix
+
+ The earth in the Paracelsian philosophy was the mother or matrix
+ giving birth to plants, animals, and men.
+
+### Renaissance was diverse
+
+ In general, the Renaissance view was that all things were permeat-
+ ed by life, there being no adequate method by which to designate
+ the inanimate from the animate.
+ [...] but criteria by which to differentiate the living from
+ the nonliving could not successfully be formulated. This was due
+ not only to the vitalistic framework of the period but to striking
+ similarities between them.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Popular Renaissance literature was filled with hundreds of im-
+ ages associating nature, matter, and the earth with the female sex.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In the 1960s, the Native-American became a symbol in the ecol-
+ ogy movement's search for alternatives to Western exploitative atti-
+ tudes. The Indian animistic belief-system and reverence for the
+ earth as a · mother were contrasted with the Judeo-Christian heri-
+ tage of dominion over nature and with capitalist practices resulting
+ in the "tragedy of the commons" (exploitation of resources avail-
+ able for any person's or nation's use). But as will be seen, European
+ culture was more complex and varied than this judgment allows. It
+ ignores the Renaissance philosophy of the nurturing earth as well
+ as those philosophies and social movements resistant to mainstream
+ economic change.
+
+### Mining as revealing the hidden secrets
+
+ In his defense, the miner argued that the earth was not a real moth-
+ er, but a wicked stepmother who hides and conceals the metals in
+ her inner parts instead of making them available for human use.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In the old hermit's tale, we have a fascina,ting example·of the re:·
+ lationship between images and values. The older view of nature as a
+ kindly mother is challenged by the growing interests of the mining
+ industry in Saxony, Bohemia, and the Harz Mountains, regions of
+ newly found prosperity (Fig. 6). The miner, representing these
+ newer commercial activities, transforms the irnage of the nurturing
+ mother into that of a stepmother who wickedly conceals her bounty
+ from the deserving and needy children. In the seventeenth century,
+ the image will be seen to undergo yet another transformation, as
+ natural philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) sets forth the need
+ for prying into nature's nooks and crannies in searching out her se-
+ crets for human improvement.
+
+ -- 33
--- /dev/null
+[[!meta title="Torture and Truth"]]
+
+* [Torture and Truth](https://www.worldcat.org/title/torture-and-truth/oclc/20823386).
+* By Page duBois.
+
+## About
+
+ First published in 1991, this book — through the examination of ancient
+ Greek literary, philosophical and legal texts — analyses how the Athenian
+ torture of slaves emerged from and reinforced the concept of truth as something
+ hidden in the human body. It discusses the tradition of understanding truth as
+ something that is generally concealed and the ideas of ‘secret space’ in both
+ the female body and the Greek temple. This philosophy and practice is related
+ to Greek views of the ‘Other’ (women and outsiders) and considers the role of
+ torture in distinguishing slave and free in ancient Athens. A wide range of
+ perspectives — from Plato to Sartre — are employed to examine the subject.
+
+## Topics
+
+* Example of actual tortures that took place: see defense of Andokides. Footnote 6.
+
+## Excerpts
+
+### Machine atroci
+
+ Inside sat other devices. The iron maiden of Frankfurt, a
+ larger-than-life-size female body, cast in iron, strangely reminiscent of one
+ of those Russian dolls, a rounded maternal peasant body that opens horizontally
+ to reveal another identical doll inside, that opens again and again until one
+ reaches a baby, perhaps, I can’t recall, in its deepest inside. This body,
+ propped open, had been cast with a vertical split, its interior consisting of
+ two sets of sharp iron spikes that, when the maiden was closed on a captive
+ human body, penetrated that body, trapping it upright as it killed in a
+ grotesque parody of pregnancy made a coffin.
+
+ [...]
+
+ For me, the pear was not the most compelling “machine” on display. There
+ sat, on one of the tables inside the Quirinale Palace, a simple modern device,
+ looking something like a microphone, with electrodes dangling from it. The
+ catalogue acknowledged that critics had objected to the inclusion of this
+ instrument in the exhibit.
+
+ [...]
+
+ As I recognized what it must be, pieced together an idea of its functions from
+ recently read accounts of refugees from the Argentinian junta and from Central
+ America, recalled films of the Algerian war, news stories of the reign of the
+ colonels in Greece, this instrument composed of the only too familiar elements
+ of modern technology defamiliarized the devices on exhibit; removing them from
+ the universe of the museum, it identified them with the calculated infliction
+ of human agony. It recontextualized all the other objects, prevented them from
+ being an aesthetic series, snatched them from the realm of the commodified
+ antique, recalled suffering.
+
+ The ancient Greeks and Romans routinely tortured slaves as part of their legal
+ systems. So what? Is the recollection of this fact merely a curiosity, a memory
+ of the “antique” which allows us to marvel at our progress from the past of
+ Western culture, our abolition of slavery? Some of us congratulate ourselves on
+ our evolution from a barbaric pagan past, from the world of slave galleys and
+ crucifixions, of vomitoria and gladiatorial contests, of pederasty and
+ polytheism. But there is another, supplementary or contestatory narrative told
+ about ancient Greek culture—a narrative about the noble origins of Western
+ civilization. This narrative has analogies with the Quirinale exhibit—it
+ represents the past as a set of detached objects, redolent with antique
+ atmosphere. This alternate and prejudicially selective gaze at the high culture
+ of antiquity, the achievement of those ancient Greeks and Romans to whom we
+ point when we discuss our golden age, produces an ideological text for the
+ whole world now, mythologies about democracy versus communist totalitarianism,
+ about progress, civilized values, human rights. Because we are descended from
+ this noble ancient culture, from the inventors of philosophy and democracy, we
+ see ourselves as privileged, as nobly obliged to guide the whole benighted
+ world toward Western culture’s version of democracy and enlightenment. But even
+ as we gaze at high culture, at its origins in antiquity, at its present
+ manifestations in the developed nations, the “base” practices of torturers
+ throughout the world, many of them trained by North Americans, support this
+ narrative by forcing it on others, by making it the hegemonic discourse about
+ history. So-called high culture—philosophical, forensic, civic discourses and
+ practices—is of a piece from the very beginning, from classical antiquity, with
+ the deliberate infliction of human suffering. It is my argument in this book
+ that more is at stake in our recognition of this history than antiquarianism,
+ than complacency about our advances from barbarism to civilization. That truth
+ is unitary, that truth may finally be extracted by torture, is part of our
+ legacy from the Greeks and, therefore, part of our idea of “truth.”
+
+### Sartre
+
+ "Torture is senseless violence, born in fear. The purpose of it is to force
+ from one tongue, amid its screams and its vomiting up of blood, the secret of
+ everything. Senseless violence: whether the victim talks or whether he dies
+ under his agony, the secret that he cannot tell is always somewhere else and
+ out of reach. It is the executioner who becomes Sisyphus. If he puts the
+ question at all, he will have to continue forever."
+
+### Tradition, secrets, truth and torture
+
+ The Gestapo taught the French, who taught the Americans in Indo-China, and
+ they passed on some of their expertise to the Argentinian, Chilean, El
+ Salvadoran torturers. But this essay is not meant to be a genealogy of modern
+ torture. Rather I am concerned with what Sartre calls “the secret of
+ everything” with the relationship between torture and the truth, which “is
+ always somewhere else and out of reach.”
+
+A crucial point (an "crucial" also in the sense of the crucified, tortured body):
+
+ I want to show how the logic of our philosophical tradition, of some of our
+ inherited beliefs about truth, leads almost inevitably to conceiving of the
+ body of the other as the site from which truth can be produced, and to using
+ violence if necessary to extract that truth.
+
+ [...]
+
+ I want to work out how the Greek philosophical idea of truth was produced
+ in history and what role the social practice of judicial torture played in its
+ production.
+
+ I don’t want to suggest that the ancient Greeks invented torture, or that it
+ belongs exclusively to the Western philosophical tradition, or that abhorrence
+ of torture is not also part of that tradition. But I also refuse to adopt the
+ moral stance of those who pretend that torture is the work of “others,” that it
+ belongs to the third world, that we can condemn it from afar. To stand thus is
+ to eradicate history, to participate both in the exportation of torture as a
+ product of Western civilization, and in the concealment of its ancient and
+ perhaps necessary coexistence with much that we hold dear. The very idea of
+ truth we receive from the Greeks, those ancestors whom Allan Bloom names for
+ us,3 is inextricably linked with the practice of torture, which has almost
+ always been the ultimate attempt to discover a secret “always out of reach.”
+
+ [...]
+
+ The ancient Greek word for torture is basanos. It means first of all the
+ touchstone used to test gold for purity; the Greeks extended its meaning to
+ denote a test or trial to determine whether something or someone is real or
+ genuine. It then comes to mean also inquiry by torture, “the question,”
+ torture.4 In the following pages I will discuss the semantic field of the word
+ basanos, its uses in various contexts, both literal and metaphorical. [...]
+ This analysis will lead me to consideration of the idea of truth as secret in
+ ancient Greek thought, in literary, ritual, and philosophical practices
+
+ [...]
+
+ The desire for a reliable test to determine the fidelity of a suspect
+ intimate recurs in Greek poetry, and later poets often employ the metaphor of
+ the testing of metal to describe the necessity and unreliability of testing for
+ the fidelity of friends.
+
+ The Lydians of Asia Minor had invented the use of metal currency, of money, in
+ the seventh century B.C.E. The polis or city-state of Aegina was reputed to be
+ the first Greek city to establish a silver coinage; in the classical period
+ several different coinages circulated. By the fifth century B.C.E. coins of
+ small enough denominations existed to enter into the economic transactions of
+ daily life. In Euripides’ Hippolytus the Athenian king Theseus, bewildered by
+ contradictory accounts of an alleged seduction attempt by his son against his
+ wife, uses monetary language to convey his confusion about the mysteries of
+ domestic intimacy:
+
+ [...]
+
+ Theseus employs the language of the banker, of the money-lender, to suggest
+ that one of his friends, that is, of those dear to him, either his son or his
+ wife, is false and counterfeit.
+
+ [...]
+
+ pollution is a religious term, connected with the impurity of blood shed,
+ of unclean sacrificial practices or murder.10
+ In the archaic period, the state of freedom from pollution is sometimes
+ connected with notions of inherited purity, of uncontaminated descent from the
+ generations of heroes, from the gods, ideas of inherited excellence through
+ which the aristocrats justified their dominance in the archaic cities.
+
+### Governing, the steering of a ship in the hands of the aristocracy
+
+ The very last lines of the poem echo the concerns of Theognis, a recognition of
+ the political disturbances of the ancient city, and the desire of the
+ aristocratic poet for a steady hand, sanctioned by blood and tradition, at the
+ city’s helm:
+
+ Let us praise
+ his brave brothers too, because
+ they bear on high the ways of Thessaly
+ and bring them glory.
+ In their hands
+ belongs the piloting of cities, their fathers’ heritage.
+ (68-72) [poet Pindar, in Pythian 10]
+
+ This last phrase might be rendered: “in the care of the good men [Theognis’s
+ agathoi, a political term] lie the inherited, paternal pilotings, governings
+ [following the metaphor of the ship of state] of cities.” The city is a ship
+ that must be guided by those who are capable by birth of piloting it, that is
+ to say, the agathoi, the good, the aristocrats. The basanos reveals the good,
+ separates base metal from pure gold, aristocrat from commoner.
+
+### A change of meaning
+
+ The Sophoclean language, and its ambiguity, reveal the gradual transition of
+ the meaning of the word basanos from “test” to “torture.” The literal meaning,
+ “touchstone,” gives way to a figurative meaning, “test,” then over time changes
+ to “torture,” as the analogy is extended to the testing of human bodies in
+ juridical procedures for the Athenian courts. Is the history of basanos itself
+ in ancient Athens a process of refiguration, the alienation of the test from a
+ metal to the slave, the other? Such a transfer is literally catachresis, the
+ improper use of words, the application of a term to a thing which it does not
+ properly denote, abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor (OED); George
+ Puttenham, the Elizabethan rhetorician, calls catachresis “the figure of
+ abuse.” The modern English word touchstone is similarly employed by people who
+ have no idea of the archaic reference to the lapis Lydius, also called in
+ English basanite . The figurative use of the word touchstone has taken the
+ place of the literal meaning.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The forensic language of Oedipus Rex fuses heroic legend with the poetic
+ representation of the city’s institutions. The mythic narrative of Oedipus’s
+ encounter with the Sphinx, set in the most remote past, and the struggle
+ between Kreon and Oedipus over the investigation of an ancient and mythic
+ homicide, here meet the daily life of the democratic polis. The language of
+ Sophokles’ tragedy might be said to exemplify not only the contradictions
+ between the tyranny of the fictional past and the “secret ballots,” alluded to
+ disparagingly by Pindar, of the audience’s present, but also to represent
+ dramatically, in an almost Utopian manner, a synthesis of the Greeks’ legendary
+ origins and their political processes. The chorus’s attempt to judge Oedipus
+ resembles the aristocratic reveler’s testing of his fellow symposiasts, using
+ as it does archaic, lyric language; it is also like the democratic jury’s
+ testing of a citizen on trial, alluding obliquely at the same time to the
+ juridical torture of slaves in the Athenian legal system, a process which by
+ this time was referred to as the basanos.
+
+ Some of the semantic processes that transformed basanos as touchstone into the
+ term for legal torture can be seen in the use of the term in the Oedipus
+ Coloneus. This tragedy is only obliquely concerned with the process of
+ democracy, with the new institutions of the mid-fifth century which mediated
+ between the city’s aristocratic past and its democratic present. It speaks
+ instead of the exhaustion of the political, of disillusionment with parties and
+ with war, of metaphysical solutions to problems too bitter to be resolved in
+ mortal agones.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The basanos, no longer an autonomous, inert, inanimate tool for assaying
+ metal, has become a struggle between two forces, a contest that assumes
+ physical violence, a reconcretizing of the “touchstone,” which is neither the
+ literal stone nor a metaphorical ordeal. Hands, pitted one against the other,
+ rematerialize the test. The touchstone sets stone against metal; the test of
+ friends sets one against another; here the agon, the contest implicit in the
+ notion of basanos, takes on a new connotation, one of combat between enemies.
+
+ Some historians of the ancient city believe that the word basanos refers not to
+ physical torture, but to a legal interrogation that does not involve violence.
+ Others claim that the threat of torture may have been present in the word, but
+ that there is no evidence that torture was actually ever practiced.16 It seems
+ to me very unlikely , even though the ancient evidence does not describe
+ directly any single case of torture, that the frequent mentions of basanos in
+ contexts of physical intimidation can refer to anything but the practice of
+ torture. The accidents of survival of ancient material may mean that we have no
+ single documented instance of torture having been applied, but the many uses of
+ the term, not only in the context of the law court, suggest a cultural
+ acceptance of the meaning “torture” for basanos, and an assumption that torture
+ occurred. For example, the historian Herodotos, in recounting an incident that
+ took place during the Persian Wars, in the early years of the fifth century
+ B.C.E., describes the Athenian hero Themistokles’ secret negotiations with the
+ Persian emperor Xerxes after the battle of Salamis:
+
+ Themistocles lost no time in getting a message through to Xerxes. The men he
+ chose for this purpose were all people he could trust to keep his instructions
+ secret [sigan], even under torture [es pasan basanon].
+
+ [...]
+
+ This passage suggests not only that basanos was not merely interrogation, but
+ that with the meaning torture it formed part of the vocabulary of daily life,
+ and that torture figured in the relations between ancient states as well as in
+ the legal processes of the democratic city. Themistokles had to take into
+ account the ability of his emissaries to resist physical torture, pasan
+ basanon, “any, all torture,” when deciding whom to send to the Persian emperor.
+ He required silence under extreme interrogation, since he was claiming falsely
+ to have protected Xerxes from the pursuit of the Greeks after the Persians’
+ defeat. And Herodotos uses the word basanos as if the meaning “torture” were
+ common currency.
+
+ As do Sophokles’ Oedipus plays, Herodotos’s text offers a double vision,
+ providing further evidence about the place of torture in the democracy and in
+ its prehis-tory. Sophokles writes from within the democracy about episodes from
+ the archaic, legendary past of the city. Herodotos writes from the world of the
+ mid-fifth century, the time of Sophokles and the great imperial age of Athens,
+ looking back half a century. The victories of Athens in the Persian Wars had
+ enabled and produced the great flowering of Athenian culture and ambition in
+ the middle of the fifth century. Herodotos’s retrospective gaze at the origins
+ of the democracy and its empire paints the portrait of Themistokles, one of the
+ great aristocrats whose power and vision shaped the evolution of the democratic
+ city. His encouragement, for example, of the policy of spending the city’s
+ mining wealth on its fleet, rather than distributing of monies to the citizens,
+ meant that the poorest citizens in Athens, who manned the fleet, participated
+ actively and powerfully in the political and military decisions of the
+ following years. In the incident Herodotos describes, Themistokles takes care
+ to ensure that his self-interested machinations not be known by the Athenians
+ he led. Themistokles, like Oedipus, has become a creature of legend.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Silence under torture may be coded as an aristocratic virtue. [...] it
+ indicates the degree to which silence under pain is ideologically associated
+ with nobility. The slave has no resources through which to resist submitting to
+ pain and telling all. In contrast the aristocratic soldier, noble by both birth
+ and training, maintains laconic silence in the face of physical abuse.
+
+### Comedy and inversion
+
+ We find a comic parody of the use of basanos for the courtroom in Aristophanes’
+ Frogs.20 The comedy is devoted to themes of judgment, discrimination, and
+ evaluation . Dionysos and his slave Xanthias have set off on a journey to Hades
+ to retrieve the tragic poet Euripides, but end by choosing Aeschylus to bring
+ back with them, claiming him over Euripides as the superior poet. Dionysos had
+ dressed for the trip as Herakles, who had once successfully entered and, more
+ importantly, departed the realm of the dead, but when he learns that Herakles
+ is persona non grata in Hades, he forces his slave to trade costumes with him.
+ When Xanthias is mistaken for Herakles and about to be arrested as a
+ dog-napper, for the stealing of Kerberos, the slave offers to give up his own
+ supposed slave, really the god Dionysos, to torture
+
+ [...]
+
+ The result is a beating contest in which Xanthias seems sure to win, accustomed
+ as he, a real slave, is to such beatings. The beatings constitute not
+ punishment but torture, and the language of the comedy reflects this fact. The
+ torture will reveal the truth, show which of the two is a god, which a slave.
+ The comedy works on the reversal of slave and god; Xanthias claims a god would
+ not be hurt by a beating, but the slave, the lowest of mortal beings, might in
+ fact be thought, because of experience, most easily to endure a whipping.
+ Dionysos begins to weep under the beating, but claims it’s due to onions.
+ Aiakos is finally unable to decide which of the two is divine.
+
+ In the parabasis, the address to the audience, that follows, the theme of noble
+ and base currency emerges once again, as if connected by free association with
+ this scene of torture, of the basanos or touchstone. The chorus appeals to the
+ Athenian populace, complaining that Athenians who had committed one fault in a
+ battle at sea were to be put to death, while slaves who had fought alongside
+ their masters had been given their freedom. This seems to the chorus to be a
+ perversion of traditional hierarchical thinking:
+
+ [...]
+
+ The comic beating is quite hilarious, of course. But it does not put into
+ question the reality of torture. The exchange has a carnival quality, Dionysos
+ masquerading as slave, slave masquerading as Dionysos masquerading as Herakles,
+ the god beaten like a common slave. The slave remains uppity and insolent, the
+ god cowardly and ridiculous. Comedy permits this representation of the
+ quotidian reality of the polis, the exposure of what cannot be alluded to
+ directly in tragedy, the violence and domination implicit in the situation of
+ bondage. Comedy allows the fictional depiction of the unspeakable, the
+ representation of the lowly slave, the allusion to ordinary cruelty, a
+ commentary on the difficulty of perceiving the essential difference between
+ divine and enslaved beings.
+ [...] If Aristophanes is so iconoclastic as to mock the gods, and to treat
+ the slave as if he were a human character, he does not go so far as to question
+ the institution of the basanos.
+
+### Testing
+
+ The slave on the rack waits like the metal, pure or alloyed, to be tested.
+ [...] The test assumes that its result will be truth; [...] The truth is
+ generated by torture from the speech of the slave; the sounds of the slave on
+ the rack must by definition contain truth, which the torture produces. And when
+ set against other testimony in a court case, that necessary truth, like a
+ touchstone itself, will show up the truth or falsity of the testimony. The
+ process of testing has been spun out from the simple metallurgist’s experiment,
+ to a new figuration of the work of interrogating matter. It is the slave’s
+ body, not metal, which receives the test; but how can that body be demonstrated
+ to be true or false, pure or alloyed, loyal or disloyal? The basanos assumes
+ first that the slave always lies, then that torture makes him or her always
+ tell the truth, then that the truth produced through torture will always expose
+ the truth or falsehood of the free man’s evidence.
+
+### Athenian democracy and torture
+
+ Yet the Athenian democracy was at best a sort of oligarchy, one that denied
+ legal and political rights to all women, even daughters of citizens, and to
+ foreigners and slaves residing in Attica. The practice of slave torture is
+ consistent with the democracy’s policies of exclusion, scapegoating, ostracism,
+ and physical cruelty and violence; to overlook or justify torture is to
+ misrecognize and idealize the Athenian state.
+
+ MacDowell describes the place of torture in the Athenian legal system:
+
+ A special rule governed the testimony of slaves: they could not appear in
+ court, but a statement which a slave, male or female, had made under torture
+ (basanos) could be produced in court as evidence.3
+
+ The party in a trial who wished a slave to be tortured would put his questions
+ in writing, specifying which slaves he wished to have tortured and the
+ questions they were to be asked, and also agreeing to pay the slave’s owner for
+ any permanent damage inflicted on the slave. Athenian citizens could not be
+ tortured.
+
+ MacDowell reasons as follows about the rule that slave’s testimony could
+ be received in the courtroom only if the slave had been tortured:
+
+ The reason for this rule must have been that a slave who knew anything material
+ would frequently belong to one of the litigants, and so would be afraid to say
+ anything contrary to his owner’s interests, unless the pressure put on him to
+ reveal the truth was even greater than the punishment for revealing it which he
+ could expect from his master.4
+
+ A. R. W. Harrison believes that the right to testify freely in court may have
+ been seen as a privilege, perhaps because witnesses who appeared in court were
+ once thought of as “compurgators,” witnesses who swore to the credibility of a
+ party in a law suit. “Torture must therefore be applied to the slave as a mark
+ of the fact that he was not in himself a free agent entitled to support one
+ side or the other.”5 Since the slave was a valuable piece of property, liable
+ to damage from torture, she or he could not be tortured without permission of
+ the owner.6 If that permission were denied, the opponent often claimed that the
+ evidence which would have been obtained under torture would of certainty have
+ been damning to the slave’s owner.
+
+### Slavery and freedom
+
+ Jean-Paul Sartre’s [...] says: “Algeria cannot contain two human species, but
+ requires a choice between them”.1 The soldiers who practiced torture on
+ Algerian revolutionaries attempted to reduce their opponents to pure
+ materiality, to the status of animals.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Free men and women could be enslaved at any time, although in Athens the
+ Solonian reforms of the sixth century B.C.E.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In the Politics Aristotle claims that some people are slaves “by nature”
+
+ [...]
+
+ The discourse on the use of torture in ancient Athenian law forms part of an
+ attempt to manage the opposition between slave and free, and it betrays both
+ need and anxiety: need to have a clear boundary between servile and free,
+ anxiety about the impossibility of maintaining this difference.
+
+### Tendency of suspend democracy protections (coup) during crisis
+
+ [The] incident of the mutilation of the herms shook the stability of the
+ Athenian state, but also points to the future tendencies among the aristocratic
+ and oligarchic parties to suspend democratic protections in a moment of crisis.
+ The logical tendency would seem to be either to extend torture to all who could
+ give evidence, or to forbid torture of any human being. The instability of the
+ distinctions between slave and free, citizen and noncitizen, Greek and
+ foreigner, becomes apparent in these debates on the possibility of state
+ torture of citizens. Athenian citizens treasured the freedom from torture as a
+ privilege of their elevated status; Peisander’s eagerness to abrogate this
+ right is a premonition of the violence and illegality of the oligarchic coup of
+ 411 and of the bloody rule of the Thirty after the defeat of the Athenians by
+ the Spartans in 404.5
+
+### Truth-making and the secret of everything
+
+ Another kind of truth, what Sartre calls “the secret of everything,” is named
+ by many Greek writers as the explicit aim of judicial torture. [,,,]
+ In the Greek legal system, the torture of slaves figured as a guarantor of
+ truth, as a process of truth-making.
+
+### Secret ballots and lawyers
+
+ Jurors received pay for their service in the courts [...] A case was required
+ to be completed within a day at most; several private cases would be tried
+ within a single day. The time alloted for arguments by the opponents in a trial
+ was measured by a water-clock; the amount of water allowed for each side was
+ determined by the seriousness of the charges. After each of the litigants
+ spoke, brought forward witnesses, and had evidence read, the jurors placed
+ disks or pebbles into urns to determine the winner of the suit.
+ [...] At the end of the fifth century it became customary to employ professional
+ writers to compose one’s speech for the court.
+
+ Thus the scene in the court resembled the great assemblies of the democratic
+ city, with up to six thousand men adjudicating disputes. [...]
+ In this context, the evidence from the torture of slaves is evidence from
+ elsewhere, from another place, another body. It is evidence from outside the
+ community of citizens, of free men. Produced by the basanistês, the torturer,
+ or by the litigant in another scene, at the time of torture, such evidence
+ differs radically from the testimony of free witnesses in the court. It is
+ temporally estranged, institutionally, conventionally marked as evidence of
+ another order; what is curious is that speakers again and again privilege it as
+ belonging to a higher order of truth than that evidence freely offered in the
+ presence of the jurors by present witnesses.
+
+ [...]
+
+ There are many such passages. The slave body has become, in the democratic
+ city, the site of torture and of the production of truth.
+
+ The argument concerning the greater value of slave evidence frequently occurs
+ in accusations against an opponent who has refused to allow his slaves to be
+ tortured. The speaker claims then that this failure to produce slave witnesses
+ proves indirectly that their testimony would condemn their owner.
+
+### Slaves are bodies; citizens possess logos
+
+ Lykourgos argues against Leokrates [...]:
+
+ Every one of you knows that in matters of dispute it is considered by far the
+ just and most democratic [dêmotikôtatori] course, when there are male or female
+ slaves, who possess the necessary information, to examine these by torture and
+ so have facts to go upon instead of hearsay, particularly when the case
+ concerns the public and is of vital interest to the state.
+
+ He argues that by nature the tortured slaves would have told the truth; does
+ this mean that any human being, when tortured, will produce the truth, or that
+ it is the nature of slaves to tell the truth under torture? Free citizen men
+ will be deceived by clever arguments; slaves by nature will not be misled
+ because they think with their bodies. Slaves are bodies; citizens possess
+ logos, reason. [...] This appeal to the practice of torture as an integral
+ and valued part of the legal machinery of the democracy points up the
+ contradictory nature of Athenian democracy, and the ways in which the
+ application of the democratic reforms of Athens were carefully limited to the
+ lives of male citizens, and intrinsic to the production and justification of
+ this notion of male citizenship.
+
+### Notions of truth and the real of the untorturable, the dead
+
+ In another speech attributed to Antiphon, this one part of a case presumably
+ actually tried, torture again plays an important role in the defense of a man
+ accused of murder, Euxitheos [...]
+
+ Probably both of these considerations induced him to make the false charges
+ against me which he did; he hoped to gain his freedom, and his one immediate
+ wish was to end the torture. I need not remind you, I think, that witnesses
+ under torture are biased in favour of those who do most of the torturing; they
+ will say anything likely to gratify them. It is their one chance of salvation,
+ especially when the victims of their lies happen not to be present. Had I
+ myself proceeded to give orders that the slave should be racked [strebloun] for
+ not telling the truth, that step in itself would doubtless have been enough to
+ make him stop incriminating me falsely. (5.31-32)
+
+ The speaker, because for once forced to confront the evidence of a tortured
+ slave, rather than bemoaning the lack of slave evidence, here points out the
+ absolute unreliability of slave evidence, based as it is on the will of the
+ torturer. Bizarrely, however, he ends by claiming that the true truth would
+ have emerged, another truth truer than the first, if he himself had been the
+ torturer. If so, it is interesting that the defendant distinguishes between
+ an essentialist notion of truth and a pragmatic notion of truth in the case of
+ the slave, but not in the case of the free foreigner, where a reversion to the
+ essentialist notion appears to occur. And the logic he exposes, that the slave
+ will say anything to gratify his torturer, is dropped as soon as he himself
+ becomes the torturer. We can imagine the body of the slave ripped apart in a
+ tug-of-war between two litigants, in a law case in which he was implicated only
+ by proximity.
+
+ This very slave, who had been purchased by the prosecution, in fact later
+ changed his testimony, according to the speaker because he recognized his
+ imminent doom. Nonetheless the prosecution put him to death. The defendant
+ continues:
+
+ Clearly, it was not his person, but his evidence, which they required; had the
+ man remained alive, he would have been tortured by me in the same way, and the
+ prosecution would be confronted with their plot: but once he was dead, not only
+ did the loss of his person mean that I was deprived of my opportunity of
+ establishing the truth, but his false statements are assumed to be true.
+ (5.35)
+
+ All of the prosecution’s case rests on the testimony of the tortured and now
+ dead slave; the defendant claims to be completely frustrated, since now the
+ truth lies in a realm inaccessible to him. He cannot torture the dead man and
+ discover the “real” truth. Even though the slave had at first insisted on the
+ defendant’s innocence, he had under torture called him guilty:
+
+ At the start, before being placed on the wheel [trokhon], in fact, until
+ extreme pressure was brought to bear, the man adhered to the truth [alêtheia]
+ and declared me innocent. It was only when on the wheel, and when driven to it,
+ that he falsely incriminated me, in order to put an end to the torture.
+ (5.40-41)
+
+ The persistence of the defendant’s desire himself to torture this slave claims
+ our attention; even after the inevitability of false testimony under torture
+ stands exposed, he bemoans the retreat of the slave into the realm of the
+ untorturable, of the dead.
+
+ I repeat, let no one cause you to forget that the prosecution put the informer
+ to death, that they used every effort to prevent his appearance in court and to
+ make it impossible for me to take him and examine him under torture on my
+ return.… Instead, they bought the slave and put him to death, entirely on their
+ own initiative [idia], (5.46-47)
+
+### Reasoning attributed to a free man, but foreigner
+
+ The free man knew that the torture would end; he also could not be bribed by
+ promises of freedom for giving the answers the torturers desired to hear. In
+ this case, the defendant gives priority to the free man’s unfree testimony;
+ unlike the free testimony of an Athenian in a courtroom, this evidence was
+ derived from torture, but the defendant seeks to give it the added authority of
+ the free man in spite of its origin in this procedure tainted with unfreedom,
+ because it supports his view of the case.
+
+### Truth even if it cost lives
+
+ You do not need to be reminded, gentlemen, that the one occasion when
+ compulsion [anagkai] is as absolute and as effective as is humanly possible,
+ and when the rights of a case are ascertained thereby most surely and most
+ certainly, arises when there is an abundance of witnesses, both slave and free,
+ and it is possible to put pressure [anagkazein] upon the free men by exacting
+ an oath or word of honour, the most solemn and the most awful form of
+ compulsion known to free men, and upon the slaves by other devices [heterais
+ anagkais], which will force them to tell the truth even if their revelations
+ are bound to cost them their lives, as the compulsion of the moment [he gar
+ parousa anagkê] has a stronger influence over each than the fate which he will
+ suffer by compulsion afterwards. (6.25)
+
+ That is, the free man is compelled by oaths; he might lose his rights as a
+ citizen if he lied under oath. The slave, even though he will certainly be put
+ to death as a consequence of what he reveals under torture, will nonetheless,
+ under torture, reveal the truth. The two kinds of compulsion are equated, one
+ appropriate for the free man, one for the slave.
+
+### Torturability
+
+ Torture serves not only to exact a truth, some truth or other, which will
+ benefit one side of the case or the other. It also functions as a gambit in the
+ exchange between defendant and prosecution; if for any reason one of them
+ refuses to give up slaves to torture, the other can claim that the missing
+ testimony would of a certainty support his view of things. And as I argued
+ earlier, torture also serves to mark the boundary between slave and free
+ beings. Torture can be enacted against free, non-Greek beings as well as
+ slaves; all “barbarians” are assimilated to slaves. Slaves are barbarians,
+ barbarians are slaves; all are susceptible to torture. Torturability creates a
+ difference which is naturalized. And even the sophistry of the First Tetralogy,
+ which wants to create a category of virtually free in the case of the slave who
+ would have been freed had he lived, seeks to support this division of human
+ beings into free, truth-telling creatures, and torturable slave/barbarians, who
+ will only produce truth on the wheel.
+
+### The Slave's Truth
+
+ Torture performs at least two functions in the Athenian state. As an instrument
+ of demarcation, it delineates the boundary between slave and free, between the
+ untouchable bodies of free citizens and the torturable bodies of slaves. The
+ ambiguity of slave status, the difficulty of sustaining an absolute sense of
+ differences, is addressed through this practice of the state, which carves the
+ line between slave and free on the bodies of the unfree. In the work of the
+ wheel, the rack, and the whip, the torturer carries out the work of the polis;
+ citizen is made distinct from noncitizen, Greek from barbarian, slave from
+ free. The practice of basanos administers to the anxiety about enslavement,
+ hauntingly evoked in the texts of Athenian tragedy that recall the fall of
+ cities, particularly the fall of Troy, evoked as well in the histories that
+ recount Athenian destruction of subject allies.
+
+ [...]
+
+ But the desire to clarify the respective status of slave and free is not the
+ motive, never the explicit motive, of torture. Rather, again and again, even in
+ the face of arguments discounting evidence derived from torture, speakers in
+ the courts describe the basanos as a search for truth. How is this possible?
+ And how are the two desires related? The claim is made that truth resides in
+ the slave body.
+
+ [...]
+
+ That is, the master possesses reason, logos. When giving evidence in court, he
+ knows the difference between truth and falsehood, he can reason and produce
+ true speech, logos, and he can reason about the consequences of falsehood , the
+ deprivation of his rights as a citizen. The slave, on the other hand,
+ possessing not reason, but rather a body strong for service (iskhura pros ten
+ anagkaian khrêsin), must be forced to utter the truth, which he can apprehend,
+ although not possessing reason as such. Unlike an animal, a being that
+ possesses only feelings, and therefore can neither apprehend reason, logos, nor
+ speak, legein, the slave can testify when his body is tortured because he
+ recognizes reason without possessing it himself.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Thus, according to Aristotle’s logic, representative or not, the slave’s truth
+ is the master’s truth; it is in the body of the slave that the master’s truth
+ lies, and it is in torture that his truth is revealed. The torturer reaches
+ through the master to the slave’s body, and extracts the truth from it. The
+ master can conceal the truth, since he possesses reason and can choose between
+ truth and lie, can choose the penalty associated with false testimony. His own
+ point of vulnerability is the body of his slave, which can be compelled not to
+ lie, can be forced to produce the truth. If he decides to deny the body of his
+ slave to the torturer, assumptions Will be made that condemn him.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Aristotle advocates the pragmatic approach; one can argue either side concerning
+ the truth of torture.
+
+ [...]
+
+ As Gernet says, “Proof is institutional.” Proof, and therefore truth, are
+ constituted by the Greeks as best found in the evidence derived from torture.
+ Truth, alêtheia, comes from elsewhere, from another place, from the place of
+ the other.
+
+### Torture and Writing
+
+ The tortured body retains scars, marks that recall the violence inflicted upon
+ it by the torturer. In part because slaves were often tattooed in the ancient
+ world, such marks of torture resonate in the Greek mind with tattoos, and with
+ other forms of metaphorical inscription, in Greek thinking considered analogous
+ to writing on the body.1 I have discussed the topos of corporeal inscription
+ elsewhere. The woman’s body was in ancient Greece sometimes likened to a
+ writing tablet, a surface to be ”ploughed,” inscribed by the hand, the plough,
+ the penis of her husband and master.2
+
+The famous case of the tatooed head:
+
+ One especially intriguing mention of slave tattooing occurs in Herodotos’s
+ Histories, in a narrative in which the possibility of torture remains implicit.
+ Although I have discussed this episode elsewhere, I want here to draw out its
+ implications for a consideration of the relationship between torture and truth.
+ Histiaios of Miletus sends a message urging revolt to a distant ally by shaving
+ the head of his most trusted slave, tattooing the message on the slave’s head,
+ then waiting for the slave’s hair to grow back. He sends the slave on his
+ journey, ordering him to say at the journey’s end only that the “destinataire,”
+ the receiver of the message, should shave off his hair and look at his head.
+ The message reaches its goal, and Aristagoras the receiver revolts (Herodotos,
+ Histories 5.35).
+
+ The tattooed head is a protection against torture. If the slave were captured
+ and tortured, he would not himself know the message of revolt. He could not
+ betray his master if questioned and interrogated specifically about his
+ master’s intentions to rise up against those who have enslaved him. He did not
+ know the content of Histiaios’ communication with Aristagoras. But he did know
+ the instructions he bore to Aristagoras, to shave his head and read the message
+ inscribed there. The ruse only displaces the discovery of the message’s truth
+ by a single step, but in this case it succeeds in protecting the message. Here
+ the tattooing, the inscription on the slave’s body, subverts the intention of
+ torture to expose the truth.
+
+"Branding":
+
+ In other contexts in ancient Greece, slave tattooing serves as a sort of label.
+ It is as if writing on the slave body indicated the contents of that body. Such
+ a function of writing recalls the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who argues
+ that writing originates in the markings on the outside of packages recording
+ their contents.3 Aristotle points out in the Politics, as we have seen, that
+ the slave body ought to reveal its truth, ought to be immediately perceptible
+ as a servile body to the eye, but in fact sometimes it is not. A tattoo on a
+ slave reveals his or her true status. In Aristophanes’ Babylonians, of which
+ only fragments remain, we learn that prisoners of war were sometimes branded or
+ inscribed with a mark indicating the city they served.4
+
+ [...]
+
+ though he is a human being, he does not know himself, soon he will know, having
+ this inscription on his forehead. (74_79)6
+
+ Herodes invokes the inscription at Delphi, also cited by Plato: gnôthi seauton,
+ “Know yourself.”7
+
+ [...]
+
+ This placement of the “epigram,” whatever it is, if it is that, on the metope,
+ the forehead of the slave, makes the inscription a sign. The message of
+ Herodotos’s slave was concealed by his hair, directed to a specified other, the
+ recipient who received the slave as a vehicle for his master’s words. The
+ communication was not directed to the slave himself. In the case of Herodes’
+ slave, the man named “Belly” would bear a sign meant to remind him of his
+ humble status.
+
+### Buried Truth
+
+ If torture helped to manage the troublesome differentiation between slave and
+ free in the ancient city, it also served as a redundant practice reinforcing
+ the dominant notion of the Greeks that truth was an inaccessible, buried
+ secret. In his valuable book Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque,
+ Marcel Detienne describes a historical shift in the Greeks’ ideas about truth
+ that corresponds to the historical shift from mythic to rational thought.1
+ According to Detienne, Alêtheia is at first conceived of by the Greeks in an
+ ambiguous relationship with Lethe, forgetting; truth is the possession of the
+ poet and the just king, who has access to this truth through memory. Alêtheia
+ is caught up in a relationship of ambiguity with Lêthê because, for example,
+ the poet who speaks truth by using memory also confers truth’s other,
+ forgetfulness, oblivion of pain and sorrow, on his listeners. His
+ “magico-religious” speech, as Detienne calls it, which exists in an ambiguous
+ relationship with truth, persists as the dominant form in the Greek world until
+ the speech of warriors, the citizens who form the city’s phalanxes, a speech of
+ dialogue, comes to dominate the social world in the time of the polis. Detienne
+ associates a resultant secularization of poetic Alêtheia with the name of the
+ poet Simonides. Doxa, seeming, becomes the rival province of sophistic and
+ rhetorical speech, while Alêtheia comes to belong to an unambiguously
+ “philosophico-religious” domain. In this field of discourse the logic of
+ ambiguity typical of the Alêtheia-Lêthê relationship is replaced by a logic of
+ contradiction, in which Alêtheia is opposed to Apatê, deception, as its other.
+ The common use of memory provides a link between these two stages of thinking
+ truth; the secularization of speech marks a break between a mythic and a
+ rationalist semantic field in which the term Alêtheia persists.
+
+### The modern word Tortura
+
+ A word used in addition to alêthês in the Odyssey is atrekês, real, genuine,
+ with a connotation perhaps of that which does not distort or deviate. The Latin
+ word torqueo means “to twist tightly, to wind or wrap, to subject to torture,
+ especially by the use of the rack.” This word may come from the root trek-,
+ also occurring in Greek, which may give us atraktos, “spindle,” and also
+ “arrow.”6 (Tortor is used as a cult title of Apollo, “perhaps”, according to
+ the Oxford Latin Dictionary, “from the quarter at Rome occupied by the
+ torturers.”)7 Our English word “torture” is taken from this Latin root. The
+ Oxford English Dictionary defines “torture,” an adaptation of the Latin
+ tortura, in the following way:
+
+ The infliction of excruciating pain, as practised by cruel tyrants, savages,
+ brigands, etc., from the delight in watching the agony of a victim, in hatred
+ or revenge, or as a means of extortion; spec. judicial torture, inflicted by a
+ judicial or quasi-judicial authority, for the purpose of forcing an accused or
+ suspected person to confess, or an unwilling witness to give evidence or
+ information.8 Although the writers of the dictionary list first tyrants,
+ savages, and brigands as the agents of torture, the first entry in their
+ citations of the use of the word in English refers to the Acts of the Privy
+ Council of 1551. This set of connotations, to return to the point, links the
+ English word torture with the twisted, the distorted, and suggests that the
+ truth gained as a confession is in English not conceived of as a straight line,
+ but is rather bent, extorted from time on the rack.
+
+ In Greek, however, not passing through Latin into English for our etymology
+ (etumos is another word used for “true” in Greek), we have, parallel to
+ atrekês, the word alêtheia with its suggestion of hiddenness and forgetting.
+ The connotations of the alternative words nêmertês and atrekês are respectively
+ “not missing the mark”, and “not deviating from an existing model”; the weight
+ of alêthês rests instead on the trace of something not forgotten, not slipping
+ by unnoticed.9
+
+ [...]
+
+ Even in the texts of the Hippocratic tradition, the body is seen to contain
+ secrets that must be interpreted, elicited by signs that emerge onto the body’s
+ surface, as the emanation from the earth arises to possess the Pythia.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Each of these sites of meaning in ancient culture—the epic, oracles, sacred
+ buildings, the medicalized body—lay out a pattern of obscure, hidden truth that
+ must be interpreted.
+
+### Heraclitian truth differs
+
+ The works of the pre-Socratic philosophers (even to presume to call them
+ philosophers may be to presume too much) present problems of reading for the
+ historian of philosophy, for the literary and cultural critic. Even the problem
+ of who is disciplinarily responsible for these texts is insoluble. And the
+ incompleteness of many pre-Socratic texts causes unease. How can one speak of
+ philosophical development when only one line, one metaphor, one aphorism
+ remains, torn out of context, lines repeated to illustrate a well-known point?
+ The ellipses in the published pre-Socratic fragments recall stopped mouths,
+ messages gone astray, the utter failure of communication across a distance of
+ centuries.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The very search for integrity and indivisibility in all things has been called
+ into question by the heirs of Nietzsche, among them those feminists who see the
+ emphasis on wholeness and integrity, on the full body, as a strategy of
+ scholarship that has traditionally excluded the female, who has been identified
+ as different, heterogeneous, disturbing the integrity of the scholarly body,
+ incomplete in herself. Aristotle describes the female as a “deformed”
+ (pepêrômenon) male (Generation of Animals 737a), and argues further that her
+ contribution to reproduction lacks a crucial ingredient, the principle of soul
+ (psukhe). The project of scientific textual studies has been to supply the
+ text’s lack, to reduce the fragmented, partial quality of embodied, material
+ texts, to reject the defective text as it rejects the defective female. Like
+ the slave body that needs the supplement of the basanos to produce truth, the
+ female body and the fragmentary text are both constructed as lacking.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Elsewhere Herakleitos seems to argue against an innate hierarchy of mortal
+ beings: “War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others
+ men; he makes some slaves, others free” (fr. 53). Mortal and immortal status
+ depends on human history, on events. There is no essence, no absolute truth in
+ the differences among beings. Circumstances, history, time affect relations of
+ difference and power.2 This relativism establishes a ground for the vision of
+ equality among citizens in ancient democratic ideology, and even further, a
+ point from which to examine the commonly held view that some human beings are
+ slaves by nature.
+
+ Herakleitos represents an alternative to the essentializing concept of truth as
+ a buried, hidden substance; he offers a temporal notion of truth, that the
+ basanos of the physician is good at one time, at another time bad, that war
+ creates slaves and free, a relative notion of truth. [...]
+ Herakleitos’s relationship to time, change and process prefigures values of the
+ democracy and of the pre-Socratic sophists whom the aristocratic philosophical
+ tradition despised: “As they step into the same rivers, different and (still)
+ different waters flow upon them” (fr. 12); “we step and do not step into the
+ same rivers; we are and are not” (fr. 49a). His is not a doctrine of
+ superficial appearance and deep truth, but rather a celebration of the
+ mutability and interdependence of all things. The Heraclitean truth, read
+ within his words, fragmentary as they are, celebrating flux, time, difference,
+ allows for an alternative model to a hidden truth. [...]
+ for him truth is process and becoming, obtained through
+ observation, rather than a fixed, divine and immutable truth of eternity.
+
+### Truth and memory
+
+ The word anagkê, “constraint,” is associated with the yoke of slavery.10 All of
+ human experience suffers from its subjection to necessity; the slave offers an
+ extreme example of the general human condition. In one of her many forms the
+ goddess who instructs the youth, the Kouros, is mistress of “brute force,” or
+ of the bonds associated with enslavement, and is therefore binding the
+ “what-is,” the “true,” in captivity. Like the slave who yields the truth to the
+ torturer, the “what-is” is bound in domination, and delivers up its truth under
+ necessity.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Does truth as eternally located elsewhere, either hidden in the body, or hidden
+ in the earth, or hidden inside or beyond human existence, in some realm
+ inaccessible to ordinary consciousness, lead by some tortuous path to the
+ necessity for torture? Can we posit a truth of process and becoming, and
+ another truth of eternity? If so, the word a-lêtheia seems to carry buried
+ within it support for the view of hidden truth, of truth brought up from the
+ depths. The possibility of forgetting leads to the imagination of a buried
+ realm, the realm of forgetting, of Lethe, which can be represented either
+ positively or negatively. It is good to forget suffering and pain, regrettable
+ to forget a message, to forget crucial information that must be transmitted to
+ a listener; in either case Lethe—or, to coin a word, “letheia”—remains a domain
+ beyond consciousness.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The dominance of a notion of truth as alêtheia, not forgetting, he attributes
+ in part to the gradual shift to literacy taking place in the fifth and fourth
+ centuries.14 The legal corpus reflects the state of the problem of truth in the
+ fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. Charles Segal has discussed eloquently the
+ ways in which growing literacy affects concepts of the self and truth in Greek
+ tragedy.15
+
+ [...]
+
+ In the dominant literary and philosophical paradigm, the truth is seen to be
+ forgettable, slipping away from notice, buried, inaccessible, then retrieved
+ through an effort of memory, through the invocation of divine possession,
+ through the interrogation by a privileged seeker of some enlightened source;
+ seeking the truth may involve a journey, a passage through a spatial narrative
+ of some sort, a request, a sinking down into the past, into the interiority of
+ memory. This model of truth seeking is consistent with other such paradigms
+ already suggested earlier, in the law courts, where, as we saw, the violence of
+ the torturer is thought to be necessary to enforce the production of truth from
+ the slave, either to force him or her to recall the truth, or to force him or
+ her to speak the truth for the benefit of the court.
+
+ The slave’s body is thus construed as one of these sites of truth, like the
+ adyton, the underworld, the interiority of the woman’s body, the elsewhere
+ toward which truth is always slipping, a Utopian space allowing a less
+ mediated, more direct access to truth, where the truth is no longer forgotten,
+ slipping away. The basanos gives the torturer the power to exact from the
+ other, seen as like an oracular space, like the woman’s hystera, like the
+ inside of the earth, the realm of Hades, as other and as therefore in
+ possession of the truth. The truth is thus always elsewhere, always outside the
+ realm of ordinary human experience, of everyday life, secreted in the earth, in
+ the gods, in the woman, in the slave. To recall it from this other place
+ sometimes requires patience, sometimes payment of gifts, sometimes seduction,
+ sometimes violence.
+
+### Torture and commodification
+
+ Does it have to do with the invention of coinage, with the idea of abstract
+ exchange value, and the slave as an exchangeable body, a thing to be tested
+ like a coin, like a marker for exchange? In the Laws the Athenian says men are
+ like puppets with strings, and that they should follow the soft, golden string,
+ the “golden and hallowed drawing of judgment which goes by the name of the
+ public law of the city” (644-45).
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