American Cruelty
American Cruelty
The “torture memos” defending the treatment of detainees considered ineligible for due process only confirm that in jurisprudence, “cruelty,” despite its polemical power as an ordinary-language term, is considered less serious than torture. Colin Dayan locates the origin of the memos’ rhetorical maneuvers in the distortion of the Eighth Amendment provision against “cruel and unusual punishment” by the institution of slavery and by the subsequent perpetuation of slave-status for incarcerated felons. The chapter links the history of interpretation of the Eighth Amendment to the discussion of cruelty in American philosophy (in the work of Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and Judith Butler), where it is variously defined as a failure of noticing, sympathy, love, or identification. The chapter traces the implications of the fact that diametrically opposed perspectives—the defense of torture and the critique of the war on terror—are implicated in an interpretative erasure of any specificity to cruelty.
Keywords: Judith Butler, Eighth Amendment, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, torture memos, War on Terror
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