TY - JOUR

T1 - At the Threshold of Justiciable Violence

T2 - Configuring and Contesting Torture’s Production

AU - Cakal, Ergun

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - “Torture” is one of law’s most charged categories—burdened with distinguishing the legitimate from the illegitimate, the permitted from the prohibited forms of state violence. Embedding it in its broader discursive production, I ask: how are forms of state violence configured, controlled, and contested in, through, and by legal articulations? How are anti-torture practitioners to understand the relation between law and violence and how law legitimates some forms of violence whilst not others? How does human suffering at the hands of the state even enter the “hearing” of its law? Taking psychological torture as paradigmatic, I diagrammatically discuss how such violence is “invisibilized” and falls below definitional thresholds, due to discursive processes of active occlusion as well as epistemic limitations.

AB - “Torture” is one of law’s most charged categories—burdened with distinguishing the legitimate from the illegitimate, the permitted from the prohibited forms of state violence. Embedding it in its broader discursive production, I ask: how are forms of state violence configured, controlled, and contested in, through, and by legal articulations? How are anti-torture practitioners to understand the relation between law and violence and how law legitimates some forms of violence whilst not others? How does human suffering at the hands of the state even enter the “hearing” of its law? Taking psychological torture as paradigmatic, I diagrammatically discuss how such violence is “invisibilized” and falls below definitional thresholds, due to discursive processes of active occlusion as well as epistemic limitations.

U2 - 10.1177/17438721211018764

DO - 10.1177/17438721211018764

M3 - Journal article

VL - 20

SP - 355

EP - 372

JO - Law, Culture and the Humanities

JF - Law, Culture and the Humanities

SN - 1743-8721

IS - 2

ER -