1. Human Rights and Human Bodies
The Road to Guantanamo and the Prohibition on Torture
2. The prohibition on torture
Because of the ways it violates the bodies, torture also violates
the fundamental paradoxes of human rights. Not “both . . . and”
but “neither . . . nor.”
• Neither natural nor social
• Neither universal nor particular
• Neither equal nor respectful of difference
3. The prohibition on torture
According to Hunt, transforming the European culture of torture
to a culture that abhors torture required that human bodies
come to be seen as more real than symbolic.
4. The prohibition on torture
Under the traditional
understanding, the pains of
the body did not belong
entirely to the individual
condemned person. Those
pains had the higher
religious and political
purpose of redemption and
reparation of the
community. Bodies could
be mutilated in the interest
of inscribing authority, and
broken or burned in the
interest of restoring the
moral, political, and
religious order. In other
words, the offender served
as a kind of sacrificial
victim whose suffering
would restore wholeness
to the community and
order to the state. (94)
5. The prohibition on torture
Allegorical Portrait of Anna of Austria as Minerva
(ca. 1643) Allegorical Portrait of Diane de Poitiers (ca. 1556)
6. The prohibition on torture
Portrait of Captain John Pigott (ca. 1700–1763)
7. How does the film attempt to
recreate the “frame”?
8. How does the film attempt to
recreate the “frame”?
By returning, via narrative, symbolic force to the real, physical
bodies of the detainees, the film can be said to subvert state
power rather than reinforcing it.
9. How does the film attempt to
recreate the “frame”?
By returning, via narrative, symbolic force to the real, physical
bodies of the detainees, the film can be said to subvert state
power rather than reinforcing it.
But does it succeed?
10. How does the film attempt to
recreate the “frame”?
Two very familiar and very different plots:
• The Nazi Plot
• The Marriage Plot
