Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty Book

This is a very provocative account but with some serious issues: that's five stars for ambition and three for execution if you're keeping score at home. Basically, Kahn (a law professor at Yale) accepts Schmitt's account of the political and throws in some Girard to account for the necessarily sacral/sacrificial account of the political community, which is then contrasted with the legal community: torture and terror exist in the space of sovereignty beyond law, and they show up the puniness of our and every legal system by demonstrating their necessary dependence on a political community defined by violent and sacrificial exclusion instead of sweetly reasonable social contract. That's the coolest move he makes in this book: he tries to figure out why we're all obsessed with torture to the exclusion of, say, war: we're much more concerned about the torture of one person than the bombing death of 100 (or: we're afraid to torture someone to find out the location of a bomb but we'll shoot down a whole civilian aircraft -- we've said we would do this -- if we knew that it was carrying, or was about to become, a bomb). The reason is that torture, more flagrantly than war, exists in this discomfiting space of sovereignty beyond law and forces us to see the irrational sources of political community which the post-Cold War hegemony of international law and human rights has trained us to forget. So the "ticking time bomb" hypothetical is not a MORAL issue at all but a POLITICAL one, and, following Schmitt, Kahn distinguishes between the two pretty rigorously.

The real problem is the complete absence of history in this admittedly short book: he has a whole speculative theory of modernity, in which he, as far as I can tell, assumes that Lefort was right about 1789 but that nothing has changed since then and that every state in the "West" is exactly like France. He also does things like claim that civilization is founded on a crime and cites "Totem and Taboo" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" as though these were unimpeachable historical accounts of early human civilization. I wouldn't let an undergrad do that.