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3 Law, Culture & Human. 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/lculh3 and id is 1 raw text is: Law, Culture and the Humanities 2007; 3: 1- 2 EDITORIAL Sometimes the world summons us to bring all our intellectual resources to explain what seems inexplicable. Sadly, this time, our time, provides too many such calls. While LCH is not a journal of current affairs, from time-to-time we will devote attention to a current and pressing problem. Thus, this issue's Commentary Section takes on the complex and disturbing issue of torture. It would be naive to assume that torture is new to our era. It has been, and remains, a sorry testimony to mankind's cruelty or our desperation. No one, not even the world's supposedly most civilized, law-abiding societies is untouched by this history. America's post 9/11 actions and policies place this country firmly within that history. But how should students of law, culture, and the humanities respond to the pressing call to speak out about, and against, torture? What can our voices add to the pained conversations that today try to come to terms with it? We can focus on language and its misuses, language that unartfully but insistently, proclaims - 'America does not torture - all the while finessing existing understandings to engage in activities that are cruel, inhuman, and degrading. We can be clear about what international law condones and what it condemns, and be vigilant and watchful when legal meanings are inverted. We can describe the many ways in which violence is disdainful of reason, pushes it aside, or takes over completely. Reason and violence have no way to share control of human agency. When the two meet in battle only one can win. We can insist that practices of torture are at war with the conception of human agency that is basic to legality. Torture reminds us of the complex relations of state, law, and violence and the fact that, in the end, state power is a power that makes its appearance on the body. Our work should serve as a reminder that violence of all kinds is done everyday with the explicit authorization of legal institutions and officials or with their tacit acquiescence. Some of this violence is done directly by legal officials, some by citizens acting under a dispensation granted by law and some by persons whose violent acts subsequently will be deemed acceptable. Moreover the pain which these violent acts produce is everywhere, in hidden recesses of the torture chamber and the drama of law's sporadic vengeance. Because the violence of law and the state is done, authorized or condoned with all the normal abnormality of bureaucratic abstraction it is often hard to name and categorize. This is one of the lessons of our era's effort to come to terms with torture. Our work then should do the deed of imagining, encouraging or perhaps more precisely foreshadowing a jurisprudence of violence or at least a jurisprudence that would put the question of law's lethal character at the center of its concerns. Our work should help to end the conspiracy of silence C 2007 Association for the Study ofLaw, Culture and the Humanities 10. 1177/1743 87210 70 73233

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