Interrogation, or Forced to Silence: Rankin, Harris, Pinter, Duras

Abstract

‘Noirs jumeaux’, Michel Foucault calls them in Histoire de la sexualité: confession and torture are ‘dark twins’. Since the Middle Ages, Foucault writes, torture has accompanied confession as a’shadow’, pushing it out of and further from its hiding places in the soul or in the body.¹ However, torture generates not only confession, but also, and paradoxically, its opposite, silence, the refusal to confess — and to speak. Or, as Elaine Scarry writes: ‘Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate recession to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned,’²