The Subject of Torture by Hilary Neroni

Author:Hilary Neroni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, SOC051000, Social Science/Violence in Society
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

TORTURE AND TIME

A closer investigation into the clock as a philosophical idea can shed some light onto how this ideological collusion between torture and time might have come about. The speculation on time is certainly broad and varied, but Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time presents perhaps the most wide-ranging and substantive consideration of the impact of the clock on our lives. Of course, Heidegger wasn’t a torturer (despite his association with Nazism), but his concept of temporality actually relates to that articulated in 24. Unbeknownst to himself, Heidegger moves in the direction of a biopolitical idea of time when he criticizes our inability to take up and engage with our own finitude, a fact of our everyday life for which the clock functions as a symptom. Heidegger describes the effect of the clock in this way: “In the way time is ordinarily understood, however, the basic phenomenon of time is seen in the ‘now,’ and indeed in that pure ‘now’ which has been shorn in its full structure—that which they call the ‘Present.’”7 For Heidegger, the clock denudes the complexity of our interpretation of time by leveling off the profundity of the now.

With the acceptance of the clock and its relationship to time, the now becomes the right now, and this suggests an infinite extension of nows, an infinite that stretches both into the past and the future. Heidegger himself has two specific quarrels with the conception of time implied by the clock (rather than with the clock as such). He feels it stifles our understanding of the now, which is in fact rooted in a structure far more complex than the clock’s emphasis on a succession of “right nows.” On the other hand, however, Heidegger also finds fault with our understanding of time as infinite, which comes from the never-ending succession of “nows,” a succession that seems implicit in the very idea of a clock. He argues that this blinds us to an authentic relationship toward death, to an adequate appreciation of our inescapable finitude. An authentic being-toward-death, in contrast, would foster a much greater sense of urgency and an acute awareness of the finite. The clock is a barrier to our authenticity insofar as it suggests that we always have more time, a time that is infinite rather than constituted through our own proper finitude.

Since Heidegger wrote Being and Time, however, there have been several important sociocultural shifts in relation to the clock. Most important, there has been a philosophical shift from seeing the clock as infinitely progressing forward to seeing the clock as always counting down to something (usually destructive). Some of the broad cultural changes that have affected this idea are new technological innovations—such as the nuclear bomb and the computer—that emphasize the countdown instead of infinite progression. For example, with the advent of the atom bomb and the understanding that superpowers such as the United States and the Soviet Union could destroy the earth as we know it, the countdown to total destruction became not

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