IMPOSED MEMORY AND IMPOSED FORGETTING: INSTITUTIONALIZED TORTURE AS WEAPONIZED ANIMALITY
Giorgio Chambers and Isola Chambers
20 March 2025
This essay continues where “On Violence and Memory: Nietzsche, Forgetting, and War,” left off, which laid some of the theoretical groundwork — and opened up the various avenues — that will be explored in this project.
There is a particular role that torture plays within the folds of the relationship between violence, on the one hand, and the social relations that it either reformulates or destroys, on the other. One such social relation is that of each individual to their own sense of self, in particular their memory, and that will be the focus of this essay. From a cursory and strategic perspective, it is not at all obvious why torture happens in war at all. Perhaps occasional torture, amongst other acts of brutality, can be explained on the basis of a hatred for one’s enemies, but torture is an institutionalized activity within war zones; it installs itself, often with a permanence that outlives the official confines of the conflict in space or time.