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“Living Alongside Death”: Torture, Detention, and the Intersubjective Body
Kaku, Archana
Kaku, Archana
Abstract
How does torture work? Scholarly consensus seems to agree that torture reaches into the body to undermine the fundamental core of the person, but rarely do we specify the mechanisms by which it achieves this effect. I propose to answer this question through a focus on the conditions of detention and the ways in which these conditions are manipulated. I examine spatial dislocation, sleep deprivation, and dietary manipulation as prominent techniques of torture. Using what I call an “improper phenomenology,” I show how these techniques work to subvert the detained person’s relationships with space, time, and community. With reference to critical and feminist phenomenologists, I argue that these relationships are what structure and constitute the subject. These ties, in other words, are not only part of what enables us to exist but part of what makes us who and what we are. The unmaking or subversion of these relationships through techniques of torture not only undermines the stable subject but also has profound effects on those “beyond” the detention center.
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2025
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Political Theory
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Keywords
torture, critical phenomenology, politics of the body, space, time
Citation
Kaku, A. (2025). “Living Alongside Death”: Torture, Detention, and the Intersubjective Body. Political Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917251344256