South Central Review

"Information and the Tortured Imagination": The logic of torture is such that the practice of torture necessarily entails its institutionalization. The way in which the moral argument for torture is structured also requires that torture's product—in the present case, information or intelligence—necessitates a re-description of reality—necessary to deflect any charge of brute oppression or sadism—that breaches the very logic of information-gathering, reducing it to absurdity. When such power of re-description lies in the hands of exclusive political actors, regardless of their intent, truth resides at the boundary of political tyranny formed out of a re-descriptive pseudo-reality. It is not simply the power to torture that is the sign of tyranny. It is the capacity to re-describe reality to fit immoral desires which include torture.