Bentham, torture, modernity

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the relatively little-known and commented-upon writings of Jeremy Bentham regarding the potentially beneficial uses of torture in a utilitarian frame. If, following Michel Foucault’s extraordinarily influential work on Bentham’s panopticism, the motifs of governmental surveillance, practical intervention into mass behaviours, and institutional diagrams have become some of the crucial themes of sociological and historical studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these themes do not quite touch—for a number of reasons discussed below—the new sense that Bentham gives to torture. Moreover, Bentham does so precisely because his reasoning regarding the development of the panopticon reveals a certain limit to that dispositif, a limit at which its own logic is threatened; Bentham, accordingly, retreats that limit according to an ingenious reapplication of his utilitarian logic. In reconstructing Bentham’s singular dialectic of panopticism/torture, this essay proposes that it has further fundamental historical effects, necessarily complicating received aspects of “modernity”, embedding the discussion of Bentham in our own post-9/11 context.

Keywords

• torture
• democracy
• jeremy bentham
• michel foucault
• panopticon
• modernity