Pasolini’s con­tro­ver­sial final film Salò (1975), based on Mar­quis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), poses sig­ni­fic­ant ques­tions regard­ing the inter­sec­tion between sad­istic tor­ture and sov­er­eignty. The film is divided into four seg­ments, heav­ily inspired by Dante’s Inferno: Ante-​Inferno, Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit, and Circle of Blood. Salò focuses on four cor­rupt sov­er­eigns after the fall of Italy’s fas­cist ruler Benito Mus­solini in 1944. Four fas­cist lib­ertines — the Duke, the Bishop, the Magis­trate, the Pres­id­ent — kid­nap the most beau­ti­ful young people in town and take them to a villa, to an enclosed space called ‘The Repub­lic of Salò’, a Nazi pup­pet state. From now on, the Repub­lic of Salò becomes a fas­cist enclave from which there is no escape. Thus starts extreme abuse, tor­ture, and the murders of young men and women for the sake of per­ver­ted lust and extreme pleas­ure. The fas­cist captors wel­come the beau­ti­ful young Itali­ans to hell with the fol­low­ing words:

You her­ded, feeble creatures, destined for our pleas­ure. Don’t expect to find here the free­dom gran­ted in the out­side world. You are bey­ond reach of any ‘leg­al­ity’. No one knows you are here. As far as the world goes, you are already dead. (Pasolini, 1975)

The young vic­tims’ bod­ies become sites of repress­ive pain and sexual pleas­ure, bear­ing the scars of sov­er­eign ven­geance. The greatest strength of the movie lies in show­ing us that the appeal of pleas­ure is insep­ar­able from the appeal of sov­er­eign viol­ence. Remin­is­cent of the rituals of prim­it­ive sys­tems of cruelty, Pasolini almost suc­ceeds in mak­ing the sad­istic tor­ture part of an enter­tain­ing spec­tacle. This fest­iv­ity is, how­ever, unlim­ited and pro­tec­ted by an unres­tric­ted law of sov­er­eign power. Thus, what we encounter in Salò is what I call the lim­it­less ‘enjoy­ment of cruelty’, which makes tor­ture the ven­geance of four cor­rupt des­pots. Sov­er­eign cruelty pun­ishes the vic­tims’ bod­ies without any guilt, while sexual pleas­ure becomes a weapon of total dom­in­a­tion. Whereas phys­ical beauty becomes a symp­tom of vul­ner­ab­il­ity, sov­er­eign polit­ical power becomes a destruct­ive power, a total form of fascism.

Tor­ture is widely con­sidered as a form of mad­ness, as an ‘irra­tional’ act, as an uneth­ical prac­tice that is con­fined to cor­rupt admin­is­tra­tions or total­it­arian sys­tems. It is also viewed as a jur­idical prob­lem, as one of the basic prin­ciples of human rights. I sug­gest that both approaches mis­un­der­stand and sim­plify the role of tor­ture; they fail to grasp the true pur­pose of tor­ture within sov­er­eign polit­ical power. Tor­ture, I assert, is one among many mani­fest­a­tions of sov­er­eignty as dom­in­a­tion. Tor­ture, there­fore, needs to be con­sidered in rela­tion to other cruel mani­fest­a­tions of state sov­er­eignty: for example, the destruc­tion of eco­lo­gical sys­tems, the risk-​security com­plex, the state of excep­tion, and the com­plete anim­al­isa­tion of human beings car­ried out by neo­lib­eral biopol­it­ics. And yet tor­ture is not one among these vari­ous forms of sov­er­eign power. Tor­ture is the most priv­ileged actu­al­isa­tion of state ter­ror, for it reveals the nature of sov­er­eignty (and its rational consciousness).

Tor­ture is the extreme sys­temic expres­sion of the logos of sov­er­eign dom­in­a­tion. Tor­ture is a tech­nique of sov­er­eign dom­in­a­tion; it is not an extreme expres­sion of law­less ven­geance, for sov­er­eign ven­geance is polit­ical. It is for this reason that it is widely prac­ticed in secret. Tor­ture is a smal­ler sys­tem which is rep­res­ent­at­ive of a rational sov­er­eign law; it is a tool of gov­ernance, with the aim of eli­cit­ing inform­a­tion from and humi­li­at­ing the ‘enemy’. As a tool of war and sov­er­eign dom­in­a­tion, tor­ture is, there­fore, intim­ately bound to a ‘lib­eral way of war’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009).

Lib­er­al­ism con­sists of vari­ous inter­re­lated social regimes, which, although said to be com­mit­ted to ‘peace-​making’, is nev­er­the­less also com­mit­ted to viol­ence, per­man­ent state of emer­gency, and con­stant pre­pared­ness for per­petual war (Ibid. 7). Seen in this light, war, viol­ence and soci­ety are mutu­ally con­stitutive and the lib­eral way of war is ‘a war-​making machine whose con­tinu­ous pro­cesses of war pre­par­a­tion prior to the con­duct of any hos­til­it­ies pro­foundly, and per­vas­ively, shape the lib­eral way of life’ (Ibid. 9). The main object of the lib­eral way of war is life itself because it is what threatens life itself. Thus ‘everything is per­mit­ted’ to the lib­eral way of war.

How then are we to under­stand the rela­tion­ship between tor­ture and the deten­tion of ‘enemy com­batants’ in light of con­tem­por­ary sov­er­eign power? Tor­ture has its own set of theo­lo­gical, philo­soph­ical, and polit­ical val­ues. The phys­ical destruc­tion of the ‘enemy’ — from cru­ci­fix­ion employed by the Scythi­ans in Antiquity, to the sleep depriva­tion and mutil­ated arms of the accused with a blunt knife put into prac­tice dur­ing the time of the Eng­lish Civil War, from pub­lic exe­cu­tions dur­ing the Middle Ages, to pro­longed use of stress pos­i­tions, star­va­tion, beat­ings, elec­trical charges and extreme cold through­out the Cold War, and squeez­ing the testicles, hanging by the arms or legs, blind­fold­ing, strip­ping the sus­pect naked, spray­ing with high-​pressure water prac­tised by spe­cial­ized teams in Turk­ish pris­ons — in short, what we see before us today, is not the expres­sion of incom­pre­hens­ible hor­ror. It is the exact oppos­ite: the cal­cu­lated expres­sion and a rational neces­sity that define sov­er­eign power. It is the same expres­sion that led Pasolini to explore the nexus between tor­ture, the state of excep­tion and the biopol­it­ics of late-​capitalist hege­mony. Today’s most likely suc­cessors of Pasolini’s fas­cist sov­er­eigns are to be found in the tor­ture cham­bers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

In the Repub­lic of Salò, young captors are given the taste of sov­er­eign ven­geance in its most rad­ical shape: that of the lim­it­less enjoy­ment of sov­er­eign cruelty and tor­ture. Bey­ond reach of any ‘leg­al­ity’, ‘her­ded creatures’ are reduced to bare life, life devoid of any value. In Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, sim­il­arly, ‘enemy com­batants’ are being given the taste of sov­er­eign cruelty and the ‘lib­eral way of life’ at its most effect­ive: that of the lim­it­less enjoy­ment of sov­er­eign ven­geance, viol­ence and sys­temic tor­ture. Reduced to bare life, they are effect­ively stripped of all rights. Sys­temic tor­ture starts at the top and trickles all the way down. Behind water-​boarding is the com­mander. Behind the com­mander are the poli­cy­makers such as Dick Cheney, Don­ald Rums­feld, George Bush and Barack Obama.

Tor­ture cre­ates vic­tims who are not able to act. In tor­ture, the subject’s imme­di­ate responses (anger, spite, revenge) against the oppressor are muted and thus take a detour through sub­lim­a­tion, inward suf­fer­ing. Hence the favour­ite des­tin­a­tion is not the courtroom but the camp where tor­ture is prac­tised secretly. ‘Cre­at­ive’ forms of tor­ture find expres­sion in water board­ing, sod­omy and fuck­ing. This is the paradigm of sov­er­eign polit­ical power, of reign, that makes the lib­eral way of war oper­at­ive. That is to say, tor­ture and the state of excep­tion are fun­da­mental to the oper­a­tion of neo­lib­eral order as a whole. They are fun­da­mental engage­ments of the war against everything. The bare life of vic­tims has come to define con­tem­por­ary soci­ety in the war against terror.

Sov­er­eignty con­sti­tutes the polit­ical body by decid­ing who are reduced to bare and value­less life and who are recog­nised as valu­able and ‘good’ life. The young vic­tims in the Nazi-​backed Repub­lic of Salò, like the inmates at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, are examples of people who have the first kind of life but not the second. They are reduced to bare and value­less life, but they are not recog­nised as hav­ing a valu­able and good life. And because they are reduced to homo sacer (Agam­ben, 1998) under the rule of the sov­er­eign power and viol­ence on which sov­er­eign polit­ical order rests, they can be tor­tured and killed.

Bare life sig­ni­fies the anim­al­ity of humans, blur­ring the demarc­a­tion between human and animal. Redu­cing them to homo sacer and declar­ing the excep­tion, Salò’s fas­cist, cor­rupt lib­ertines are suc­cessors who have acted out of the same fear their ancest­ors have acted at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo: the fear of revolu­tion. It was the same fear that executed Robe­s­pi­erre; it was the same fear that turned the revolu­tion of 1848 into a régime of ban­ditry; it is the same fear, in sum, that estab­lishes a neo­lib­eral and mil­it­ar­ised post-​politics in mod­ern times.

This fear, and sad­istic viol­ence that fol­lows, recon­fig­ures neo­lib­eral cap­it­al­ism in the same sense that Hobbes and Schmitt treated a state of excep­tion as a polit­ical ker­nel of the law, as a con­di­tion for the estab­lish­ment of a total­it­arian state power. And it is in this sense also that today we pay wit­ness to a ‘cruel and venge­ful sov­er­eign power’ that has cul­min­ated in the pub­lic tor­ture at Guantá­namo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and the secret tor­ture at CIA pris­ons, the exterm­in­a­tion of pre­cari­ous indi­vidu­als with remote-​controlled drone mis­siles, and extraju­di­cial killing, con­tract­ing out the secret trans­port­a­tion of ‘enemy com­batants’ to third parties and states.

It is worth not­ing that Pasolini suc­ceeds in present­ing tor­ture as a con­stitutive act of polit­ical and mil­it­ary organ­isa­tion of the state. Tor­tur­ers are nor­mal (not mad and bad) sov­er­eigns because the bod­ies of the vic­tims are inscribed by signs and regimes of sov­er­eign viol­ence that is seen as ‘leg­ally legit­im­ate’. In this way the sad­istic pleas­ure of the tor­turer meets the total passiv­ity of the tor­tured body. In other words, the sad­istic tor­ture coin­cides with react­ive sub­jects who are rendered obed­i­ent and sub­or­din­ate their desires to sov­er­eign polit­ical power.

Vic­tori­ous only in per­ver­sion, the tor­tur­ers derive pleas­ure from inscrib­ing signs and regimes of sov­er­eign viol­ence on the bod­ies. In effect, signs and traces of sov­er­eign ven­geance become an integ­ral part of oppress­ive norms that give rise to the cre­ation of a legal sov­er­eign state. Pasolini thus shows how tor­ture is the interior dimen­sion of state sov­er­eignty that is ‘legit­im­ized by fear’ (Badiou, 2008: 13), accord­ing to which polit­ical philo­sophy, from Hobbes to Schmitt, has defined the abso­lut­ist idea of state sovereignty.

Nev­er­the­less, Salò does not only denounce tor­ture, it also anti­cip­ates the crimes of state sov­er­eignty. Tor­ture as polit­ical: this is one of the con­tem­por­ary dimen­sions of tor­ture as an instru­ment of sov­er­eign dom­in­a­tion and repres­sion. As men­tioned before, Pasolini presents polit­ical dimen­sions of tor­ture by means of four seg­ments: Ante-​Inferno, Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit, and Circle of Blood. Circle of Blood is par­tic­u­larly illu­min­at­ing in this regard. At issue here is a kind of tor­ture that is polit­ical, which is replete with sad­istic viol­ence, gore, blood, and death: pre­cisely the sort of tor­ture that the fas­cist regimes in Latin Amer­ica and Tur­key put into prac­tice and is being prac­tised in the tor­ture cham­bers of the ‘lib­eral way of war’. The Circle of Blood sym­bol­ises tor­ture as a paradigm for the inten­ded destruc­tion of the integ­rity of the humanness.

In the final sequence of scenes, an orgy of polit­ical tor­ture is prac­tised in a court­yard. While the young vic­tims are sub­jec­ted to the most bru­tal and almost unen­dur­able tor­ture and even­tual exe­cu­tion, the fas­cist sov­er­eigns derive greater sexual pleas­ure and enjoy­ment, from watch­ing them suf­fer. Aroused by the dis­play of suf­fer­ing, the lib­ertines begin to suf­fer with the vic­tims they’ve once degraded, tor­tured and exterm­in­ated. Who’s tor­tur­ing whom? What goes there? What does it all mean? The fas­cist sov­er­eigns and the vic­tims enter into a zone of indis­tinc­tion, mak­ing it impossible to dis­tin­guish between obed­i­ence to the law and its transgression.

Thus the entire sys­tem would start to break down. But one of the lib­ertines and a fully aroused sol­dier watch this deadly and inver­ted scene from an enclosed bal­cony, through a set of bin­ocu­lars. The screams, the cries, the pains, and the suf­fer­ing of the vic­tims can­not be heard. Orff’s Car­mina Bur­ana is played in the back­ground. We begin to wit­ness erot­i­cism, beauty and the suf­fer­ing in silence. The cam­era then shifts from the suf­fer­ing bod­ies to the fas­cist lib­ertine, who is being mas­turb­ated by the sol­dier. The scene focuses on the voyeur­istic and mas­turb­at­ory vic­tim­iser, who sits with his back to the camera.

All of a sud­den, the vic­tim­iser turns out to be an anonym­ous viewer. He becomes us, the audi­ence. Voyeurs of the voyeur­ism of oth­ers, we are — by this con­clu­sion — both dis­tanced from and part of the film’s politi­cisa­tion of sad­istic viol­ence. The sad­istic pleas­ure of Salò is pro­jec­ted onto the audi­ence: we are shocked and dis­gus­ted at sad­istic tor­ture, and are shocked and dis­gus­ted all the more when we real­ize that we ourselves have become silent accom­plices to viol­ence com­mit­ted by the global sov­er­eign order in our every­day lives.

Ali Riza Taşkale is a doc­toral can­did­ate in Human Geo­graphy at the Uni­ver­sity of Shef­field. Email: a.​taskale@​sheffield.​ac.​uk

Ref­er­ences

—Agam­ben G, 1998 Homo Sacer. Sov­er­eign Power and Bare Life (Stan­ford, Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity Press).
—Badiou A, 2008 The Mean­ing of Sarkozy (Lon­don, Verso).
—Dillon M & J Reid, 2009 The Lib­eral Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (Lon­don and New York, Rout­ledge).
—Pasolini PP, 1975 Salò (United Artists Cor­por­a­tion and Water Beaver Films).