Abstract
This is an innovative, closely argued and empirically rich account of a crucial aspect of the study of violence in modern societies: torture.
Its point of comparison, the US and India, is innovative, since intuitively at least, in comparisons of the west and ‘non-west’, one may reach for spaces that have historical linkages as metropolis and colony as counterparts. Yet, Lokaneeta stages her comparison between the US and India on the shared concept and practice of ‘liberal democracy’, and also the appropriation of US case law by the modern Indian Supreme Court.
Theoretically, the great importance of this study is its argument with, and attempted displacing of, the pervasive formulation taken from Agamben that the practice of torture in the US, for example, is a ‘state of exception’. Lokaneeta wants to locate the propensity to torture far deeper in the heart of liberal democracies, than the place of an ‘exception’, and to do so, revives and then attempts a relocation of Foucault’s concept of ‘excess violence’.
As she argues, for Foucault, modern governmentalities are an ‘economy’ that operates as ‘the bumble bee who rules the bee hive without needing a sting’ (p. 100, quoting Foucault; emphasis is Lokaneeta’s). ‘Excess violence’, in Foucault’s argument, has been dispensed with the regime of modernity that occupies his central analytical work. Lokaneeta’s argument is that, to the contrary, ‘the state, in its own quest for legitimacy and control continues to find ways of accommodating acceptable levels of excess violence with an art of government’ (p. 99).
While this formulation does have great power, it also, even though in a revisionist way, retains the Foucaultian concept of ‘excess violence’. Lokaneeta is able, given a rich set of ethnographic examples, to locate instances of ‘excess violence’ in both modern societies: the US and India. In relation to the US, her analysis of the TV serial 24 is telling as is her framing of the opening scene of the film Slumdog Millionaire set in Mumbai. We see that in both instances, ‘acceptable levels of excess violence’ differ, given the socio-historical difference between the two moments.
Yet, in the argument of the book, both instances have to be accommodated within the given Foucaultian framework. Perhaps, this is the vulnerability of Lokaneeta’s theoretical argument: for even as the given quotation explicates her argument, it also demonstrates the impossibility of stabilising analytically the place and province of the concept of ‘excess violence’ nationally, let alone transnationally, as it were. Indeed, in Lokaneeta’s argument, ‘excess violence’ appears to inhabit both the possibility and limit of liberal government, even though I am not certain that this is her formulation and if it would sit in comfort with an argument that attempts a critical enlargement of Foucaultian concepts.
Nevertheless, these theoretical worries aside, this is a laudable and important volume that does considerably enrich our understanding of multiple histories of torture, and reopens and enlarges the effort to find conceptual clarity in the study of violence in the social sciences.