Author: John P. Nichols

Cited by

• Antonin Varenne (1)
  • IN: Bed of Nails (2008) Fiction, French
    EPIGRAPH: [...] So it is as if the torturer had let the victim take over the job of continuing his work of annihilation. But the case of this man, a former torturer who has become his own victim -- both physically in his own person and representatively of others -- is a striking illustration of what I have called the Saint Sebastian Syndrome: the inversion of the object and subject of torture and its behavioural consequences. This case study will be both the object and the subject of this study on war-related trauma, from the point of view of the torturer. So among the questions to be considered will be whether other forms of torture exist, separately from the "instituitionalised" form [...] We shall see clearly that the answer is no. Like suicide, chosen as a subject of study by the earliest sociologists, torture is a social phenomenon. To paraphrase Durkheim and his famous demonstration on voluntary death, we may conclude this introduction as follows: every society is predisposed to produce a given contingent or torturers.
    FROM: his Ph D. thesis, (2008), Essay, NULL