Joseph R. Slaughter

Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There

The narrative turn in the social sciences and the ethical turn in the humanities that occurred in the 1990s converged in the study of human rights and social justice. Human rights, it was argued, were about and dependent upon modes of storytelling; torture was often cited as a paradigmatic example of the ways in which narrative and human rights were co-implicated. The centralization of torture in the prosecution of the “War on Terror” and the recent declassification of documents authorizing the use of torture by US personnel offers an important occasion to reconsider some of the tenets of the arguments about human rights and narrative. This essay considers the problem of declassification as a process of un-narration and examines some of the ways that art and literature have attempted to deal with the stories of torture that are actively untold.