Punishment in Effigy: An aesthetics of torment versus a pedagogy of pain in Georges Bataille and Eric Garner.

At least twice, Georges Bataille commented briefly but memorably on photographs he owned of a Chinese prisoner being executed by dismemberment. The history of this punishment in China, known as lingchi, or “the death by a thousand cuts,” ended around the same time the photographs were taken, but Bataille’s comments evinced a modern sensibility of punishment that is aesthetic rather than pedagogical, and which Bataille often theorized with reference to the Marquis de Sade. In the contemporary US, this regime is intimately connected with the visual stigmatics of racism, and has resulted in two contrasting phenomena: capital executions giving way to solitary confinement, and the extrajudicial public killings of unarmed black people by police. In this paper, the purposes of hidden and visible torture by the state are compared through examples taken from premodern China, early modern Europe, and the contemporary United States, and interpreted with reference to psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]