Dissidences

Hispanic Journal of Teory and Criticism

Volume 1
|
Issue 2 Article 10
11-29-2012
Torture and the Sublime. Te Ethics of Physical
Pain in Garaje Olimpo
Patricia Vieira
Harvard University
Follow this and additional works at: htp://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/dissidences
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Recommended Citation
Vieira, Patricia (2006) "Torture and the Sublime. Te Ethics of Physical Pain in Garaje Olimpo," Dissidences: Vol. 1: Iss. 2, Article 10.
Available at: htp://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/dissidences/vol1/iss2/10
Torture and the Sublime. Te Ethics of Physical Pain in Garaje Olimpo
Keywords / Palabras clave
Garaje Olimpo, Argentina, Dictadura, Trauma, Ethics, Torture
Tis article / artculo is available in Dissidences: htp://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/dissidences/vol1/iss2/10
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DISSIDL&CLS
lispanic Journal o 1heory and Criticism




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Patricia Vieira , larard Uniersity






Physical pain is oten described as an experience that eludes representation. In 1he Body in
Pain Llaine Scarry emphasizes the unsharability o bodily suering and identiies resistance
to language as one o its essential attributes. A central consequence o the diiculty to
erbally express pain is its inisibility. 1his characteristic becomes particularly unsettling in a
situation o iolence purposeully inlicted on others, since its insubstantiality allows or its
dismissal as a side eect o a particular policy or goernment. A case in point is the
ubiquitous use o torture by the dictatorial regimes o America`s Southern Cone during the
190s and 80s, when thousands were submitted to the practice, justiied by abstract notions
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such as internal enemy` or security o the state`. Scarry points to the potentially benign
eect o expressing the pain imposed on onesel or on another, as a irst step in unmasking
its reality and in giing the tortured social and political representation.

1here are many perspecties rom which to articulate discourses on torture. 1estimonies o
ictims and their amilies, reports by human rights agencies, social scientiic research and
documents produced during legal procedures are perhaps some o the more common texts
on the subject. All these accounts share what Idelber Aelar describes as authority to
speak` ,254,. 1heir legitimacy arises either rom being the result o personal experience or
rom their reerence to juridical, political or scientiic objecties. In the case o imaginary
creations about physical pain the deinition o authority is more complex. 1he
ictionalization o the horror o iolence leads to a questioning o the aesthetics and ethics o
creatie representations on this subject. In this essay I will analyze the iction ilm Garaje
Olimpo ,1999,, directed by Marco Bechis, which depicts the practice o torture during the
Argentine dictatorship. I will argue that traditional concepts such as beauty are inapt to
explicate the artistic language o the moie and make the case or the use o the notion o
the sublime to interpret the aesthetic o horror it presents. In the irst part o the essay I will
go back to Immanuel Kant`s deinition o sublimity and attempt to explain how this notion
establishes a bridge between aesthetics and ethics in the moie. In the second section o the
text I will ocus on the representation o the suering body. lollowing Ldmund Burke`s
relections on the sublime I will try to show that the ethics o sublimity in Bechis` ilm is
rooted on the iewers` physical response to the depiction o corporeal pain.

A crucial sequence in Garaje Olimpo occurs towards the end o the ilm. Mara ,Antonella
Costa, is on the irst loor cleaning one o the cars when 1exas ,Pablo Razuk, leaes the
building. In an extreme long shot that corresponds to an eyeline match rom the perspectie
o the prisoners we realize that the door at the end o the garage has been let open. 1he
intense light that enters through the small gap produces a strong contrast with the low-key
illumination in the interior. Mara realizes that this is an opportunity to escape. She begins to
run towards the door to the increasingly louder sound o a cello. 1he moement is
emphasized by a series o jump cuts while the camera pans to ollow her. She is ilmed rom
the inside while she goes out and the shot continues rontally ocusing on the open door.
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1he music stops and or seeral seconds the strong light coming rom outside ills the
screen. Shortly ater, 1exas enters the scene dragging Mara with him. le orces her to kneel
down, points a gun at the back o her head and starts to count to ten. A high angle shot
shows the situation rom aboe and is ollowed by a cut to an extreme close-up o the girl`s
terriied ace. 1exas ires and Mara screams and alls orward, the representation o her drop
to the loor is prolonged in time by three match o action shots that depict her all rom
dierent angles. Only then does the iewer realize that 1exas ired to the side and that
Mara, lying on the loor, has not been killed.

1his scene condenses many key elements o Garaje Olimpo. lirst, it emphasizes the
dehumanizing treatment o prisoners. 1exas grabs Mara by her hair and arm, as though she
were an animal, and compares her to a bird who whishes to ly. It equally stresses the close
relationship between torture and power, a connection that had already been pointed out by
Michel loucault: power relations hae an immediate hold upon it |the body|, they inest it,
mark it, train it, torture it, orce it to carry out tasks, to perorm ceremonies, to emit signs`
,25,. 1exas is inested not only with institutional authority but also with a weapon that helps
him enorce it. 1his situation o absolute power o the torturers, who are able to dispose o
their prisoners` lies, is a leimoti throughout the ilm. As one o the jailers puts it: Aca
somos Dios`. In addition, this sequence thematizes the conlation between the purposeul
inliction o pain and sexual control, which will be urther discussed later. |1| All torturers
are men and both 1exas and llix try to use their position to obtain Mara`s sexual aors.
1he gun in 1exas` hand could be interpreted as a phallic symbol, an extension o his physical
but possibly also sexual dominance.

In this sequence, the diision between the inside o the improised concentration camp and
the outside o the city o Buenos Aires is sharply presented. 1he contrast between both
spaces is constant throughout the moie and is established by the use o lighting, among
other technical deices. 1he interior o the garage is always dimly lit, with long shadows and
an abundance o somber tones juxtaposed to ochre, dark blue and dark red. 1he city, on the
other hand, is presented as bright and colorul, as exempliied by the strong luminosity
coming rom the outside through the open door. 1he sun almost always shines and at night
the intensity o the lights is emphasized. 1he signiicance o these dierences goes beyond
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the obious distinction between the gloom o prison and the pleasures o reedom, as
director Marco Bechis points out:

Nelle scene sotteranee la camera era sempre in spalla, la luce era semplicemente la lampadina che
si ede nell`inquadratura, non c`e stata alcuna luce aggiunta. |.| luori, alla supericie, la citta e
statta inece raccontata come iction, con luce artiiciale, carrelli, che in questo dispositio
unzionaano come inzione: quella in cui ieano gli abitanti. Soto c`era la realta` ,25,.

1he 1.'/# o torture is ilmed with natural lights while artiicial illumination is added to the
city scenes. 1his contributes to the eeling o unreality attached to the images o the world
outside the garage. 1he physical and psychological pain o the tortured is presented as more
genuine than the rest o Buenos Aires.

In 1he Body in Pain Llaine Scarry deines torture as an act that unmakes the oundations o
the world. 1he purposeul inliction o physical pain destroys our most basic assumptions
and deconstructs reality. Idelber Aelar, howeer, criticizes this clear diision between
barbarity and social order as an illusion.

|2| le argues that atrocity and ciilization are closely
bound since practices such as torture can only exist with the implicit conniance o the
society ,260,. In this scene o Garaje Olimpo, the open door unctions as a threshold
between two worlds and symbolizes their interrelation. 1he street seen through the door,
with its quiet harmony, is obliious to the suering o the prisoners. 1he dreamlike quality
o the images o Buenos Aires points to the act that its serenity is an illusion. 1he whole
city, the ilm seems to imply, is responsible or the acts o torture happening in its midst.

I the ilm addresses the inactiity o Argentineans in the ace o torture, it equally questions
the comortable passiity o iewers. \hen 1exas is about to ire on Mara, there is a shot
ilmed directly rom aboe, a technique oten employed throughout the moie. Panoramic
iews o the city, certain streets or the interior o prison cells are requently presented rom a
higher angle. It seems as though spectators were being metaphorically inited to assume the
role o gods, looking at the action rom a higher leel and judging what they see. 1he
audience is being intimated to take a stance, to appraise not only the action but also the ilm
itsel and what it represents. loweer, the challenge to assess Garaje Olimpo proes to be a
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diicult one to meet. Veracity, a central category in narratie accounts on torture such as
testimonies, is not a releant tool to comment on ictional and artistic productions. Also, as
we shall see, traditional aesthetic categories such as harmony or beauty do not seem to be
appropriate to the analysis o the ilm. 1he concept o the sublime might be employed here
as an alternatie to the concept o beauty in dealing with the ictional representation o
iolence and pain.

In On Beauty and Being Just Llaine Scarry argues that beautiul objects, beings or artistic
creations incite replication. \e tend to wish to recreate beauty or, as Scarry puts it: Beauty
brings copies o itsel into being` ,3,. A brie relection on the use o this category applied to
a moie such as Garaje Olimpo is enough to realize its inadequacy. 1he horriic, painul
moments portrayed in the ilm probably do not elicit in most iewers the desire to duplicate
them, be it in reality or in art. In act, our aesthetic response to the ilm is much closer to the
notion o the sublime, as it was established by philosophy in the 18
th
century.

In his Critique o Judgment ,190, Immanuel Kant deines some o the dierences between
the idea o beauty and that o the sublime:

|Beauty| carries with it the eeling o lie being urthered, and hence is compatible with charms
and an imagination at play. But the other liking ,the eeling o the sublime, is a pleasure that
arises only indirectly |.|.lence, too, this liking |the sublime| is incompatible with charms, and,
since the mind is not just attracted by the object but is alternately always repelled as well, the
liking or the sublime contains not so much a positie pleasure as rather admiration and respect,
and so should be called a negatie pleasure. ,98,

Unlike beauty, the sublime is not compatible with play and charms. It is iolent to our
imagination` and arises rom chaos, iolence and deastation in nature ,99-100,.
Agreeableness is the eeling elicited by beauty, while the sublime produces a strong outpour
o emotion ,2,. Its attraction is closely bound with repulse and the pleasure that results
rom it is a negatie one in that it relates to pain. Kant depicts a person contemplating the
sublime as someone seized by an amazement bordering on terror, by horror and a sacred
thrill` ,129,. Len though Kant associates the sublime primarily with the contemplation o
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nature, he does not exclude its pertinence to the realm o artistic endeaor. In act,
throughout the 18
th
century, the term had been commonly used to describe art, especially
literature. 1he notion was particularly releant in the discussion o what Samuel Monk
designates as the graeyard school` ,54,. In his seminal work on the sublime, this critic
documents the increasing popularity in the 18
th
century o texts in which ear and terror
played a central role. le points out that there was a connection between graeyard poetry
and a desire to attain the sublime ,8,. |3| Later, this aesthetics was extended to prose
writing, chiely with the gothic noel, and, in the 20
th
century, in ilm, with the emergence o
horror moies. 1he sublime became a common concept in the study o both genres ,see
Mishra, 1994,.

Marco Bechis` moie can be seen as an example o an aesthetic o horror. 1he somber
atmosphere o the indoor shots, the uncertainty that runs through the moie and the scenes
o torture and other physical and psychological abuse resulting in the constant terror elt by
the prisoners combine to create a mood o right that permeates the work. |4| 1he category
o the sublime, with its emphasis on strong emotion, ear and een terror is thus particularly
apt to describe the ilm. loweer, this concept is equally useul in the analysis o this motion
picture rom another point o iew, namely rom an ethical perspectie.

Unlike what usually happens in gothic noels, horror ilms and many other artworks
associated with an aesthetic o horror, a patent moral stance underlies Bechis` moie. Garaje
Olimpo is not only a ilm about torture but also a ilm ,@,"&#7 torture. It is clearly a
denunciation o the physical and psychological iolence inlicted on political prisoners. |5|
1he ethical responsibility o both the ilmmaker and the spectators is heightened by the act
that, although the eents narrated are ictional, they are based on the reality o Argentina
during the 190s and 80s. |6| 1his is emphasized in the end o the ilm by a short note
shown beore the credits and stating that, during the dictatorship in the country, thousands
o citizens were thrown alie into the sea. 1he military responsible or these crimes, the text
points out, still hae not been brought to justice. 1he moie openly intends to arouse not
only an aesthetical but also an ethical response in iewers and to encourage them to assume
a critical position regarding the actions it narrates.

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1he sublimity o horror has a long tradition o being associated with the liminal situation
between aesthetics and ethics we ind at Garaje Olimpo. Samuel Monk states that the eeling
o terror was originally deried rom religion. 1he terror produced by nature or artworks was
related to the idea o an angry God ,52,. Literature that exploited the sensation o ear oten
had a moralizing intention, since the terrible elements described helped to show the
greatness o the Creator and the inscrutability o lis ways. 1he sensation o the sublime
prooked by horror was consequently a way to appreciate God`s greatness. In Kant`s
Critique o Judgment the relationship between the sublimity o horror and morality is
secularized since ethics, not theology, lies at the core o the philosopher`s system o thought.
Unlike beauty, the sublime is, according to Kant, a completely subjectie experience. It is not
a quality o a particular object or landscape but the eect that these prooke in men: lor
the beautiul in nature we must seek a basis outside ourseles, but or the sublime a basis
merely within ourseles and in the way o thinking that introduces sublimity into our
presentation o nature` ,Kant 100,. \hen human beings are aced with certain stimuli they
experience the sublime and are led to realize that there is a supersensible world beyond the
natural phenomena that surround them. 1hey understand that although they are immersed in
physical realities their cognitie powers are superior to sensibility. 1hey enter the realm o
reason, which is the source o the moral law that goerns them and their true calling. ||

1he Kantian sublime constitutes a transition between theoretical and practical reason, i.e.
between physical realities and morality. It is through the eeling o ear and horror that the
indiidual experiences sublimity and is able to associate aesthetics with ethics. |8| 1he
emphasis in Kant`s Critique on the interrelation between these two notions is pertinent or
the understanding o Garaje Olimpo. 1he aesthetic o horror deeloped in the ilm and its
portrait o cruelty produce in iewers a response ery close to what Kant described as the
sublime. It is due to the spectators` strong emotional reaction to the scenes o iolence in the
screen, to their amazement bordering on terror` ,Kant 129,, that their ethical conscience is
aroused. 1heir moral condemnation o purposeully induced physical pain is likely to hae
gained renewed orce ater watching this artistic depiction o torture.

Kant`s aesthetic philosophy can be deployed in the interpretation o numerous
contemporary art orms dealing with iolence, such as Bechis` ilm. \et the contrast
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established in the philosopher`s writings between the physical world and the rational realm
seems ery reductie, in that human beings are presented as diided into two distinct
compartments mediated through aesthetics. lurthermore, he deines a rigid hierarchy o
human aculties, where the sensorial ability constitutes the lowest orm o knowledge and is
opposed to moral consciousness, which is the domain o reason. Consequently, the body is
seen as completely separated rom ethics and een as impairing its actiity. In the next
section I will attempt to recuperate the body as a site both o aesthetic and ethical
experience. In the case o artistic representations o physical pain the sublime can only be
understood through its hypostasization in the human body.

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One o the irst scenes o Garaje Olimpo ater Mara`s imprisonment ocuses on the eect
o pain upon the body. During her initial ten-hour torture session through electric shocks
she gets dangerously hurt and her torturer Vbora ,Marcos Montes, hastens to call his
superisor 1igre ,Lnrique Pineyro,. le reanimates Mara with the use o a deibrillator and
scolds Vbora or using too high a oltage. 1heir conersation shows the complete
instrumentalization o the prisoners and the jailers` bureaucratic approach to their mtier:

1: ,Qu dice la tabla para 40 kilos
V: Quince mil.
1: Quince mil. ,Cuanto le diste
V: No, estaba dandole bien. \o. Bueno, si no hablaba.
1: La tabla esta por algo all. Bueno, ya esta regular. Puedes seguir. No le des agua.

1he callousness o this dialogue is emphasized by the background sound o light pop music
playing in the radio outside the prison cell, supposedly to conceal the cries o the tortured.
1he sequence is ilmed in one shot and the camera concentrates on Mara`s body. She is
ilmed naked rom her waist up, lying on her back on top o the torture table in the center o
the rame rom a slightly high angle. She has her arms tied aboe her head to the top o the
bench and her position eokes Christ in the cross. Vbora is at her let and 1igre occupies
her right side but their aces are almost always outside the rame, since the camera rarely
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moes rom the girl`s body. She has obiously been under intense physical pain and her skin
shines with sweat. ler appearance is o utter deenselessness.

As it is mentioned in the dialogue between Vbora and 1igre, the immediate justiication or
inlicting pain is the desire to get inormation rom the prisoners. 1hus the torturer increased
the oltage o the electric current applied to the girl`s body because she would not speak.
loweer, as Page DuBois points out, the practice o torture is not a reliable source o
knowledge. 1he suering o prisoners is rather seen as a punishment or certain actions
,148, and the abuse o the body becomes an end in itsel and not simply a means to gather
data. |9| DuBois sees in the purposeul inliction o pain the wish to extract rom the body
o the other a truth that it conceals and which cannot be reduced to releant inormation on
political actiities. lor the torturer, the ictim represents a dierence that needs to be
eradicated:

But a hidden truth, one that eludes the subject, must be discoered, uncoered, uneiled,
and can always be located in the dark, in the irrational, in the unknown, in the other. And
that truth will continue to beckon the torturer, the sexual abuser, who will ind in the
other - slae, woman, reolutionary - silent or not, secret or not, the receding phantasm
o a truth that must be hunted down, extracted, torn out in torture. ,14,

DuBois delineates a correlation between torture and sexual abuse, since the body o women
has traditional been regarded by a phallocentric society as the 1.'/# o absolute otherness. 1he
domination o the other through torture eokes the power relations resulting rom sexual
dierence. \e can ind this association in the scene o Garaje Olimpo described aboe,
where Mara`s naked helpless body is surround by the two men. 1he ilm enacts women`s
subjection and seems to ascribe Mara the traditional emale role o a ictim in a masculine
unierse. loweer, we can also interpret this scene as a subtle critique o the ictimization
o women and o the exploitation o their bodies.

1hroughout Garaje Olimpo there is an emphasis on the representation o torture, o which
the scene described aboe is only an example. 1he suering body plays a signiicant role in
the creation o an aesthetic o horror in the ilm. 1he iewers` reaction to this artistic
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representation o pain is, to a certain extent, a physical one. Nerousness, tension and een
the irresistible wish to coer one`s eyes in order to escape the most brutal moments are likely
to be some o the most common eects o the scenes o iolence. 1he Kantian diision
between body and reason proes unable to explain the spectators` physical response to the
moie. In this case, the eeling o sublimity cannot be conceied solely as an intellectual
answer to outside stimuli.

In his Philosophical Lnquiry into the Origin o our Ideas o the Sublime and Beautiul
Ldmund Burke attempts to elucidate the physiological origins o the eeling o the sublime.
lor the philosopher, the oundation o sublimity was pain, while pleasure was the basis o
beauty. lis deinition o the sensation is as ollows:

\hateer is itted in any sort to excite the ideas o +,"&, and danger, that is to say, whateer is in
any sort terrible, |.| is a source o the sublime, that is, it is productie o the strongest emotion
which the mind is capable o eeling. I say the strongest emotion because I am satisied the ideas
o +,"& are much more powerul than those which enter on the part o pleasure. \ithout all
doubt, the torments which we may be made to suer, are much greater in their eect on the :.$5
and mind, than any pleasures |.|. ,39, |my emphasis|

Burke attempts to gie a physical explanation o how ideas o pain aect both the body and
the mind and produce the eeling o the sublime. 1he philosopher emphasizes here the
interrelation between physical and psychological processes when dealing with aesthetic
concepts. lor Burke, pain and ear - the idea o pain - aect the body in similar ways.
Both the sensation and the emotion lead to a contraction o the muscles and cause tension in
the neres. 1hus the eect that pain operates in the mind through the body is similar to the
results o the idea o pain in the body ,see Monk 9,. 1he eeling o the sublime, resulting
rom terror, is thereore a tension o the subject. 1he philosopher goes on to explain how
human beings can transorm terror in an aesthetic experience. Just as labor is essential or
the constitution, the contraction o the body through the eeling o the sublime is also
beneicial: As common labor, which is a mode o pain, is the exercise o the grosser, a
mode o terror is the exercise o the iner parts o the system` ,Burke 136,. lumans can
appreciate the idea o pain and ear, proided that it does not endanger them. 1he sensation
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o the sublime resulting rom an aesthetic o horror is thus highly dependent on physical
processes.

Although Burke`s physiological description o the sublime seems nowadays irretrieably
archaic, his eorts in bringing the whole organism into the artistic experience are still
pertinent. lis lessons are particularly releant in the analysis o artworks that depict iolence
and torture, such as Bechis` ilm. 1he origin o the tension we experience when watching the
moie is perhaps not so ar remoed rom the idea o pain` described by Burke ,39,. 1he
repulse iewers eel in beholding the inliction o physical pain is probably due to their
imagining that suering in their .A& bodies. Kant`s notion that the sublime resulting rom
the horrible may elicit a moral reaction explains the ilm only partially. It is the beholding o
the physical suering and the reraction o that pain in the audience that conditions our
aesthetical appreciation o the ilm and allows or a possible ethical reaction. Lthics is thus a
not only an intellectual but also a physical response o the beholders o torture scenes. In
Garaje Olimpo sublimity cannot be dissociated rom the bodies o the ictims portrayed in
the screen and rom those o the spectators watching in horror.


/&0$1

|1| In the ilm Ll Caso Pinochet ,2001, directed by Patricio Guzman there is a similar
association between the practice o torture and women. 1he moie presents the testimony o
Chileans who suered torture while narrating the legal process against ormer dictator
Augusto Pinochet. O the seeral people interiewed only one is a man. \omen are thus
ascribed to their traditional role o passie ictims.

|2| In 1orture and 1ruth Page DuBois makes a similar argument by showing how the alues
o ciilization are bound with iolence. She emphasizes the interrelation between torture and
truth in Ancient Greece and describes the act that in the Greek legal system, the torture o
slaes was seen as a guarantor o the truthulness o their testimony. She equally points out
that, during a certain period, torture was used as a way to deine social status. 1hus the
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Greek citizen was, by deinition, someone who could not be submitted to the practice.
1hereore, the social order was constituted through the inliction o pain.

|3| Monk points out that the concept o the sublime grew increasingly estranged rom that o
neo-classical beauty. In act, it came to represent a set o qualities that neo-classical aesthetics
had rejected: 1error is the irst o seeral qualities that, inding no ery happy home in the
well-planned, orderly, and careully trimmed domain o neo-classicism, sought and ound
reuge in the sublime, which constantly gathered to itsel ideas and emotions that were to be
prominent in the poetry and prose o the romantic era` ,52,.

|4| Marco Bechis states that the actors did not hae access to the whole script beore the end
o the ilm. 1hey receied new instructions while the shooting progressed. 1his may hae
contributed to the mood o uncertainty in the ilm since the perormers did not know what
would become o the character they were interpreting ,100,.

|5| 1he iews o the ilmmaker became clear in the way the main characters are portrayed.
1he torturers are not only unnecessarily brutal but they are also petty thiees, like llix, or
crooks and murders, like 1exas. 1he ictims, on the other hand, are brae and noble, like
Nene or Mara, who worked in a destitute neighborhood alphabetizing the poor.

|6| 1he ilmmaker interiewed seeral ormer prisoners and ictims o torture in preparation
or the ilm. Also, he had himsel been arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp
called Club Atltico` while he was isiting Argentina in 19. Due to the inluence o his
amily, the military transerred him to a ciilian prison, where he met a man who had spent a
year in Garaje Olimpo` ,Bechis 204-,.

|| Kant`s own words are the ollowing: lence the eeling o the sublime in nature is
respect or our own ocation. |...| this respect is accorded an object o nature that, as it were,
makes intuitable or us the superiority o the rational ocation o our cognitie powers oer
the greatest power o sensibility. |.| lor it is a law ,o reason, or us, and part o our
ocation, to estimate any sense object in nature that is too large or us as being small when
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compared with ideas o reason, and whateer arouses in us the eeling o this supersensible
ocation is in harmony with that law` ,114-5,.

|8| Signiicantly, there are pre-requisites or experiencing the sublime. \hile beauty is
uniersally accessible to all human beings, one needs to be prepared to eel sublimity: In
act, what is called sublime by us, haing been prepared through culture, comes across as
merely repellent to a person who is uncultured and lacking in the deelopment o moral
ideas. In all the eidence o nature`s destructie orce, and in the large scale o its might, in
contrast to which his own is nonexistent, he will see only the hardship, danger and misery
that would conront anyone orced to lie in such a place` ,Kant 124,. 1he transition rom
aesthetics to ethics can consequently only be undertaken by those who are already
predisposed or it.

|9| Michel loucault had already made a similar argument in Discipline and Punish. 1he work
documents the transition rom corporeal punishment to other orms o criminal justice in
the last 200 years. loucault mentions that in the Larly Modern Age torture was commonly
inlicted not so much to ind out the truth about a certain crime but as a legal orm o
chastisement ,16,. 1he change to more humane sentences marks a transormation o
paradigm in western legal systems. 1he decline o what loucault names the hold on the
body` goes hand in hand with the end o punishment as a spectacle: At the beginning o
the nineteenth century, then, the great spectacle o physical punishment disappeared, |.|
the theatrical representation o pain was excluded rom punishment` ,14,. 1he use o torture
in contemporary societies is thus oten perceied as an anachronism, a barbaric practice
rom another age and is hidden rom public iew. 1his can be obsered in Garaje Olimpo.
1he scene described aboe happened underground, in a dark, closed space below the streets
o Buenos Aires.


2&341 5-0$'

Aelar, Idelber. lie 1hesis on 1orture.` Journal o Latin American Cultural Studies 10.3
,2001,: 253-1.

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