The rhetoric of torture in Henri Alleg’s La Question

Abstract

Drawing essentially on David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), this article discusses the discursive mechanisms that accompany the practice of torture as described in Henri Alleg’s La Question (1958). Examining the relation between these mechanisms and the broader discourses of colonialism and subjection, it shows that the inscription of colonial power on the injured and dehumanised body of the tortured is paralleled by the verbal denigration of these victims, reduced to a state of infantilism or, worse, animality, through verbal reflexes such as animalistic adjectives and tutoiement – a form of speech which consists in the use of the singular form of the second person (you) and which is usually reserved for children and those deemed not worthy of respect. More importantly, it argues that, rejecting both the victim status and the dehumanisation to which his jailers attempt to reduce him, Alleg shapes his own empowering rhetorical strategies, in turn debasing the torturers, ridiculing them, or mocking the colonial myths of chivalry and racial superiority. Instead of the latter, Alleg proposes a discourse of humanism and interracial brotherhood that conquers the violence he endures.