ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the origin of truth, the origin of torture, to search in the buried past for the determining instance of ancient Greek torture, to prove that their civilization is based on barbarism. The author's interest in torture and in the problem of truth arises in part from his engagement with deconstruction and with its origins in Heidegger's thought. The chapter shows to distinguish between an ancient mysticism, which the author continues in Heidegger's work, and democracy, a moment in political process experienced only intermittently in the course of Western history. Of course deconstruction would refuse the possibility of distinguishing clearly between these two entities that are inevitably and inextricably implicated in the positing of the other. Deconstruction has difficulty arresting the slippage between signifiers, stopping the endless play. But there must be an essentialist moment, a moment in which politics and ethics punctuate the infinite flux, some refusal of what is in the name of a Utopian possibility.
