ABSTRACT
In a reorientation of Elaine Scarry's influential account of the language-destroying power of torture, Darius Rejali argues that 'the inexpressibility that matters in torture is the gap between speakers and their communities, not the brain and the tongue'. The work of the hostile witness is facilitated by the particular features of torture in the War on Terror, and their relationship to forensic narrative. It is important to understand that torture complainants in the War on Terror face not only rhetorical but legal problems when attempting to establish their testimony—legal problems which themselves have consequences at the level of narrative. The torture laws' attack on narratability and the speaking subject as such is more recently exemplified in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The regulatory control exercised over the possible meanings of torture testimony in Australia is in part enabled through the politics of genre that governs its presentation.
