Torture and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and The Moor’s Last Sigh

Throughout "The Moor’s Last Sigh" Salman Rushdie meditates on the possibility of the Enlightenment ideal of disembodied cosmopolitanism, represented in this novel with the image of a mind freed from its specific body and flayed out of its distinctive skin and thus one with the world. The meditation reaches its limits when the Moor, expelled from the paradise of familial belonging and imprisoned in the deprivations of the solitary conf inement, feels his skin peel once again. This time he does not welcome the feeling, but sees his personality disintegrate and his body taking precedence with its pain, fear and fragility. His body becomes flesh, “a self without walls” (288). Jean Amery’s description of torture as “transformation of the person into flesh” finds further representation in Saladin Chamcha’s experience of torture in "The Satanic Verses": he metamorphoses into a goat while being beaten in the police van. Later, he finds a number of other immigrants transformed into a variety of animals in a Detention Center.

This paper argues that representations of torture as metamorphosis in Rushdie’s fiction show the limits of disembodied cosmopolitanism, because - as Amery asserts - when “trust in the world” dissipates, the body “can no longer feel at home in the world.”