Aretxaga: "State violence, especially the kind that circumambulates the law, that transgresses the law from within [...], that violence that materializes frequently in the assassinations of death squads, the torture of detainees, the disappearance of victims, and other like technologies of terror — such violence, simultaneously public and secret, is deeply wrapped in fictional plots and phantasmatic images. It is that fantasy space within which state violence operates that gives it a surreal, uncanny, and chilling feeling, a power to 'unmake worlds' (Scarry 1985) as it 'unmakes' bodies. No amount of political, economic, and social causality, of rational aims, goals, and interests can explain that surplus of meaning in state violence that manifests itself at the level of the feeling body as a sense, an image, a panic, or an excitement. This essay is about that surplus in state violence and the fantasies that produce and fuel it"
(the Scarry 1985 is for The Body in Pain)