1 [Note to readers: this is chapter 6 from the book Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture , co-edited with Maria Pia Di Bella, in the series Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies (New York: Routledge, 2012). The larger context of studies of the “death of a thousand cuts” appears in other places: see the related material in “The Very Theory of Transgression: Bataille, lingchi, and Surrealism,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 5 no. 2 (2004): 5–19; “The Most Intolerable Photographs Ever Taken,” in The Ethics and Aesthetics of Torture: Its Comparative History in China, Islam, and Europe, edited by Timothy Brook and Jérôme Bourgon (London: Rowman and Littlefield, c. 2012); and in Portuguese as “As fotografias mais intoleráveis já tiradas,” in Leituras do Corpo, edited by Christine Greiner and Claudia Amorim (São Paulo: Annablume, 2003), 27–63. ISBN 85-7419-358-5. This essay was originally posted on academia.edu , and on the author’s website, www.jameselkins.com . Please send all comments, criticism, etc., to jelkins@saic.edu . The text was written c. 2005, revised 2010-12, and uploaded July 14, 2013.] On The Complicity Between Visual Analysis and Torture: A Cut-by-Cut Account of Lingchi Photographs James Elkins What follows is not an ordinary analysis of a visual material, but an analysis that means to say something about analysis itself. It is also a contribution to the study of the images known as lingchi, called in English the “death of a thousand cuts.” But even there, I am only offering a very partial and narrow kind of contribution. Others have written about the social and political contexts of the lingchi images, and I have written about the strange influence have had on the understanding of surrealism. 1 I think those kinds of investigation are important for the historical understanding of the lingchi, and the more recent question of what counted as transgressive to certain viewers in the early twentieth century. The lingchi images are complex, and involve a diverse cast of characters from the original executioners to the French photographers, surrealists, psychologists, and, more recently, critics of various sorts from Giorgio Agamben to Georges Didi-Huberman. 2 My contribution to the historical study of the lingchi images is strictly empirical: I aim to say, as succinctly as possible, what actually happened in the course of a lingchi execution, from