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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In a humane world, cruelty should not exist, and yet it has been a feature of our societies since time immemorial. From individual acts of cruelty to systematic torture and mass murder, cruelty has been humanity’s constant companion, attesting to a darker side of human nature. Cruelty involves the use of violence but it is more than this, since it is organized and calculated; its intention is to inflict pain and suffering on others, even to destroy the other. Cruelty is perhaps the ultimate form of violence in which the extermination of the other is staged as a threat in order to make others compliant or instil in them the fear of death.
In this wide-ranging cultural history, Wolfgang Müller-Funk examines the ways in which different thinkers and authors – from Herodotus to Nietzsche, from Seneca to Musil and Koestler – have conceptualized and tried to make sense of a phenomenon we would prefer to ignore. He seeks to unveil the conditions under which an economy of cruelty emerges, in which violence is calculated and becomes a quasi-natural matter of course. The economy of cruelty involves the efficient use of means to pursue irrational goals. It also involves discourses and narrative patterns that legitimize organized violence and neutralize emotions, such as empathy and compassion, that would restrain or obstruct the pursuit of cruelty.
This disturbing inquiry into the nature of cruelty and its role in human culture will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and to a wide general readership.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Quote
1 Sighting
Self-Confrontation
Rudiments of an Anthropology of Cruelty
Cruelty as a Culturalization Effect
Psychological Paradoxes
Rationalization
Violence and Power
Terreur,
or, the Subject Posits Itself
Culture- and Literature-Historical Approaches
A Brief Discursive History of Cruelty: A Methodological Sketch
Notes
2 The Economy of Cruelty (Robert Musil)
The Subjective Dimension of Cruelty (Stendhal)
Adolescence: Youthful Discovery of Cruelty and Its Secret Places in Robert Musil
Cruelty as Transgression of Boundaries: Thresholds and Rituals
Juvenile Perpetrators and Their Discourses
Postscript to the Fantasy of Omnipotence (Arnold Zweig)
Notes
3 People Like Beetles: Coldness and Distance (Ernst Jünger)
The School of Cruelty: Preliminary Remarks
War as a Test of Character and Founding Myth: The Case of Ernst Jünger
A New Type: The ‘Worker’ and His Cold Passions
One-Upmanship
The Apotheosis of Danger
The Cult of Constant Victory
Self-Eradication, with an Excursus on Other Conservative Revolutionaries
New Values in a Culture of Cruelty
The Dream of the Totalitarian State
Notes
4 Cruelty as the Inability to Control Affects (Seneca,
De clementia
)
With a Postscript on Michel de Montaigne
Affective States and How to Control Them: Temperance and Rage
The Art of Ruling
The Risk of Cruelty
Pleasure in Cruelty
Punishments
Pity versus Punishment
Cruelty as a Passion of Power
Excursus: Beyond Stoicism (Montaigne)
Notes
5 On the Cruelty of the Ruler (Elias Canetti)
With Sideways Glances at Herodotus, Shakespeare and Ibn Batutta
Earning Power through Cruelty
Unlimited Control over the Other: Excursus on Friedrich Hebbel and Lion Feuchtwanger
Muhammad Tughlak – Canetti’s Historical Sources: Ibn Battuta and Ziauddin Barani
Family Constellations
Hypertrophy and Female Cunning (Herodotus)
Shadow Figures of Despotic Power: Croesus and Cyrus
Cambyses: The Unruly Ruler
Cruelty as Compensation for Feelings of Inferiority
The Bloody Crown (Shakespeare)
Notes
6 Where Cruelty Is Needed – He Who Has Greatness Is Cruel to His Virtues and Secondary Considerations (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The Evil Eye
The Figure of Reversal: It’s the Others That Are Cruel
Superiority
The Mask
Notes
7 Sexuality and Calculated Cruelty (Marquis de Sade with Horkheimer/Adorno and Roland Barthes)
The Ambiguities of the Marquis
Female Initiation and Transgression of Boundaries: Juliette and Justine
Prohibition of Shame
Sexuality as a Liminal Phenomenon
The Cult of Cruelty
Total Control of Bodies
After the Death of God
Praise of Coldness
Notes
8 Sacrifice, Violence, Cruelty (Ismail Kadare with René Girard)
Revenge and Cruelty
In the World of the Blood Feud (Ismail Kadare)
One’s Own Violence as an External Force (René Girard)
Reciprocity
Notes
9 Also an Ethics of Cruelty (Arthur Koestler)
Cruelty after the Death of God
Steely
The Victim and Their Executioner
The Strong Law
The Trial
Humanism and Terror: Merleau-Ponty’s Reply to Koestler
The Shadow of the Exiled: Leon Trotsky on Revolutionary Morality (with a Brief Appendix on Cambodia)
Notes
10 Colonial Crimes (Mario Vargas Llosa)
The Impossible Question of the Worst Crimes in the History of Humanity
Cruelty and Exploitation
Interrogation and Research: Casement’s Fight against Racist Exploitation
Change of Location: In Ireland and along the Peru-Colombia Border
Homosexuality and Empathy
Notes
11 In the Face of Nazi Torture (Jean Améry)
The Exorcism of Morality in the Name of Heroic Hypermorality
Torture: Inscribing Violence into the Body
The Return of Evil
Boundlessness: Hitler with de Sade
A Personal Addendum
Notes
12 After Freud
Freud in Conflict
Cruelty and the Double Death Drive
Postscript
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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CRUELTY
A Cultural History
Wolfgang Müller-Funk
Translated by Wieland Hoban
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Crudelitas. Zwölf Kapitel einer Diskursgeschichte der Grausamkeit © MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2022. All rights reserved.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2026.
Cover design © Dirk Lebahn, Berlin
The translation was supported by the Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich.
The translation was supported by the Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport, Republic of Austria.
The translation was supported by the Amt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung.
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6395-1 – hardback
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2025934160
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Dedication
For Anna and Lea, who are dedicated to making sure
that this world becomes and stays liveable.
Quote
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport.
William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1
Cruelty is one of the oldest festive joys of mankind. Consequently it is imagined that the gods too are refreshed and in festive mood when they are offered the spectacle of cruelty – and thus there creeps into the world the idea that voluntary suffering, self-chosen torture, is meaningful and valuable.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak
1Sighting
Self-Confrontation
Cruelty is impossible. In a humane world, it should really not exist. To engage with this grim subject threatens our own sensibility, drags us down into the hell of something unspeakable that religion and metaphysics have deemed the ultimate evil. Anyone who spends time examining the systematic torment of other people, individuals or groups risks being attracted by it. Cruelty is also impossible because it is difficult to approach it without prejudice. Our horror in its face can easily lead us to misread it. The statement that cruelty is inhuman rolls off the tongue easily, but the opposition of ‘human’ and ‘inhuman’ is – like most binary oppositions – questionable, for both attributes coincide in the phenomenon of cruelty in a baffling and alarming fashion.
There are different ways to react to cruelty. Moral outrage and rejection is the most understandable response, but it can easily prevent us from engaging with it. Instead we attribute cruelty to others, which hardly brings our own cruel potential into view. Individual serial killers like Fritz Harmann or the collective death squads of the National Socialists led almost automatically to forms of demonization that are psychologically relatable in the light of their terrible consequences. However, demonization quickly leads to distortion and ultimately trivialization, as it reduces the use of systematic violence to exceptional monstrosities. The deliberate extermination of the Other becomes a moral and analytical challenge for an Enlightenment that, after the death of God, also wished to bid farewell to evil as such.
Contrary to all humanist hopes, collective and politically insinuated crimes, in which cruelty plays a considerable part, have not disappeared from the world. Hannah Arendt’s provocative notion of the ‘banality of evil’, a phrase coined for the bureaucratic enforcer Adolf Eichmann, must be understood against this background.1 The word ‘banal’ only began to appear in the German language in the first third of the nineteenth century, such as in Goethe’s reference to the ‘banal savageries of hunting’.2 This French loan word refers to something ordinary, dull, hackneyed or shallow. Speaking of banality turns evil – and with it all calculated, apparently unprovoked violence towards others – into a general fact that no longer feeds off the aura of the extraordinary. Arendt’s achievement, against the sustained criticism of her position, is not least that she divested human malice of its aura of depth and grandeur; thus the executor of mass murder became a shockingly normal, indeed banal and by no means special person. The ascription of banality takes the nimbus of the extraordinary away from evil. It can potentially be found in all of us.
The aestheticization of cruelty, a hallmark of Dark Romanticism and heirloom of Janus-faced individualists like de Sade, can be read as an attempt to confront its attraction and indulge in it within the world of literary fiction. Whoever enters it crosses a threshold, and it seems possible to savour the fragrance of the ‘flowers of evil’ (Baudelaire) without a guilty conscience.3 The transgression lies not only in the excesses presented there, often interwoven with sexuality, but also in morally proscribed enjoyment. Because literature is ambivalent rather than propositional, and thus eludes any clear moral-political evaluation, one can argue in support of all these aestheticizations that they enable a sublimated enactment of the corresponding urges and protect others from deliberate harm. One can also make the opposing argument that, as in de Sade’s philosophical novels, literature initiates its audience into a world where a special moral code applies: some have the right to thoroughly torment and ruin others.
Psychology and anthropology are the disciplines that have probably examined the phenomenon of calculated violence and its significance and function within the human soul in the most unbiased fashion. Mostly, they insist uncomfortably that the willingness to commit targeted violence is not some accidental and rare phenomenon, but rather a thoroughly typical form of human behaviour. Their assumptions, theses and findings open up a new, unexpected perspective on the question of the nature and future of cruelty, though this does not mean that it is impossible to develop cultural techniques that can be used to moderate, sublimate and overcome the desire to damage or even destroy the Other in a lasting physical and psychic fashion. For what can be broken down or deconstructed in the ambiguity of the word ‘cruelty’ are all those discourses in religion, ideology and science that overtly or covertly legitimize the use of targeted violence and seek to neutralize its inner and outer horror. The corresponding means for such a deconstruction are close reading and critique. Here the distance between theoretical self-confrontation with cruelty and its affirmation, as Nietzsche’s example will show (see Chapter 6), is narrow. It evokes a balancing act on steep and exposed terrain.
It sometimes seems constructive and appropriate to consider how one arrives at a certain subject matter – or, more precisely put, how the subject matter arrives at its author. The trail of this book leads back to a study published by the author in 1995 under the title Experience and Experiment: Studies on the Theory and History of Essayism. It dealt with essayistic approaches whose primary streams aim to foil the scientific methodology for accessing the world as a mere ‘object’, and are instead committed to a gesture of protecting and keeping open. Essayism can thus be linguistically described as a potential form of sublimation of violence.
The study quotes some lines from Gottfried Benn’s essay ‘The Doric World’ (1934), in which he argues that liberals cannot look power or – as becomes clear from the subsequent deliberations – violence in the eye:
For a century we have been living in the age of the philosophy of history, and if one sees what conclusion it has drawn, it is nothing but a continued feminine interpretation of power reserves […]. The liberal age was unable to envisage people and humans, unable to grasp them – ‘grasp’, that already sounded too violent; it could not see power.4
This was not intended by Benn as a compliment, nor does it express any reverence for structural, programmatic peacefulness. Rather, it is a mocking comment on the ideological opponent and their inadequacy. It is unmistakably clear that Benn, the right-wing rebel, based his intellectual identity on this statement. The critic of bourgeois liberalism, unlike his adversary, knows he is capable of acknowledging phenomena such as power and violence as part of human existence and even appreciating them. He is capable of viewing them unflinchingly. His self-expectation is that he must not repress or deny them. He resolutely brings them into view and is able to assess their historical dynamics.
Clearly, it is only a small step from such intellectual heroism to affirmation. It only takes an almost imperceptible shift, and suddenly the reader finds themselves together with the author on the side of those who no longer view violence as an unavoidable evil – as in Hegel’s figure of the cunning of reason – but rather, in the sense of a heroic realism, as an aesthetically and politically positive power to shape history. Gottfried Benn took this step in the early 1930s. For him – and he never denied this – there was no doubt that fascism and National Socialism were programmatically violent dictatorships, yet nonetheless historically promising forces. The ‘New State’ – that is, the authoritarian and military regime that replaces the despised order of liberal democracy – knows no mercy for the individual, but has a sublime collective goal. Benn compared this ‘New State’, which follows on from the military hardness of the Spartans, with the work of a sculptor, who brings his work into existence by hewing off and eliminating everything superfluous. In the essay ‘Ptolemy’s Disciple’ (1947), Benn employs the image of glass blowing to illustrate his political aesthetic of coldness and reduction.5 As Benn never tires of emphasizing, dictatorship specifically in Germany requires an aesthetic dimension. What the Germans lack, Benn argues based on Nietzsche, is style and format. Thus it was not National Socialism’s programmatic rejection of humanism that led to Benn’s later disavowal of the Hitlerist state, but rather the fact that it was incapable of developing an aesthetically noble and distanced form of violence.
However, Experience and Experiment focuses on an entirely different position whose contrariness to Benn (and Ernst Jünger) is unmistakable. It is that of Montaigne’s Essays, whose attitude and structure abandon both cruelty and aggression in favour of a serenity that combines empathy and reflexive distance (‘equanimity’). In the eleventh essay of Book II, proximity and distance are concentrated into a vivid shock: ‘I fear that Nature herself has attached to Man something which goads him on towards inhumanity.’6 The context leaves no doubt that, by this all-too-human inhumanity, this early modern thinker means the form of deliberate violence for which he had already used the following unmistakably paradoxical formulation: ‘Among the vices, both by nature and judgement I have a cruel hatred of cruelty, as the ultimate vice of them all.’7 This hints at an opposing position indebted to an unflinching autobiography of humans. It always presupposes the self-analysis of the individual who looks violence in the eye without surrendering to it. The whole attitude of Montaigne’s essay-writing revolves around working through aggression in the act of writing. It dispenses with fixity and avoids any form of polarization that would lead to the disparagement of others.
When the author of this book, years after the publication of Experience and Experiment, was at the New School in New York for a research visit and began reviewing the existing literature on cruelty, particularly the material in English, it became clear to him how difficult it is to grasp the concept, since it is more than merely an increase or escalation in violence. For example, the employment of violence can be ethically and morally justified by a situation that can be termed self-defence, whether at the level of individuals, groups or states. But cruelty in self-defence is a contradiction in terms, since cruelty has an offensive attitude and intention from the start that amounts to the marginalization, suffering and extermination of the respective Other, whether singular or plural. It proves to be a conscious and targeted act in which an extreme and perverted turn towards the figure of the Other takes place.8 It is the most radical form of negative proximity to the Other, which it seeks to do away with symbolically or actually. Here he or she becomes an object of perverted desire that manifests itself in rape or execution, and here – as in Musil’s exemplary literary case study The Confusions of Young Törless (see Chapter 2) – self-affirmation through power can be overlaid with sadistic, sexually inflected elements.9
So if the capacity for cruel deeds is rooted in the structure of human urges – as a psychoanalytical interpretation of Montaigne’s statement might posit – then it should be noted that it is arranged and calculated to the highest degree. This is evidenced by the ritualization of cruel practices in de Sade as well as the state-organized violence in the reflections of Benn and Jünger, or the malign acts carried out by the three cadets against a fourth in Musil’s novel. In other words, acting cruelly towards others is a highly developed and efficient cultural technique.
Rudiments of an Anthropology of Cruelty
Proceeding from such thinkers as Nietzsche and Artaud, the French anthropologist Marcel Hénaff understands cruelty as something specifically human.10 In his view, the human being is the only consciously violent animal on Earth whose violence appears in a multitude of situations. Hénaff encapsulates their common features in a formula that corresponds roughly to the definition given above:
Cruelty is a form of violence that aims for extermination. It can be described as a lack of empathy. The exceptional position of humans results not least from their precarious capacity for cruelty. As the speaking animal, the human being ‘is also the cruel animal’.11
Moreover, the author understands the dual phenomenon of empathy and cruelty as a result of cultural evolution, drawing on Karl Bühler’s theory of representational function as well as the ideas of Konrad Lorenz. The acquisition of verbal language, he argues, along with the capacity for distancing and abstraction, is the central precondition for human violence. At the same time, verbal language enables a playful form of distance and opening towards virtual worlds. In a further attempt at definition, Hénaff describes cruelty as a doubled violence, a ‘violence within violence’:
It presupposes the intention to make the opponent suffer through physical pain and cast them into despair by humiliating them beyond the point of victory. Cruelty displays the passionate will to exterminate the humanity of the Other. And more than that: to negate the boundary of humanity itself, to claim that the other person is not like me, to create the Other as a non-human.12
To Hénaff, it is this radicalism, combined with a specific form of power and violence, that constitutes the real hermeneutical challenge: ‘Cruelty chooses irreversibility; it seeks irreconcilability. That is precisely its enigma.’13 To approach it nonetheless, the French anthropologist distinguishes between four different forms in which ‘violence in violence’ is carried out with varying intensity. Here the boundary between violence and cruelty is sometimes blurred.
In legal and ritual cruelty, the central aim is not so much suffering, which is at most a means to an end or a side effect. The aim is rather to maintain a dictatorial order. Some of Herodotus’s descriptions fall into this category, but so do the excesses presented by Gustave Flaubert in his orientalist novel Salammbô.14 Hénaff does not make it clear whether revenge also falls into this category as a reciprocal act of violence.
In pogroms as well as massacres, violence appears as a sudden event; affective elements play a special part in this. Here it is not uncommon for a person to play the part of ringleader and agitator, inciting a whole group against other people. The ringleader embodies the cold and intentional element, while those who rally around them embody the emotional element, the affect. One finds a vivid image of this in Joseph Roth’s novel Tarabas. The novel describes a scene from the time of the October Revolution in which marauding, intoxicated Polish soldiers in a small town storm a little tavern belonging to a Jewish businessman. The leader of the unit draws obscene, naked female bodies on the walls and proceeds to shoot at them. When the paint comes off, Christian icons of the Virgin Mary come to light. This is the decisive moment for the ringleader to invoke antisemitic discourses and narratives:
That wall where you see that picture is where the altar used to be! The Jew removed it! He defiled the church. […] This place shall be a church again. And the Jew Kristianpoller shall do penance here as well.15
By contrast, torture, the subject of the ninth and eleventh chapters of the present book, constitutes a professionally practised psychic and physical cruelty that is used to find out ‘the truth’. This includes the use of blackmail in interrogations as described by Jean Améry in the case of National Socialism and Arthur Koestler in that of Stalinism, and as already methodologically refined and tested during the Inquisition in the late Middle Ages.
In wilful and experimental abuse, pure cruelty is an end in itself. This would apply to Musil’s short novel The Confusions of Young Törless (see Chapter 2). All these forms of doubled violence are due to a specifically human development that is not accounted for in established theories of evolution, and which Hénaff refers to at one point as ‘coincidences of evolution’. And so he summarizes experimentation with possibilities, the freedom thus gained and the new spaces of action and forms of representation based on verbal language as elements in a cultural development that lead to completely ‘artificial’ forms of violence. Here the anthropologist mentions the inventiveness of an instrumental intelligence, the hypertrophic sexuality disconnected from reproduction, and an intact aggressiveness modelled via language. ‘The speaking, cultivated, technically proficient animal is also the cruel animal.’ The author sharpens his understanding of cruelty by comparing this animal with the kinds of people inhabiting a world such as de Sade’s: ‘The specimen thus described is strangely reminiscent of the figure of the modern libertine.’16
Cruelty as a Culturalization Effect
The thesis that cruelty is a self-culturalization effect has considerable potential to create confusion. It contradicts the notion of an originary violence in humans and instead understands it – and this is central to the present book – as a precarious result of cultural progress. For the first time in its history, the abstraction known as ‘humanity’ established and organized power and violence on a large scale, and in some cases permanently, in the form of very worldly ‘advanced civilizations’. Its artefacts and cultural techniques of domination point to the mechanisms that Hénaff described as characteristic of the cultivated, technical, linguistic and cruel animal, the human being. It is no coincidence that Walter Benjamin – for whom the classical idea of progress was as foreign as its biologistic counterpart, the standard theory of evolution – envisaged this barbaric aspect of advanced civilization. ‘Barbarism’ can be found wherever triumph and domination are involved:
Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried in the procession. They are called ‘cultural treasures’. […] There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.17
Cruelty, one might say, is the element that turns the Other into prey and thus an exhibit, a fetish of absolute power or even complete subjugation. It is quite obvious that Western culture has often shifted its cultivated cruelty on to other, oriental cultures – this too belongs to the critical discourse on orientalism initiated by Edward Said. We find this orientalism in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (which importantly invoke Herodotus) and – as mentioned above – in Flaubert, but also in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. When Canetti summons the figure of the tyrant, he does so primarily with reference to oriental or Muslim rulers. This may correspond to a certain need for spatio-temporal alienation that opens up a space for reflection by making something of one’s own visible by looking at something foreign. In this way, Canetti almost programmatically avoids any reference to the European despots of the twentieth century, yet does suggest that his findings regarding culturally different worlds can also be applied to our own. Nonetheless, the second part of Canetti’s study, precisely the one about the ruler and his power, gives an uncomfortable sense of an orientalism that always finds the sophisticated violence of advanced civilizations in another culture, but never in its own (see Chapter 5).
Psychological Paradoxes
The view that a cultivated person in particular is, without exception, capable of cruelty, is a psychological imposition, a political challenge, but also a theoretical test of courage. In this context it is worth mentioning the extensive transdisciplinary study by Kathleen Taylor, who, referring to the desaparecidos (the ‘disappeared’), writes very dryly, ‘Humans are staggeringly creative when it comes to hurting and killing other humans.’18 It is also informative to consult the statistics from the 2005 Statistical Handbook on Violence in America mentioned by the author:19 65.3 per cent of reported violent crimes were committed by men against men and 22.7 per cent by men against women. Only 9.6 per cent were committed by women against men and 2.4 per cent by women against women. So while acts of violence by women accounted for slightly over 10 per cent, slightly under 90 per cent of comparable crimes were committed by men. Considering that between 1976 and 2003, on average, 76.5 per cent of violence was committed by men against men and 12.3 per cent by men against women, there was an increase in violence against women and a decrease in violence against men.20
This finding brings us to sociopolitical debates that are very strongly influenced by feminist positions. The official statistics cited by Taylor exclusively relate to legally determined acts of violence, and they also tell us something about the level of sensitization in liberal postmodern societies in which the systematic application of violence is increasingly perceived and sanctioned. What the statistics cannot supply, however, is information about all the cruel everyday games that are (or can be) legally punished.
Cruelty has two faces, one subjective and the other objective: on the one hand, the often sublime and invisible intention; on the other hand, the brute fact, the physically and psychically battered human being. In addition, one should distinguish between the discourses of cruelty and the often silent intentional acts of violence.
The statistics provoke a theoretical finding – or, more cautiously put, suggest – that there is a specifically male disposition to cruelty. Almost automatically, the question arises of whether this disposition is universally and biologically rooted, or rather a consequence of particular sociocultural power structures in which men hold the privilege or monopoly on the visible practice of intentional violence.
Taylor’s finding is also relevant for a discursive history of cruelty, of course, since it is no coincidence that almost all theorists who pay tribute to cruelty as a creative force are gynophobic. For them, women are not full human beings because they are not fully capable of cruelty; they are far more likely to employ it secretly as a psychological trick, in a malicious plot against a husband or a female rival. In these discourses, then, it is fundamentally possible to determine male identity positively via the capacity for cold violence, as Ernst Jünger does with his idea of the worker as the new warrior in a technological world (see Chapter 3). This constitution of identity actually occurs via difference and exclusion, through a negative differentiation from the allegedly weak woman. Taylor considers the assertion of such a strong connection difficult, however, as there are countless perspectives on this phenomenon.21 She tries to do justice to this complexity by connecting findings from biology and brain research with perspectives from the humanities and cultural sciences, albeit without addressing the tension that arises between a universalizing, ahistorical biological anthropology and a psychoanalytically schooled culture-historical view.
Taylor confronts her readers with three far-reaching theses. Firstly, that cruelty, unlike theft or fraud, which we naturally also condemn, carries a moral weight that makes it difficult to resist, even if we are disgusted by it.22 It is, the author argues, the epitome of all human evil and can scarcely be fought, though the status of excessive violence is always discursively contested.23 The second thesis emphasizes the strategic and rational character of painful killing. Referring to a study by the British historian Lawrence Rees about the Final Solution,24 Taylor writes that ‘perpetrators generally know exactly what they’re doing’.25 She places this in a general context when she argues that, on the whole, acts of cruelty are not performed by madmen or ‘natural’ villains; cruel behaviour is rational, stemming from calculated operations. At the time of the deed, the perpetrator considers it advantageous to torment the victim.26 In a given situation, any of us could be such a perpetrator.27 The third thesis takes up a thought that also plays a central part in Judith Butler’s reflections on hate speech.28 If, as in speech act theory, speaking is analysed as a form of action in itself, or as connected to action, then it makes sense to consider both verbal and actual bodily aggression as violent acts. Taylor quotes an aphorism by Heine in which the lyrical self greatly relishes the image of a political adversary dangling from a tree:
I have the most peaceful disposition. My wishes are: a modest hut with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, milk and butter, very fresh, flowers in front of the window, a few nice trees in front of the door, and if God truly wants to make me happy, he will grant me the joy of around six or seven of my enemies being hung up on those trees. Touched to my heart by their deaths, I will forgive all the wrongs they did me in life – yes, one must forgive one’s enemies, but not before they are hanged.
And he adds:
I am not vindictive – I would like to love my enemies; but I cannot love them until I have taken revenge on them; only then will my heart open up to them. Until one has taken revenge, there is always a bitterness that remains in one’s heart.29
This passage from Heine’s Thoughts and Ideas displays a fair amount of self-irony and humour. In that sense, it is an alternative to all the methods of prohibition that are employed today in the name of ‘political correctness’, which seek to ban aggressive expressions and phrases and thus do away with them in a highly illusory fashion. This approach, both illiberal and naive, is meant to bludgeon the Other, dictating to them how they should speak – which not only is an aggressive reaction in itself, but also renders symbolic processing and reflection impossible. The alternative aspect of Heine’s enjoyment is that the uncommitted deed is replaced by verbal venting, by a violent fantasy. His sleight of hand is strikingly different from that because, in admitting to its own tendency to cruelty, the lyrical self sublimates it in the literary medium and thus largely defuses the hatred.
Things are very different when it comes to the verbal violence against immigrants, for example, which is far from ironic. But that also means, if one embeds it in a Foucauldian discourse analysis, that the primarily non-fictive discourses which espouse violence and cruelty with rhetorical élan are themselves potentially cruel verbal actions.30 They constitute themselves not least by excluding all of the faint-hearted who, as in Benn, refuse to look the violence of reality in the eye. Even a revolutionary didactic play like Brecht’s The Decision, which advocates the dispassionate, violent elimination of the dissenter,31 must be understood in logical relation to all the measures taken in the ‘Moscow Trials’ (see Chapter 9). This ‘thanatology’ can – as Eva Horn argues – be encapsulated in the following lines:
We cannot help you.
Only advice
Only an attitude
Can we give you.
Die, but learn
Learn, but learn rightly.32
Rationalization
As a scientifically trained psychologist, Kathleen Taylor is more interested in the motives ‘behind’ cruelty than the discourses that lend it plausibility and legitimacy. She understands cruelty as a ‘continuum of spiralling hostility’ whose motives extend from the dehumanization of the Other, their social death, negative and aggressive images of people from other cultures, to social ostracism and the desire to exclude the Other(s) from one’s own group. For Taylor, what is central in all these motives is that a collective element gains significance in the shape of the crowd. She also emphasizes the significance of alterity in this context: only alterity allows us to understand the dynamic of potentiation that makes cruelty emerge as a spiralling form of violent action.33
Taylor emphasizes the significance of alterity for this form of violence. It generates superiority purely by degrading the Other, causing one’s own status to grow to the extent that one can do violence, seemingly without resistance, to the Other. In that sense, Taylor sees the aggressive act as an involuntary confirmation of one’s own unjustified self-aggrandizement.34 Especially in the construction of the Other, or othering, the significance of status, honour, preference and advantage increases dramatically in times of crisis. In this situation, certain forms of radical violence may also be unleashed and increase exponentially. For Taylor, the psychological trap lies in the fact that it is always the Others who are displayed as threatening. They are the evil that must be fought and which justifies the mobilization of our propensity for violence.
Why, Taylor asks herself, are we attracted to Medea and Orestes? Because their motives – honour and vengeance – can be understood in this context of crisis, even if the deeds themselves cannot be condoned. It is the foreign culture and Medea’s own husband that refuse to acknowledge her, an injury to which she reacts with a radical act of killing. Even today, she is still a tragic figure of identification whose circumstances drove her to murder her children for the sake of punishing her husband. In this interpretation, Medea’s act is also a form of anti-patriarchal self-empowerment of which a woman is not thought capable in a male-dominated world. Where revenge and retaliation for a grievance suffered have an escalatory component, they approach the phenomenon of cruelty. It is not for nothing that one speaks of someone taking gruesome revenge on a person who has insulted and injured them. It is largely irrelevant whether this harm is real or perhaps only imagined.
Following on from a study by David Frankfurter,35 Taylor describes the precarious logic that emerges in hostile behaviour towards other, unfamiliar groups in the following terms:
This entity is hostile and threatens our existence and identity.
This entity is beyond our powers of influence or negotiation. Nothing we could do could make it change its behaviour.
This entity is utterly unlike us. We cannot approach it with kindness or empathy, any more than we would a plague or an earthquake; that would be at best useless, at worst lethally dangerous. Nor can we explain its behaviour as we would our own.
This entity is not, like a plague or an earthquake, an inanimate force of nature (though it may be a force of supernature). It is an agent which chooses to act as it does because it desires to hurt, damage, and destroy. It can thus be held morally responsible for its actions.
Because the threat it poses is so severe, we are justified in neutralizing that threat by any means possible.
36
For Taylor, it is instructive that this attitude inversely anticipates one’s own action, so to speak: someone who wants to be cruel seeks to harm and destroy the other entity, so they assume that the entity wants to do them harm or has supposedly done so. One constructs one’s own actions as an inevitable response to a preceding action. All conspiracy theories operate with this type of self-exoneration and with a mobilization of aggression. Whether cruelty actually appears ultimately depends on social and cultural variables; it only takes effect in such contexts as war, civil war, national and ethnic tensions or group conflicts. Targeted violence triggers retaliation at the same level and supplies a discursive legitimation for collective killings. In this context, Taylor considers a dialogue from Homer’s Iliad in which Agamemnon stresses the duty to be pitiless:
Ah would to god not one of them could escape
his sudden plunging death beneath our hands!
No baby boy still in his mother’s belly,
not even he escape – all Ilium blotted out,
no tears for their lives, no markers for their graves!37
Furthermore, Taylor’s account includes an interesting media aspect that can be enlisted for a discursive history of cruelty: it is ‘unjustified voluntary behaviour which intentionally causes suffering to an undeserving victim or victims’. She continues: ‘In addition, cruel behaviour often, though not always, affects observers, evoking disgust directed at perpetrators and empathy (and sometimes also disgust) for victims.’38 Accordingly, the cruel act fundamentally involves three parties: the perpetrator, the victim and the real or virtual observer. In their discourses and dialogues, there is also a struggle for distance and empathy. In Taylor’s view, empathy with the victim can be undermined in two ways: either by negative and incompatible feelings and emotions towards the victim, or by discursive concepts emphasizing convictions that call into question the connection between empathy and the victim and – as in Homer’s Iliad – even make sympathy seem morally dubious.39
Moral codes and ideologies that operate with stark binary oppositions have the corresponding potential to normalize cruelty in a society by turning it into an acceptable, even preferred, behaviour.40 Such ideologies, Taylor argues, can contain justifications for what would really, under normal circumstances, be impossible to justify. This mechanism is an answer to a central question: Why do humans act cruelly, despite knowing that cruelty is wrong?41 This enables Taylor to propose the thesis that cruelty is unmistakably based on a ‘moral’ concept relating to such factors as punishment, justification and responsibility.42 Such discourses have a highly dramatic structure: in this war, we are fighting for the survival or non-survival of our people. The motif of war here points to the dramatic aspect, the either/or, the structural element of the narrative. The binary conspiracy narrative drawn on by the Nazis, as in Himmler’s infamous Poznan speech on the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, follows exactly this pattern: we are in the final battle against the Judeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy.43 The conspiracy narrative acts as a symbolic format for self-assertion and self-preservation; this is where the justification for targeted collective violence comes into play. Securing one’s ‘own’ pompous self is, both individually and collectively, a decisive motivation for coolly calculated violence.
Once the guilty conscience has been neutralized, a positive inversion of pleasure can be brought about: displeasure at the Other becomes a pleasure that enables us to enjoy the act of killing.44 Where this motive becomes overly manifest, it triggers disgust and loathing,45 resulting, psychologically speaking, in a superimposition of the unconscious and the conscious, the rational and the libidinous. There are, then, according to Taylor, several elements that favour cruelty and usually appear together: ideological and religious codes, revenge, fear, anxiety and disgust. These are connected to existential fear, social power, status, convention, goals and defence. The thread running through them is the belief that one’s own identity is under threat.46
Violence and Power
Taylor’s study, which does not always distinguish precisely between violence and cruelty, illuminates the accompanying obsessions from a psychological perspective. In her study, discursivity and cruelty come to the fore where the discourse mutes or heightens them, where it stimulates them or brings them to a halt. What she does not foreground is the relation between violence and power.
Drawing on Hannah Arendt, we can distinguish between violence and power in so far as the former is processual, dynamic and temporally limited, while the latter constitutes a structural factor that is lasting as well as institutionalized (which is almost the same thing).47 Violence is a complement of power in that – as Michel Foucault has shown – it is based on a system of possible physical and/or psychic punishments that forms the symbolic horizon of all power. What is referred to as the ‘political body’ would, in a sense, be the Foucauldian aspect of the connection between power and violence.48 Beyond the findings of the French thinker, there is a suspicion that no power based purely on terror and violence can be stable in the long term, and that the deliberate use of violence is actually an indication of the fragility of rule.
If someone increases their use of violence, they are concerned for the preservation of their power and are seeking to destroy all real as well as imaginary foes. No doubt violence forms the horizon of power, but it also threatens power in so far as an uncontrolled succession of violent acts will undermine the structures of power as a form of maximum and reliable control. Rather, it leads to the opposite of what is intended: an endangerment and collapse of the respective position of power. In that sense, any form of power lives off a forced or voluntary agreement with a social entity.
Based on this, cruelty in political surroundings can only superficially be understood as an increased, power-preserving form of violence, and it would be hasty to limit our description of cruelty to that. This form of violence, which entails a paradoxical turn towards the Other, has an unmistakably narcissistic aspect: it not only gets to work methodically, it also lives off the knowledge of the pain it inflicts on the Other. Its perversion lies in the fact that it presupposes a certain sensitivity on the perpetrator’s part, yet that same sensitivity ends up being exercised on the Other. Translated into everyday language, perversion means a turning around, which is exactly what is happening here in psychological terms. This generates a sadistic surplus of cruel acts that, as Hénaff’s reference to the ‘violence in the violence’ suggests, is indeed a potentiation of violence.
Terreur, or, the Subject Posits Itself
Contrary to what its title may suggest, Henning Ritter’s The Cries of the Wounded: An Essay on Cruelty mostly draws on thinkers who sought to restrain political cruelty.49 Ritter’s study focuses on the long nineteenth century, whose discourses prepared and anticipated the historical disasters in the first half of the twentieth. The author describes the dilemma of the great historiographer Jules Michelet: how to defend the revolution without justifying the ‘system of elimination’50 that began with the regicide and culminated in the Reign of Terror. Michelet always considered it a flaw in the revolution that ‘it denied the king any sympathy or forgiveness’.51 He prides himself on the ‘gift of tears’ and speaks of the drought and desolation left by the Jacobin terror.52
Here Michelet refers to the role of the observer, who in Taylor’s study acts as a third element in cruel events. As a historical observer, Michelet identifies very obviously with the victims and – rather like Georg Büchner – is bothered by the perpetrators, even though he largely supports their revolutionary discourses. The proclamation of human rights on the one hand and the collective killing of innocent people on the other: how do the two go together? That is the nagging question Ritter poses with reference to the future of cruelty and its neutralization. And it is also the reason why he enters into a dialogue with the French historian. Ritter’s essay on Robespierre and his observer Michelet supports another of Taylor’s views, namely that cruelty can itself constitute a moral concept. It is based on the command to kill, which can also be called cruel because it strips those who are killed of any moral reputation. Not without a sideways glance at Michelet, who describes the last hour of Robespierre’s life as the end of the revolution, Ritter sets his sights on the most famous representative of the ‘pitilessness of the Jacobin terror’ and describes his type as that of ‘the enforcer, who will reappear in the twentieth century and follows through on what is already implicit in the situation: turning words into deeds’.53 The man is unassuming, modest and incorruptible, and could easily have ended up as a simple lawyer in the French provinces, but instead he unexpectedly rises to become a revolutionary state terrorist who fights together with his comrades for the right to spread fear and terror in order to advance the revolution against its enemies. It is the implacability of his strict morals, not a lack thereof, that would make Robespierre the bloodiest figure of the French Revolution alongside Saint-Just. This, as Ritter writes, is intertwined with the ‘longing for purity’, with the ‘idea of a terrible, universal, absolute purification’.54 Establishing this regime requires a heroic violence, a just killing of enemies, which is especially effective in spreading fear and terror among onlookers. Those who urge moderation automatically become adversaries, merely because they disregard the morality of cruelty in the name of purity. This lack of radicalism is their real sin, their ‘objective’ moral failing. That Robespierre himself fell victim to this terror corresponds to the logic of the spiral of violence unleashed by the Terreur. It can only be halted together with the system of virtues through the death of its initiators.
This shows that, in this context, there is a type of discourse in which the pathos and absolutism of ‘virtue’ play a prominent part, and it applies both to the Jacobins and to the Bolshevik revolutionaries who invoked them, as well as to their caricature, Stalin. But the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran was also marked from the outset by the presence of morality police, who sought – not without success – to assert a state-sanctioned and religiously legitimized morality in society through fear and terror. For Ritter, the Terreur as an inseparable part of the French Revolution is a key scene because it broaches the question of the future of cruelty in modernity. The proclamation of human rights was part of the programme of leaving behind collective state or revolutionary-political terror once and for all. This was the dramatic, and accordingly theatrically enacted, break with both the past of the Old Regime and the logic of cruelty that had established itself since the birth of advanced civilizations. Now this logic reappeared in an altered form, at the heart of a revolution that was proclaimed in the name of the Enlightenment that had preceded it.
This confusion and the double-edged nature of the revolutionary legacy occupied not only Michelet but also Benjamin Constant, whose liberalism was focused on avoiding and ending revolutionary terror, and the aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who first of all had to acknowledge contre cœur that, based on his criteria, the society developing in North America was unexpectedly a more democratic and equal one than that in Europe. Political moderation went hand in hand with the reduction of aggressive passions that encourage a willingness to carry out violence. This made it necessary to set up autonomous institutions that were ‘secured against despotism and tyranny’.55 The liberal position, heir to the revolution, thus occupied a narrow, uncomfortable space between two hostile camps: the reactionary and the revolutionary, of which the latter – as the example of the Terreur showed – likewise tends towards despotism and tyranny. This seems to preserve the achievements of the revolution, but also to bring to a halt the violence that historically accompanied them. Without indulging in ‘isms’, it is fair to say – and perhaps this is not unimportant at a time when liberalism is obviously coming under political pressure – that such positions and discourses exhibit a structural resilience against cruelty: in addition to the ‘gift of tears’, which Ritter’s monograph debates with reference to Schopenhauer and Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, this resilience comes from the aversion of these positions to polarizing forms of rhetoric, from their conciliatory spirit and their willingness to compromise, which go hand in hand with their ability to differentiate. From another perspective, it is their lukewarmness and lack of radicalism that provokes the mockery of critics on the left and the right. Ritter’s approach should therefore be understood partly as making a case for openness and liberalism, which he understands as the antidote to the cruelty of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Richard Rorty’s view, the ironic liberal fears not only the violent potential of others, but also their own.56 Rorty refers to Judith Shklar when he writes that ‘the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless’.57
Culture- and Literature-Historical Approaches
Cruelty is a complex and complicated phenomenon. It has various forms and has made numerous historical appearances from the first advanced civilizations via the European, perhaps also Arab-Ottoman, ‘Middle Ages’ up to modernity after 1789. In the different books and collections on the history of culture and ideas, then, the bodies of text likewise vary. The polymorphy of crudelitas is also reflected in the academic literature, which deals with it more or less precisely as a specific and potentiated form of violence.
The focus of Jody Ender’s study, to pick out one exemplary work, is medieval cruelty. The author understands torture and agony as a legacy of antiquity. Such forms of systematic injury and often gratuitous execution function within the framework of a hermeneutical desire for truth presented in classical rhetoric, a form of test and punishment that is exacted by a stronger party on a weaker one and presupposes the spectacle and the enjoyment of spectators.58 Like all discursive regimes, it generates a form of relief through cultural self-evidence.
Elaine Scarry’s study, on the other hand, which likewise sets its sights on the Middle Ages and draws on the research of Alec Mellor, Henry Lea, Edward Peters, Piero Fiorelli, Page du Bois, Kenneth Burke, Jacques Derrida and Deleuze/Guattari, among others, focuses primarily on physical pain.59 Its central thesis is that organized violence produces a fantastic illusion of power. Public torture prior to the early Modern Age, i.e. up until the modern surveillance system discussed by Foucault, is described as a grotesque example of compensatory drama.60 It acts as a rhetorical system that initiates a cathartic process.61
Clément Rosset’s theoretical study on cruelty, which discusses texts by Marcel Proust and Ernesto Sabato as well as philosophical concepts by Lucretius, Epicurus, Montaigne, Pascal and Leopardi, stands unmistakably in the shadow of Nietzsche and de Sade, as when the author argues that a theory must be implacable towards its creator.62 This shifts the meaning of cruelty towards single-mindedness and clarity – a shift also evident in Derrida’s interpretation of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud invites us ‘to think only of “rigour, implacable intention and decision”, and of “irreversible and absolute determination” […] and not necessarily of “sadism”, “horror”, “bloodshed”, “crucified enemies”, etc.’63
Rosset understands the real as the meaningless, with an essential connection to silence. His ethics is linked to two principles: that of sufficient reality and that of uncertainty. In the French thinker’s eyes, cruelty is not an isolated act, since he considers it the intense, painful and tragic nature of reality itself, which is raw, bloody and unpalatable.64 It has a cruel and real punishment in store for humans: like the death sentence that coincides with the execution and deprives the condemned of the necessary time to appeal for mercy, reality ignores and cuts off any plea for clemency.65
Catherine Toal’s study of cruelty in modern literature examines both Rosset and Artaud.66 However, what also makes her book important is that she discusses classical philosophers and authors such as Seneca, Cicero and Aristotle, as well as medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, and incorporates them into her reflections. She also refers to Judith Shklar’s seminal works.67 The fixed body of literature in this discourse includes such authors as Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), Voltaire (Treatise on Tolerance, 1713), Shaftesbury (An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, 1699), Alexis de Tocqueville/de Beaumont (1833), de Sade (Philosophy in the Bedroom, 1745, and Juliette, 1797), Hermann Melville (Benito Cereno, 1855), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw, 1898), Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire and Lautréamont (Maldoror, 1869). At the centre of this study and others is the aesthetic transformation of cruelty in the medium of literature.
Finally, we should also mention an essay by Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter as well as research by Andy Mousley, who argues against the aestheticization of cruelty and calls for a new literary humanism.68
One reason for listing these studies from the sea of publications on this frequently ill-defined subject is to make a pragmatic, expressly non-dogmatic, distinction: the present author will not attempt an extensive, systematic treatment of the ethical and aesthetic aspects of the representation of excessive violence found in the field of literary criticism – that is, of the question of whether and how the literary or cinematic representation of violence should be viewed: as cathartic deterrence, as empathy with the victim, as a sophisticated presentation that employs subversive, literary fiction as a niche in the face of a world in which violence is officially frowned upon (despite obviously continuing to exist), or as an unquestioned duplication of violence.
Where works of literature are mentioned in this study, it is in the aforementioned philosophical and culture-theoretical sense, making them fruitful as media for a circling essayistic thinking that seeks out the lacunas and contradictions left by theories of cruelty.
A Brief Discursive History of Cruelty: A Methodological Sketch
This is the starting point for the present study. It examines the discourses that enable this paradoxical behaviour – a vivid, physical knowledge of the pain one inflicts on others – and snuff out the sympathy espoused by Montaigne, in contradistinction to the Stoics, like a light being switched off. To that extent, the present book is a work of cultural analysis, since it uses immanent readings of philosophical and literary texts and the cultural technique of close reading to expose the discourses that form the core of a cult of cruelty. Accordingly, writings by other authors are quoted at length in order to enter into both dialogue and dispute with them and allow the reader to participate in the process. It is impossible to avoid contemplating, or at least taking into account, the undeniable allure of violence, which thinkers such as Artaud and Nietzsche celebrated. Artaud attempts to separate his definition of cruelty from the notion of brutal violence; unmistakably, in this he follows on from Nietzsche, whose approval for the divine feast of cruelty ultimately aims to legitimize its facticity (see Chapter 6).
The aim of this book, to put it in a Kantian conceptual nutshell, is to analyse the condition of possibility of calculated – i.e. not spontaneous or affective – violence. This is not meant to refer to an anthropological dimension, even though the latter is indispensable as a horizon (the human as a being potentially capable of violence). It is far more about examining the specific conditions under which an economy of cruelty can emerge and thrive, and in which it almost becomes a natural, self-evident fact. The aim is to establish which discourses and narrative patterns neutralize those affects and emotional dispositions that are obstacles to the actualization of organized violence, and can be grasped via concepts such as empathy, sensitivity and susceptibility to pain – central elements of a socially effective imagination.
To speak of an economy of cruelty suggests that, beyond a mere neutralization, there is a strategic will to cruelty that need not be identical to the will to power first addressed by Nietzsche and investigated further by Foucault in the discourses of Western epistemai (knowledge forms). Here economy encompasses the aspect of an efficient use of means, the pursuit of medium- and long-term goals, and accordingly a knowledge of the effectiveness of means as well as the calculus of a rational operation that can easily go hand in hand with irrational and phantasmatic goal orientations. It is probably this very coupling of a rational use of means with irrational goals that characterizes the economy of cruelty – or so the hypothesis goes. It is possible that other economies, such as those of growth, competition and control, are also based on such a linkage, which harbours a knowledge of the ineffability of the pain one inflicts on others; in the same breath, however, the imagination must be tamed and dampened with regard to the vulnerability of one’s own body. In this ghostly activity between perpetrators and victims, power plays a central part, both subjectively and objectively.
