Violent Appetites

Abstract

Violence has been a popular staple of art and entertainment from the tragic heroes on the stage of the Great Dionysia to the spandex-clad übermen beating the snot out of each other in today’s multiplex theaters. Yet, for all that voracious appetite for violence, many of the great aesthetical thinkers from Aristotle on have warned against excessive violence in art. The representation of violence, while often exciting, can all too easily go too far and venture beyond the bounds of propriety and, importantly, beyond the bounds of good taste. The history of how we have thought about the representation of violence is a history of dealing with the distasteful. This chapter focuses on the role of distaste in the aesthetics of violence. I begin by outlining how classical aesthetics has contrasted and evaluated tasteful and distasteful representations of violence. Interpolating from the reasonings of David Hume, I argue that excessive graphic violence forms the standard of distaste that falls outside the scope of traditional aesthetic inquiry. Hume’s reluctant attitude toward the representation of violence has not completely curbed the development of aesthetical theories on the subject. To illustrate this, I examine an exceptional oddity in aesthetics, Thomas De Quincey’s semi-satirical essays on murder as art, which aim to formulate the guidelines of both tasteful homicide in reality and its sublime representation in narrative. Finally, I go on to criticize the long-standing idea of the sublimity of violence that De Quincey establishes in his essays. Through an analysis of the roles of distaste and disgust in aesthetic theory, I argue that the kind of tasteful representation of violence that Hume or De Quincey would approve of is in some ways more ethically problematic than an openly distasteful approach to the representation of violence.