Sadistic Pleasure Research Articles

Those who (enjoy to) hurt: The influence of dark personality traits on animal- and human directed sadistic pleasure

Background and objectivesSadistic pleasure – gratuitous enjoyment from inflicting pain on others – has devastating interpersonal and societal consequences. The current knowledge on non-sexual, everyday sadism – a trait that resides within the general population – is scarce. The present study therefore focussed on personality correlates of sadistic pleasure. It investigated the relationship between the Dark Triad traits, and both dispositional and state-level sadistic pleasure. MethodsN = 120 participants filled out questionnaires to assess their level of Dark Triad traits, psychopathy subfactors, and dispositional sadism. Then, participants engaged in an animal-directed task in which they were led to believe that they were killing bugs; and in a human-directed task where they could ostensibly noise blasts another participant. The two behavioral tasks were administered within-subjects, in randomized order. Sadistic pleasure was captured by increases in reported pleasure from pre-to post-task. ResultsAll Dark Triad traits related to increased dispositional sadism, with psychopathy showing the strongest link. The coldheartedness psychopathy subscale showed a unique combination with both self-reported sadism and increased pleasure following bug grinding. LimitationsPredominantly female and student sample, limiting generalizability of findings. ConclusionsOut of all Dark Triad components, psychopathy showed the strongest link with gaining pleasure from hurting others. The results underscore the differential predictive value of psychopathy’s subcomponents for sadistic pleasure. Coldheartedness can be considered especially disturbing because of its unique relationship to deriving joy from irreversible harm-infliction (i.e. killing bugs). Our findings further establish psychopathy – and especially its coldheartedness component – as the most adverse Dark Triad trait.

I like it because it hurts you: On the association of everyday sadism, sadistic pleasure, and victim blaming.

Past research on determinants of victim blaming mainly concentrated on individuals' just-world beliefs as motivational process underlying this harsh reaction to others' suffering. The present work provides novel insights regarding underlying affective processes by showing how individuals prone to derive pleasure from others' suffering-individuals high in everyday sadism-engage in victim blaming due to increased sadistic pleasure and reduced empathic concern they experience. Results of three cross-sectional studies and one ambulatory assessment study applying online experience sampling method (ESM; overall N = 2,653) document this association. Importantly, the relation emerged over and above the honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness personality model (Study 1a), and other so-called dark traits (Study 1b), across different cultural backgrounds (Study 1c), and also when sampling from a population of individuals frequently confronted with victim-perpetrator constellations: police officers (Study 1d). Studies 2 and 3 highlight a significant behavioral correlate of victim blaming. Everyday sadism is related to reduced willingness to engage in effortful cognitive activity as individuals high (vs. low) in everyday sadism recall less information regarding victim-perpetrator constellations of sexual assault. Results obtained in the ESM study (Study 4) indicate that the relation of everyday sadism, sadistic pleasure, and victim blaming holds in everyday life and is not significantly moderated by interpersonal closeness to the blamed victim or impactfulness of the incident. Overall, the present article extends our understanding of what determines innocent victims' derogation and highlights emotional mechanisms, societal relevance, and generalizability of the observed associations beyond the laboratory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Мотив вампиризма в романе О. Миртова «Мертвая зыбь»: гендерный аспект

The article discusses the reinterpretation in O. Mirtov’s (Olga Negreskul) novel Dead Swell (1909) of the images and plot moves of the novel by English writer Bram Stoker Dracula (1897) and, in general, the vampiric myth peculiar to romantic and neo-Gothic literature. Recognizable clichés associated with the appearance and abilities of vampires manifest themselves at different levels of the novel: at the level of subtext in ambiguous conversations about blood, in the description of the appearance of the characters (red lips, a string of red coral beads around the neck, pallor, haggardness), in the characteristics of their actions (the physical attraction of a man to a woman is compared with the craving of a vampire to fresh blood, it is realized in the form of sadistic pleasure associated with violence: forced intimacy, neck bites, beatings, tickling). These artistic details form a cross-cutting motif of vampirism. The writer’s appeal to the vampiric myth is due to the gender issues of the novel Dead Swell. The reader reveals the picture of psychological and sexual vampirism and the eternal conflict between man and woman in an androcentric society. In this struggle of the sexes, a woman, as a rule, finds herself in the role of the defeated and most often dies, and her tormentor, like a vampire, goes in search of the next victim. With the help of the motif of vampirism, Negrescul reveals and comprehends from the point of view of a woman the taboo themes of violence, sex, and death in Russian classical literature, which allows her to express her attitude to the “women’s question,” “the problem of gender,” the concepts of eros and platonic love.

Is "sadistic pleasure" a contrived process of signaling one's antagonism?

Sadistic pleasure presumably incorporates processes that support an authentic enjoyment of others' pain. However, antagonism confirmation theory, grounded in social-psychological theorizing on identity maintenance and the notion of ego-syntonicity, suggests that individuals higher in sadism report greater pleasure in response to others' pain because such reports are immoral responses that confirm their self-views. This alternative conception has yet to be tested. In two preregistered experiments (total N=968), participants completed measures of sadism, read about situations involving others' pain, and rated their pleasure. We manipulated the extent to which pleasure from others' pain could be used to signal morality or antagonism. We found that relatively sadistic people indicated greater pleasure across the studies but, like relatively non-sadistic people, they altered their pleasure ratings to signal greater morality or less antagonism. The findings fail to support antagonism confirmation theory, but they support recent perspectives on sadism that suggest that sadistic people may occasionally care about seeming moral (or not seeming antagonistic) and that sadism may be somewhat ego-dystonic in this respect.

Caring as the Default of Empathic Direct Perception

The phenomenological understanding of empathy as the direct experiencing of the mental states (feelings, intentions, moods) of others eschews the identification of empathy with caring. At the same time, it leaves open the possibility of sadistic pleasure, indifference, or malice as consequences of empathic experience. In this paper, I intend to defend the place of caring as an inseparable part of the empathic experience, specifically when understood as direct perception. My defense relies on (a) conceiving of attentive concern as a perceptual predisposition, and (b) understanding the caring responsiveness of the empathizer as embedded in her direct perception of the empathee's mental states. My claim proceeds by three steps. Firstly, I will present the need to include caring within empathy through the problem that arises from excluding it. Secondly, I will argue for the presence of active responsiveness, inherent in the phenomenological concept of perception and expressed more explicitly in its Gibsonian understanding. Thirdly, I will propose my understanding of attentive concern as a predisposition, which together with the intentionality attributed to the other (itself also a disposition) forms the pre-perceptual basis for identifying empathy with caring.

Sadistic pleasure and diminished suffering perceptions: Further evidence that sadism entails rationalization

Nonclinical people high in sadism report less displeasure upon witnessing another person's suffering; some recent theorizing speculates that such people may seek to rationalize this blunted displeasure by diminishing another's amount of suffering. To help address this idea further in the context of an experimental design, participants (N = 375) read about a target suffering various humiliating events; as a within-subjects manipulation, they imagined the target suffered no emotional turmoil (i.e., no-suffering condition) or was highly disturbed (i.e., suffering condition). In addition to estimating the target's emotional suffering, they indicated their pleasant vs. unpleasant mood as they read the vignette. Sadism only related positively to pleasant mood in the suffering condition, and only related negatively to perceptions of target-emotional-suffering in the suffering condition. Furthermore, within the suffering condition, mediation evidence was consistent with the possibility that sadism related to reduced perceptions of target-emotional-suffering via the experience of less displeasure. Additional analyses accounted for sadism's confounding with other dark-personality constructs, gender, and aggressive humor. The present work supports the possibility that sadism may encompass blunted displeasure from others' suffering and rationalization mechanisms for this blunted displeasure.

Précis: Concern, Respect, and Cooperation

Précis: <i>Concern, Respect, and Cooperation</i>

Sexual Violence, Narrative Authority, and Spectral Reading

Sexual Violence, Narrative Authority, and Spectral Reading Judith Goldman (bio) Total Recall Samantha Giles Krupskaya www.krupskayabooks.com/giles.html 185 Pages; Print, $17.00 Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents ([1929] rewriting Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals [1887]) obsessively speculates on the genesis of bad conscience. Offering up theory after theory behind the introjection of the super-ego, Freud comes to formulate the circuit of guilt as self-propelling, with conscience lacerating us even for sins sinned in thought only: indeed, the more acetic we are, the more we are unconsciously driven to punish ourselves and to seek punishment. He rues civilization for the pervasive discontent it causes through this moral masochism. In view of contemporary American culture, Freud's concern harbors a certain dramatic irony, as the malaise of interminable neurotic guilt seems to have given way to a psychotic incapacity for guilt. Of the sadistic pleasures pursued with impunity, perhaps the most enabling is the meta-sadism of gaslighting, whereby a sadistic pleasure is taken in the disavowal of sadistic pleasure. I read Samantha Giles's magnificent book Total Recall when it appeared shortly following the truncated investigations and hearings around, and speed confirmation of, Brett Kavanaugh, one of so very many sadistic episodes densely darkening the interminable time of the Trump administration. Total Recall is a tour de force, hybrid genre work dealing with incest. It comprises three, thematically interrelated prose pieces interleaved with two groups of poems, all of which deal with questions of traumatized memory in the aftermath of sexual assault. This review focuses on the two longer narratives bookending the work. The opening piece, entitled "Total Recall," is written in an elegant braided structure, the three discursive strands told by the same narrator: the family drama around the founding of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation; a plot summary of Total Recall, the 1990 science fiction thriller whose crux involves the indistinction between real and "implanted" memories, whose recounting the [End Page 11] narrator continually qualifies by commenting on the potential fallibility of her memory and understanding of the film; and a first-person narrative that describes an unsettling reunion, after a year-and-a-half hiatus, between a daughter (accompanied by her male partner), and her parents, due to a fight whose cause is never specified, but is implicitly connected to her father's physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of her in childhood. As this narrator explains, her life has been filled with her father "remembering things for her"—a problem of telling especially endemic to the manipulative, distorting representation of incest events by perpetrators to children even as they are unfolding. All of Giles's narrators' speech in this book is riddled with self-reflexive phrases that underscore the uncertainty of the accounts being given: "I think I remember," "maybe what happened," etc. In this particular piece, rather than undermining her epistemic authority, these qualifying tags shore up the narrator's account, as she offers a precise, considered sense of exactly how fallible her recollections may be: where, exactly, she may have inserted a merely probable, verisimilar detail, rather than an actual detail; where her "facts" may be wrong or her memory vague. As everywhere in the book, contesting evidentiary rubrics are perspicuously foregrounded: here, the juxtaposed threads work through implicature to offer the reader the sense that memories of childhood abuse do not yield, and do not need to yield, to a forensic approach. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, as the narrator herself notes, doesn't directly refute the prevalence of sexual violence in families. What it focuses on, as has egregiously ramified in our culture, is that memory lacks provability, a verifiable, unshifting ontology, which thereby also leaves its referent in suspension. Which is to say, it shifts the stakes of the matter away from the real problem: that the patriarchal family formation is a machinery for the abuse of power. The father does not say the abuse never happened: he says she has "false memories." We catch patriarchal abuse in the act, as the executive power to declare its own narrative authority and to control the dispensation of epistemic positions. In the very gesture of violently disallowing...

The Significance of Epiphany in D.H. Lawrence’s Short Story “The Odor of Chrysanthemums”

The aim of this study is to point out to the significance of epiphany experienced by the character Elizabeth in “Odour of Chrysanthemums” with an eye on the social realities of the time in which the story was written. With the analysis of the story, this study challenges the claims that D. H Lawrence is a sexist by feminist critics such as Kate Millet. In the line with these, after a brief information on D. H. Lawrence and his stories that are similar to “Odour of Chrysanthemums” and social, cultural and financial realities of British Industrial society, the story has been handled. In the end, it has been observed that by portraying the main character Elizabeth as a woman who seems to have a sadistic pleasure of her husband’s death in the story, Lawrence criticizes not femininity but 20th century British society which imposes unbearable responsibilities on women. In addition to these, the study also criticises industrial society and helps the reader to have an idea concerning its social facts especially on the role of a woman in the working-class family.

The Manifestation Account of Evil

Abstract This article defends a novel definition of evil. An action is evil if (1) a pro-attitude (or complete indifference) towards severe harm to a sentient being is (2) manifested in the action. The manifestation can take either of two forms: expressing the pro-attitude or attempting to realize its object. In order to exclude cases where the pro-attitude is the result of a positive attitude and the action does therefore not count as evil, the pro-attitude (3) must be generated from a morally reprehensible attitude such as greed or sadistic pleasure. As an implication of this definition, not every evil action is extremely bad, and some ‘merely’ wrong acts might be worse than some evil acts.

When is your pain my gain? The use of perspective taking by everyday sadists

Findings from previous literature suggest that taking the perspective of a suffering victim is an important factor for a sadistic individual to experience pleasure. In the present study (N = 387, with a priori preregistered hypotheses, analyses, and sample size), we examined the impact of perspective taking in everyday (non-clinical) sadists from the general population. Specifically, we tested how everyday sadists' emotional reactions were affected by different perspective-taking instructions when exposed to another person's misfortune. Results revealed that individual differences in everyday sadism predicted the tendency to experience pleasure from another's misfortune. Further analysis of the interaction between individual differences in everyday sadism and perspective-taking instructions indicated that instructions to take a suffering other's perspective (compared to receiving no instructions) significantly reduced everyday sadists' tendency to derive pleasure from said suffering. In sum, the present research contributes to a better understanding of sadistic tendencies and the possible role of perspective taking in reducing sadistic pleasure among everyday sadists.

Psychopathy subfactors distinctively predispose to dispositional and state-level of sadistic pleasure

Background and objectivesSadistic pleasure — the enjoyment of harm-infliction to others — can have devastating interpersonal and societal consequences. The current knowledge on non-sexual, subclinical forms of sadistic pleasure is poor. The present study therefore focussed on the personality correlates of sadistic pleasure and investigated the relationship between the different subcomponents of psychopathy and both dispositional and state-level sadistic pleasure. MethodN = 120 males drawn from a community sample filled out questionnaires to assess their level of psychopathy and dispositional sadism. Then, participants engaged in a bug-grinder procedure in which they were led to believe that they were killing pill bugs. The positive affect they reported after ostensibly killing the bugs served as measures of sadistic pleasure. The bug-grinding task was repeated a second time after installing either a positive victim attitude combined with giving human names to the bugs, or a negative victim attitude combined with labeling the bugs with numbers. ResultsAlthough the Self-centred Impulsivity component of psychopathy had some relevance to sadism, it was the Coldheartedness subscale that showed the strongest relationship to sadistic pleasure. Specifically, increased Coldheartedness was uniquely related to more positive affect, along with less guilt after bug grinding. LimitationsDrawbacks of the study include the unique reliance on a male, community sample, and the potential impact of demand characteristics, including a suggestion that the participant put at least some bugs into the grinder. ConclusionsOur findings underscore the differential predictive value of psychopathy components for sadistic pleasure. Coldheartedness can be considered especially disturbing because of its unique relationship to harm-infliction of the most irreversible nature (i.e. killing), and gaining pleasure out of it.

Жертви й кати: соціальна історія Голодомору 1932 та 1933 років

Introduction . Delusions, which bring grief and suffering, have a profound effect on the course of history. Large-scale poverty was accompanied by people always, but in the twentieth century they first received a broad public response, became the subject of international recognition and justice, formed historical memory. Understand the logic of thinking and actions of the organizers of the Holodomor in the early 1930s will mean finding out the true preconditions, causes, real scales and even recurrences of the memory of the great misfortune that Ukrainian historians call national and universal human beings today, at the end of the 2010s. Relevance of research topic is determined, firstly, by the increased interest that persists in society to the events Holodomor-genocide, and secondly, the challenges faced by modern humanities, first of all historic. In formulating the problem, the authors deliberately shift the emphasis on those cognitive aspects that make it possible to trace, assess the social essence of the tragedy as irreparable grief and, at the same time, terrible in its scale and consequences of the crime. Purpose. The purpose of the article is an in-depth study of the Holodomor of 1932 and 1933, the anthropological aspect of which the authors and represent with two social strata: the ruling Communist Party nomenclature headed by a leader and deprived of food supplies by the peasantry. Methods. The methodology of reconnaissance is social history. She is aimed to answer the question: what social processes took place in Ukrainian society (village) in the early 1930’s. Results . It was clarified that the social premise of the Holodomor was the formation of a stratum of the population who perceived the godless Bolshevik ideology. These were the people who often acted independently of their social backgrounds, former religious and ideological beliefs. Among the executioners, there were many native peasants, as well as «highly educated» intelligentsia. The second prerequisite was the creation of the methods of the same social engineering of the strata of «collective farmers». Before the threat of terrible extinction from artificial food deprivation, they were psychologically intimidated, limited in movement, localized from the support of the authorities and the public. Extreme cruelty of officials was caused either by their fear of higher authority, or by sadistic pleasure of the omnipotence of peasants. As a result of a terrible experiment, mentality has changed, with both the executioners and the victims. In the minds of others, social fear, political apathy and social passivity have been entrenched. Originality. The authors reviewed the problem of interpreting the chronological boundaries of the Holodomor. Between the two catastrophes of 1932 and 1933 there was a period of several months, when the deaths became less and the authorities could critically understand the consequences of the first wave of «pressure on the peasant». But she did not do it that. The subdivision of catastrophe into two parts creates the opportunity to treat the course of events more objectively as well as to display the camps of executioners with less prejudice. Conclusion. The consequences of the Holodomor of 1932 and 1933 were: mass extinction of people, deformation of traditions of management, customs, rituals, devaluation of family values, which negatively affected moral and ethical principles of behavior, strengthened the instincts of adaptation of people, led to their indifference, conformism and cynicism.

Internet trolling and everyday sadism: Parallel effects on pain perception and moral judgment.

This research seeks to clarify the association between online trolling and sadistic personality, and to provide evidence that the reward and rationalization processes at work in sadism are likewise manifest in online trolling. Online respondents (community adults and university students; total N = 1,715) completed self-report measures of personality and trolling behavior. They subsequently engaged in one of two judgment tasks. In Study 1, respondents viewed stimuli depicting scenes of emotional/physical suffering and provided ratings of (a) perceived pain intensity and (b) pleasure experienced while viewing the photos. In Study 2, the iTroll questionnaire was developed and validated. It was then administered alongside a moral judgment task. Across both studies, online trolling was strongly associated with a sadistic personality profile. Moreover, sadism and trolling predicted identical patterns of pleasure and harm minimization. The incremental contribution of sadism was sustained even when controlling for broader antisocial tendencies (i.e., the Dark Triad, callous-unemotionality, and trait aggression). Results confirm that online trolling is motivated (at least in part) by sadistic tendencies. Coupled with effective rationalization mechanisms, sadistic pleasure can be consummated in such everyday behaviors as online trolling.

The Extremities of Racial Meaning

The Extremities of Racial Meaning

The Torturer's Smile as the Stain of Enjoyment

The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film by Hilary Neroni. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 200 pages. $28.00 paperback.In his well-known essay with Sade,1 Jacques Lacan claims that Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, is in fact the truth of Kant. That is to say, the Kantian respect for the moral law, according to Lacan, contains an unconscious enjoyment that possesses a certain sadistic characteristic. The respect for the moral law articulated by Kant is unknowingly tied to a sadistic pleasure in being able to cause pain and humiliation in the victim. The Sadist torturer acts, according to Lacan, as an agent of the moral law. Although for Kant there must remain a gap between the subject's pathological motivations and personal sentiments (feelings, personal desires, and so forth) and the moral law, there is, as Slavoj Zizek explains, a priori sentiment that the subject necessarily experiences when confronted with the injunction of the moral Law, the pain of humiliation.2 Zizek notes that for Lacan, the Kantian privileging of pain as the only a priori sentiment is correlative with the Sadean notion of pain as the privileged way to access sexual enjoyment. How might we consider Lacan's argument in the context of contemporary practices and representations of torture-torture, that is, as an arm of the law?Hilary Neroni's The Subject of Torture takes up this question directly. The book is insightful and enjoyable, and it provides a considerably useful point of entry into a key debate in contemporary cultural and political theory. Its overarching focus is the debate between proponents of and those of psychoanalysis. The book addresses the diverging critical and analytical perspectives of power that depend on the choice of the body or the subject as the site of knowledge. This debate is at the heart of current theories of subjectivity, power, and ideology, and in this book Neroni defends the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach, particularly a version of it influenced by Zizek and Joan Copjec.3Interest in biopolitics and the body have developed out of critiques of Marxist and psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity. Though important in many respects-particularly when dealing with questions about racism and sex, for instance-a focus on the body seems to sidestep the role of desire and enjoyment and their connection to truth. In The Subject of Torture, which includes poignant, psychoanalytically charged interpretations of popular films such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the Hostel and Saw series, and television series such as 24, Homeland, and Alias, Neroni contends that is actually aligned with contemporary ideology and informs the predominant fantasy about torture. The torture as it is described by Neroni, is one that sees the body as a repository of information that, bound to its wish for mere corporeal survival, can be made to purge whatever details are deemed necessary for the enhancement of the security state. Neroni contrasts the biopolitical fantasy with the psychoanalytic conception of the desiring subject. Unlike the biopolitical body, the desiring subject is not a repository of information. Rather, it is based in an irrational (unconscious) experience of enjoyment. Therefore, on the one hand the reigning fantasy, the one that sees the body as repository, opens up an avenue for the critical interrogation of biopolitics and biopower that Neroni pursues, and on the other hand, according to Neroni, the psychoanalytic interpretation of the desiring subject shows precisely why as a technique of interrogation is bound to failure. Through her interpretation of various media representations of torture, Neroni shows that the limits of are tied to ideologies of the body and knowledge that miss the pathological dimension of libidinal pleasure. Her analyses also make a significant contribution to the psychoanalytic critique of ideology, and the book therefore proves useful beyond the limited scope of popular culture studies. …

Sadistic Aestheticism: Walter Pater and Octave Mirbeau

Clara, the English femme fatale of Octave Mirbeau's decadent novel Torture Garden (1931) (Le Jardin des supplices, 1899), takes a weekly stroll through an expansive garden to admire both the striking flowers and what she considers to be equally arresting, and sexually exciting, scenes of torture. The tortured bodies-mutilated Chinese convicts-are narrated as aesthetic objects, like the flowers. These flowers are described with attention to shape, color, and composition:Irises rose up out of the water, their long stems bearing extraordinary flowers whose petals were coloured like old earthenware vases: precious glazes that were purplish blood-coloured; sinister purples; blue flames twisted with orange-ochre. . . . Some of them were immense and shrivelled up like cabbalistic characters.1Composition and arrangement are also emphasized in descriptions of the torture scenes:[A woman] with her legs spread, or rather torn apart, had iron collars around her neck and arms. Her eyelids, her nostrils, her lips and her sexual parts had been rubbed with red pepper and two screw-nuts crushed her nipples. . . . Another one, with head and shoulders tipped back, whose balance was maintained by a brass wire which bound his neck to his two big toes, was squatting with sharp and pointed stones between the bends of his shins. (TG, 184-85)The bodies are angled and contorted with precision, meticulously trained and constrained like cultivated plants, gnarled and twisted like bonsai shrubs. The passage disregards the convicts' pain, focusing instead on their painstaking aesthetic arrangement. Although such scenes may reasonably elicit a visceral response from the viewer-horror or disgust, perhaps-how they provoke such a violently sexual response from Clara is not immediately clear.As I detail in this essay, it is art, especially art's role as a signifier of class distinction, that lies at the heart of Clara's sadistic passion for torture. Clara's sadistic pleasure-which is intentionally deviant, a cultivated affront-is stimulated by the aesthetic values that she perceives in the torture scenes. Her bodily response declares, more convincingly than words might, her agreement with the torturer who claims that art . . . consists in knowing how to kill, according to rituals of beauty . . . there has to be . . . variety, elegance and invention (TG, 154).2 The writer we must address in order to understand how and why Clara links the aesthetics of torture with sexual pleasure is, perhaps surprisingly, nineteenth-century British aestheticist Walter Pater. Pater propounds key principals of aestheticism-such as the relationships between art, life, and social status, form, and matter-that Mirbeau would integrate into Clara's aestheticist epistemology. Pater also subtly and earnestly weaves into his aesthetics instances of grotesque torture, murder, and undertones of decadent sexuality, linking sadism and aestheticism in a manner that Mirbeau would manipulate with irony, self-consciousness, and extreme hyperbole. The resulting sadistic pleasure of Torture Garden is glorified above erotic, aesthetic, and moral normality and used for the purpose of class distinction, reproducing in flowerlike form the aesthetic status of the torture it is stimulated by. By briefly comparing Torture Garden to passages in The Marquise de Sade (1994) (La Marquise de Sade, 1887) by Rachilde-the pen name of Marguerite Eymery-and Against Nature (1922) (originally published as A rebours, 1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans, I also demonstrate how sadism's floral aesthetics signify a broad trend within French decadent literature.The active engagement between British and French writers during the final two decades of the nineteenth century is frequently considered in terms of France's influence upon British literature.3 The impact of English aestheticism upon French decadent writing is much less marked but may be exemplified by the case of Pater's work. …

Stalin's Boots and the March of History (Post-Communist Memories)

Stalin's Boots and the March of History (Post-Communist Memories) Roland Végső (bio) No doubt, history hurts. But the irreversibility of this proposition immediately relocates its subject beyond what is conceivable within the horizon opened up by its predicate. For if not everything that hurts is actually history, then there is an insurmountable gap or an irreducible barrier of alterity between the subject and the predicate. This complication suggests that even if history manifested itself exclusively in the form of suffering, its identity would still remain irreducible to this universal affliction. Thus, we must ask ourselves— without the shadow of the slightest cynicism—whether it would be possible to find some enjoyment in history that is not the sadistic pleasure of the one who inflicts wounds? The question is difficult both on historical and theoretical grounds. On the one hand, in the wake of the cultural triumph of psychoanalysis in the West, the twentieth century learned to explain itself to itself in the quasi-theoretical language of therapeutic utopias. The field opened up by Freud (but often in contrast to Freud's own convictions) gave rise to a whole set of ideas that have become the tacit presuppositions of our cultural self-definitions. In its most reductive form, this worldview suggests that the past is by definition the site of suffering, while the future is, if not the site of happiness, at least that of manageable compromises and redemptive reconciliations. On the other hand, in the wake of the historical catastrophes of the century and the seemingly anachronistic persistence of violent barbaric forces, Western thought by its own inclination gravitated toward ethical paradigms. Thus, the category of "trauma" emerged as a fundamental component of our definitions of history, ethics, and politics as well. We discover here a distant affinity between academic theoretical reflection on the constitution of the subject and popular narratives of selfhood. [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution In fact, the pervasive presence of this newly discovered "traumatic subject" did not go unnoticed by critics of the zeitgeist. By the second half of the 1990s, the term "trauma culture" was coined in order to designate our cultural obsession with traumatic narratives. For example, in 1997 Mark Seltzer argued the following: "The notion of the public sphere has become inseparable from the collective gathering around sites of wounding, trauma, and pathology: sociality and the wound have become inseparable" (24).1 This transformation of our [End Page 32] relation to the public sphere, however, had at least one important consequence. Both in academic and popular accounts of the self, it tended to eliminate the problem of enjoyment from our understanding of the historicity of the subject. This is why, at the same time as the theorization and public performance of traumatic subjectivities was on the rise, the category of "nostalgia" has been redefined as the negative correlate of trauma. Paraphrasing Seltzer, we could even say that we have learned to approach any "collective gathering" around sites of nostalgia with a good deal of political skepticism: sociality and nostalgia have become irreconcilable for us. This two-fold distribution of theoretical and public narratives is so self-evident for many of us today that it is very difficult to conceive of alternatives to the imaginary matrix that it defines. So the task that I would like to propose here is precisely the invention of a relation to history and the public sphere of sociality that deconstructs the trauma/ nostalgia opposition. The theoretical goal is to separate concrete narrative forms from actual political contents. In other words, we need to insist that just because a particular historical narrative is clearly marked by tropes and figures of trauma or nostalgia, we cannot determine its political significance in an a priori fashion. At the same time, the theoretical separation of narrative form from political content needs to be complemented by another strategic argument. It follows from the previous point that it might be possible to conceive of historical moments or concrete rhetorical situations in which we need to rely on nostalgic rather than traumatic narratives in order to imagine progressive political change. In these situations, the political task could...

STALIN'S BOOTS AND THE MARCH OF HISTORY (POST-COMMUNIST MEMORIES)

No doubt, history hurts. But the irreversibility of this proposition immediately relocates its subject beyond what is conceivable within the horizon opened up by its predicate. For if not everything that hurts is actually history, then there is an insurmountable gap or an irreducible barrier of alterity between the subject and the predicate. This complication suggests that even if history manifested itself exclusively in the form of suffering, its identity would still remain irreducible to this universal afXiction. Thus, we must ask ourselves— without the shadow of the slightest cynicism—whether it would be possible to Wnd some enjoyment in history that is not the sadistic pleasure of the one who inXicts wounds? The question is difWcult both on historical and theoretical grounds. On the one hand, in the wake of the cultural triumph of psychoanalysis in the West, the twentieth century learned to explain itself to itself in the quasi-theoretical language of therapeutic utopias. The Weld opened up by Freud (but often in contrast to Freud’s own convictions) gave rise to a whole set of ideas that have become the tacit presuppositions of our cultural self-deWnitions. In its most reductive form, this worldview suggests that the past is by deWnition the site of suffering, while the future is, if not the site of happiness, at least that of manageable compromises and redemptive reconciliations. On the other hand, in the wake of the historical catastrophes of the century and the seemingly anachronistic persistence of violent barbaric forces, Western thought by its own inclination gravitated toward ethical paradigms. Thus, the category of “trauma” emerged as a fundamental component of our deWnitions of history, ethics, and politics as well. We discover here a distant afWnity between academic theoretical reXection on the constitution of the subject and popular narratives of selfhood.

Innocence, Perversion, and Abu Ghraib

In the 2005 Hollywood blockbuster, Mr. & Mrs. Smith-which generated more off-screen heat in the tabloids man on-Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play a couple, John and Jane Smith, whose marriage has lost its spark after only five or six years and who rekindle their passion by beating, shooting, and each otiier. The film begins with the couple in therapy reluctant to answer questions about their lac luster marriage, especially about their sex life. In the course of the film we learn that unbeknownst to each other, both are accomplished assassins working for competing companies. They sleep walk through their marriage and everyday lives together like automatons, while their violent killing sprees are executed as manic moments in their otherwise empty lives. The few words they exchange are passionless-until they receive orders from their respective companies to kill each other. Unlike the failed couples therapy mockingly shown at the beginning and end of the film, their brutality toward each other enflames their desires and reinitiates sex and conversation, both of which revolve around violence. Neither loses sleep over their killing sprees; Jane brags that she has lost feeling in three of her fingers and it seems that-outside of their violent mania-neither of them much of anything, even for each other. They have become killing machines who abuse others as automatically as they brush their teeth or eat dinner. Their violence is so mechanical that when ordered they turn it on each other without a second thought. And it is their automatic violence mat apparently saves them from their robotic marriage. Watching this glorification of sadomasochism and sexual violence, I was reminded of the young military personal who used sexualized torture to enhance their sex lives at Abu Ghraib, where one soldier gave another pictures of prisoners forced to simulate sex acts as a birthday present, and pictures of sex between soldiers were interspersed with torture photographs. The idea that abusing others is a form of sexual arousal seems to move easily between the everyday fare of sexual violence and violent sex of Hollywood films and the shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib. Why is one banal and the other shocking? Is it that one is real and the other is fantasy? With reality television and virtual facts and virtual personalities on the internet, how can we tell the difference? In fact, don't our fantasies affect our perceptions of reality? And weren't the young soldiers at Abu Ghraib not only following orders to soften up the prisoners but also acting out their own fantasies? The border between reality and fantasy is precisely the dangerous terrain of human habitation, filled as it is with hair-triggered landmines, images both virtual and real. With these real and imagined images of sadomasochistic violence, it is as if the only way to give meaning to life has become destroying it, that we only embrace life by denying it to the point of murder and suicide. Abu Ghraib displays a sadistic pleasure in violence toward others to the point of murder. And what of the popularity of cutting among young people who ritualistically cut themselves in order to feel something? Or think of the kids who play the hanging game to see what it feels like to cut off their air supply? These attempts to something more intensely are dangerous masochistic practices that can and have led to death. These sadomasochistic forms of entertainment are symptomatic of a general sense of a loss of purpose or a sense of the meaning of life. Media culture feeds this meaninglessness by turning reality into a spectacle. As a result, we desire more intense experiences, more real experiences. We oscillate between trying to shut off our emotional lives with pharmaceutical drugs-antidepressants and sleeping pills-and channel or net surfing to find alternative realities. Witness the fascination with reality television and live internet webcams. …