Cruel Modernity
Abstract
I N T R O D U C T I O NCruelty, a word that suggests a deliberate intention to hurt and damage another, is not only practiced by governments, including democracies, that employ torture and atrocity for many different reasons -from the extraction of information, to the suppression of dissident and ethnically different groups -and by criminal groups, especially drug gangs that use mutilated bodies as warnings.It is now deeply embedded in fantasy life: in cartoon violence, in video games, in literature and visual art, in mass media versions of the Holocaust and the "dirty wars."Consider a film like Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, in which extreme cruelty is played for laughs as Jewish commandos in Nazi Germany rival the ss in horrendous acts and scalp their prisoners.Tarantino boasted that "taboos are meant to be broken," but when the taboo against harming another is broken, there can be no limits, no social pact.Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones devotes several hundred pages to acts of cruelty as the protagonist, a Nazi officer, welcomes the reader as his brother, as someone who in the same circumstances would behave just as he did.Postapocalyptic devastation in countless films, in comics and in novels takes us back to primitive states where violence was the necessary tool of survival.Notorious crimes are rapidly fictionalized or
Cite this
Jean Franco (2013). Cruel Modernity. Duke University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378907
@book{jean2013cruel,
title = {Cruel Modernity},
author = {Franco, Jean},
year = {2013},
publisher = {Duke University Press eBooks},
doi = {10.1215/9780822378907}
}Citations in this library
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