The Modalities of Desire in Mimetic Rivalry

This chapter analyses the modes of perpetrator performative transgression by distinguishing between torture, torment, and agony as outcomes desired by perpetrators that represent different kinds of suffering reflective of the comparative influences of culture. The analysis focuses on the language of perpetrators in terms of lies, empty euphemisms, and the anti-ironic to develop a theory of language that is framed by the willed desire of perpetrators to use cruelty to produce a form of post-factuality the analysis describes as “informativeness.” This chapter advances a theory of social antagonism based on an analysis of the dynamics of envy, jealousy, honor, shame, purity that in turn are anchored by theoretical explanations emphasizing the psychodynamics of lack and loss, encapsulated by the concept of rival self-other.

Criminology · Cruelty · Epistemology · Honor · Immediacy · Jealousy · Objectification · Performative utterance · Psychoanalysis · Rivalry · Shame · Sociology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Torture, Ethics, and Law · Genocide · Massacres · Political atrocities