From Collective Violence to Human Violation

This chapter argues that the psychodynamics of desire contribute to the transformation of “ordinary” individuals into those who directly and indirectly support or engage in genocide, mass atrocity, and their performative dramaturgies. The chapter describes the practices of the macabresque in terms of noir ecstasy and the psychodynamics of obscene surplus enjoyment in the transgressive theaters of human violation. Comparative depictions of the macabresque in the Guatemalan, Chilean, Sri Lankan, Congolese, Darfurian, and other cases are framed by Lacanian psychosocial theory and concepts focused on ideology, fantasy, and personality that analytically transitions from festivality and the carnivalesque to the macabresque. Human violation and the desire for absolute power drive perpetrator behavior in ways that normalize their anti-normative or anomic hatred and enemy-making relative to victims’ fixed, fixated, and frozen identitarian categories that become naturalized, and often racialized. Victims suffer racialization by means of forced displacement. This produces spatialized “islands” of demonization.

Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Hatred · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Racialization · Sociology · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology