This chapter contains sections titled: Sade, Nietzsche, and Brady at the Gates of Janus Brady's Life and Crimes Philosophy and the Moors Murders Brady's Library A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing Nietzsche Sade The Sadean Hero and the Serial Killer Opening the Gates of Janus Brady Evaluates Other Serial Killers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American PsychoCarla Freccero (bio)R.L.: Do you believe in God?B.E.E.: Are you asking me if I was raised in a religious family or if I go to church? I was raised an agnostic. I don’t know—I hate to fly, I have a fear of flying. That means either that I have no faith in air traffic controllers or (...) that I’ve done something really bad, and this is God’s way of getting at me. Maybe I’m caught in the middle.... But no, I don’t believe in God. That’s such a strange thing to admit in an interview.—Robert Love, “Psycho Analysis,” Rolling Stone interview with Bret Easton EllisBefore Capitol Hill acts on these dimwitted proposals, we should remember what the writer Bret Easton Ellis might have said, but didn’t: “Doing bad stuff is wrong.”—Ted Rall, “Meet the Cusp Kids”US mass media has become a much-publicized target of censorious commentary within American public culture in recent years. Censorship, as E. S. Burt notes, may take at least two forms: philosophical censorship, such as that discussed by Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing, and the more commonly applied form of US censorship enacted against “pornography” or “obscenity.” Philosophical censorship, in this reading, entails the state’s persecution of message-bearing texts or utterances that counter the doxa and threaten to disrupt the state, while the second form of censorship involves “a language use that falls outside the interpretive scheme defining the work as the intentional act of a moral being” [Burt 25]. In the United States, state censorship of the first kind may perhaps be practiced through the “incitement to riot” escape clause provision in the First Amendment, while obscenity censorship—in certain forms—is explicitly written into legislation as excluded from speech protection.Extending Strauss’s argument to the liberal state, Burt suggests in effect that these two forms of censorship become related insofar as the state’s censorious intent is directed not so much at the content of the expression as at the degree to which it confirms the axiom, what Burt calls the “very fundamental, convening assumption of the... liberal state” [25] that “virtue is knowledge” [see Strauss 25]. Thus obscenity is a form of expression that cannot be interpreted as productive knowledge but instead as a certain repetitive excess, “dirt for dirt’s sake” [Burt, quoting Judge Woolsey 28]. The problem here, of course, is that such distinctions do not apply comfortably to that category of utterance termed the literary, and especially to the use of figurative language, where “art for art’s sake” can be [End Page 44] seen precisely to resemble the nonproductivity of obscenity. The text I am going to discuss in depth here, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, has been attacked on both grounds—as an active (and violent) disruption of the doxa that is also obscenely nonproductive of knowledge—and as such, it serves as an illustrative, and I will argue, noncoincidental, case of “censorship” in the liberal state.It may be useful here to begin by surveying and making distinctions among the various popular and popularized censorships in recent US media: Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” was probably the most authentic case of “philosophical” censorship, even though its silencing did not derive directly from the state (the liberal state often does not function in some of the ways supposed when the definition of censorship is restricted to state censorship). “Cop Killer” is a song about killing policemen, and thus came closest—in the list I am going to propose of silenced works—to tempting the state’s retaliation. It was written and sung by a black man (a black man who often plays a gangster and a cop in popular films), in a genre already regarded as threateningly disruptive to the state: rap. The result is that the CD containing this song was pulled from the shelves of music stores and can no longer be purchased. There was no trial. The author withdrew his work from public circulation in the face of... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Serial Killers, Real and Imagined Dexter Gacy Are Serial Killers Morally Responsible? Moral Responsibility: Emotions and Cognitive Frames.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Allure of Monsters Explaining the Allure: First Look Stalking the Deeper Reasons Closing in for the Kill Removing Empathy The Prison of Rules Conclusion.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Serial Killer as Superhero Why Do We Love Dexter? Dexter Morgan: Superhero Dexter and the Viewer Dexter vs. Dexter Dexter's Ethics Dexter's Dark World.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Historical Survey with Interviews Moral Skepticism and the Serial Killer A Brief History of Serial Killers Serial Killers of the Ancient World Serial Killers of the Renaissance Serial Killers of the Nineteenth Century Serial Killers of the Early Twentieth Century The Golden Age of Serial Killers Serial Killers Today: Conversations on Motivation.

This chapter contains sections titled: In Cold Bold: The Moral Psychology of Fictional Serial Killers I Think I'll Eat Your Heart: The Lack‐of‐Empathy Explanation Dexter and the Extreme Lack of Understanding The Hot‐Blooded Reality: Sex, Rage, Fame My Evil Just Happened to Come Out: Empathy Inhibits? Serial Killing Because They Care? “Angels of Death” “I didn't want to hurt them, I only wanted to kill them”: Empathic Dissonance The Serial Killer Next Door?

_Serial Killers - Philosophy for Everyone_ investigates our profound intrigue with mass-murderers. Exploring existential, ethical and political questions through an examination of real and fictional serial killers, philosophy comes alive via an exploration of grisly death. Presents new philosophical theories about serial killing, and relates new research in cognitive science to the minds of serial killers Includes a philosophical look at real serial killers such as Ian Brady, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the (...) Zodiac killer, as well as fictional serial killers such as Dexter and Hannibal Lecter Offers a new phenomenological examination of the writings of the Zodiac Killer Contains an account of the disappearance of one of Ted Bundy's victims submitted by the organization Families and Friends of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims Integrates the insights of philosophers, academics, crime writers and police officers. (shrink)

The research deals with the issue of genre hybridization in the novel “Silence – Chronicle of a Killer” written by a contemporary Austrian writer Thomas Raab. An examination of the novel's composition and structure, as a text in motion, has been accomplished in the article. The novel “Silence” is an excellent illustration of how the genre of adventure has been adapted to include elements of science fiction. This novel is a love tale, a rural life saga, a formation narrative, (...) and a psychological thriller all in one. As a fictionalized account of the life of a serial murderer with hypersensitive hearing who became a legend for his mental torment and suffering, it serves both as a biography and a thriller. Novelist Raab uses elements from classic horror novels like Frankenstein, German romantics, in particular, G. Kleist, the tale of Casper Hauser, and detective novels like Friedrich Durrenmatt's "Promise" to tell the story of Casper Hauser's disappearance in his book. A new aesthetic experience may be formed at various degrees of identification ranging from naive perception to higher levels of literary reception. Concentration is required for poetic and philosophical substance. Michel Focalut's nomadism, marginality, and authoritarian power rhetoric have been discussed in this article. The novel's ultimate content has been disclosed as the aphesis torment, emotional sublimation, as the birth of an artwork and, at the same time, death of the author, who exposes discourses, accountable for creating texts that are allocated to him. (shrink)

At least some serial killers are psychopathic serial killers. Psychopathic serial killers raise interesting questions about the nature of evil and moral responsibility. On the one hand, serial killers seem to be obviously evil, if anything is. On the other hand, psychopathy is a diagnosable disorder that, among other things, involves a diminished ability to understand and use basic moral distinctions. This feature of psychopathy suggests that psychopathic serial killers have at least diminished responsibility for (...) what they do. In this chapter I consider whether psychopathic serial killers might be properly said to be both evil and morally responsible for their actions. I argue that psychopathic serial killers are plausibly evil in at least one recognizable sense of the term, but that they are nevertheless not likely to be responsible for many of the evils they perpetuate. (shrink)

Many creatures exhibit desires of various strengths competing with one another for the prize of interacting with beliefs to cause behaviour. Harry Frankfurt famously analyzes persons in terms of the ability to form second-order desires; desires that intervene in this economy of first-order desires in ways that sometimes award the prize to weaker competitors. This paper augments Frankfurt’s analysis with Kendall Walton’s understanding of pretence behaviour and then interprets the central metaphors in several films by Terrence Malick in terms of (...) this augmented analysis. The result is an understanding of those films as investigations into personhood and factors that inhibit attempts to manifest it. Along the way, the discussion touches on the relation between linguistic and visual metaphor, the potentially ethical character of art, and the question of whether a valid interpretation must be congruent with the actual communicative intentions of the artist. (shrink)

Investigating random homicides involves constructing models of an odd sort. While the differences between these models and scientific models are radical, calling them models is justified both by functional and structural similarities. Serial homicide investigations illustrate the marked difference between theoretical models in science and the models applied in these criminal investigations. This is further illustrated by considering Glymourian bootstrapping in attempts to solve such homicides. The solutions that result differ radically from explanations in science that are confirmed or (...) disconfirmed by occurrences. Unlike the scientist, the flatfoot gumshoe is also barefoot: he is bereft of a general, determinative theoretical frame. This result shows that criminal investigations do not apply science in the Galilean sense. (shrink)

The self has been a consistently central theme in philosophy and the social sciences and, in the last decades of the 20th century, the fragmentation of the modern self has engendered extensive academic commentary. In order to contribute to current discussions about self, it is perhaps most effective to map the transformation of a single representation of the self in contemporary culture. As a cultural ‘flashpoint’, the serial killer could provide an apposite analytical focus. Drawing critically on Mark (...) Seltzer's work on serial killers this article interprets serial killing as a form of commodified transgression. In contrast to the modern self, established through state-institutionalized routines, serial killers establish their identities through ecstatic intercourse. These acts of bodily and ethical transgression are facilitated by the use of commodities. In this way, the serial killer represents a self which is consistent with the colonization of interpersonal relations by multinational capital. The serial killer signifies the appearance of a postmodern self. (shrink)

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture investigates the emergence and meaning of the cult of death. Over the last three decades, Halloween has grown to rival Christmas in its popularity and profitability; dark tourism has emerged as a rapidly expanding industry; and funerals have become less traditional. "Corpse chic" and "skull style" have entered mainstream fashion, while elements of gothic, horror, torture porn, and slasher movies have streamed into more conventional genres. Monsters have become pop culture heroes: vampires, zombies, (...) and serial killers now appeal broadly to audiences of all ages. This book considers, for the first time, these phenomena as aspects of a single movement, documenting its development in contemporary Western culture. Previous considerations of our fixation on death have not developed a convincing theory linking the mounting demand for images of violent death and the dramatic changes in death-related social rituals and practices. This book offers a conceptual framework that connects the observations of the simulated world of fiction and movies--including The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, Night Watch, Hannibal, and the Harry Potter series--to social and cultural practices, providing an analysis of the specific aesthetics and the intellectual and historical conditions that triggered the cult of death. It also considers the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and investigates the role played by 20th-century French theory, as well as by posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement, in the formation of the current antihumanist atmosphere. With its critique of movie and book blockbusters and the death-related social rituals, festivals, and fashions that have coalesced into the cult of death, this timely volume will appeal to anyone hoping to better understand a defining phenomenon of our age. Scholars and general readers of cultural studies, film and literary studies, anthropology, and American and Russian studies will find this book thought-provoking. (shrink)

The literature on the aetiology of serial killing has benefited from analyses which offer an alternative perspective to individual/psychological approaches and consider serial murder as a sociological phenomenon. The main argument brought to bear within this body of work identifies the socio-economic and cultural conditions of modernity as enabling and legitimating the motivations and actions of the serial killer. This article interrogates this work from the standpoint of a gendered reading of modernity. Using the Yorkshire Ripper (...) case, it emphasizes how in addition to the political economy, gender relations and masculinity shape the dynamics of serial murder and its representation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Clinical Anecdotes: A Painful Lack of WoundsChristopher Bailey (bio)Keywordsdepression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), evolution, fight-or-flight, veteran (treatment of)Colin came to me complaining of depression, which started after he got back from Iraq in 2005. Although he had served in the National Guard, he volunteered absolutely nothing about his time in Iraq as we spoke, instead focusing on other factors, like problems at his job and a family history of (...) depression.Colin's depression seemed serious but not severe. He had been functioning fairly well at work and was not suicidal, although his home life had begun to suffer. As the interview proceeded, I myself fell into Colin's blind spot, all but forgetting his tour of duty as I forged ahead with my list of questions. My avoidance was conscious at first, a deliberate reluctance to come across as one more morbidly curious onlooker recklessly inflaming the wounds of war.When Colin complained of irritability, however, and being kept awake by sinister, shadowy “flashes” at night, I knew I had to ask about Iraq. He was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, I decided, and was thus trying to avoid the very memories that were haunting and hunting him. And for fear of retraumatizing him (if not suffering second-hand trauma myself), I had colluded in his denial.So when I finally got around to asking about Iraq, I fully expected to hear horror stories, half-articulated perhaps, but all the more grisly for the graininess of their images. Instead, Colin surprised me. He had not experienced anything he considered traumatic. No bombs, bloodshed, or shattered bodies. And in fact, he felt like a “wimp” for having been assigned to a noncombat detail where he missed what might have been his last, best chance “to be a hero.”Most of us would consider this a good thing, but in Colin's case, it had left him feeling somehow uninitiated, like he had not done his part or proven his manhood. Contrary to my assumption, it was the lack of trauma that seemed to trigger his depression upon returning from Iraq. In a relatively safe homeland, rife with middle-class comforts and lacking all but metaphorical rites of passage, perhaps we all feel this way at some level.I pointed out to Colin that people have been dying everywhere in Iraq and under all different circumstances, not just combat. From my stateside perspective, just being there is brave. Although I meant to honor him, he seemed to take my offering as more evidence of his failure, reassuring me that nothing he did could ever compare with the unspeakable horrors endured by veterans of Viet Nam and World War II.Now, as a civilian, he questions whether or not he would respond with sufficient ferocity if, say, he had to defend his family against an attacker. Although powerfully built, Colin (to his credit) has never been a brawler or a bully. Nonetheless, [End Page 223] I have no doubt he could do whatever it took to protect his family. What concerns me more is the opposite: That in trying to prove himself, he might unwittingly put himself and his family in harm's way, if not hurt someone who was never really a threat to begin with.With a new family member, I too feel the burden of hypervigilance. But although terrorists, serial killers, and gangs grab headlines, activating our visceral alarm systems, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that a sedentary lifestyle still exacts a higher death toll among white American men, like Colin and myself. Although the effect of inertia on the body has been discussed extensively, its impact on mental health has received relatively little attention. Maybe for a creature who evolved on the African savannah, competing over territory and trying not to get eaten, the absence of a visceral challenge can be as debilitating as too much of one.Colin seemed receptive to my concerns, which I took to be a good sign. Although insecure men are quick to fear emasculation, Colin did not seem to be the least bit threatened when I suggested a course... (shrink)

Content analysis of 291 cop action films reveals the gendering of heroism by Hollywood filmmakers. Employing Griswold's “cultural diamond” framework, this study frames the genre as product of a Hollywood labor market dominated by men but increasingly integrated. Women among its heroes continue disproportionately to be rookies and to work a narrow range of cases involving undercover operations and the detection of serial killers. Women in cop action films are also more likely than men to begin heterosexual affairs and (...) to arrest or kill their lovers. However, they engage in less combat and do not confront or engage in police corruption. The most aggressive uses of and contest over state power thus turn out to be men's work in these films. The genre implies a collective common sense among industry professionals about the limits of men's professional ethics and women's professional achievements. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader Psychopaths versus Psychotics The Psychopath Language and the Emotional Brain Empathy, Lack of Shame, Insincerity Fantasies The Serial Killer and Nietzsche.

While in the movies or reading a novel, how can we feel terrified by monsters, ghosts, and fictional serial killers? And how can we feel sad or outraged by depictions of cruelty? After all, we know that the imagined threats that we fear do not exist and, therefore, pose no real threat to us; and we know that the instances of cruelty that bring tears to our eyes have not happened. And yet, the fear, the sadness, or the outrage (...) experienced in our imaginations feels very real. This is the so-called paradox of "fictional emotions." This and related paradoxes have become recalcitrant problems for a purely representational approach to the imagination that tries to accommodate the imagination in a belief-desire psychology, explaining our imaginings as mental states that are similar to beliefs or desires in some ways but not others—as "quasi-beliefs" or "quasi-desires." This representational approach can be seen, for example, in Kendall Walton's influential account of the imagination as "make-believe," or in Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich's boxological account of the imagination as a "pretend box," which is in close interaction with the suspiciously similar "belief box". (shrink)

In 1902, the Calabrian brigand Giuseppe Musolino was tried on several counts of murder and many crimes of lesser magnitude. While the tale of the brigand’s 1898 false conviction, imprisonment, escape and then revenge sparked a national debate about the political and cultural meaning of brigandage, the trial came to focus on Musolino’s emotional state at the time of his crimes. Was he a cold-blooded and calculating killer who manipulated southerners into believing he was a folk hero? Or (...) was he an angry, passionate and insane murderer victimized by his own feelings? Both jurists and scientists weighed in to determine his culpability. By turning a political question of banditry or brigandage into a psychological question of morbid or criminal emotions, the trial politicized the criminal character. This article examines the perspectives on emotions that shaped Musolino’s trial, and how psychiatric knowledge came to challenge legal notions of insanity and culpability. It argues that the determination of emotions as motives served to de-legitimize the rationale and political motives of the defendant, in turn politicizing his emotions and character. At the same time, the cause of Musolino’s crime and his culpability represented the failures of national unification and the ongoing tensions between the North and South of Italy. The introduction of psychiatric expertise into the criminal court pushed judgement and punishment to examine increasingly who a person was as opposed to what that person had done. The court’s definition of who a person ‘was’, was a matter of how that person felt. (shrink)

In the spirit of the work edited by Michel Foucault (1975) on Pierre Rivière, I propose to put philosophy to work by tackling a case study in which I shall analyse certain court transcripts that pertain to the defence of serial killer, Stewart Wilken, in Die Staat Teen Stewart Wilken. My analysis of these documents is intended to uncover the practices and struggles of the discourses that come together, and into conflict, at this event. The analysis is divided (...) into two parts. In Part One, I thematize subjectivity in relation to the idea of enlightenment autonomy. Here I aim to show that the discourses in law, psychiatry and psychology that dominated at Wilken's trial, appear to have undergone “normalization.” In other words, what Foucault uncovered as early internecine struggles among discourses for supremacy have given way to a unanimous stance concerning the nature of the autonomous subject and its legal ramifications; effectively silencing alternatives. In Part Two, I shall skirt around the frayed edges of these dominant discourses, with the aim of showing in more detail how internal theoretical tensions, such as those evident in the expert testimony given at Wilken's trial, may open up spaces for other accounts of subject- formation. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(4) 2003: 289-305. (shrink)

Alfred Hitchcock’s first cinematic success, The Lodger (1926, silent), provides a case study of contagious violence in the modern metropolis. The film is ostensibly a crime thriller centered on the search for the Avenger, a serial killer modeled on Jack the Ripper. But Hitchcock raises the stakes by introducing a love plot in which the detective and the suspected killer compete for the same woman, who may or may not be the slayer’s next target. In the course (...) of this triangular struggle, the hostility between rivals for the same object of desire escalates to the point of eroding any secure distinction between the cop and the killer, innocence and guilt, legal authority and criminal transgression. As if in homage to .. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Language of Psychopathy Why a Moral Grounding Traits versus Behaviors Primates, Communication, and Serial Killers.

I don’t know whether undead beings exist. I also think it is an open question whether anyone is evil in, say, the way bad guys are depicted in supernatural horror films and serial killer movies. I do think it’s nevertheless puzzling that the undead are frequently portrayed as evil in that way. I’m inclined to think that if we were to stumble across any undead they would be less likely to be evil than any random live person we (...) stumble across. Consider this a call for some undead understanding. I am going to approach these conclusions in a roundabout way. First, I’ll try to sketch something of an ontology of the undead, an account of their nature and variety. Then, I’ll show how these considerations should change how we think about the undead and their purported propensity for evil. (shrink)

Gadamer's project in Truth and Method is as much about truth in the human sciences as it is about human subjectivity, for, following Heidegger, he claims that truth is reducible to method (technical rationality) only if one is misled by old Enlightenment subject/object dualisms. Posing the question of the possibility and nature of truth in scientific thinking, where a strict division between subjective and objective has fallen away, Gadamer belongs, as one of its inaugural figures, to an alternative tradition of (...) philosophical complexity, which implicates environmental systems (culture, ideology, institutions), embedded in language, in the constitution of human subjectivity.With these theoretical shifts in mind, what caught my attention in a press report concerning the trial of (subsequently convicted) serial killer, Stewart Wilken (“Boetie Boer”), was the strangely anachronistic question that dominated the front page of a Port Elizabeth newspaper: “Boetie: Is he Sick or Evil?” This question, in my view, harks back to a questionable framework of Enlightenment autonomy, which depends upon the easy technical rationality of clear-cut dichotomies. In what follows I hope to show that in acknowledging the role of complex interrelations between cultural and other systems, a tradition of philosophical complexity justifiably claims a more adequate framework for understanding self- formation than that underpinning the discourses at work in Wilken's trial. I shall draw on Gadamer's hermeneutic model of an “embedded”subject, which is based on his speculative model of “play” out lined in Truth and Method, and supplement this with Lacan's psychoanalytic account of subject formation. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.21(4) 2002: 258-273. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Epistemology of Murder Violence and Human Nature The Gestation of Terrorists and Serial Killers Conclusions.

Using my experience at a stage of the 2014 Giro d'Italia, I argue that de is the soul of cycling and that ancient Chinese philosophy's insight into the conditions that promote de may help the sport. I compare the relationship between sages and virtuous practitioners, to the ancient Greek relationship between heroes and athletes, both of which depend on the performance of de. I also criticize modern cycling for its focus on technology, stark commercialism, and emphasis on the individual, prescribing (...) as antidotes the connection between de and wuwei, the rejection of acquisitiveness and the emphasis on collectivity. (shrink)

In his Metrica, Hero provides four procedures for finding the area of a circular segment (with b the base of the segment and h its height): an Ancient method for when the segment is smaller than a semicircle, $$(b + h)/2 \, \cdot \, h$$ ( b + h ) / 2 · h ; a Revision, $$(b + h)/2 \, \cdot \, h + (b/2)^{2} /14$$ ( b + h ) / 2 · h + ( b / (...) 2 ) 2 / 14 ; a quasi-Archimedean method (said to be inspired by the quadrature of the parabola) for cases where b is more than triple h, $${\raise0.5ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle 4$} \kern-0.1em/\kern-0.15em \lower0.25ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle 3$}}(h \, \cdot \, b/2)$$ 4 / 3 ( h · b / 2 ) ; and a method of Subtraction using the Revised method, for when it is larger than a semicircle. He gives superficial arguments that the Ancient method presumes $$\pi = 3$$ π = 3 and the Revision, $$\pi = {\raise0.5ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle {22}$} \kern-0.1em/\kern-0.15em \lower0.25ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle 7$}}$$ π = 22 / 7. We are left with many questions. How ancient is the Ancient? Why did anyone think it worked? Why would anyone revise it in just this way? In addition, why did Hero think the Revised method did not work when $$b > 3\;h$$ b > 3 h? I show that a fifth century BCE Uruk tablet employs the Ancient method, but possibly with very strange consequences, and that a Ptolemaic Egyptian papyrus that checks this method by comparing the area of a circle calculated from the sum of a regular inscribed polygon and the areas of the segments on its sides as determined by the Ancient method with the area of the circle as calculated from its diameter correctly sees that the calculations do not quite gel in the case of a triangle but do in the case of a square. Both traditions probably could also calculate the area of a segment on an inscribed regular polygon by subtracting the area of the polygon from the area of the circle and dividing by the number of sides of the polygon. I then derive two theorems about pairs of segments, that the reviser of the Ancient method should have known, that explain each method, why they work when they do and do not when they do not, and which lead to a curious generalization of the Revised method. Hero’s comment is right, but not for the reasons he gives. I conclude with an exploration of Hero’s restrictions of the Revised method and Hero’s two alternative methods. (shrink)

The heroic figure is a human fiction of the wholly singular. In the hero, discourses about ideals and exemplariness, extra-ordinariness and exceptionalness, agonality, transgressivity, or good and evil become condensed into a single individual. Thus, the hero is the opposite of the masses. As it is argued in this article, the answer to the question of what distinguishes a hero lies in the supererogatory moment, the reference to the hero’s quality of more than can be expected: (...) the heroic figure does more than he or she has to, more than duty requires of an ordinary person, and this is the reason they are heroized. However, this also points to a dialectic moment of the heroic in which the opposition between the hero and the many seems to be suspended. Following Niklas Luhmann, the hero represents the paradox of conformity through deviance, because through the example of their abnormality they produce in others a desire to imitate them. In the end, there is a collective appeal of the heroic that affects even the conceptual complement of the hero: the crowd which is characterized by the disappearance of the individual within it. Inspired by Luhmann’s sociological reflections on the heroic as well as Elias Canetti’s anthropological perspectives on the phenomena of the crowd, this article traces the rhetoric of the hero along its path from the singular to the plural. Against the backdrop of the analysis of the heroic in revolutionary Iran, a generalizable typology is proposed that distinguishes between the hero, the collective of heroes, the heroic collective, and collective heroism. This order reflects a progression that is analogous to the conjunction of the one and the many, moving qualitatively from the distinct figure of the hero to the indistinguishable masses. (shrink)

En juin 1959, Elena Spirgevičienė, de Kaunas (Lituanie), saisit le comité central du parti communiste d’Union soviétique d’une plainte contre l’attribution à titre posthume du titre de Héros de l’URSS au partisan Alfonsas Čeponis. En 1944, affirme-t-elle, cet homme faisait partie d’une bande qui a assassiné sa sœur, l’a violée elle-même, et a tenté de violer puis a tué sa fille. Fondé en particulier sur des documents d’archives originaux publiés dans ce même numéro de Clio, cet article retrace les différentes (...) étapes de l’affaire et les récits contradictoires qu’elle met en jeu. Il oppose la figure du héros soviétique Čeponis à sa déconstruction par la plaignante qui le dépeint comme un bandit. Il montre le retournement qui a lieu lors de l’examen de la plainte par le Comité central du parti communiste de Lituanie : non seulement le viol commis contre la plaignante est nié, mais c’est elle qui se retrouve en position d’accusée. Enfin, il retrace comment la tentative de viol de la fille, suivie de son assassinat, est utilisée par le discours lituanien dissident dans les années 1970, dominant aujourd’hui, pour construire une nouvelle figure de martyre. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Attribution Bias in the Trials of Accused Serial Killers Introduction The Case of Doug Clark Situationism and Destructive Behavior Attribution Biases Seeing Ghosts “Ewww…Guilty!” “You people are all…” “Aren't you the guy who…?” Doug Clark Again Conclusion.

This chapter contains sections titled: Two Killers in Montana Naming, Metaphor, and the Language of Serial Murder What's in a Name? The Wolf and the Widow Naming: Putting Practice into Theory Metaphor: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing Metaphor: White Wolf Revisited I Am Become Wolf: Anthropomorphism and Zoomorphism Strange Bedfellows For Further Contemplation.

This chapter contains sections titled: Can a Serial Killer Ever Be Good? Dexter on Trial Four Ethical Tests Dexter Dreams Darkly: An Overview of Showtime's Dexter Morgan Killing to Maximize Happiness Kant's Dark Champion A Virtuous Devil or a Moral Monster? Hypothetical Consent: Would You Want Dexter in Your Neighborhood? Closing Arguments.

The 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs tracks the fictional pursuit of an American serial killer by a Federal Bureau of Investigation trainee, via the assistance of another incarcerated serial killer. It features psychologically disturbing themes, such as corpses, the mutilation of skin and monstrous persons. Incidentally, these are all themes regularly encountered by nurses in their day‐to‐day practices, including forensic mental health nurses. Despite regular encounters with these themes and phenomena, nurses continue to find (...) them disturbing and troubling, but, at the same time, clinically fascinating. This paper will mobilize Kristeva's poststructuralist, psychoanalytic concept of abjection to relate the encounters in The Silence of the Lambs to those of nurses, to reconceptualize feelings of both disgust and fascination and to consider how vulnerability may benefit nursing practice. Of particular relevance are the breakdown of skin encountered in nursing practice, encounters with corpses and work with forensic patients considered monstrous. The film provides opportunity for nurses to conceptualize abjection in their own practice and to consider how a reconceptualization of boundaries and vulnerability may prove productive. (shrink)

This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir’s reading of the 18th century writer and libertine Marquis de Sade, in her essay “Must we Burn Sade?”; a difficult and bewildering text, both in pure linguistic terms and philosophically. In particular, Beauvoir’s insistence on Sade as a “great moralist” seems hard to reconcile with her emphasis, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, on the interdependency of human beings and her exhortation to us to promote other people’s freedom, as well as the aspiration of The (...) Second Sex to equal relations between the genders. While earlier scholars addressed the ethico-political implications of Beauvoir’s essay, they insisted that the ambiguity so fundamental in her philosophy is denied by the Sadean hero, and that the Other can never be attained in his system. In this essay, I argue that Sade paradoxically emerges as an ethical model in Beauvoir’s text: as a writer, he assumes the ambiguity of the human condition in the extreme. Further, Sade reveals the potential of sexuality if it is explored in a form of eroticism that largely transgresses behavior constructed as normal: his writings open up new forms of existence, where, contrary to prevailing ideas, woman’s sexual freedom is claimed as equal to man’s, where genders are unstable and heterosexuality no longer the standard. Beauvoir’s fascination with Sade in this essay can be linked with the seemingly unresolvable asymmetry in the relation between men and women in The Second Sex: in his writings is revealed sexuality’s potential to subvert patriarchal norms and mystifications, and perhaps, in the end, even gender itself. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible connections between the Virgin Mary, Myra Hindley and Rosemary West. The paper is divided into five sections. In the first, I explore the role of Mary in Christian theology and provide a Christian feminist response to this. In the second, I address some of the theoretical issues involved in studying female serial killers; this includes outlining the role of the media in responding to news stories involving female killers. In (...) the third, I separately address media responses to Myra Hindley and Rosemary West. In the fourth, I explore psychoanalytic perspectives on mothers and mothering. In the conclusion I attempt to bring together and synthesize the significant threads of the paper. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Philosophical Gaze into the Writings of the Zodiac Killer Who is the Zodiac Killer? Peek‐A‐Boo: You Are Doomed! This is the Zodiac Speaking Conclusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Confessions of an American PsychoJames Hogg’s and Bret Easton Ellis’s Anti-Heroes’ Journey from Vulnerability to ViolenceDaniel Cojocaru (bio)My vitals have all been torn, and every faculty and feeling of my soul racked, and tormented into callous insensibility.... I could perceive no bottom, and then—not till then, did I repeat the tremendous prayer!—I was instantly at liberty; and what I now am, the Almighty knows! Amen.—James Hogg, The Private Memoirs (...) and Confessions of a Justified Sinner1My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist.... My pain is constant and sharp.... But even after admitting this... and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself.... This confession has meant nothing.—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho2A hundred and sixty-seven years lie between the publication of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) (henceforth referred to as Confessions) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). Yet one cannot but be amazed at the striking similarities of the main [End Page 185] protagonists’s insights at the end of these two novels. Although connections between works of Gothic Romanticism and postmodern narratives have been duly noted, the possible reasons for the analogies remain largely unexplored.3It will be argued here that both novels are representations of worlds immersed in what René Girard, in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (henceforth referred to as Deceit), has termed “deviated transcendency,” resulting in similar stages of narrative progression, which in turn can be analyzed in terms of Girard’s mimetic cycle of violence.At a first glance, the two pieces seem to be concerned with themes that to a secularized age must appear most disparate. But as Girard has noted: “The very idea of mediation encourages literary comparisons at a level which is no longer that of genre criticism or thematic criticism.... It may illuminate the works through each other.”4 Hogg’s narrative deals with the problem of antinomianism and the resulting spiritual pride. The anti-hero of the narrative, Robert Wringhim, relies on his belief that he is one of the elect and cannot fall from grace and consequently is convinced by his elusive friend Gil-Martin to become a murderer without having to fear punishment. American Psycho on the other hand is concerned with the consequences of the crass materialism of the U.S. yuppie generation, culminating at the end of the 1980s, as experienced by the serial-killing first-person narrator Patrick Bateman. However, one could argue that in its very first pages, American Psycho presents the reader with a secularized version of antinomianism. Michael Steig has fleetingly noted that the egocentric doctrines of antinomianism psychologically resemble the “I’m alright tenets” of yuppie pseudo-psychology.5 Timothy Price, one of Bateman’s colleagues on Wall Street, expresses this in the following words: “In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset.”6 Translated into antinomian terms, one could say that he is one of the elect, one of the privileged enjoying a capitalist heaven on earth; and by saying that society cannot afford to lose him, he, like Robert Wringhim, is showing that he believes he cannot fall from grace—or at least he tries to believe it.“I was well aware that the devilish powers of his mother would finally prevail; and either the dread of this, or the inward consciousness of having wronged him, certainly unnerved my arm.”7 If, in this reference to a quarrel with a fellow pupil at school, Robert gives away the fact that he doubts his own words, through the rhetorical device of correctio, so does Timothy Price by his choice of words. In fact, it is exactly because he is an asset that society can afford to lose him. As he is literally transformed into a commodity, society can discard him and in the novel indeed does so. It is one of the many ironies of the narrative that Price disappears soon after the above... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 84-115 [Access article in PDF] Be-longing and Bi-lingual States Doris Sommer "How sad that people don't keep commitments any more. Even marriages last only about five years.""Yes, but long-distance marriages can stretch those five years out over weekends and vacations to make relationships last a lifetime."Benedict Anderson's provocative new book, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World, raises questions about political relationships over (...) time and over space. Like precarious modern marriages and their corollary "political" kinships (in-laws in Spanish are one's familia política), national sentiment today strains with the movements of transnational communities from home to distant enclaves. Over time, ties can unravel as modern subjects choose, or not, to identify with adopted political relatives. Is one's country the bastion of a people reluctant to receive more immigrants? Is it the sender of surplus people who will, in turn, send money home? (Heads of state in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico typically object to US restrictions on immigration.) Or is it the harbor for many peoples? Does belonging even to a recently invented country anchor an existential need, a be-longing, because being a "man"--as Hannah Arendt still called the subject of politics--means striving for recognition among equals? Or, do many citizens today feel like resident aliens (to themselves or to others), belonging rather to ethnic minorities and perhaps--long-distance--to other nations of origin or of choice? Anderson is right to worry about precarious belongings and optional obligations.In the end though, he finds solace from the threats of egotism and despair, and from the social decomposition of too much movement (what Arjun Appadurai calls "modernity at large") in the resilient promise of the "goodness of nations." Confidence in the extrapersonal goals and pride in national belonging appears, almost miraculously, in the last of seventeen chapters. Each of these brilliant and erudite essays will reconfirm our admiration for Anderson. My own personal debt includes his extraordinary generosity and the good counsel that encourages me to follow him, sometimes with a swerve, as will be evident when my appreciation for be-longing plays bi-lingual games.The opening pages of The Spectre of Comparisons theorize a paradox in the postcolonial condition: the inescapable folly of comparing one's nation to another, or to a mother country. Concepts like nation or culture, after all, take on meaning in their particular contexts and by contrast with others. The core chapters chronicle aborted beginnings and abusive conflations of the nation and the state. But hope has the last word, thanks to three guarantees of national imaginings: the promising and innocent unborn generations; the nation's dead (war heroes); and the living who are ever willing to give the nation another chance, and yet another. Feelings of pride and shame come together in the end, because citizens invest, often against the evidence, in "the goodness [End Page 84] of nations" [364]. This resilience shows up right after the trouble in chapter 16, where shame was the connection between nation and narrator in Mario Vargas Llosa's 1987 novel about Peru. Unfounded but unrelenting, Anderson's hope follows on shame rather abruptly and suggests that shame itself is a sign of our care for our countries. 1 The narrator of El hablador had tried to escape from his ill-fated country, his "malhadado país," only to be haunted by it.My question is whether Anderson's coda to this Peruvian novel is inspired by the same indomitable demon of comparisons that he has been exposing throughout the essays. José Rizal had named the meddling devil to blame it for distracting the Filipino from the lovely garden he saw in Manila, assailing him with memories of a European original or model [2]. This double vision raises a specter of possible inauthenticity; it undermines meaning as models slip from centers to peripheries. Local concepts lose their particularities in global vocabularies. Anderson calls the movement a "logic of seriality." I prefer to call it trans-latio, literally a carrying from one place to another... (shrink)

본 논문은 ‘영웅-순교자’라는 화두를 통해 밀 사상의 통일성을 새롭게 조명해 보고자 했다. 사상적 성숙기에 집필된 『공리주의』와 『자유론』사이에 이념적 불일치가 발생함을 주석가들은 지적해 왔다. 밀의 소극적 자유 개념이 필연적으로 모든 간섭주의적 성격의 법을 배제하는데 반해, 공리주의의 제1원리인 ‘최대 다수의 최대 행복’의 원리는 그러한 법을 요구할 수 있다는 것이다. 공시적 관점에서 제기된 밀 사상의 통일성 문제는 곧장 전⋅후기 사상 사이의 단절이라는 통시적 문제로 이어진다. 아버지 제임스 밀로부터 물려받았던 공리주의를 자유주의자 존 스튜어트 밀은 저버렸던 것일까, 아니면 여전히 계승하고 있는 것일까? 공시적 관점과 통시적 (...) 관점 모두에서 밀 사상의 통일성을 논하고자 하면서, 본 논문은 ‘영웅-순교자’ 화두가 지니는 논쟁적 의미와 발견술적 의미에 초점을 맞추었다. (shrink)

Despite the emergence of computer games as a dominant cultural industry, we know little or nothing about the ethics of computer games. Considerations of the morality of computer games seldom go beyond intermittent portrayals of them in the mass media as training devices for teenage serial killers. In this first scholarly exploration of the subject, Miguel Sicart addresses broader issues about the ethics of games, the ethics of playing the games, and the ethical responsibilities of game designers. He argues (...) that computer games are ethical objects, that computer game players are ethical agents, and that the ethics of computer games should be seen as a complex network of responsibilities and moral duties. Players should not be considered passive amoral creatures; they reflect, relate, and create with ethical minds. The games they play are ethical systems, with rules that create gameworlds with values at play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy and game studies, Sicart proposes a framework for analyzing the ethics of computer games as both designed objects and player experiences. After presenting his core theoretical arguments and offering a general theory for understanding computer game ethics, Sicart offers case studies examining single-player games, multiplayer games, and online gameworlds from an ethical perspective. He explores issues raised by unethical content in computer games and its possible effect on players and offers a synthesis of design theory and ethics that could be used as both analytical tool and inspiration in the creation of ethical gameplay. (shrink)

The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a"dying party" in the Netherlands; examinations of (...) the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives. (shrink)