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Comment apprendre a reconnaitre la cruaute a la dechiffrer, a saisir son universalite, sa permanence ? Explorant quelques fragments d'une cruaute perceptible dans le quotidien, l'auteur provoque la rencontre insolite du Freud de 1920, de Bion, de Lacan, de Nathalie Zaltzman, de Rene Major, mais aussi de Derrida, Blanchot, Faulkner, Saramago. Entre ces auteurs, les spectres s'agitent, communiquent, s'opposent. Ils deconstruisent sans fin ce qui engendre la cruaute la plus ordinaire. La pratique maintient le psychanalyste au plus pres du malheur. Il apprend a en dechiffrer l'ecriture singuliere, a reperer ce qui maintient la memoire des traumatismes initiaux. Il entend la lettre qui manque dans l'ecriture de la parole, mais aussi l'ecriture du mal dans la culture ambiante. Pour desserrer l'emprise individuelle de la pulsion de mort il se doit d'enoncer cette cruaute, la ou elle aurait tendance a se rendre tres ordinaire, en particulier celle d'une humanite qui, d'un cote, soigne scientifiquement la douleur, et de l'autre, ne cesse de la reproduire ou feint de l'ignorer.

Cruelty. --- Psychoanalysis.

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The Cudgel and the Caress explores the enduring significance of tenderness and cruelty in a range of works across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. Divided into two parts, the book initially focuses on tenderness, with David Farrell Krell delivering original readings of Homer's Iliad, Sophocles's Antigone, and writings by Hölderlin, Hegel, Freud, and Derrida that deal with the importance of tenderness and the tragic consequences of its absence. Part One concludes with an extended reading of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, in which Krell analyzes the tender relationship between Ulrich and Agathe. In Part Two, Krell begins by examining Otto Rank's Birth Trauma, which reflects on the tenderness of gestation in the womb and the cruel necessity of birth. He then turns to an examination of cruelty in general, focusing on Derrida's challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis, his opposition between Kant and Nietzsche, and his analysis (and indictment) of the death penalty. Groundbreaking and insightful, the book provides a rare philosophical treatment of subjects vital to the world we live in.

Cruelty --- Tenderness (Psychology) --- Philosophy.

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Cruelty --- Violence --- History --- History

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Evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay beg the question: has the “war on terror” forced liberal democracies to rethink their policies and laws against torture? Transnational Torture focuses on the legal and political discourses on torture in India and the United States—two common-law based constitutional democracies—to theorize the relationship between law, violence, and state power in liberal democracies. Analyzing about one hundred landmark Supreme Court cases on torture in India and the United States, memos and popular imagery of torture, Jinee Lokaneeta compellingly demonstrates that even before recent debates on the use of torture in the war on terror, the laws of interrogation were much more ambivalent about the infliction of excess pain and suffering than most political and legal theorists have acknowledged. Rather than viewing the recent policies on interrogation as anomalous or exceptional, Lokaneeta effectively argues that efforts to accommodate excess violence—a constantly negotiated process—are long standing features of routine interrogations in both the United States and India, concluding that the infliction of excess violence is more central to democratic governance than is acknowledged in western jurisprudence.

Torture --- Cruelty --- Punishment --- Extraordinary rendition

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This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.

Torture --- Torture. --- Cruelty --- Punishment --- Extraordinary rendition --- Government policy.