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Edward Weisband: The Macabresque: Human Violation and Hate in Genocide, Mass Atrocity, and Enemy-Making. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. ix, 462.)
The literature on genocide, mass atrocities, and mass killing has vastly expanded in the past two decades to integrate new methodologies, regions, and histories of violence. Mass killing has become the subject of world-systems theory, ethnographic interview, psychological and behaviorist intervention; it has been analyzed as a product of natural drives, strategic and rational choices, and complex historical contingencies. Edward Weisband's The Macabresque contributes to the growth of this literature by highlighting the persistent failure to theorize the dramaturgy and theatricality of mass violence. Put differently, Weisband theorizes the distinctive aesthetics and performativity of sadistic cruelty as a genre of the practice within episodes of mass violence. He approaches this problem through the titular term of “the macabresque,” which describes the spectacular or dramaturgical elements that consistently reappear in cases of intense mass violence. For Weisband, sadism is problematic not solely because it produces pain or death, but also because it creates a place for the perpetrator of violence to experiment with processes of performative self-creation, and find a place within a broader symbolic or political order.
Weisband's book is vast, even tome-like on this point, surveying literature from political science, psychology, history, and cultural studies on the instincts, motives, and mechanisms that incite perpetrators to commit violence. His work highlights the limits and omissions of many of these accounts primarily in relation to the desire that causes perpetrators to engage in human violation. Weisband models his description of this process in conversation with the psychoanalytic tradition. He notes that many participants in mass violence were previously “ordinary people” that were triggered or incited to sadism through...