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PARTISAN REVIEW
cruelty, a cruelty which decidedly aims at the destruction of the hunted
object.
The two kinds of cruelty between which we are attempting to
differentiate, therefore, could be briefly defined as
pleasure-on'ented
cruelty (Grausamkeitslust)
and
task -on'ented cruelty (Grausamkeitsar–
beit)
,
Pleasure-oriented cruelty stems from an early inversion of
libidinal experience , Task-oriented cruelty is aggressively, but asex–
ually, destructive , The fascinating personality of de Sade has seduced
us into considering primarily sexual forms of cruelty in psychoanalytic
literarure, De Sade, the most dramatic representative of a relatively
rare perversion , became the prototype by which the quality of human
cruelty has been studied , Whoever has
readJustine
or
The
120
Days of
Sodom
knows the manic compulsive and deadly monotonous gratifi–
cation of perversion , One thing is clear : the contact with the object,
via cruel manipulation, in sadistic object relations results in genital
discharge , Torture is a means to a genital sexual end; orgasm occurs
during the torture, The object's signs of suffering serve the purpose of
heightening sexual-genital pleasure, In mild form, this kind of playful
infliction of suffering is to be found as part of sexual foreplay ,
In the case of task-oriented cruelty-a cruelty which is performed
like physical labor- there is almost no cooperation between sexual and
destructive drive gratifications , There is no sexual pleasure in the
putting our of a cigarette on the back of a victim during an interroga–
tion , or the pushing of wood splinters under fingernails , The concep–
tion and execution of torture and killing methods can take on the
proportions of wild destructiveness in the fanatic , but they are clearly
to be distinguished from sexual orgasm, The
destruction worker,
whose organization has given him his job in the gas chambers, goes
home in the evening with the same feeling other people have of having
put in a good day ' s work , He has not experienced sexual pleasure or
excitement in the course of it , To be sure, in reality one can find fusions
of sadistic pleasure-seeking with cruelty as labor. But this does not
seem to be the rule,
There are few torture victims who have given testimony of their
experience , yet the testimony that does exist clearly underlines the
difference between torture and sadistic perversion, Jean Amery, in a
conversation we conducted on the subject of torture , assured me that in
the world of concentration camps he never met anyone in command
