196
PARTISAN REVIEW
fantasies are activated and pleasure in torture and humiliation
is
strengthened .
Where by tacit agreement, cruelty
is
socially permissible , total
satisfaction in murderous destruction still must not ensue. Rather, a
circle of victims must remain alive to bear constant witness to the fact
that the weaker are at the mercy of the stronger. Any resistance on their
part only escalates the torture . Such are the daily premiums tied in with
the task-oriented cruelty .
Ifwe now cast a backward glance ,
it
becomes clear that cruelty, as
an expression of sexual perversion , hardly constirutes a social danger.
Only a handful of collectors of perverse literature have been able to
take up de Sade 's daring challenges . Eichmann , on the other hand ,
was made of different stuff. He supplied killing the way one provides a
supermarket with merchandise. If the traces of the death instinct are to
be found anywhere , they appear to me to be recognizable in this
second form of cruelty.
Are we then helplessly condemned to the road to Apocalypse
herein sketched our? In earlier episodes of man 's history, this was
indeed the case , and the human sacrifices were huge . We should
therefore concern ourselves with the
viczssitudes of the aggressive
dn've-especially
in
its
search for gratification unmixed with moder–
ating libido-rather than with the sexual-aggressive perversion of the
Marquis de Sade , who was himself heavily tortured by his perversions
and who
still
remains a remarkable writer. Compared with Eichmann
and others of his
ilk,
he emerges as a positively likable figure .
