What Is Cruelty? Part 3

Rastinews — Marcel Hénaff on Cruelty: Ferocity, Passion and Deliberate Malice

Marcel Hénaff draws a striking distinction in his essay "Rätsel der Grausamkeit" (Lettre International, issue 109, 2015). What defines cruelty, he argues, is not simply the intensity of rage, the degree of violence, or the amount of pain inflicted. What matters is the will to do passionate, deliberate harm to another human being. Seen this way, not every act of violence qualifies as "cruelty." A duel, or a fight that ends in death, may involve intense violence, but because both sides take part voluntarily and on equal footing, it is hard to call that cruelty. Cruelty is not just causing harm — it is causing harm while denying the other's humanity.

What defines cruelty is that the other is seen not as a subject but as an object. The person is turned into an animal, into a thing; their suffering ceases to carry meaning. At that point violence stops being a mere instrument and becomes an expression of the desire to dominate. What matters to the person inflicting cruelty is no longer the pain the other feels, but the sense of power over that pain. This is why cruelty, unlike violence alone, always carries a moment of domination, degradation and dehumanization. Violence can kill; but cruelty strips a person of their humanity before it kills them.

The Irreparability of Cruelty and the Limits of Forgiveness

Cruelty is not simply harming someone. It is the desire to dominate another, to subject them to one's will, and to take pleasure from that domination. But one of the most unsettling aspects of cruelty is that it cannot be repaired. The wound cruelty opens cannot be compensated for like an ordinary injury; it cannot be undone. Cruelty should therefore be understood not only through the pain inflicted on the victim, but as a crime committed against time itself: what happened in the past can never be fully balanced out by any future. This is where the question of forgiveness breaks down. Cruelty crosses a threshold so severe that even if the victim forgives the perpetrator, that forgiveness cannot restore the humanity the perpetrator has lost. The issue is not simply pardoning an act — it is that humanity itself has been suspended. Cruelty is an experience that exceeds the limits of forgiveness: even where forgiveness occurs, what was done is not undone.

Cruelty, then, is not only an ethical violation but an irreversible rupture in the relationship between human beings. Those who inflict it damage not only the other but their own humanity — and that damage is often beyond full repair by any act of forgiveness.

Cruelty in Modern Warfare: Distance, Facelessness and Abstraction

The shape of cruelty has changed in today's wars. The distance between perpetrator and victim has widened, and in many cases the relationship has become entirely faceless. Violence once involved, at minimum, some encounter — a look, a witness. In modern warfare, killing is often reduced to pressing a button. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima is one of the starkest examples: seen from above, a city is targeted, but the faces of the individual people below remain invisible.

This distance is not only physical; it is emotional and ethical as well. The person who kills never meets the eyes of the person they kill; they never see that person's fear, helplessness, or final moment. The most basic experience that gives rise to empathy — encountering another's face — disappears. Without empathy, guilt weakens; as guilt weakens, cruelty becomes easier to carry out.

At this point, modern violence operates through a kind of abstraction: people are reduced to concepts like "target," "coordinates," or "collateral damage." This is not merely technical language; it is language that suspends conscience. The other ceases to be human and becomes an object of procedure. The paradox of modern cruelty, then, is this: physical distance also makes ethical distance possible. Not seeing means not feeling; not feeling means not carrying the weight of what is done. Cruelty becomes not only executable, but psychologically bearable.

Violence Within Violence: Making Pain Permanent

Marcel Hénaff draws another important distinction in defining cruelty: cruelty is not simply violence — it is violence within violence, a compounded, intensified form of violence. This is why not every act of brutality or harshness automatically amounts to cruelty. What defines cruelty is not merely inflicting pain but making that pain permanent. It is not enough to harm someone; the harm is lodged in time, made indelible. Cruelty is therefore not a momentary act but an effect that acquires continuity. Here, the evil lies not only in what is done, but in its persistence.

This is where a sadistic dimension of cruelty emerges: the person inflicting it does not stop at causing harm — they become passionately attached to the act of causing it. Evil ceases to be a means and becomes an end in itself. This is why cruelty often cannot be explained by "necessity" or "requirement"; instead, it contains an excess sustained by desire.

The most unsettling form of cruelty is that the evil does not end even with death. Degrading or devaluing a person even after death, or targeting their memory, reveals cruelty's nature as something that stretches across time. In such cases, cruelty is not only violence directed at the body; it is also an assault on memory, on the right to mourn, and on the meanings a person leaves behind. Cruelty, then, is something beyond violence: a will that does not stop at producing pain but seeks to sustain it, even to carve it into time.

Types of Cruelty: Marcel Hénaff and Wolfgang Müller-Funk

Within this framework, Marcel Hénaff and Wolfgang Müller-Funk (Crudelitas: Zwölf Kapitel einer Diskursgeschichte der Grausamkeit — Crudelitas: Twelve Chapters on the Discourse History of Cruelty, 2022) classify cruelty into different forms, revealing its multilayered structure. According to Hénaff, the first form is ritually marked cruelty. Here, the aim is not directly to inflict pain. In human sacrifice, for instance, the victim is not the target in themselves; they are merely the instrument. The real issue is constituted in the relationship between man and god. As a result, the victim's suffering becomes secondary, even rendered invisible.

What Müller-Funk calls "legal or ritual cruelty" works by a similar logic. In executions or systematic killing practices, the aim is not the individual's suffering but the preservation of order. Cruelty thus ceases to be an exception and becomes part of the norm.
Second, Hénaff speaks of cruelty organized around an event. Lynchings are the clearest example. An incident acts as a spark; people gather around it, and a collective wave of violence quickly emerges. What Müller-Funk calls "spontaneous and collective cruelty" completes this dynamic. In such cases, agitators incite the crowd, direct the course of the violence, and ensure that the cruelty gains continuity.

Third, Hénaff describes cruelty carried out professionally. Torture is the clearest example. Here cruelty becomes a professional practice; the perpetrator normalizes the work and carries it on alongside ordinary daily life. This intersects with what Müller-Funk situates within interrogation and torture processes: cruelty becomes institutionalized and legitimized under the guise of producing information or extracting confession.
Fourth, Hénaff defines cruelty arising from individual pathologies. Psychopathic tendencies, sadistic impulses and individual deviations fall into this category. This is also where Müller-Funk's category of "arbitrary and experimental cruelty" belongs. In this form, cruelty is no longer a means but a direct object of pleasure.

Taken together, these two approaches show that cruelty is not merely a matter of individual deviance or momentary outbursts. It reproduces itself in different forms across rituals, law, institutions, collective movements and individual pathologies. Yet all these forms share one thing: cruelty is a violation of the human being's own limits. It does not just make another's suffering possible — it renders that suffering sustainable, repeatable, and at times invisible. Cruelty is therefore not simply an escalation of violence; it is also a suspension of conscience. And perhaps its most dangerous moment arrives when no one says "this cannot be" anymore.

Cruelty as Cultural Production, Not Human Nature

Wolfgang Müller-Funk argues that humans are the only cruel creatures in nature, and stresses that cruelty is uniquely human. A similar line of thought appears in Alfred Lorenzer (see part one of this piece). Nature contains violence, but not cruelty: a lion killing a gazelle calf is an act of destruction, not cruelty. Cruelty is a product of humans, not of nature.
One of cruelty's defining features is that the perpetrator, in the act itself, works to strip the other of their humanity. Here, power, domination and violence become intertwined. When one person harms another, humiliating them, devaluing them and dehumanizing them is not just infliction of harm — it is also a display of power. Cruelty, in fact, always arises within an asymmetric relationship; the balance of power is broken from the outset.
Cruelty is not simply violence; it is violence layered and intensified. What makes it distinct is the systematic suspension of empathy, conscience and mercy. This is why cruelty targets not just physical harm but the subject's very integrity: the aim is not only to inflict pain, but to humiliate, to render helpless, and ultimately to strip away a person's humanity.

Another point Müller-Funk raises is human ingenuity in producing cruelty. Western thought, in particular, often attributes cruelty to nature, pushing it outside the realm of cultural responsibility; yet cruelty is culturally produced, organized and legitimized. In this sense, the phrase "man is a cruel animal" is itself unfair to animals.

Cruelty is not merely a visible act; it has subjective and objective dimensions, and visible and invisible faces alike. The tendency to label perpetrators as "mad" or "irrational" often serves to obscure cruelty's planned, rational dimension. Historically, though, many forms of cruelty have been consciously designed, organized, and carried out within specific networks of interest.
Here, the relationship between cruelty and power becomes decisive. History is full of examples not so much of violence used to seize power, but of cruelty sustained to protect it. Once power is secured, the fear of losing it deepens cruelty and makes it systematic. This is why cruelty often becomes not merely a tool, but a mode by which power sustains itself.

The Narrative of Inevitability and the Legitimization of Cruelty

The most basic narrative perpetrators use to legitimize their own actions is the narrative of "inevitability." Cruelty is presented almost always not as a choice but as a necessity. The perpetrator frames what they do not as an option, but as the only path that had to be taken. Responsibility is thus withdrawn from the subject's will and transferred to "the necessity of the situation."

This discourse is not merely a defense; it is also an ideological order that sustains cruelty's continuity. The phrase "there was no other choice" neutralizes the crime; it suppresses the ethical shock that killing produces. But this neutralization works not by transforming the act itself, but by transforming the victim's status.

Cruelty never names itself "killing an innocent person." On the contrary, the victim's innocence is systematically erased. The means for this is dehumanization. The victim's name is changed: redefined under categories like "terrorist," "traitor," "threat," "enemy." The person killed thus becomes not a human being but an object that had to be eliminated.
This transformation is not merely linguistic manipulation; it is also a moral reconstruction. Cruelty has its own internal "morality," one in which the victim's standing is stripped away from the outset. Because it is hard to be cruel to someone who has standing, a face, a story. This is why cruelty first devalues the victim, then renders them helpless. The things that make a person human — dignity, recognition, meaning — are systematically eroded.

Here, cruelty targets not just the body but the subject. The aim is not only destruction, but the elimination of the other's capacity to exist as a human being. For a person, one of the heaviest devastations is not merely suffering pain, but being devalued and left defenseless.

Every act of cruelty has three parties: the perpetrator, the victim, and the witnesses. Dehumanizing discourse targets this third party most of all. Because if the victim's humanity is erased in the witnesses' eyes, cruelty becomes easier to tolerate. Cruelty is therefore always, at once, both an act and a narrative.

Within this narrative, the perpetrator often sees themselves as the executor of a necessity, while at the same time undergoing an imaginary experience of power. A kind of fantasy takes hold here: absolute power, unlimited authority, the illusion of invincibility. This imagined sense of power sustains cruelty's continuity; the perpetrator does not merely carry out an act, but identifies with power itself.
In the end, cruelty is not merely the exercise of violence but the systematic erasure of the victim's humanity. The claim "we don't kill innocent people" is the most critical tool of this erasure. Because the linguistic and moral distance built between killing a human being and "eliminating a threat" renders cruelty itself invisible.

Cruelty, the Destruction of Trust, and a Paranoid World

Cruelty is not merely violence directed at the body; it targets the most basic relationship of trust a person builds with the world. Everyday life rests on an invisible web of trust. Waiting on a subway platform, you assume no one behind you will push you onto the tracks. That assumption carries a basic belief that the world is predictable and livable. Cruelty works precisely by collapsing that ground.

Cruelty makes possible the thing we call "impossible." It removes the certainty of certainty itself. Reality thus ceases to be a stable structure; it fragments. Seen psychoanalytically, this fragmentation damages the subject's sense of reality and gives rise to a paranoid structure. The threat is no longer only outside — it is everywhere.

One of the central mechanisms in this process is dehumanization. To eliminate the victim, the perpetrator first strips them of their humanity. This is not merely an ideological operation but also a psychoanalytic defense. Splitting (Spaltung) and projection take hold: the perpetrator projects their own destructive, unacceptable parts outward onto the victim, constructing them as a "threat," a "traitor," "unclean." What is destroyed, then, is in fact an inner part carried outward.

Another notable dimension of cruelty is sadistic pleasure. But this pleasure feeds not only on inflicting pain, but also on humiliation and the violation of privacy. Seen especially in practices of torture, this involves targeting the subject's most fragile, most unprotected areas. Forcibly exposing what is private means destroying the subject's boundaries. This is a symbolic devastation, not only a physical one.

At this point, the victim's capacity for self-protection collapses. More importantly, the possibility of revenge is eliminated. This too is one of the things that defines cruelty: the perpetrator's absolute confidence that they will face no consequence. This condition feeds the fantasy of omnipotence — being all-powerful. The perpetrator experiences themselves as possessing unlimited power; law, limits and reciprocity fall away.
Cruelty is therefore not merely an act but an attempt to construct a world. In this world, it becomes harder for the good to survive. Ethical reference points erode, and people are forced to abandon their own values in order to survive. Identification with the perpetrator comes into play here: out of fear or the desire to survive, some begin to speak the perpetrator's language. But this identification damages the subject's own inner integrity; a person cannot cross to the perpetrator's side without renouncing their own dignity.
One of cruelty's most destructive effects is the collapse of the inner world. The good object representations a person carries within, along with trust-giving relationships and memories, are damaged. Seen through object relations theory, this means the fragmentation of the inner world and the failure to preserve good objects. The world becomes unsafe now not only outside, but inside as well.

Cruelty, then, is not merely violence multiplied. It is a perverse mode of relating. As Wolfgang Müller-Funk points out, the relationship here is not built on recognition, reciprocity or empathy — it is built on the will to destroy, to humiliate, to establish absolute power.

Love, too, sometimes produces evil…

To object to someone speaking Kurdish on the street, to humiliate them for it, is an act of cruelty. Humiliation does not target only a person — it targets a language. On a symbolic level, it is an attempt at erasure: an intervention aimed at wiping out a language, and with it, a mode of existence. Such momentary cruelties, though, can remain isolated encounters — the kind most people can withstand to some degree. What is truly destructive is when these small cruelties accumulate into something systematic. Insinuations of "immorality" directed at Alevis, the mockery of their worship — these too are cruelty. But what turns them into persecution is not that they are isolated remarks; it is that they persist, repeat, and are carried forward by a structure.
In psychoanalysis we call this cumulative trauma: injuries that on their own might seem "minor" accumulate through repetition into psychic devastation. At this point we are no longer speaking only of individual cruelty but of structural cruelty. Such a structure legitimizes everyday cruelty, leaves it unpunished, even encourages it. But there is a more subtle dimension here too: the character of the relationship itself. When people exist in a relationship of dependency, cruelty is not confined to open attack. Neglect by the powerful toward the weak, indifference, or an unequal distribution of "love" can be traumatic in itself.

We see this most starkly in the parent-child relationship. A child depends on its parents for its very existence. The relationship is asymmetrical by nature. If a parent fails to protect the child, the child is not merely hurt — its existence itself comes under threat. Power misused in this way, or withdrawn through neglect, produces deep relational trauma over time. This is why not loving someone is not, in itself, cruelty. People are not obligated to love one another. Someone reading this text may dislike me, even hate me — that alone is not violence. But the same absence of love, when it occurs within a relationship of dependency — directed, say, at a child — produces a traumatic effect. Because here the issue is not an emotional preference but a vital need. A similar pattern appears in social relations. The cruelty a state, an institution, or a majority identity directs at minorities does not always take the form of open humiliation. Sometimes cruelty appears in the unequal distribution of love, attention, and regard. A teacher may not humiliate immigrant children in the classroom. But consistently favoring German students, showing that they are loved more, granting them privileges — and making this visible — creates a deep wound in the other children. Here cruelty takes the form not of hatred but of unequal love. Perhaps this is why the question is not simply "being cruel" or "being good." The question is how we love.

Village romanticism, or nostalgia…

A culture of cruelty does not merely hurt people; it erodes the symbolic fabric that makes shared life possible. It weakens, and at times dissolves, the invisible "text" or contract that binds us together. I grew up in a small town. Looking back today, I can still see traces of that symbolic order — but I do not say this as nostalgia or idealization. That order was not itself flawless. Around orphaned children, parents would show their own children's affection more sparingly. This was love withheld so as not to remind others of their loss — a kind of delicacy, a kind of ethical instinct. But it carries a question too: does withholding love truly protect, or does it simply reproduce the lack in another form? Even love was calibrated to spare the other's wound — but that calibration sometimes diminished love itself. We, too, hesitated to eat in front of the poor. That was a sensitivity: avoiding display, limiting oneself in the face of another's want. But it was also a stance that deferred any direct confrontation with visible inequality. Poverty did not disappear; it merely became less visible. These small practices were the delicate rules of living together — but rules with limits, carrying their own contradictions. A culture of cruelty erases even these contradictions. Because cruelty does not only generate hatred; it also erases shame, restraint, delicacy. In their place comes a crude visibility, the flaunting of inequality, and numbness before another's lack. Once, love was withdrawn in an effort to spare another's wound; today, even love can turn into a display, an exhibition of privilege. So the question is not simply about losing the past or criticizing the present. The question is in what forms an ethics of living together remains possible. There was an ethic there, but it was incomplete. Today, even that incomplete ethic is disappearing.