A Response to Suzanne Gearhart

Here is a very quick response, written at long-distance [Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin], to Suzanne Gearhart’s interesting paper.

I think that Suzanne Gearhart is astute in detecting that I am deeply, temperamentally resistant to the celebration of sadomasochism as the source of either political progress or psychological liberation. It may be that crowds at executions felt a frisson of erotic pleasure at the hideous spectacle, but it is difficult for me to grasp, even theoretically, that this pleasure, insofar as it exists, is a plausible source of progressive politics or psychic health.

There may well be spectacles of state violence that arouse mass protest or lead men and women to feel differently about their own inner lives. But I can find no evidence—and certainly Gearhart’s essay, which stays very far from lived experience, does not provide such evidence—that such transformation derives from sadomasochistic excitation. Sometimes intellectuals, in the grip of powerful visions such as those of Freud or Foucault, seem to me to drift toward ideas that bear little relation either to the historical traces one can study from the past or to the observations one can make in the present.

Let me take a single example of the subversive potential of the early modern spectacle of punishment. When in 1618 King James, in order to appease the Spanish ambassador and rid himself of an annoyance, decided to execute Sir Walter Ralegh, guards had to be posted all along the route to keep the crowds from tearing Ralegh to pieces. Ralegh was hated for his arrogance and his lucrative monopolies during the preceding reign, and the mobs that gathered to watch him die must indeed have anticipated a bloody delight. As it happens, this particular festival of royal power decisively backfired: when Ralegh comported himself in the face of death with magnificent dignity and courage, pleasure turned to a revulsion and outrage whose echoes continued to be heard throughout the Civil War. All of the popular hatred of the arbitrariness, cruelty, and injustice of royal prerogative came to be focused symbolically on the execution of Ralegh.

It would be possible, I suppose, to claim that this revulsion was merely the surface manifestation of the deeper erotic excitement at the sight of the ax falling on the victim’s neck, that it was pleasure and not disgust and a demand for due process that motivated the anti-Stuart protests that were framed in Ralegh’s memory. But such an argument has to be made in the complete absence of all evidence—and it then becomes incumbent upon Gearhart or whoever wishes to make such an assertion to explain clearly why we should accept it merely as an act of faith. Why exactly should we believe that a crowd’s sexual pleasure in someone’s suffering is in fact a progressive act and not a nightmare?