Sadism as Social Violence: From Fin-de-Siècle Degeneration to the Critiques of Nazi Sexuality in Frankfurt School Thought

Abstract

This word, ‘sadism’, has been invoked frequently in both popular and intellectual forms of representation of the Holocaust: from the theories of the Frankfurt School to those of Susan Sontag and George Steiner; from Italian neo-realist cinema of the post-war era to kitsch Anglophone pornography from the 1970s to the present day; and to ‘Radical’ feminist claims about patriarchal sex.¹ Cultural attempts to account for the horror of the Holocaust have repeatedly invoked a drive assumed to be sexual and which many have called ‘sadistic’ or ‘sadomasochistic’. One way in which to explore this problem is through the study of sexualized slippages and the ways in which they operate in filmic, literary and historical visions of the Holocaust, as Laura Frost, Kriss Ravetto, Andrew Hewitt, myself and others have attempted.² This chapter, however, will consider the context of such representations by considering the longer history of the use of the word ‘sadism’, posing the question of how a pathology invented in late nineteenth-century psychiatry came to be used in post-war diagnoses of Nazism and the Holocaust in the work of the Frankfurt School philosophers, in particular, Adorno.³ The aim of such a genealogical sketch will be to show that the invocation of this word to describe Nazi genocidal cruelty goes to the very heart of modern European discourses of violence, sex and civilizational progress, discourses that constructed unreasoned cruelty as a form of barbarous resistance to the teleological imagination of history; discourses that persist still today in attempts to account for the subjectivity of the Holocaust perpetrator.