Hard-nosed dispassionate enjoyment

Re Lord Stevens' assurance that the only way to stop a suicide bomber was to "destroy his brain instantly, utterly", Lenin remarks -

'It is rather salacious. I always detect a secret enjoyment when right-wingers pretending to be tough-minded and realistic describe psychotic violence'.

Absolutely. This co-incidence between hard-nosed realism and perverse enjoyment was nicely captured in an old Not the Nine O’clock News sketch. At the time, there was a public information advert on TV warning car drivers to watch out for motor cycles. The "hard-nosed" guy in the advert, talking about braking distance and so on, asked us to pretend that his fist was the car and his other open hand the motor cycle. He would then smash his fist into his hand with obvious tight-lipped relish. The parodic version asked us to pretend that 'this bag of cellophane filled with marshmallow' is a motor cycle.. this large lump hammer (perhaps a block of concrete?) is your car; now see what happens when your car comes into contact with a motor cycle: he goes berserk, setting about the cellophane bag with the hammer like a crazed lunatic.

Now, I’d like to just elaborate a little on Lenin’s point.

It’s not just that the secret enjoyment of violence can be passed off as mere neutral description, smuggled in under guise of realism or whatever, and therefore disowned. Hard-nosed unsentimental description isn’t merely the alibi for an obscene enjoyment. The clinical neutrality of the description, the uncompromisingly unsentimental tone is itself the very object enjoyed. To talk about murder, death, suffering in purely technical, medical or scientific terms already constitutes a brutalism of its own, a tone so neutral as to be itself a kind of cold violence. Paradoxically, what is enjoyed is the very elimination of affect.