This is an important book with significant flaws. The book is important because it asks a question too seldom asked: if the goal of genocide is extermination, why is humiliation, torment, torture, and devaluation of the victims so central (p. 47)? In a word, why not just kill them?

It’s a harsh question, and Weisband has an answer. The macabresque is not the answer; it is a category under which to organize the answer. The macabresque is an inversion of the carnivalesque, referring to what almost seems like sport on the part of those who would torture, torment, and kill (p. 4). More precisely, the macabresque refers to “performative transgression” (p. 49): the importance of the public display of torture and torment to others, including other perpetrators as well as victims.

The book has a number of case studies. The best, in my opinion, are those of Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Each goes on for pages. They are emotionally difficult to read. If one wants a more detailed study that makes Weisband’s point, then Jan Gross’ Neighbors (2001) is a good choice, a history of the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland, by other residents during World War II.

So why do people like to humiliate, torment, and torture other people before killing them? The most persuasive answer is that of Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Give a group of people absolute power over another group, remove all of the usual normative constraints, and one group will torment and kill the other because this is what people like to do when there are no rules, no laws, and no limits. Not even Hobbes saw the world so darkly, but he had not lived through the Holocaust. Included in the pleasure of torment is the sharing of this secret pleasure with others, a type of blood bond. One might argue that the explanation is too simple, no explanation at all really. Perhaps, but I would argue that Bauman’s explanation is not too simple, just too disturbing. Surely the answer must be more complex.

Perhaps so, but Weisband’s answer is no answer, but rather a troubling hypothesis that cannot be tested. The source of his hypothesis is Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst with a wide following among academics, particularly but not exclusively among literary critics. Weisband argues that “desire inheres in a willfulness that seeks to lend ‘positivity’ to the negativity of psychic absence or emptiness that Lacanian theory situates at the center of human personality” (p. 15). In other words, “theoretical effort to apply psychosocial perspectives, in particular Lacanian perspectives, in explaining the macabresque must perforce do so on the basis of a single building-block assumption.” That single assumption is that everyone wants to restore a primordial state of oneness with mother. The “phallic law of separation” from mother is the basis of civilization (p. 225).

I have no quarrel with psychoanalytic explanations. I have employed them in a number of books. At the same time, it is clear that statements like those of Lacan cannot be shown true or false (these terms still mean something). Even if one can understand what Lacan is saying, he is more useful for literary interpretation than group psychology. Then why would Weisband get so drawn into obscure psychoanalytic explanations? Probably because he recognizes that “the macabresque” is not an explanation of anything. It is a category that is being asked to do the work of a theory. Since it can’t, Weisband turns to an au courant psychoanalytic theorist whose totalizing assumptions can encompass the concept that interests him while remaining impervious to falsification.

Wiesband is right that macabresque is a useful category in understanding horror. In particular, it shows that the usual explanations invoking categories such as civil war, ideology, leadership—even ethnicity—are inadequate. The answer lies deep in the psyches of men and woman. As Bauman shows, we should at least consider that the answer is simple, just unbearable. There are a lot of people who would like to torment, torture, humiliate and kill other people if given the chance. The desire is not deep but shallow and widespread, restrained by norm and law.

And so the question remains, what is the theoretical contribution of the concept of macabresque given that it is not an explanation? Wiesband’s notion of the macabresque offers a perspective on genocide and mass atrocity that calls our attention to the disturbing fact that death is not the primary goal of the perpetrators. Humiliation is. “Perpetrators want victims to feel shame, suffer humiliation, and recognize that they deserve the humiliation because they are shameful” (p. 341). Victims are made complicit in their own betrayal and torture. Recall Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, tortured so terribly that he finally cries out “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!” Julia, the reader will recall, is Winston Smith’s lover and fellow rebel against the regime of Big Brother. Once Smith betrays all he loves, his life is over. His physical life or death is meaningless.

Wiesband alerts us to the idea that this seems to be what those who commit torture often want, either explicitly (forcing one family member to kill or rape another), or implicitly. The only hard case for Weisband is Argentina, where the torture took place in little rooms hidden from the public and was thus not a straightforward performative transgression, insofar as it lacked an audience. But if the performances were a poorly kept secret, the disappearances were widely known, just unspoken, at least in public, at least at the time.

What is to be learned from Weisband’s study? The most important thing is how horrible ordinary people can be to others. This is not the same thing as Arendt’s “banality of evil,” for there is nothing banal about their motives. Beyond this, the macabresque points out and organizes an infrequently noticed, or at least an infrequently commented upon, aspect of genocide and mass atrocity. The goal is not to kill other people, but to degrade and humiliate them so that they become someone for whom death is the same as life. Finally, the book illustrates that a concept is not a theory. This is not to devalue a good concept, one that organizes and highlights aspects of human action previously given insufficient attention, possibly because they are so disturbing.

Psychoanalytic explanations, at least the one Weisband draws upon from Lacan, are obscure and hermetic to the uninitiated, and we can never know if they are true or false, or even a likely story. A psychological explanation that makes more sense, and one that Weisband also draws upon, is that those who impose shame and humiliation have themselves been shamed and humiliated. The psycho-logic seems to assume that shame and humiliation can be transferred from one person to another, one group to another, if absolute power over the other is available. As the United States intervenes, or not, throughout the world it is a good thing to take care not to inflict shame and humiliation on friends and enemies alike, lest they turn on themselves, the United States, and each other in our wake.