This interdisciplinary volume offers a bold rethinking of cruelty in contemporary political, cultural, and psychological contexts. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and media studies, the book explores how cruelty manifests across institutions, infrastructures, and representationsfrom war photography and neoliberal economics to AI and surrealist art. It examines the breakdown of mediation in politics, the crisis of the autonomous subject, and the libidinal economy of sadism and masochism. Rather than treating cruelty as a moral lapse or psychological pathology, the contributors examine it as a structural and aesthetic force that organizes perception, politics, and representation. The volume provides a multi-layered anatomy of cruelty, dissecting its material, symbolic, and affective dimensions. With authors from a range of global locations, the book offers a truly global and methodologically diverse perspective. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of continental philosophy, political theory, and social philosophy.
Chapter
1. Introduction:From Brutality to Cruelty and Back Again.- PART
I: THE EYE AND THE EAR, OR THE MEDIATION OF CRUELTY.
Chapter
2. Werner
Herzog or Documents of Cruelty.
Chapter
3. Terror of the Ear, Torture of
Love.
Chapter
4. Mickey Mouse and Cruel Technicity:Revisiting Walter
Benjamins Concept of Technological Reproducibility in the Age of Artificial
Intelligence.
Chapter
5. War Photography and Embodied Suffering:A
Phenomenological Image Analysis.- PART II: HEADS OR TAILS, OR THE NEOLIBERAL
ECONOMY OF BODIES.
Chapter
6. Coldness and Alienation in Civil Engineering
Infrastructure.
Chapter
7. Capitalist Realism Fifteen Years Later.
Chapter
8. The Cruel Fantasy of Non-Relationality: Depressed Society in an Isolation
Tank.- PART III: FACELESSNESS, OR CRUELTY AS PERVERSION.
Chapter
9. The
Unbearable Happiness of Writing: The Cruelty of Euphoria in Franz Kafkas
Letters and Diaries.
Chapter
10. Cruelty Always Transforms in The Great
Silence: How Perversion Restores the Consistency of Law.- Chapter
11. At the
Back of My Head: Cruelty, Submission, and Desire in Xavier Dolans Tom at the
Farm.
Chapter
12. Ontological Cruelty And Art:
The Surreal World Of Hans Bellmer's Dolls.- PART IV: THE CORPSE, OR THE
POLITICAL AND BEYOND.
Chapter
13. Cruelty, Savagery, and Art: What the
Ancients Can, Indirectly, Tell Us about Modern Art?.
Chapter
14. Cruelty
Through Its Opposites.
Chapter
15. Cruelty as Metaphor: Penal Reforms and
Civilizational Discourse(s) in Colonial India.
Chapter
16. Evil
Entanglements: Assembling A Materialist-Vitalist Theory Of Evil.
Chapter
17.
Absolute Cruelty under the Rule of the Pleasure Principle.
Szymon Wróbel is a professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is the author of numerous publications, including the co-edited book, Rethinking Materialism: Making the World Material Again (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).
Katarzyna Szafranowska researches at the University of Warsaw. She is a philosopher and cultural theorist, working as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Artes Liberales.
