The internalisation of cruelty: Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Masoch

The article is foremost dedicated to Nietzsche's account of cruelty, which represents one of the central focuses of Nietzsche's genealogical polemic, if not its very foundation. This close reading is complemented by drawing parallels with two other outstanding intellectual figures of the nineteenth century, in whom cruelty plays no less a role. These two authors – one could say that together with Nietzsche they form a kind of cruel trio from the European East – are the writers Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the latter of whom is also the inventor of a particular genre of erotic discourse characterised by 'tyranny, cruelty and, above all, the infidelity of a beautiful woman,' which inspired Krafft-Ebing to name a type of perversion after Masoch. The paper shows that the affinity between the authors lies not only in the fact that cruelty is one of the key themes in all three of them, but that the connection between them – and thus perhaps the beginning of an era characterised, as Alain Badiou said, by an intellectual fascination with cruelty – needs to be sought in the idea of the internalisation of cruelty, which Nietzsche in particular considered to be one of the fundamental driving forces of civilisation.