Theorizing Violence as an Essential By-product of the Paradox of Modernity: Reading Inglourious Basterds

Abstract

This paper argues that the animosity and violence theorized in the movie Inglorious Basterds (Tarantino 2009) can be interpreted as a paradoxical by-product of the Enlightened humanity. If the world is a carefully calculated phenomenon of the enlightened man and the reason is the fundamental driving force, it is paradoxical how evil becomes a by-product in modern post-enlightenment humanity. The bourgeois humanity of the Enlightenment project, therefore, carries the characteristic that educated, cultured, mannered and charming men are fully capable of metamorphosing into monstrous beasts and the ‘dialectic totality’ of both good and evil is the ‘true history’ of the modern world. To exemplify that dual existence, the above movie can be considered as an example, where the aestheticized violence portrayed in the movie displays how the ‘decent’ political space has been taken over by the ‘diabolic evil’ of obscene underground. The paper also investigates how the people who immerse in ‘cultivated academic environments’ are capable of justifying violence over fellow human beings, despite whatever said about their conscience.