How Far Can We Go? Pain, Excess and the Obscene

Download or read book How Far Can We Go? Pain, Excess and the Obscene written by Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The public does not desire horror, yet enjoys it in art and suffers it in life. When we deal with the monstrous marriage of the abject and the sublime, the consequent thrill of enjoyment is never appeased, always problematic, often unresolved and finally borders on physiological if not pathological narcissism. The public is well acquainted with this ‘rhetoric of effects’; rhetoric of extreme effects, which transforms the spectator into voyeur or victim, into an apathetic torturer, whenever cruelty is shown without respite. A look of horror greets the enjoyment of extremes and enjoyment to the extreme as well; the Eighteenth Century teaches us that lesson. The century of good taste elaborates a sense of the limits, since representing horror means choosing not so much to domesticate it as to render it more enjoyable. It is a game of limits that are not limits anymore, as we can allude to an infinity that often shows the features of the sublime.