Carcasses

The corpses of the de Witt brothers, by Jan Baen

The town of Jutaí, in the state of Amazonas, has approximately 13,500 inhabitants. Interestingly, data from the 2022 census shows that Jutaí became one of the 244 Brazilian municipalities where the number of evangelicals surpassed the number of catholics. The event I will relate below is not directly connected to this, since barbaric crimes and lynchings were already part of Brazilian culture when we were still considered “the largest Catholic country in the world.” Not to mention that these things were, and still are, part of world culture and history. Although today there are prosperous societies that are very safe to live in, even they had bizarre brutalities, not only in their colonies, but within their own countries. But enough digression. Let's return to Jutaí, in the state of Amazonas.

In 2024, in Jutaí, a 48-year-old man violated and murdered a 1-year-old baby girl. Apparently, there was no doubt about his guilt. He was arrested and promptly confessed to the crime. At some point during the night, the population stormed the police station where he was being held, forcibly removed him, and proceeded to lynch him in the streets. When I say population, I'm not talking about a dozen people, nor a few dozen, but hundreds of people participating, encouraging, and live-streaming on social media via cell phones, with countless written comments celebrating and encouraging the lynching in the live streams. Children and teenagers were also watching in the streets, like football supporters. Something that impressed me was hearing a woman, amidst the pandemonium of the fire and the blows, speak aloud:

Guys, the guy's head exploded already.

The tone of her voice when she said this was one of horror and fascination. And indeed, the man's head really did explode. While the body burned, many people struck the perpetrator's head with pieces of wood, including the victim's mother, according to the subsequent police investigation. In the end, with the crowd voluntarily dispersing to go to sleep, some stirred the remaining goo with pieces of wood. The consistency of the skin on the head resembled the plastic of a burst party balloon, only slightly larger. The only thing that indicated that was a human being was what remained from the neck down, which was also quite damaged, but still resembled a human shape. Other things were done that I prefer not to describe, including one person commented that the criminal no longer felt pain, demonstrating the futility of continuing with that grotesque scene where specific body parts were being burned and pierced.

While writing The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri provided a detailed and somewhat realistic description of the misfortunes of hell because he had ample material to work with by observing reality. The situation is very different with purgatory and, even worse, with heaven, which is dominated by blinding lights and indescribable things. The world is full of horrifying events, and the medieval world to which Dante belonged was no exception, however much some unfortunate people try to romanticize it today because they find contemporary life so bad; it is indeed bad, but it was also very bad in the past. In fact, in many aspects, it was much worse. This kind of disordered torment that the criminal from Jutaí endured is part of the cultural heritage not only of contemporary Brazil, but of humanity as a whole.

In 1672, for example, in The Hague, Netherlands, two powerful politicians, the brothers Johan and Cornelis de Witt, were lynched by an angry mob that blamed them for the setbacks suffered by the Netherlands in its war with France and England. A famous painting by Jan de Baen depicts the state in which the bodies were left. They were mutilated and had their organs cannibalized by the mob, although the event was seemingly organized and they were shot relatively early on; which is of no consolation to Cornelis, who had been tortured earlier by the authorities. The accusations of treason leveled against the brothers, especially Cornelis, were false, but the Hague militia, which instigated the scene, didn't care, nor did the people who enthusiastically watched everything.

It's difficult not to think of Georges Bataille's philosophy at a time like this, for whom all of nature is organized through the expenditure of excess energy, and for whom transgression always holds fascination. In works such as The Accursed Share, Bataille develops the concept of general economy, which goes beyond the concept of restricted economy. Restricted economy is what we normally understand as economy, a system that manages scarcity in one way or another, and where the expenditure of energy is analyzed through utility and calculation. General economy, however, is the economy of excess that serves no purpose considered useful from the perspective of restricted economy. For Bataille, there is always an excess of energy that necessarily needs to be wasted. This comes from nature itself. The Sun emits an amount of energy almost infinitely greater than that which reaches the Earth and can be used by living beings, since there is a limit to their growth, and besides, most of the energy emitted by the Sun is lost in space.

In the case of humans, according to Bataille, this waste can historically occur in various ways, some sacred, others profane. Both sacred and profane forms of waste are those in which the expenditure of energy yields nothing useful in a concrete and material sense. This energy will be wasted anyway; it is inevitable. The accursed share is that which will be removed from the useful part, but it in itself will serve no purpose from the point of view of the restricted economy. In the case of human sacrifices, for example, as occurred in certain Amerindian, Mediterranean, and Levantine cultures, the accursed share was wasted within the context of the festival or ritual, events that aimed to touch the sacred in some way, causing that extreme experience suffered by the victim to temporarily return the group to the immanence from which humanity was separated, at least symbolically.

In the case of lynchings, collective and chaotic events distinct from sacrificial rituals, the expenditure of energy approaches a profane demonstration of waste, regardless of whether the victim is guilty or not, in my opinion, although the fact that they are indeed guilty in Jutaí's case might cast a shadow of utility upon the event, returning it to the sphere of restricted economy. In this way, one can think that the death of the lynched man has a utility for society, which is to provide justice to the victims and increase the safety of the people, despite the spectacularization and symbolism that the event of their lynching brings. Incidentally, regarding spectacularization, Bataille is also quite pertinent, since he too sees in the grotesque a limit experience to which we are attracted. In Erotism, Bataille writes:

In sacrifice, the victim is divested not only of clothes but of life (or is destroyed in some way if it is an inanimate object). The victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective nature of religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. We should incidentally be unable to imagine what goes on in the secret depths of the minds of the bystanders if we could not call on our own personal religious experiences, if only childhood ones.

Although Bataille makes it clear that he is speaking here of sacrifices made within solemn rules, I think that the fascination can indeed be extended to the collective observation of grotesque and gratuitous violence, especially when this violence is practiced collectively. I would even say that this fascination extends to the individual murderer, although his actions are not so much within the scope of the general economy, but of the restricted one, in a Bataillean sense. The idea of ​​transgression is key here. On transgression, still in Erotism, he writes:

The origins of war, sacrifice and orgy are identical; they spring from the existence of taboos set up to counter liberty in murder or sexual violence. These taboos inevitably shaped the explosive surge of transgression.

Again, he refers to collective events, not the actions of a depraved murderer. But, in my opinion, the lynching of the depraved murderer in Jutaí, perpetrated by a mob of people outraged and thirsting for bloody justice, would indeed be a transgression according to Bataille's thought, as well as a profane way of eliminating the accursed share necessarily destined for disposal in any society.

Despite being fascinating and agreeing in my own way with some of these theses, I remain more inclined towards Spinoza's thought as portrayed in his Theological-Political Treatise and Ethics, where he points to the irrationality of rituals as a kind of attempt to exchange with a supernatural being susceptible to influence, something impossible for Spinoza, since God, who for him is nothing more than existence itself, is pure necessity. Praying and worshiping do not alter the course of reality. The usefulness of rituals, if they have any, is not tied to a supernatural truth, because it does not exist. Although he doesn't explicitly say so, it's possible to presume that Schopenhauer thought the same way, since in this aspect he greatly praises Spinoza's thought. A sacrificial ritual, even more so a human sacrifice, is ultimately an irrational practice. It may have all possible cultural justifications, but it remains nothing more than superstition.

What exists is chaos, brutality, and hell, because the foundation of the world of becoming is pure, indifferent, and somber manifestation; i.e. the will. Any order that exists is completely alien to our desires and our reason. We, humans, always seek to build a fortification, whether metaphorical or real, to protect ourselves from the hell of reality, which, unlike what Hegel thought, is not rational, despite being ordered. Rationality is in humans, by force of chance, and yet it is not always exercised. We could very well have been born imbued only with will and instinct, as in the case of other animals. In a way, we are, since we are nothing more than ephemeral representations of the same will that animates the rest of reality. We are capable of understanding the whole, understanding the order and regularity that presents itself in the world; but the world itself is not rational, nor does it have a purpose. Our fortifications crumble constantly, no matter how much we believe we have built sturdy walls that separate us from the horror that lies in the world.

In Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, the main character, the English sailor Charles Marlow, recounts his time working as a steamship captain for an ivory trading company in the Congo, then a Belgian colony. He describes the brutality and indifference of the company's management towards Africans and the days it takes to reach the central station, where he finds the boat he was to pilot on the Congo River damaged. With little access to tools, Marlow takes months to repair the boat and, during that time, discovers that the postmaster he was supposed to meet upriver, Mr. Kurtz, considered excellent by the company's chief accountant, has fallen ill. When he finally reaches Kurtz, Marlow discovers that he is not only feverish but has been insane for some time. Kurtz's post is surrounded by the severed heads of natives, and Kurtz himself has led the natives to worship him as a deity.

Although Marlow brings Kurtz back to the boat to return him to the central station, Kurtz returns to his post and Marlow goes out again to fetch him, in a tense moment. On the return trip, Kurtz's health worsens and he asks Marlow not to give his papers to the company administrator. Kurtz, dying, begins to recall some of the many atrocities he committed and whispers:

The horror! The horror!

Marlow returns to Europe, but begins to resent the veneer of civilization that surrounds him. A year later, he visits the fiancée Kurtz had left behind to make his fortune in Africa, and she begs him to know what her great love's last words were. Desperate, Marlow refuses to tell her. From Marlow's narration:

I was on the point of crying at her, “Don't you hear them?” The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. “The horror! The horror!”

Marlow spares her the details of her fiancé's monstrous madness and tells her that the last thing Kurtz said was her name. Several real people have been cited as inspiration for the character of Mr. Kurtz. Several of them participated in an ill-fated and pathetic European and American expedition to aid Mehmet Emin Pasha, a Jewish doctor of German origin who became Ottoman and ended up as governor of an Egyptian province in what is now South Sudan. The expedition took place between 1887 and 1889. During a revolt, Emin was cornered, and wealthy Europeans and Americans decided, for whatever reasons, to organize a large expedition to help him. Several atrocities occurred, several members of the group died of disease, murder, and madness, but one of them caught my attention because of the brutality of his actions.

The Scottish heir, traveler, and naturalist, James Sligo Jameson, grandson of the founder of Jameson whiskey, bought the right to participate in the expedition. During a deplorable episode, he took advantage of the fact that several tribes in the Congo Basin practiced slavery and cannibalism frequently, including cannibalism purely for culinary reasons, to witness the death and cannibalization of a 10-year-old girl. Fascinated by the idea of ​​cannibalism, Jameson was instigated by the powerful Omani slave owner and trader, Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi, known by the nickname Tippu Tip. Tippu Tip, one of the last great slave owners and traders in Africa, accompanied the expedition, having negotiated to help it. For Tippu Tip to buy the girl and stage the scene, Jameson only needed to give six handkerchiefs to the natives. Some time later, still in Africa, Jameson fell ill and died of a fever.

by Fernando Olszewski