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.
