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his or her lack of fear requires further explanation. Similarly, if he or she
is afraid when no danger can be identified, his or her fear is denounced as
irrational or pathological. Without characteristically human perceptions
of and relations to the world, Jaggar points out, there would be no char-
acteristically human emotions.
Jaggar maintains that feminists can learn from outlaw emotions how
to reeducate, refine, and eventually reconstruct their emotional constitu-
tion. Moreover, social alienation enables outsiders to see and understand
patterns which elude insiders. Ironically, outsiders understand systems of
domination better than those who construct or enforce them. Insiders
need outsiders to explain how a community can be improved:
Oppressed people have a kind of epistemological privilege insofar
as they have easier access to this standpoint [ a perspective that of-
fers a less partial and distorted and therefore more reliable view ]
and therefore a better chance of ascertaining the possible begin-
nings of a society in which all could thrive. (p. 162)
The very idea of defending or valuing outlaw emotions raises difficult
questions about social stratification and what we are to understand by the
facts of inclusion and exclusion. Those difficulties aside, I want to high-
light Jaggar s contention that those who are excluded from a morality
might enjoy a privilege unknown or unknowable to those who are in-
cluded by it. It is a thesis that sounds remarkably like Nietzschean ressen-
timent. For Nietzsche, the kind of knowledge that the weak possess is
frankly not worth having: more important is the knowledge or where-
withal one needs to become strong. Jaggar would insist here that people
struggling under a system of domination are not weak, but rather op-
pressed. There is an important difference.
We might view the elite as the oppressed, particularly given Niet-
zsche s account of the  herd mentality. 4 I do not want to criticize Jaggar
180 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
for not filling out the notion of oppression in part because Nietzsche
leaves the same question unanswered and in part because any normative
answers introduce an illusion of neatness into what is a very ambiguous
concept. Descriptive answers to the question of what oppression is  and
they are enormously varied  suggest an infinite number of possible out-
law emotions.
Jaggar forces us to rethink what we mean by male dominance. She
focuses our attention on control, evaluation, and exclusion. Male-
dominated cultures control women s conduct; they label women the intel-
lectual, moral, or spiritual inferiors of men; and they exclude women from
the religious and political centers of a society. Jaggar recognizes that
people (not just men) are highly motivated to seize meanings and re-
sources out of a sociocultural environment that has been arranged to pro-
vide them with the meanings and resources that suit them.
The point of identifying Schadenfreude as an  outlaw emotion is to
expose a moral system of domination. I want to look more closely at the
social position of women, among whom Schadenfreude is reputed to
flourish and to lurk. The first of two strategies for repressing Schaden-
freude illustrates the effect of names on concepts, and the second reveals
an assumption of the moral inferiority of women. The assumptions under-
lying these strategies limit in advance the applicability of the moral theory
they produce. They also show that strategies for repressing Schadenfreude
mask both the expression and production of ressentiment.
First Denial Strategy: The Disavowal of Schadenfreude
A central part of the experience of Schadenfreude involves the denial that
one takes pleasure in the actual suffering of another. As with the sentenc-
ing of  enemies of the people and those guilty of  crimes against human-
ity, morally acceptable pleasure in the injury of other people must spring
from love of justice. The underside of justice is the emotional satisfaction
of revenge (for those who were directly harmed by the criminals) or
Schadenfreude (for those whose belief in justice sustains the conviction
that criminals deserve to suffer) or of malice (for those who simply take
sadistic pleasure in the suffering of others, whether or not they are guilty
of serious acts). It is not farfetched to assert that a conviction won in a
Outlaw Emotions 181
war crimes court entails not only joy that a particular side has won the
case but also (for the allies of the winning side) active pleasure that the
other side has suffered defeat.
Denying Schadenfreude is one of the simplest ways to claim that one
takes pleasure only in justice prevailing. Refusing to name Schadenfreude
is one of the simplest ways to deny it, much in the way that a heterocen-
tric society might have refused to name homosexual impulses, desires, or
domestic arrangements. Let s circle back to the identification of Schaden-
freude as a discrete emotion in order to see how naming Schadenfreude
(or refusing to do so) amounts to an act of symbolic formulation.
In the American play Suddenly Last Summer (1958) by Tennessee
Williams, Violet Venable, a reclusive grande dame played by Katharine
Hepburn, is puzzled when a young doctor asks her if she is not a widow.
 Yes, of course, she confirms, but points out that much more important
to her, she is a woman who has lost her only son.  Why is it, she won-
ders aloud,  that they have a word for a woman who has lost her hus-
band, but not for a woman who has lost her son?
Like Violet Venable, someone might wonder why there is no English
word for  pleasure in the misfortune or suffering of another. Few Eng-
lish speakers avail themselves of the term, most likely because of their un-
familiarity with it. If at first Schadenfreude seems like a term English
speakers can do without, we should recognize a strong case for arguing to
the contrary, given the ubiquitousness of what it signifies. For the brand
of happiness it names is so much a part of our daily lives, and so central to
our narratives of them, that it seems futile to protest that the would-be
label sounds too foreign or simply pretentious. We are conditioned to
think of Schadenfreude as a pleasure that dare not speak its name.
Schadenfreude in America
Why haven t Americans adopted the German term? The reason may be
simple: we manage just fine without it. Though such a reason may explain
why we have no word for  a woman who has lost her only son, it seems
an implausible answer to the Schadenfreude question. For it can just as
easily be argued that Americans would immediately be able to use the
word discriminately upon acquiring it as it can be argued that they do not
182 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
need a word for Schadenfreude because they manage just fine without it.
Claiming that a society can do without a particular word or device ne-
glects the possibility that that word or device might quickly assume a use-
ful function in a society. As Yale historian John Boswell notes:
English appears to have no real equivalent for the French term  fi-
ancé, but this is certainly no indication that the idea of heterosex-
ual engagement was unknown in the British Isles prior to its
adoption. Why foreign words for social relations ( protége,
 gigolo,  madame, etc.) catch on and supplant indigenous terms
is a complex issue; the notion that the phenomena they describe
were unknown before importation of the word belongs among the
least likely explanations.5
What is especially puzzling about Schadenfreude  unlike the hypotheti-
cal word for  a woman who has lost her only son  is that the term has
not caught on in America. For what it signifies is not something peculiar
to a few sinister or morally weak persons, but something that occurs, no [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]