Violent Faculties – Charlene Elsby

[Clash Books; 2024]

Violent Faculties, the latest book by horror writer, critic, “data analyst,” and “former philosophy professor” Charlene Elsby, PhD, presents us with a protagonist who has either found the most or the least obvious ways to answer some of philosophy’s questions about what it means to be human. These are questions that we typically treat as purely “academic” (read: abstract and inessential), but the protagonist embarks on a series of absurdly practical experiments to answer questions such as: “How much space does a human occupy?”; is there “such a thing as a unified entity we refer to as human?”; if one has a “soul mate,” then “is not your soul a little bit defective, until you’re married off?”; where is the soul anyway? These “experiments” take the form of a series of kidnappings, followed by brutal scenes of torture that involve physical, mental, and sexual violation. So we’re in the horror genre, but the book’s title page bears a note that reads, “Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements toward application for tenure and promotion within the Department of Philosophy as evidence of research productivity.” So we’re also in the academy, complete with copious footnotes to Aristotle, Plato, and company.

The novel is structured as a series of numbered chapters, with sub-numbered sections that resemble an academic work of philosophy. Most of these chapters focus on the torture of and experimentation upon one victim or set of victims. In the second chapter, “The Lips, the Teeth, the Tip of the Tongue,” the protagonist drugs and kidnaps a victim named Gillian, who becomes the basis for testing rationality’s centrality to definitions of the human. Of Aristotle’s characterization of man as the “rational animal,” Elsby notes that “λόγον,” typically translated as “rational,” also translates as “speech.” Insofar as human is the rational animal, human is the animal that speaks. This erudite discussion unfolds as observations interjected between the narrator’s description of her experiment and repeatedly butts up against the vulgarity and cruelty of these experiments, shifting the tone erratically. (Noting that Gillian, being a woman, would be precluded from Aristotle’s definition of the human, the protagonist asserts, “But fuck those people.”) I will summarize the experiment conducted on Gillian below, which is one of many such gruesome examples in the novel. (Skip the paragraph below if you’d rather avoid the details, which include the aforementioned physical and sexual violations.)

The testing of such claims begets neither logical proofs nor rigorous argumentation, but successive removal of Gillian’s tongue (the tip, at least), then teeth, and finally lips, as this victim gradually loses her physical capacity for speech, voicing increasingly deformed versions of the word, “Don’t.” Turning to her friend John for aid in this experiment, the protagonist asks if John would still have sex with this victim (he says yes) and then asks John if he would have sex with an animal (he says no). Therefore, Gillian remains human. The protagonist then directs John to rape the victim repeatedly to test her capacity to bear human offspring. When a baby is born with the capacity and organs for speech, the protagonist “declares the experiment complete and disposes of [her] materials,” by which she means Gillian and her child.

The book’s shift between such horrific actions, its wry commentary, and its command of philosophical ethics and phenomenology only heightens this atmosphere of cruelty. It is not just that this protagonist commits these horrible acts but that she does so in an unflinching, detached, and even humorous manner. Such experiments prompt the reader to ask not about the nature of the human but rather questions that take the form of “Why?,” usually prefixed with the phrase “Oh God.”

Across the protagonist’s increasingly deranged narration of increasingly vicious experiments, Elsby includes hints of the protagonist’s former life as a philosophy professor, in which we see a very different person than the one who works in her home-office-turned-torture-chamber. There, we find a person who cares. She pushes her former students to actually “learn something.” “At the end of the semester, they will all forget my name,” she writes, “but I’ll be thinking about them forever.” The story gradually hints at the gutting of her philosophy department by soulless mid-level administrators. In an appendix that concludes the book, Elsby fills in the whole story, which is predictable to anybody who has a passing familiarity with the contemporary academy: “Trends are toward the destruction of the humanities on a national level.” Shortly after that line, we see Elsby’s protagonist torture one administrator in a scene replicating Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which he is subjected to the full logical extent of the “business model of human happiness.” In Violent Faculties, the real horror is not the gutting of a human but the gutting of the humanities.

Elsby’s overwrought violence and torture and its proximity to philosophical exploration sits within a lineage that follows the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille. These writers lean into extreme violence and violation not to savor such horror but rather to explore social, philosophical, and political systems through their transgression. What might appear as gratuitous violence becomes instead a necessary route to otherwise unreachable ideas and questions. They turned to fiction (not exclusively but most famously) as a tool to examine otherwise philosophical questions, using representation as a field to depict violent acts in a way that pushed philosophy to its own extremes. It is in this spirit that Susan Sontag, writing about the play Marat/Sade, claims that cruelty provides an opportunity “to act out the widest possible context for human action,” which cannot be captured by realistic art. Whereas Sontag wants this wide-angle cruelty to be the basis for the possibility of freedom, Lucy Ives finds instead that such expanded context makes the case for Sade as “one of the first major authors of what we might term modern bureaucratic literature.” In the 120 Days of Sodom, we find not only acts of violence but also the intense—and often dull—planning and organization required to keep these acts up for 120 days. Sadism, for Ives, is not the enjoyment of cruelty but rather “a lack of feeling regarding the pain of others,” the capacity to undertake in the near-bureaucratic work necessary for torture to occur. It is this version of violence and horror that drives a book like Violent Faculties, in which footnotes to Aristotle and Plato accompany, justify, and drive the slow and methodical destruction of human life.

Such violence—let’s call it bureaucratic horror—is not an aberration of the modern university but rather the logical conclusion of the forces seeking to transform it by dismantling its most vital and beneficent parts. And the exercise of human freedom would reside not in the commission of violence but in the critique of the systems and logics that facilitate that violence. In the appendix to Violent Faculties, Elsby’s protagonist tries to combat administrators “with strong argumentation, clear communication, and the underlying shared premise that knowledge for its own sake is the highest good for humanity to achieve,” but these villains “wanted practical arguments, arguments aimed at maximizing utility, productivity, financial gain and demonstrable metrics of success.” Even though humanities departments do consistently succeed by these metrics and Elsby’s protagonist “made these arguments, the ones they wanted, even though [she] thought they shouldn’t want them,” the university decides to want “all the wrong things and none of the right ones.” Lest this seem like a merely fictional account of how a university’s destruction occurs, Clifford Ando has recently analyzed the situation at the university where I am currently employed. Ando describes the university’s volitional choice to degrade the humanities and social sciences, despite the fact that those divisions are relatively cheap to operate and rank excellently compared both to similar departments at other universities and different departments at the same university: “Treating one’s best and cheapest units as an ATM is an unforced error of such magnitude that it must be deliberate, the result of a fundamentally different view of what the University should be.” Even if we accept the administration’s stated values (and we probably shouldn’t), they have done “all the wrong things and none of the right ones.”

In Violent Faculties, the tragedy does not derive from the extreme and vengeful violence that structures the book, although we are right to find that horrible too. Rather, the book’s tragic core derives from the protagonist’s adoption of the same soulless, rationalizing values that destroyed not just her way of life but also the incalculable benefits it conferred on students and the world. It is perhaps extreme to equate methodical torture with the destruction of the modern university, but if we follow this novel, the former is simply the more spectacular result of the impulse that drives the latter. In a discussion of Human Centipede and its sequels (which, as with Sade, are as much about the intricate planning of something vile as about doing it), Eugenie Brinkema finds a form of life that is reduced to a diagram. The violence of the diagram is in its seeming necessity, its blank rationality that admits no variation or struggle: “the non-spontaneity of a claim that posits itself as an existential fact.” This is a description of a horror film whose very premise is shocking, but it is also a description of the animating instincts of many of today’s university bureaucrats. Sade’s aristocratic libertines were poised to benefit from all their cruelty, but Elsby’s depiction of this former professor’s cruelty reveals a sort of purposeless, indifferent violence. Cruelty becomes regularized in this world, and that is partly why it is so sickening.

In a book that concerns itself more with human vivisection than the legal fallout for this academic serial killer, it might be reductive to resituate this fictional violence in its institutional context. One major distinction between the anti-intellectual cutting of programs in the modern university and the more visceral cutting done by Elsby’s protagonist comes from the misdirection of the latter’s violence. Save for one senior faculty member, the protagonist’s victims are largely incidental to the rationalized, bureaucratic violence that seems to have spurred these serial murders. If this is revenge, it takes the form of violence directed against anybody but the system that seems to compel it. This is perhaps why this book satirizes the form of an application for tenure and promotion, a document that serves to advance one as a professional in the field. If we are to take its form as a tenure-and-promotion file seriously, then the violence that appears in its chapters is a bid for inclusion within, rather than opposition to, the university’s rationalized bureaucracy.

In Violent Faculties, the collective problem of the modern university is everywhere experienced at the individual level, where senseless violence might resemble action. There are many ways that people are doing vital work to contest the destruction of the humanities, the rationalization of the modern university, and the myriad forms of violence that the university compels; as far as I can tell, none of them take the form of serial murder, and very few of them involve individuals acting alone. These actions include the graduate student as well as contingent and full-time faculty unionization, encampments and other protests demanding the divestment from the same arms manufacture that allows genocidal violence in Gaza and beyond, and the formation of new collectives beyond institutional bounds that aim to connect scholars and workers across their academic silos. All of them are aimed at building something different—and better—than that which currently exists, rather than clinging to that which is in the process of being dismantled.

In this sense, Violent Faculties is a book about loss. The protagonist is sadistic, not because she enjoys her violence, but because she has lost any feeling about that violence or those it affects. Shortly before contemplating her former students and the intense feelings that surround teaching, Elsby’s protagonist follows Emil Cioran and asks, “What of the structureless desire for what is gone and lost?” Those of us in, around, and after the university might feel such a structureless desire because the current structure of the university is designed to thwart the energies that brought many of us to do this work in the first place. But yes, that old structure is gone and lost. The question, one that Elsby’s book seems not to ask, is whether we give in to these new bureaucratic horrors or if we seek to build a new structure, capable not just of the maintenance but the flourishing of our—and our students’—desires.

Adam Fales is a writer and graduate student living in Chicago. His writing has appeared in Cleveland Review of Books, The Yale Review, Chicago Review, and other places. Find him online at www.adamfales.com.