Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-278) and index.

Styles of imprisonment -- Theaters of cruelty -- Great to watch -- Captivity, catharsis -- Everything is nice -- They're only dolls -- The golden rule -- Nobody said no -- The brutality of fact -- Who we are -- A situation of meat -- Precariousness -- Inflicted -- Face -- Rings of action -- Rarer and better things.

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. In this book the author aims to navigate the contemporary predicament of becoming anaesthetised to pervasive images of torture, horror and war. She discusses whether observing such representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), the author offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.