What, after all, is cruelty? How may it be interpreted or analysed, and by whom? How is it to be determined or delimited, and to whose understanding does it ‘properly’ belong? How would this relationship, this ‘affair’, manifest itself? What is the relation, for instance, not only of psychoanalysis to cruelty, but of psychoanalysis and cruelty? The latter – psychoanalysis and cruelty – would perhaps imply not only the question of the relations of domination between them, but a larger discourse, lexicon or economy (if it is indeed an ‘economy’ at all, if economy and cruelty could ever attain such identity) which may comprise them, or indeed overhang and thus constitutively exceed them, or for that matter succumb to, fall foul of them in some manner. Dominating or dominated by them (psychoanalysis and cruelty), the very idea of such an (S-M?) ‘economy’ – lexical, discursive or otherwise – therefore already suggests the possibility of a certain cruelty, one whose conceptual borders remain, however, sufficiently indistinct that it can perhaps no more dominate than be dominated.

What, after all, is cruelty? On several occasions in ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty’ Derrida confesses or professes (confesses or professes, since the question of the ‘truth’ of cruelty is, precisely, at issue here, as well as that of the cruel forms both profession and confession might take, in truth) – Derrida confesses or professes his deep uncertainty about the meaning of the term.