Emotional catharsis in El-Maslaha

BY MARIE-JEANNE BERGER Cairo: If it bleeds, it leads. We fallible human creatures gloat over destruction, delight in the horrible and the macabre, and choose to see terrible movies full of unnecessary violence to amuse ourselves. But it’s not as if violence is something rare: some sort of exceptional knowledge detached from our lived experience, isolated, occasional and infrequent. Violence is a frequent, necessary facet of experience. And don’t we get enough of it already? Susan Sontag used the opening phrase to censure society’s obsession with violence and trauma in news media and popular entertainment. Mulvey called it scopophilia: the…