Now the pain is for pleasure
’Cause nothing can measure
— Rihanna

I prepare my coffee while listening to the news. Reports of violence, wounds inflicted without consent, war repeatedly framed as preemption, deterrence, or display — narratives that claim to protect yet often unfold as performances of power.

James Hillman’s observation that “war is normal; peace is exotic” encapsulates the persistent reality of conflict in modern history — rituals of violence taking different forms under ever-changing names, but always addressing the same primal hunger within the human psyche.

My ethical impulse resists the notion that war could express the soul — that it might serve as an outlet for passion or contain something both terrible and sublime. Yet since Aphrodite and Ares were caught in the same net — desire and destruction locked in a scandalous embrace — we have understood that violence can carry an erotic charge. Beauty and brutality are not always opposed; their unsettling union, however wrong it feels, remains imaginable.

The sublime is not synonymous with beauty. It names what overwhelms and exceeds comprehension.
How then to write about this without glorifying pain, aestheticizing cruelty, or turning suffering into mere metaphor?

System booting.

1. Command Phase — Projection & Sublimation

The human urge toward destruction is sublimated into structures of ritual, spectacle, and language. It projects onto others: a rooster, a rival, a surrogate body. Cockfights, bodybuilding stages, miniature wargames, combat sports — complex systems designed to externalize vulnerability and sculpt aggression into something tangible.

These are games whose meaning multiplies with the danger they carry, played through others. The death of the animal, the fighter’s exhaustion, the collapse of muscle — injury is no mere side effect; it is the axis around which meaning spins.

2. Movement Phase — Risk & Reward

What does it mean to shape aggression into form? To train pain until it signals purpose? Whether armored or etched through muscle memory, each movement follows a long-established code. This is not raw violence unleashed, but discipline refined and ritualized — risk not avoided, but embraced as the very point.

The rooster that dies for male pride; the athlete who performs a cultural ideal of aggression; the hormone-fed body sculpted into an icon of invulnerability.
Things are precious because of death.
They won’t be forever.

3. Shooting Phase — Pleasure & Pain

Violence, like sex, is intimate. And when it is made public, when it is monetized, ritualized, glorified, it changes form but not function. The spectators become part of the mechanism. They do not watch passively. They absorb, respond, desire. The violence is not theirs.
But the pleasure might be.

4. Charge Phase — Armor & Icon

Armor does not protect; it communicates. To arm a rooster is not to protect it, but to elevate it into symbol. The hormone-fueled bodybuilder, the dumbbell’s weight — sculpt flesh into armor, a technology of power where biology, discipline, and myth converge.

Objects and bodies alike become icons, technological temple — ritualized gestures that contain, perform, and conceal fragile pride.

5. Fight Phase — Spectacle & Sacrifice

Fight games are modern cults that conjure a “magic circle” — a liminal space where archetypes awaken bravery, sacrifice, dominance, submission. Violence here is no longer merely political or social; it is a psychic eruption, a primal force forged by myth, desire, and collective ecstasy.

The fight becomes its own deity — impassive, relentless, indifferent to prayers or pleas. It demands reverence and reckoning, forcing us to face not just the spectacle, but our own complicity in the ritualized machinery of violence — as myth, as performance, as sacred technology.

¹ James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War (2004)
² Ibid.
³ Homer, Odyssey, Book 8

— Pina Bendfeld