The Wound is Where the Heart is: Political Sadomasochism in Extremist Masculinities
Classical analyses of extremist rationality cannot detect an actor who struggles to struggle—whose grievance is not a motive but shapes his identity. Categorising such libidinally invested extremists as ideologues is potentially costly — interventions premised on persuasion may fuel the very grievances they target. Drawing on Kelly’s political sadomasochism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article operationalises this elusive subject type of the political sadomasochist into observable indicators and demonstrates its portability across three cases: 1) the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto; 2) Japan’s far right; and 3) inceldom. Based on the nature of such political sadomasochism, this article argues that effective intervention in such cases requires the substitution of subjectivity and identity, rather than the mere elimination of grievance.
Introduction
Traditional explanations of extremist behaviour usually assume that violence serves some strategic end—either to achieve a political goal or to advance a transcendent religious, political or communal cause. While both models work well in explaining extremisms that seek outcomes beyond the conflict itself, they overlook an extremist who just wants to sustain the cycle of violence and struggle.[1]
This misdiagnosis has potentially significant consequences. It matters not just because this type of extremist has become increasingly visible through emerging strands like nihilistic violent extremism, but also because interventions that are effective for the first type fall short with the second.[2] An ideologically committed individual can be persuaded towards a different identity or worldview. In contrast, reasoning is arguably ineffective for someone subsumed in a cycle of grievance; the would-be solution may actually reinforce the extremist complaint. Ideological intervention that works in the former cannot meaningfully influence the latter’s subjectivity, or the organising principle that determines how a person experiences and responds to the world.[3]
This article demonstrates how Casey Ryan Kelly’s political sadomasochism framework provides an alternative account of extremist rationality. Crucially, sadomasochism here is a psychic structure, not a sexual practice—the circuit in which aggression towards another and self-degradation sustain each other. We operationalise this framework and apply it to three relevant extremist milieus, before concluding with reflections on preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) implications.
Literature Review
Existing models of terrorist rationality—either rational actor approaches or culturalist accounts—assume violence is for something: strategy, salvation, status. The former, as Crenshaw argues, presents terrorism as a rational choice produced from material constraints and careful deliberation.[4]
Conversely, culturalist accounts argue that extremist motivation is also influenced by factors beyond cost-benefit calculations, such as religion, ritual, gender and identity.[5] Hafez’s culturalist framework, for example, considers three criteria, including martyrdom, legitimating authorities and perceived victimisation.[6]
Culturalist theories of masculinities are also gaining traction because they explain how gendered motifs and narratives can influence extremism. Connell’s hegemonic masculinity—the idea that dominant forms of masculinity subordinate both women and other men—has informed influential analyses like Nilsson’s “heroic hypermasculinity” and Kimmel’s “aggrieved entitlement” in far-right movements.[7] Similarly, Roose and Cook explore similarities in the masculine performances of jihadist, far-right and male supremacists.[8] In these works, cultural pressures produce identifiable grievances, and extremist forms of masculinity provide a framework for understanding and expressing them.
Political Sadomasochism
Crucially, these frameworks assume that extremist violence is directed towards something beyond violence itself. However, they are less suited to explaining those individuals who are simply invested in the continuation of the cycle of violence. For example, Crenshaw observes that “[t]errorists usually show acute concern for morality, especially for sexual purity”, but she does not develop this point substantively.[9] Hafez’s culturalist framework shows how martyrdom gives violence meaning but ignores subjects who are invested in the cycle itself rather than its ends.[10] Similarly, the masculinities literature often reads extremist masculine formations as expressions of aggrieved entitlement seeking restoration of a lost order but misses those invested solely in sustaining their grievances rather than resolving them.[11]
Most extremists seek a tangible outcome—a state, caliphate or homeland—and would stop if they achieve it. For the political sadomasochist, however, grievance is not a goal he wants to resolve but the adhesive that binds him together. It is not something he has but something he is.[12] In other words, for the political sadomasochist, desire is sinthomic. The cycle of domination and degradation does not colour how he sees himself and the world — it constitutes the lens through which he sees and comprehends both. Strip this out and there is no ‘him’ left to see things differently.
Rahimi explains that Lacan’s sinthome is “a unique psychic formation that serves to stabilize an individual’s identity”.[13] It helps explain radicalisation by showing how a subject organises around a central lack or wound.[14] The sinthome emerges in reaction to adverse life events, but it is more than a coping mechanism — it becomes “a fundamental part of the individual’s way of being in the world”.[15] Hence, while sinthomic desire appears harmful or limiting, it is actually functional: It gives shape to the person’s identity and how he expresses himself in politics and other symbolic systems.[16]
Kelly’s analysis of white male Trump voters builds on this framework by showing how the domination-degradation cycle can structure political identity.[17] Per Kelly, the Trump voter is sadomasochistic because he resonates not only with exclusionist and ultranationalist discourses that demonise a foreign and non-white Other, but also with humiliating and belittling rhetorics that confirm his own sense of impotence.[18] The Trump voter does not simply enjoy degradation. Rather, he is constituted by it, so any end to the domination-degradation cycle would threaten the identity that he has built around it.
Lacan’s concept of jouissance is instructive here. Jouissance is not enjoyment in any ordinary sense.[19] Rather, it denotes a form of satisfaction that exceeds—and can even contradict —pleasure.[20] In this case, it describes the subject’s need to repeatedly return to a wound that they cannot allow to heal, because that wound has become central to who he is. It is akin to picking at a scab to keep it open and raw, so that the sadomasochist has permanent access to that experience. The pain is not incidental to the payoff; it is how the payoff—of identity formation—is reached. Crucially, the desired object—such as the Trump voter’s nostalgia for an unspecified historical moment of America’s purported former glory—must remain out of reach to sustain the desire.[21] Hence, whatever ‘glory’ is actually obtained always feels insufficient because the fantasy depends on remaining unresolved.
From this, we posit the following indicators to identify extremist political sadomasochists:[22]
Core[23]
- Nostalgia for an inaccessible object or moment.
- An identity constituted by grievance, such that resolution would dissolve the subject.
- Degradation experienced as gratifying rather than merely suffered.
Maintenance
- Rejecting available routes to resolution as futile, while leaving proposed alternatives underspecified.
- Grievance preservation.
- Converting degradation into compensatory domination.
In what follows, this article covers three relevant extremist milieus that are exemplary of the political sadomasochist formation. The manifesto of the 2019 Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant, has become something of an urtext for sympathisers and copycats who revere him as a ‘saint’. Because Tarrant’s sprawling manifesto is seminal but has received little sustained exploration in a direction that informs our model, it warrants an especially close reading. We then conduct analyses on the Japanese far right and inceldom to demonstrate the model’s portability—not just beyond a context of Occidental ethnosupremacist extremism but also at scale—and to explain not just individual motivations but also those of community and transnational formations.
White Supremacist Accelerationism
In his manifesto—The Great Replacement—Tarrant argues that the White identity is steeped in crisis as it confronts existential decline, demographic threats and humiliation of masculinity.[24] Here, the totalising crisis of impending White extinction (grievance) fundamentally informs how Tarrant sees the world: immigration becomes ethnic decline, policy initiatives aimed at gender equality are emasculating and mitigating systemic racial discrimination unjustly displaces a mythic White identity.
Tarrant is not merely presenting piecemeal complaints but constructing an aggrieved subjectivity of Whiteness (the mythic white identity) that has been bullied into meekness. Tarrant complains that civilisational emergency through White extinction is inevitable—and caused by dysfunctional democratic politics.[25] Ostensibly ‘radical’ right-wing alternatives are hardly promising, as he describes France’s National Rally as “a party of milquetoast civic nationalist boomers, completely incapable of creating real change”.[26] Although from the outside these arguments seem absurd, this perspective is common sense to one enclosed inside the Tarrantian sinthome.[27]
While Tarrant articulates how a widespread conspiratorial force actively marginalises Whiteness towards the brink of extinction, the way Tarrant degrades himself—as an exemplar of Whiteness—through autobiography also sheds crucial insight into how the Tarrantian sinthome keeps its grievance raw. Tarrant describes himself as “just an ordinary white man … Born in Australia to a working class, low income family”, who “barely” achieved a passing grade in school.[28] He considers himself ineligible for charismatic leadership as a mere “partisan”, which concretises his self-image as a belittled, degraded White subject without recognisable claims to greatness—as confirmed by the metrics for success imposed by the same force that oppresses Whiteness.[29]
But it is in designating this conspiratorial force as culpable for Tarrant’s and Whiteness’s subjugation that moral responsibility via revolutionary, spectacular violence becomes legible. Through a logic of retribution, Tarrant turns frustration at his own impotence into righteous indignation—which grants him the calling to become an avenger for Whiteness.[30] Thus, violence is not merely necessary to effect political change, it also becomes a moral obligation, as Tarrant’s indignation makes clear: “WHY WON’T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING? WHY DON’T I DO SOMETHING? … Why not me? / If not me, then who?”[31]
Crucially, while the tirade is clearly empowering, Tarrant remains careful to frame himself as the ordinary man who “decided to take a stand to ensure a future for [his] people”—which, in turn, reasserts and reinforces his degradation.[32] The Tarrantian sinthome thus entraps its adherents in a self-sustaining cycle, where degradation justifies domination, but domination requires degradation to properly function. Tarrant, as the representative of a humiliated Whiteness, thus overcomes his powerlessness by imagining himself as the force that can expel enemies, assert dominance and correct historical wrongs.[33]
Importantly, accelerationist violence does not obviously remedy White extinction, although Tarrant posits that redress is the ultimate goal.[34] Tarrant writes that he aims “to create an atmosphere of fear and change in which drastic, powerful and revolutionary action can occur”.[35] But this is also the clearest articulation of his intentions in his manifesto. Nowhere does Tarrant specify what an actual redressal of White extinction should entail. He only ever gestures vaguely at the instrumentality of perpetual violence to this end. Indeed, the absence of ideological commitment and the heavy reliance on nondescript ‘White glory’ motifs and aesthetics imply a libidinal investment in intensifying and sustaining crisis. Tarrant’s political jouissance can only ever end in accelerationist violence—which, in turn, refreshes his grievances, as that violence cannot result in any system that would return Whiteness to any semblance of former glory.
Ultimately, this means that Tarrant’s project is endless. Moreover, grievance resolution would dissolve this particular subjectivity centred around avenging Whiteness. In fact, Tarrant himself seems to recognise this by relating his fantasies about his own impending death as a unique moment of enjoyment. He clearly takes pride in proselytising that one should “prepare for war, prepare for violence and prepare for risk, loss, struggle, death”, before concluding that “the struggle is a beauty in itself”.[36] This is crucial to understanding Tarrant’s motivations: Grievance and struggle are not only to be endured, but pleasure should also be taken in their experience and recurrence.
Japan’s Far Right
Examples from the Japanese far right include the netto-uyoku—an online milieu that espouses ultranationalist, historically revisionist and xenophobic (primarily anti-Korean and anti-Chinese) views, and that is hostile to mainstream media and left parties—and the Zaitokukai, a real-world movement founded by political activist Makoto Sakurai that intended to strip Zainichi (residing in Japan) Koreans of ‘privileges’ without legal or empirical basis.[37] Both formations’ nativist grievances are rooted in nostalgia for an un-humiliated Japan:[38] a parochial notion of a triumphant, imperial Japan that was never defeated, never shamed for its atrocities and never had its history shaped by its enemies. They characterise mainstream historical accounts as jigyaku shikan, or the “masochistic view of history”, reasoning these accounts force Japan to dwell on its past failures and wrongdoings.[39] The far right in Japan, perhaps paradoxically, accuses its enemies of imposing the very logic that organises the movement: compulsory enjoyment of national degradation (humiliation and decline).
The March 2026 Sanae Takaichi-Donald Trump summit encapsulates how this wound is curated rather than suffered:[40] What appears as ordinary partisan tribalism actually betrays a jealous custody of a humiliated Japanese national identity. As netto-uyoku users brigade TV Asahi journalist Morio Chijiiwa for provoking Trump’s notorious Pearl Harbor remark, nobody actually disputes the humiliation or blames Trump.[41] Instead, the rage lands on left-wing media for calling attention to the embarrassment and “even inserting Pearl Harbor attack footage”.[42] Online discourse preserves this wound but eagerly punishes its exhibition. No outcome resolves it either: Sakurai’s electoral defeats prove the system was rigged, while current premier Takaichi remains insufficiently nationalist. Defeat and victory alike feed the grievance.[43]
More tellingly, a coherent harassment architecture against the journalist Chijiiwa crystallises without demagoguery or instigation from community leaders. Strikingly, maintenance of the wound is efficiently outsourced to the collective, even if it is challenging to diagnose individuals as political sadomasochists.
Zaitokukai is dead, but the formation is not.[44] The maintenance apparatus survived its own organisation and suggests the formation was never organisational to begin with. The formation’s modal output is harassment rather than mass-casualty violence; the diagnosis concerns psychic structure, not body count, though incidents like the Utoro arson attack mark its kinetic edge.[45]
Inceldom
The incel identity is constituted in opposition to hegemonic masculinity. In this relationship, the incel is portrayed as the ‘Chad’s’ essential inferior: The latter almost always has what the former lacks. Hence, incel grievance is organised around privation: of sex, intimacy, validation and status. Zimmerman’s account of how incel ideology fuses misogyny and victimhood bears noting because it captures how incels simultaneously frame themselves as oppressed victims and as individuals entitled to dominate the society they hold culpable.[46]
But what defines the incel as a political sadomasochist is not his grievance (remediable in principle), but blackpill culture’s role in making remediation seem utterly impossible. Gheorghe and Clement note that while redpilled communities see self-improvement as a viable recourse to inceldom, blackpill culture adds the fatalistic claim that inceldom is biologically predetermined. For those entrapped within this logic, exit is not only “impossible and futile” but becomes utterly inconceivable, and fantasies about potential futures are dismissed as “copes”.[47] The incel becomes burdened with an esoteric truth about biological determinism that simultaneously asserts and exacerbates his grievance. And while this truth becomes an endless font of misery, incel suffering attains a veneer of profundity that doubles as a perverse source of privilege and enjoyment.
The wound (or grievance) thus generates the incel, who is structured by the belief that biology determines a person’s social and romantic prospects. By viewing their situation as resulting from an unchangeable biological reality, incels feel entitled to moral indignation—a right whose enjoyment becomes all-encompassing and all-defining.
The 2014 Isla Vista attacker Elliot Rodger remains the original symbolic referent for inceldom.[48] Rodger’s manifesto frames his life as one of rejection, humiliation and forced retaliation.[49] Rodger’s text would become a canonical cultural script to make incel anger both legible and justifiable. Vink et al. note that Rodger’s manifesto has been instrumental to informing a subservient femininity that is obligated towards obsequiousness and service.[50] Conversely, men assume masculine-coded privileges. In incels’ formulation, “she will give” and “he will take”, otherwise “she will be punished”.[51] Again, violence emerges here as the compensatory assertion of masculine authority against women who unjustly withhold adoration, sex and status. Here, the sadomasochistic formation lives in the incel community’s metabolisation of Rodger’s manifesto.
Implications for P/CVE
This article’s distillation of political sadomasochism has several implications for P/CVE, particularly in distinguishing between grievance expression and grievance preservation. Grievance expression is ubiquitous and does not necessarily indicate political sadomasochism. Grievance preservation is essential: The actor is less interested in its resolution than in demonstrating its inevitability. As demonstrated, this entails ostensible self-sabotage.
This matters for rehabilitation as it means that outrightly dissolving the stated grievance is insufficient. Rehabilitation should therefore entail intentional identity work. For instance, helping individuals to build alternative forms of recognition, agency and belonging that do not require chronic humiliation.
The same logic applies to counter-messaging. Efforts that rely on ridicule, public humiliation or moral grandstanding risk reproducing the degradation-domination cycle that extremist communities already exploit. A more useful approach would expose the contingency of extremist self-imaging on sustaining grievance. The message should not simply be “your grievance is wrong”, but “this movement teaches you how to process your experiences but requires you to remain wounded, humiliated and bitter”. The critical question is whether the subject genuinely wants liberation from grievance or whether the movement has taught him to mistake repeated injury for authenticity.
Grassroots online forums like r/IncelExit may provide hints for intervention design. r/IncelExit shows how users can reinterpret rejection, develop alternative masculinities and ultimately detach from blackpill fatalism.[52] Gheorghe and Clement identify exit strategies grounded in self-improvement, community involvement, disruption of incel rhetoric and peer support, to argue that exiting inceldom requires identity reorganisation and “ego death”.[53] Crucially, this clarifies that one cannot shed inceldom simply by finding romantic or meaningful relationships with women. Rather, a fundamental reorganisation of how one conceives of gender is essential to successful rehabilitation. But this is no mean feat. As the Lacanian reading illuminates, the grievance has been fundamental to informing incels’ interactions with the world. By abandoning this, incels escape their grievance but also lose the psychic structure that makes their suffering understandable to them.
Conclusion
If extremists were only concerned with grievance expressions, then current interventions would be better matched to the problem, and rehabilitating the contents of extremist desires would see greater success, especially since elaborate interventions are designed precisely for such subjects. However, these programmes see middling successes because they treat libidinally and ideologically invested extremists as homogenous. Intervention programmes should focus on substitution — providing alternative ways to hold a self together — rather than elimination.[54]
Future work should consider expanded treatments of the theoretical apparatus and associated interventions. But while these details exceed the scope of this survey, this article has demonstrated why the political sadomasochist—an extremist who struggles to struggle—must be taken seriously as a distinct actor. Viable alternatives are needed so that the wound need not remain the extremist’s only home.
About the Authors
Donovan Tan is a Research Analyst at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. His research applies continental philosophy to political violence, extremist masculinities and P/CVE. He can be reached at [email protected].
Benjamin Mok is an Associate Research Fellow at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. His research focuses the intersection of technology and security studies, exploring how emergent online subcultures can both influence and be influenced by extremist activity. He can be reached at [email protected].
Thumbnail photo by Tasha-Kostyuk on Unsplash
Citations
[1] Adrian Johnston, “Jacques Lacan,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive, last modified January 16, 2026, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2026/entries/lacan/. Lacan designates investments of this sort as libidinal. Libidinal investments are wholly distinct to ideological investments, but neither are they merely unconscious or reflexive instincts. Ideology is what you think, whereas instinct is what your body does. Libidinal investments describe what our psyches need and how they are organised. This distinction, as argued here, also has implications for P/CVE interventions. Ideological investments can be reasoned with, but reflexes and instincts cannot be helped. Libidinal investments require more holistic interventions at both the subject and the environment levels.
[2] See, for example, Louis Bachaud, Andrew G. Thomas and Macken Murphy, “Incels and Psychotherapy: Experiences, Attitudes, and Resistance to Mental-Health Interventions,” Psychotherapy Research (2025): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2025.2600546. They found from an online discussion on therapy outcomes on incels.is (a well-known incel forum) that 70.8 percent of incels described negative outcomes, against just 7.9 percent reporting satisfaction. Among those compelled into therapy (25.8 percent), none reported positive outcomes.
[3] Ibid. Identity refers to how a subject conceives of himself; subjectivity describes how an individual is specifically organised to experience the world in a particular way. Put differently, identity is a self-portrait that the subject sketches. But subjectivity—which is constitutive—is the glasses one wears while drawing. The glasses colour everything the subject sees. But the subject never sees or becomes aware of the glasses because he is looking through them. The subject does not choose to don them and does not know he has them on. If someone asked, “Why does everything look a bit blue to you?” The subject would reply—as if it were common sense—“It does not, that is just how things are.”
[4] Martha Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 4 (1981): 379, https://doi.org/10.2307/421717.Crenshaw writes that the ends of violence “go beyond damaging an enemy’s material resources. The victims or objects of terrorist attack have little intrinsic value to the terrorist group but represent a larger human audience whose reaction the terrorists seek.”
[5] For example, see Robert Braun and Michael Genkin, “Cultural Resonance and the Diffusion of Suicide Bombings: The Role of Collectivism,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58, no. 7 (2014): 1258–85, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002713498707; Daniel Byman, “Understanding the Islamic State—A Review Essay,” International Security 40, no. 4 (Spring 2016): 145, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_r_00235; Joshua M. Roose and Joana Cook, “Supreme Men, Subjected Women: Gender Inequality and Violence in Jihadist, Far Right and Male Supremacist Ideologies,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 48, no. 5 (2025): 528–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2022.2104681; Marco Nilsson, “Jihad and Heroic Hypermasculinity – Recruitment Strategies, Battlefield Experiences, and Returning Home,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2024):1–18 https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2024.2341446; Kayla Preston, Michael Halpin and Finlay Maguire, “The Black Pill: New Technology and the Male Supremacy of Involuntarily Celibate Men,” Men and Masculinities 24, no. 5 (2021): 823–41, https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X211017954.
[6] Mohamed M. Hafez, “Rationality, Culture, and Structure in the Making of Suicide Bombers: A Preliminary Theoretical Synthesis and Illustrative Case Study,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 29, no. 2 (2006): 166, https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100500496964.
[7] R. W. Connell, “Relations among Masculinities: Hegemony, Subordination, Complicity, Marginalization,” in Masculinities (University of California Press, 2005), 76–81; Nilsson, “Jihad and Heroic Hypermasculinity”; Preston, Halpin and Maguire, “The Black Pill”; Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (Nation Books, 2013).
[8] Roose and Cook, “Supreme Men, Subjected Women.”
[9] Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” 394–5.
[10] Hafez, “Rationality, Culture, and Structure,” 181.
[11] Kimmel, Angry White Men; Roose and Cook, “Supreme Men, Subjected Women,” 528–9.
[12] Casey Ryan Kelly, “Midnight in America: Donald J. Trump and Political Sadomasochism,” in The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Ohio State University Press, 2020), 131–52.
[13] Sadeq Rahimi, “Impossible Justice and the Allure of the Absolute: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Radicalization,” Journal for Deradicalization, no. 42 (Spring 2025): 90, https://journals.sfu.ca/jd/index.php/jd/article/view/1025.
[14] Ibid., 107–10.
[15] Ibid., 93.
[16] Ibid., 93–5.
[17] Kelly, “Midnight in America.”
[18] Ibid., 133–6.
[19] Johnston, “Jacques Lacan.”
[20] Casey Ryan Kelly, “Introduction: The Apocalyptic Male,” in Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Ohio State University Press, 2020), 21–2; Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1996), 191. Evans writes that the sinthome represents “a kernel of enjoyment immune to the efficacy of the symbolic. Far from calling for some analytic ‘dissolution’, the sinthome is what ‘allows one to live’ by providing a unique organization of jouissance [the satisfaction of total reunion with the lost object].”
[21] Kelly, “Midnight in America,” 140–2.
[22] This list is merely provisional and inexhaustive. In identifying a political sadomasochist, look for the remaining elements after identifying one. All core elements must be present for a subject to qualify as a political sadomasochist. The maintenance indicators are suggestive of this archetype but not necessary to it.
[23] The core indicators operationalise Lacan’s concepts of objet petit a, sinthome and jouissance, respectively.
[24] Brenton Tarrant, “The Great Replacement,” self-published manuscript (2019), 87 pages.
[25] Ibid., 4. Tarrant writes that “every day we become fewer in number, we grow older, we grow weaker” and later insists that “in the end we must return to replacement fertility levels, or it will kill us” to frame low fertility rates as an existential crisis.
[26] Ibid., 22.
[27] Although Tarrant’s macabre fantasies of his impending death might read as self-destructive or a desire to exit from his sinthome, it is important to pay attention to how these fantasies actually function to maintain his subjectivity as the righteously indignant White avenger. Tarrant’s fantasy sustains because his anticipated death is exactly what helps to keep the wound raw. This is different from actually dying (or planning to die beforehand), which forecloses Tarrant’s grievance alongside everything else that maintains his subjectivity. The ‘sustain vs exit’ distinction is what defines the boundary of the category rather than splitting it. A self-terminating subject like Elliot Rodger (2014 Isla Vista attacker) does not fit our model’s criteria.
[28] Tarrant, “The Great Replacement,” 6–7.
[29] Ibid., 24.
[30] Max Walden, “New Zealand Mosque Attacks: Who is Brenton Tarrant?” Al Jazeera, March 18, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/18/new-zealand-mosque-attacks-who-is-brenton-tarrant.
[31] Tarrant, “The Great Replacement,” 12.
[32] Ibid., 7.
[33] Tarrant notes that “force is power. History is the history of power. Violence is power and violence is the reality of history.” The compensatory fantasy of dominance is not merely defensive—it is sovereign and punitive. He states that the aim is “to crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on [their] soil.”
[34] Tarrant, “The Great Replacement,” 85.
[35] Ibid., 14 and 77. Tarrant also argues that “stability and comfort are the enemies of revolutionary change,” and that such change can only “arise in the crucible of crisis.”
[36] Ibid., 28 and 86.
[37] Netto-uyoku roughly translates to net right wing, and Zaitokukai denotes the Civic Group Against Privileges of Koreans in Japan. Crucially, the Zaitokukai grievance against Zainichi Koreans has no empirical basis or material referent. As Naoto Higuchi, Japan’s Ultra Right, trans. Teresa Castelvetere (Trans Pacific Press, 2016), argues, not only have Japan’s policies long been nativist, but Koreans have also been something of a “model minority” who have attained their upward social mobility through adroit entrepreneurship, with a minimal reliance on alleged government handouts. It should be noted that while the Zaitokukai is moribund, its adherents and its animating grievances are still readily observable in political discourse. Fragments of Sakurai’s founding nativist discourse are still in online circulation, with endorsement—both explicit and tacit—from netto-uyoku and establishment figures. See also Ryuta Itagaki, “The Anatomy of Korea-Phobia in Japan,” in Visibilities and Invisibilities of Race and Racism: Toward a New Global Dialogue, eds. Yasuko Takezawa, Faye V. Harrison and Akio Tanabe (Routledge, 2025), 41–65.
[38] Higuchi Naoto, “5. The ‘Pro-Establishment’ Radical Right: Japan’s Nativist Movement Reconsidered,” in Civil Society and the State in Democratic East Asia: Between Entanglement and Contention in Post High Growth, eds. David Chiavacci, Simona Grano and Julia Obinger (Amsterdam University Press, 2020); Naoto Higuchi, “The Radical Right in Japan,” in The Oxford Handbook of The Radical Right (Oxford University Press, 2018), 959–79.
[39] Japanese neo-nationalists typically refer to mainstream historical narratives and post-war education regarding 20th-century Japanese militarism and imperialism as jigyaku shikan (自虐史観)—literally “masochistic/self-abasing view of history.”
[40] ICPVTR Internal Report.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Tomohiro Osaki, “Head of Anti-Foreigner Group Zaitokukai to Step Down,” The Japan Times, November 12, 2014, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/11/12/national/head-of-anti-foreigner-group-zaitokukai-to-step-down/.
[45] Takeshiro Tokunaga, “Man Admits Setting Fire in Ethnic Korean Community,” The Asahi Shimbun, May 16, 2022, https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14622390.
[46] Shannon Zimmerman, “The Ideology of Incels: Misogyny and Victimhood as Justification for Political Violence,” Terrorism and Political Violence 36, no. 2: 166–79.
[47] Ruxandra Mihaela Georghe and David Yuzva Clement, “‘It’s Time to Put the Copes Down and Get to Work’: A Qualitative Study of Incel Exit Strategies on r/IncelExit,” Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 17, no. 4 (2025): 1–21.
[48] It should be noted, however, that Rodger himself is not a political sadomasochist. Rodger’s murder-suicide does not intend to sustain his grievance but represents an exit from it.
[49] Elliot Rodger, “My Twisted World,” self-published manuscript (2014), relates that all he wanted was to “fit in and live a happy life,” but was ultimately “cast out and rejected,” and made to endure “loneliness and insignificance” because women refused to recognise his value.
[50] Dominique Vink et al., “’Because They Are Women in a Man’s World’: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Incel Violent Extremists and the Stories They Tell,” Terrorism and Political Violence 36, no. 6 (2024): 723–39.
[51] Rodger, “My Twisted World,” 135.
[52] Georghe and Clement, “‘It’s Time to Put the Copes Down and Get to Work’.”
[53] Ibid.
[54] Current interventions work on desire—remedying the lack experience as nostalgia for the objet petit a—but leave drive untouched. The political sadomasochist is a problem of routing drive; desire can be redirected but the subject will enjoy regardless. The question is how to alter enjoyment rather than its contents.
