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CC BY 4.0

A contribution to: Scrutinizing Beauty

Edited by Eleanor Dobson and Daisy Gudmunsen

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 12

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  Serious crime is often aestheticized on television through the female (or feminized) body of the victim. Forced to reveal themselves as objects for interrogation, dissection, and examination, these bodies are presented for our consumption. Here, I ask whether such consumed objects can be classed as beautiful in a Kantian sense by turning to a particular case of what I call psychopath aesthetics: those of the notorious fictional cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, in Hannibal on NBC (2013–15). Hannibal’s central anthropophagy compounds the synaesthetic association between beautiful murders and delicious deaths, aesthetics and taste. Whilst the horrific and taboo nature of Hannibal’s crimes might seem to preclude any Kantian approach to beauty, I explore how his acting out of his psychopath morality in accordance with a psychopath aesthetics is grounded in Kantian hope and judgments of taste.

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