Crimes of passion require no theoretical justification because passion extinguishes reason

Evidence

Heathcliff had no makings of a theorist: he did not theorize, nor did he need a theory. He loved Cathy, he wanted Cathy, and that was the only reason he needed in order to kill - that is, if reason he needed. Murder, were Heathcliff to commit it, would have been a crime of passion, and acting out of passion means putting reason to sleep; passion is, by definition, the unreason. When we speak of passion, we also speak of the nonbeing of reason. Passion and reason are at loggerheads: one wilts and fades in the face of the other. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 375

Categorization

• XREF: The passion-reason binary has a direct echo in the earlier library material on Victorian gendering of noise/silence and emotion as unreason; also resonates with Heathcliff as a figure of untamed passion in the Western canon. — connects to: Passion and divine signs provide no excuse for human actions. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 13; Horkheimer grounded ethics in desire as a fact needing no justification — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1464