On
Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou
Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen
Cabinet Magazine
In philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, evil is
back. The question of evil is, of course, an old and
venerable one in Western philosophy, having fascinated
philosophers from Socrates and Augustine through Leibniz
and Kant. For much of this history, "the question of
evil" was a theological one, namely: If God is
beneficent and omnipotent, why does he allow there to be
such evil in the world? After Kant, philosophy largely
severed its ties with theology, and, with that, the
question of evil receded. Evil seemed no longer to be a
question for philosophy, but instead became a question
for psychiatry, sociology, and biology. Yet, in the past
few years, a loosely connected group of philosophers and
theorists, influenced by the work of Immanuel Kant and
Jacques Lacan, has returned to the question of evil.
Opening this section are interviews with two key figures
in this reexamination of the place of evil in
contemporary societies.
In 1993, the philosopher Alain Badiou published Ethics:
An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, an
analysis, critique, and reformulation of the discourse of
evil in contemporary thought. Rejecting both the
theological and the scientific (psychological,
sociological, etc.) interpretations of evil. he locates
good and evil in the very structure of human
subjectivity, agency, and freedom.
The editorial group of Cabinet first began
planning this issue in the spring of 2001. We found
ourselves repeatedly returning to the initial terms of
our thememore than one editorial meeting was
dominated by discussions of its slipperiness and
complexity, by long and sometimes contentious debates
over definition and scope. Something that was of interest
to us was that the proliferation of images of evil in
contemporary popular culture in fact seemed to go hand in
hand with a fundamental inability to confront the
question of evil within its religious, philosophical, and
metaphysical contexts. It seemed, as one writer has put,
that Satan had died. Although the content of this issue
is effectively the same one we planned almost 9 months
ago, there can be no doubt, however, that the events of
11 September have changed the frame of reference around
it. In August, the word evil was likely to draw a smile
or even laughter. That is no longer true as we write this
in November. On the other hand, it seems that the
incessant rhetorical appeal to the word evil since
September 11 has in no way made the possibility of real
debate about the concept any more likely.
The interview with Alain Badiou was conducted via email
in July-August 2001. Alain Badiou asked to add the final
paragraphs of his interview after the events of 11
September. A small number of other authors also asked and
were allowed to make slight amendments to pieces they had
already submitted.
You argue that in our philosophical and political
discourses today, evil is "self-evident," and
that both this "self-evidence" and this
conception of "evil" are problematic. What is
"our consensual representation of evil" and
what is wrong with it?
The idea of the self-evidence of Evil is not, in our
society, very old. It dates, in my opinion, from the end
of the 1960s, when the big political movement of the 60s
was finished. We then entered into a reactive period, a
period that I call the Restoration. You know that, in
France, "Restoration" refers to the period of
the return of the King, in 1815, after the Revolution and
Napoleon. We are in such a period. Today we see liberal
capitalism and its political system, parlimentarianism,
as the only natural and acceptable solutions. Every
revolutionary idea is considered utopian and ultimately
criminal. We are made to believe that the global spread
of capitalism and what gets called "democracy"
is the dream of all humanity. And also that the whole
world wants the authority of the American Empire, and its
military police, NATO.
In truth, our leaders and propagandists know very well
that liberal capitalism is an inegalitarian regime,
unjust, and unacceptable for the vast majority of
humanity. And they know too that our
"democracy" is an illusion: Where is the power
of the people? Where is the political power for third
world peasants, the European working class, the poor
everywhere? We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of
affairs, profoundly inegalitarianwhere all
existence is evaluated in terms of money aloneis
presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism,
the partisans of the established order cannot really call
it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to
say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may
not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're
lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our
democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody
dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not
criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die
of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist
declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our
airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes
like they do in Rwanda, etc.
That's why the idea of Evil has become essential. No
intellectual will actually defend the brutal power of
money and the accompanying political disdain for the
disenfranchised, or for manual laborers, but many agree
to say that real Evil is elsewhere. Who indeed today
would defend the Stalinist terror, the African genocides,
the Latin American torturers? Nobody. It's there that the
consensus concerning Evil is decisive. Under the pretext
of not accepting Evil, we end up making believe that we
have, if not the Good, at least the best possible state
of affairseven if this best is not so great. The
refrain of "human rights" is nothing other than
the ideology of modern liberal capitalism: We won't
massacre you, we won't torture you in caves, so keep
quiet and worship the golden calf. As for those who don't
want to worship it, or who don't believe in our
superiority, there's always the American army and its
European minions to make them be quiet.
Note that even Churchill said that democracy (that is to
say the regime of liberal capitalism) was not at all the
best of political regimes, but rather the least bad.
Philosophy has always been critical of commonly held
opinions and of what seems obvious. Accept what you've
got because all the rest belongs to Evil is an obvious
idea, which should therefore be immediately examined and
critiqued. My personal position is the following: It is
necessary to examine, in a detailed way, the contemporary
theory of Evil, the ideology of human rights, the concept
of democracy. It is necessary to show that nothing there
leads in the direction of the real emancipation of
humanity. It is necessary to reconstruct rights, in
everyday life as in politics, of Truth and of the Good.
Our ability to once again have real ideas and real
projects depends on it.
You say that, for liberal capitalism, evil is always
elsewhere, the dreaded other, something that liberal
capitalism believes it has thankfully banished and kept
at bay. Yet isn't there also, in the contemporary
imagination, a powerful idea of internal (social,
psychological, domestic) evil? For decades, popular films
and novels have been obsessed with the idea of evil
lurking within (in the mind, in the house, in the
neighborhood). The Timothy McVeigh affair in the US seems
to have renewed political worries about "the evil
within" (within each one of us, within the heart of
the US). Just over a month ago, Andrea Yates, a Texas
mother, systematically drowned her five children,
prompting a national discussion about whether or not we
are all capable of such evil. Philosophically, the new
interest in Kant's conception of "radical evil"
(and its Lacanian reinterpretation) would seem to fall in
line with this idea of internal (rather than external,
political) evil. Indeed, throughout most of the history
of the West, it would seem that evil has been conceived
as "internal," as something that morally haunts
each one of us. So, my questions: In addition to the
notion of "external" evil you propose, do you
also recognize this notion of "internal" evil?
Is this idea perennial, or does it tell us something
peculiar about our historical moment? Do you see these
two notions of evil (external and internal) as connected
with one another in any way?
There is no contradiction between the affirmation that
liberal capitalism and democracy are the Good and the
affirmation that Evil is a permanent possibility for any
individual. The second thesis (Evil inside of each of us)
is simply the moral and religious complement to the first
thesis, which is political (parliamentary capitalism as
the Good). There is even a "logical" connection
between the two affirmations, as follows:
1. History shows that democratic liberal capitalism is
the only economic, political, and social regime that is
truly humane, that truly conforms to the Good of
humanity.
2. Every other political regime is a monstrous and bloody
dictatorship, completely irrational.
3. The proof of this fact is that political regimes that
have fought against liberalism and democracy all share
the same face of Evil. Thus, Fascism and Communism, which
appeared to be opposites, were actually very similar.
They were both of the "totalitarian" family,
which is the opposite of the democratic-capitalism
family.
4. These monstrous regimes cannot produce a rational
project, an idea of justice or something of that sort.
Those who have led these regimes (Fascist or Communist)
were necessarily pathological cases: One needs to study
Hitler or Stalin with the tool of criminal psychology. As
for those who have supported them, and there were
thousands of them, they were alienated by the
totalitarian mystique. They were finally directed by evil
and destructive passions.
5. If thousands of people were able to participate in
such ridiculous and criminal undertakings, it is
obviously because the possibility of being fascinated by
Evil exists in each of us. This possibility will be
called "hatred of the Other." The conclusion
will be, first, that we must support liberal democracy
everywhere, and, second, that we must teach our children
the ethical imperative of the love of the Other.
My position is obviously that this "reasoning"
is purely illusory ideology. First, liberal capitalism is
not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it
is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. Second,
the Communist revolutions of the 20th century have
represented grandiose efforts to create a completely
different historical and political universe. Politics is
not the management of the power of the State. Politics is
first the invention and the exercise of an absolutely new
and concrete reality. Politics is the creation of
thought. The Lenin who wrote What is to be Done?,
the Trotsky who wrote History of the Russian
Revolution, and the Mao Zedong who wrote On
the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
are intellectual geniuses, comparable to Freud or
Einstein. Certainly, the politics of emancipation, or
egalitarian politics, have not, thus far, been able to
resolve the problem of the power of the State. They have
exercised a terror that is finally useless. But that
should encourage us to pick up the question where they
left it off, rather than to rally to the capitalist,
imperialist enemy. Third, the category
"totalitarianism" is intellectually very weak.
There is, on the side of Communism, a universal desire
for emancipation, while on the side of Fascism, there is
a national and racial desire. These are two radically
opposed projects. The war between the two has indeed been
the war between the idea of a universal politics and the
idea of racial domination. Fourth, the use of terror in
revolutionary circumstances or civil war does not at all
mean that the leaders and militants are insane, or that
they express the possibility of internal Evil. Terror is
a political tool that has been in use as long as human
societies have existed. It should therefore be judged as
a political tool, and not submitted to infantilizing
moral judgment. It should be added that there are
different types of terror. Our liberal countries know how
to use it perfectly. The colossal American army exerts
terrorist blackmail on a global scale, and prisons and
executions exert an interior blackmail no less violent.
Fifth, the only coherent theory of the subject (mine, I
might add, in jest!) does not recognize in it any
particular disposition toward Evil. Even Freud's death
drive is not particularly tied to Evil. The death drive
is a necessary component of sublimation and creation,
just as it is of murder and suicide. As for the love of
the Other, or, worse, the "recognition of the
Other," these are nothing but Christian confections.
There is never "the Other" as such. There are
projects of thought, or of actions, on the basis of which
we distinguish between those who are friends, those who
are enemies, and those who can be considered neutral. The
question of knowing how to treat enemies or neutrals
depends entirely on the project concerned, the thought
that constitutes it, and the concrete circumstances (is
the project in an escalating phase? is it very dangerous?
etc.).
Given what you have said, one might expect you to turn
the tables, to assert that, contrary to the prevailing
view, liberal capitalism is itself "evil." But
you don't do that. Instead, you offer an alternative
theory of evil.
Were I to reverse the tables, as you suggest, I would
leave everything in place. To say that liberal capitalism
is Evil would not change anything. I would still be
subordinating politics to humanistic and Christian
morality: I would say: "Let's fight against
Evil." But I've had enough of "fighting
against," of "deconstructing," of
"surpassing," of "putting an end to,"
etc. My philosophy desires affirmation. I want to fight
for; I want to know what I have for the Good and to put
it to work. I refuse to be content with the "least
evil." It is very fashionable right now to be
modest, not to think big. Grandeur is considered a
metaphysical evil. Me, I am for grandeur, I am for
heroism. I am for the affirmation of the thought and the
deed.
Certainly, it is necessary to propose another theory of
Evil. But that is to say, essentially, another theory of
the Good. Evil would be to compromise on the question of
the Good. To give up is always Evil. To renounce
liberation politics, renounce a passionate love, renounce
an artistic creation
. Evil is the moment when I
lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.
The real question underlying the question of Evil is the
following: What is the Good? All my philosophy strives to
answer this question. For complex reasons, I give the
Good the name "Truths" (in the plural). A Truth
is a concrete process that starts by an upheaval (an
encounter, a general revolt, a surprising new invention),
and develops as fidelity to the novelty thus
experimented. A Truth is the subjective development of
that which is at once both new and universal. New: that
which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal:
that which can interest, rightly, every human individual,
according to his pure humanity (which I call his generic
humanity). To become a subject (and not remain a simple
human animal), is to participate in the coming into being
of a universal novelty. That requires effort, endurance,
sometimes self-denial. I often say it's necessary to be
the "activist" of a Truth. There is Evil each
time egoism leads to the renunciation of a Truth. Then,
one is de-subjectivized. Egoistic self-interest carries
one away, risking the interruption of the whole progress
of a truth (and thus of the Good).
One can, then, define Evil in one phrase: Evil is the
interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or
individual interests. Even the case that you cite
abovethe woman who drowns her five
infantssprings from this vision of things. The
debate you raise is absurd: Obviously, everyone is
"capable" of everything. One has seen
everywhere good people becoming torturers, or peaceful
citizens brutalizing people over insignificant things.
This consideration is of no interest. It only reminds us
that the human species is an animal species, governed by
the lowest interests, of which moreover capitalist profit
is merely the legal formalization. All that is short of
Good and Evil, it is nothing more than the rule of
impulses. The question of Evil starts when one can say
what Good one is talking about. I am convinced that the
murder of five children is actually tied to a brutal
renunciation of the Good, in the form of a love process.
In any case, that's the only case in which it makes any
sense to speak of Evil. The myth that one thinks of is
Medea. She also kills her children. And it's not Evil, in
the tragic sense of the term, because this murder is
entirely dependent on her love for Jason.
In your view, then, is the realm of the human animal
simply beneath good and evil (such that acts of torture,
for example, are not properly "evil")? Does one
not have a moral obligation to become a subject (instead
of remaining a human animal)? And, thus, is one's failure
to become a subject not a moral failure?
The question actually combines two common conceptions of
morality (and thus of the distinction between Good and
Evil): the "natural" conception, derived from
Rousseau, and the "formal" conception, derived
from Kant:
1. There is a "natural" morality, things that
are obviously bad in the opinion of any human
consciousness. Accordingly, Evil exists for the human
animal. The example given is that of torture.
2. There is a "formal" morality, a universal
obligation that is above any particular situation. And
therefore there is a universal Evil, which, too, is
independent of circumstances. The example given is that
of the obligation to become a subject, to place oneself
above the basic human animalism. It is bad to refuse to
become a fully human subject, no matter what might be the
particular terms of this becoming.
I must, of course, specify that I am absolutely opposed
to these two conceptions. I maintain that the natural
state of the human animal has nothing to do with Good or
Evil. And I maintain that the kind of formal moral
obligation described in Kant's categorical imperative
does not actually exist. Take the example of torture. In
a civilization as sophisticated as the Roman Empire, not
only is torture not considered an Evil, it is actually
appreciated as a spectacle. In arenas, people are
devoured by tigers; they are burned alive; the audience
rejoices to see combatants cut each other's throats. How,
then, could we think that torture is Evil for every human
animal? Aren't we the same animal as Sencea or Marcus
Aurelius? I should add that the armed forces of my
country, France, with the approval of the governments of
the era and the majority of public opinion, tortured all
the prisoners during the Algerian War. The refusal of
torture is a historical and cultural phenomenon, not at
all a natural one. In a general way, the human animal
knows cruelty as well as it knows pity; the one is just
as natural as the other, and neither one has anything to
do with Good or Evil. One knows of crucial situations
where cruelty is necessary and useful, and of other
situations where pity is nothing but a form of contempt
for others. You won't find anything in the structure of
the human animal on which to base the concept of Evil,
nor, moreover, that of the Good.
But the formal solution isn't any better. Indeed, the
obligation to be a subject doesn't have any meaning, for
the following reason: The possibility of becoming a
subject does not depend on us, but on that which occurs
in circumstances that are always singular. The
distinction between Good and Evil already supposes a
subject, and thus can't apply to it. It's always for a
subject, not a pre-subjectivized human animal, that Evil
is possible. For example, if, during the occupation of
France by the Nazis, I join the Resistance, I become a
subject of History in the making. From the inside of this
subjectivization, I can tell what is Evil (to betray my
comrades, to collaborate with the Nazis, etc.). I can
also decide what is Good outside of the habitual norms.
Thus the writer Marguerite Duras has recounted how, for
reasons tied to the resistance to the Nazis, she
participated in acts of torture against traitors. The
whole distinction between Good and Evil arises from
inside a becoming-subject, and varies with this becoming
(which I myself call philosophy, the becoming of a
Truth). To summarize: There is no natural definition of
Evil; Evil is always that which, in a particular
situation, tends to weaken or destroy a subject. And the
conception of Evil is thus entirely dependent on the
events from which a subject constitutes itself. It is the
subject who prescribes what Evil is, not a natural idea
of Evil that defines what a "moral" subject is.
There is also no formal imperative from which to define
Evil, even negatively. In fact, all imperatives presume
that the subject of the imperative is already
constituted, and in specific circumstances. And thus
there can be no imperative to become a subject, except as
an absolutely vacuous statement. That is also why there
is no general form of Evil, because Evil does not exist
except as a judgment made, by a subject, on a situation,
and on the consequences of his own actions in this
situation. So the same act (to kill, for example) may be
Evil in a certain subjective context, and a necessity of
the Good in another.
I must particularly insist that the formula "respect
for the Other" has nothing to do with any serious
definition of Good and Evil. What does "respect for
the Other" mean when one is at war against an enemy,
when one is brutally left by a woman for someone else,
when one must judge the works of a mediocre
"artist," when science is faced with
obscurantist sects, etc.? Very often, it is the
"respect for Others" that is injurious, that is
Evil. Especially when it is resistance against others, or
even hatred of others, that drives a subjectively just
action. And it's always in these kinds of circumstances
(violent conflicts, brutal changes, passionate loves,
artistic creations) that the question of Evil can be
truly asked for a subject. Evil does not exist either as
nature or as law. It exists, and varies, in the singular
becoming of the True.
In response to an earlier question, you remarked that
"[i]t is necessary to reconstruct rights, in
everyday life as in politics, of Truth and of the
Good." Can you say more about how the ethic of
truths might get mobilized in practical terms, and how
this might constitute an alternative to the current
conception of "human rights"?
Take the nearest example: the terrible criminal attack in
New York in September, with its thousands of casualties.
If you reason in terms of the morality of human rights,
you say, with President Bush: "These are terrorist
criminals. This is a struggle of Good against Evil."
But are Bush's policies, in Palestine or Iraq for
example, really Good? And, in saying that these people
are Evil, or that they don't respect human rights, do we
understand anything about the mindset of those who killed
themselves with their bombs? Isn't there a lot of despair
and violence in the world caused by the fact that the
politics of Western powers, and of the American
government in particular, are utterly destitute of
ingenuity and value? In the face of crimes, terrible
crimes, we should think and act according to concrete
political Truths, rather than be guided by the
stereotypes of any sort of morality. The whole world
understands that the real question is the following: Why
do the politics of the Western powers, of NATO, of Europe
and the USA, appear completely unjust to two out of three
inhabitants of the planet? Why are five thousand American
deaths considered a cause for war, while five hundred
thousand dead in Rwanda and a projected ten million dead
from AIDS in Africa do not, in our opinion, merit
outrage? Why is the bombardment of civilians in the US
Evil, while the bombardment of Baghdad or Belgrade today,
or that of Hanoi or Panama in the past, is Good? The
ethic of Truths that I propose proceeds from concrete
situations, rather than from an abstract right, or a
spectacular Evil. The whole world understands these
situations, and the whole world can act in a
disinterested fashion prompted by the injustice of these
situations. Evil in politics is easy to see: It's
absolute inequality with respect to life, wealth, power. Good is
equality. How long can we accept the fact that what is
needed for running water, schools, hospitals, and food
enough for all humanity is a sum that corresponds to the
amount spent by wealthy Western countries on perfume in a
year? This is not a question of human rights and
morality. It is a question of the fundamental battle for
equality of all people, against the law of profit,
whether personal or national.
In the same way, the Good in artistic action is the
invention of new forms that convey the meaning of the
world. The Good in science is the audacity of free
thought, the joy of exact knowledge. Likewise, the Good
in love is the understanding of what difference really
is, of what it is to construct a world when one is two,
and not one. And Evil, then, is academic rehearsals or
"cultural" commerce; it is knowledge in the
service of capitalist profit; it is sexuality considered
as merely a technique of pleasure [jouissance].
I'll repeat it: All the world shares these experiences.
The ethics of Truth always returns, in precise
circumstances, to fighting for the True against the four
fundamentals forms of Evil: obscurantism, commercial
academicism, the politics of profit and inequality, and
sexual barbarism.
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