暗之此物：论恶和人类的邪恶

This Thing of Darkness

Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

At the Interface

Dr Robert Fisher

Series Editor

Advisory Board Dr Margaret Sönser Breen Dr Diana Medlicott Professor Margaret Chatterjee Revd Stephen Morris Dr Salwa Ghaly Professor John Parry Professor Michael Goodman Dr David Seth Preston Professor Asa Kasher Professor Bernie Warren Mr Christopher Macallister Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 7

A volume in the At the Interface project ‘Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness’

Probing the Boundaries

This Thing of Darkness Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

Edited by

Richard Paul Hamilton

And

Margaret Sönser Breen

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation – Paper of documents – Requirements for performance”.

ISBN: 90-420-1138-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2004 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Editorial Foreword Rob Fisher ix Preface Richard Paul Hamilton xi Acknowledgements xviii ONE Twentieth-Century Vampire Literature:

Intimations of Evil and Power Katri Lehtinen 1

TWO Evil Encounters with “Others”

in Tayeb Salih and Toni Morrison The Case of Mustafa Saeed and Sula Peace Salwa Ghaly 21

THREE A Visual Theology of Evil and Redemption? Watts’s Eve Trilogy and Burne-Jones’s Altarpiece of The Nativity Kathy M. Bullough 37

FOUR Or Image of that Horror? Imagining Radical Evil David H. Fisher 51

FIVE Hier ist kein Warum?

Evil at the Limits of Understanding Richard Paul Hamilton 69 SIX Condemned to Artifice and Prevented

from Being a Pirate: How Prisoners Convicted of Terrible Crimes Recognize Themselves in Discourse Diana Medlicott 77

SEVEN The Apostasy of the Baptized:

Christians and the Holocaust Deirdre Burke 93

Religious Duties? Sandeep Singh Chohan 103

NINE Wandering the Heath:

Niebuhr and the Need for Realism Rob Fisher 115

TEN Prohibition and Transgression – Georges Bataille and the Possibility of Affirming Evil Jones Irwin 131 Contributors 147 Index 151

EIGHT The Exorcist: Personification of Human Wickedness or Upholder of

List of Illustrations Figure 1: George Frederick Watts, She Shall be Called Woman (c. 1875–1892).

Oil on canvas, 2578 x 1168 mm. Tate, London 2000. Figure 2: George Frederick Watts, Eve Tempted (exhibited 1884).

Oil on canvas, 2578 x 1168 mm. Tate, London 2000. Figure 3: George Frederick Watts, Eve Repentant (c. 1865–1897).

Oil on canvas, 2591 x 1194 mm. Tate, London 2000.

Figure 4: Edward Burne-Jones The Nativity, centre panel, (1862–1863). Gouache, 22 1/2 x 20 in. A Private Collection.

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Editorial Foreword

This Thing of Darkness wrestles with a complex problem that lies at the heart of the At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries series. The problem is centred on persons. Although we are persons, we do not know what it is to be one. Persons have become their own mystery – to themselves and in relation to other persons. The problem unfolds at the heart of the mystery; persons are capable of exquisite artistry, profound literature refined civility, and selflessness. Yet persons are also capable of insensitivity, spite, brutality, and genocide.

Our propensity for both forms of behaviour may not be accidental. Dostoyevsky’s rueful observation that not even the animals “can be so cruel as a man, so ingeniously, so artistically cruel,” indicates the peculiarity of the problem which we confront when dealing with persons. A tiger or a cat will chase its prey, tear and gnaw at it, sometimes play with it, and finally consume it. That is what tigers and cats do. They would not machete a victim’s limb to serve as a warning to the rest of their group, or stub out a cigarette on a five-year-old child who wet the bed, or explode a nail bomb in a busy pub because they did not like the “type” of person who associated with it. The same artistic refinement which persons bring to their cultural and social achievements also bring them to their destructive, violent and pernicious moments.

So varied is the nature of our evil and so apparently deep seated that the shadow it casts over our identity and relationships is broad and far reaching. The chapters in this volume are attempts to grapple with this thing of darkness lying somewhere at the heart of persons. The intention behind the chapters is deliberately multi-perspectival. The term “evil” is riddled with ambiguity, the phenomenon as manifested in persons is perplexing. No one “solution” can be forthcoming; no one discipline or area of thinking will be capable of supplying a definitive “answer.” Instead, we need to build a multi-layered picture of the “evils” that persons do in an attempt to weave together the insights and perspectives that all the areas of human thinking can supply.

Even then, we will only be beginning the study. The project is ambitious, but undeniably worth the undertaking. So long as we are alive and live with each other, the problems of being persons will continue to merit vigilance and close scrutiny. The chapters that follow are the beginnings of the conversation. You, the reader, are invited to join the dialogue and discover the heart of personhood.

Rob Fisher

Wickedness.Net


Preface

This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine

At the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero appears on

stage having vanquished all the forces ranged against him. Alongside him are the conspirators, who originally expelled him from the Duchy of Milan and who have vainly plotted to take power on the island. Also on stage are the so-called mock conspirators, Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban. Prospero reveals his true identity. In doing so he accepts his responsibility for Caliban with the phrase, “this thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.” We have taken part of this line as the title of this, the first book in the series Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness. For us, the relationship between Prospero and Caliban captures much about the relationship between humanity and evil.

The initial similarities are self-evident: evil is experienced as a paradox. It is something alien and something familiar. Further reflection reveals deeper parallels. Prospero is only able to acknowledge Caliban once he has humiliated him and reduced him to ridicule. It is as if Prospero can only recognize his own culpability for evil when he has conquered it. The only evil Prospero is able to acknowledge is an emaciated and unthreatening version.

Caliban is an ambiguous figure. When played for pantomime, as in the 2000 Globe production, we lose much of his essential pathos; we lose also the force of his rebellion. After all, it is never clear who is the true face of evil in the play. Is it the ugly and deformed Caliban representing the elemental forces of untamed nature? Or is it the far more attractive Prospero who uses his intellectual powers to exploit and manipulate nature and those around him? In an age less optimistic about the power of reason and science over nature, we are correspondingly ambivalent toward Prospero.

If we regard the evil-doer as a monstrous brute, someone who acts under the imperative of forces he can neither control nor understand, we are likely to see Caliban as evil. However, if we see the evil-doer as a man or woman possessed of many intellectual gifts and fully in control of the situation, we are more likely to regard Prospero as truly evil. After all, Caliban only becomes evil in the context of civilization. In n a paean to his former innocence he spits at Prospero:

You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is that I know how to curse; the red plague on you, For learning me your language! (The Tempest 1.2.365-267)

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xii

Only with the arrival of language and the possibility of distinctions do we have the possibility of good and evil. It is no coincidence that Prometheus and other Lucifer equivalents in ancient societies bring with them both fire and the gift of language.

What then of the conspirators? Of all the characters in the play, few of them have done any actual harm. Even the wicked Sebastian, who originally cast Prospero and his infant daughter out of Milan, has inadvertently done good in allowing Prospero to discover himself. The power of Shakespeare’s play derives from his acknowledgement of the sheer complexity of evil. The villains in The Tempest are not caricatures. They represent the full range of human responses to evil. They are by turns complicit, acquiescent, resigned, and defiant. The complexities of The Tempest are those that face any writer who attempts to confront evil. This is one more reason why the play is such an appropriate motif for this volume.

Several of the contributors raise the issue of how to represent evil and whether indeed we should. The book opens with Katri Lehtinen’s article about vampires. It might at first seem that vampires, those stock figures of cheap movies and trashy novels, have no place in a serious discussion of evil. Lehtinen’s article quickly shows this not to be the case. As she ably demonstrates, the changing ways in which vampires have been represented throughout the last two centuries reflect the various ways human beings have responded to and conceptualized evil. Moreover, in the hands of feminist, Queer, and colored writers, the figure of the vampire has come to represent all those groups marginalized and feared by mainstream society. At the end of the chapter, we are left with the disturbing prospect that the difference between vampires and ourselves may not be as straightforward as we might believe.

Salwa Ghaly takes up the theme of marginality in her analysis of the treatment of evil by Toni Morrison and the Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih. Ghaly’s piece is a sustained meditation on the question of definition. Throughout the article, the question emerges of who has the right to say that someone is evil. Like Caliban the characters in Morrison and Salih’s stories are designated as evil from the outside. It is precisely their refusal to conform to the values of a society that oppresses them that places them in this category.

Marginality and representation are two themes that re-occur in Kathy M. Bullough’s discussion of the work of the pre-Raphaelite painters George Frederick Watts and Edward Burne-Jones In the Eve trilogy, and the altarpiece of The Nativity, the painters reflect upon the ways in which women have been associated with the extremes of good and evil through the figures of Eve and Mary respectively. Bullough’s feminist reading of these works highlights the ambivalence and misogyny underpinning these

Preface xiii

representations and again raises the problem of definition from the outside.

No group of people has better understood the force of definitions than the Jews of Europe, and no book devoted to understanding human wickedness could overlook the Holocaust. The next chapter in our collection, by David H. Fisher, discusses the problem of representing this great evil. The chapter compares the works of the poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, particularly his Shulamite/Margarete series, and the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, which were inspired by Celan’s poetry. Fisher’s conclusion is that given the inadequacy of philosophical ethics in the face of radical evil, perhaps only art provides the necessary space for the ethical.

The Holocaust exposes the weakness of traditional philosophic ethics. It also reveals a weakness at the heart of the Christian tradition. The tacit collaboration of many German Christians, clerics or lay, is a black stain on the history of the twentieth-century Church. Deirdre Burke’s chapter analyzes some of the root causes of that complicity. The weakness of the response from the German churches and their sometime collaboration with the Final Solution was a key factor in the process of transforming “ordinary men” into racist murderers. She argues that a central element was the “teaching of contempt,” the anti-Semitic doctrine that held the Jews culpable for the murder of Christ and encouraged Christians to ostracize and persecute Jews as a consequence.

My chapter continues this treatment of the Holocaust but moves the focus from the victims to the perpetrators. I am concerned with the question of why academic treatments of evil seem unconvincing when contrasted with great works of literature. I compare the work of the Czech Holocaust survivor, Jiři Weil with some of the attempts to analyze Hitler’s evil discussed in Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler. I suggest that one explanation for the weakness of many academic approaches to evil is an insensitivity to our everyday moral grammar. The category of evil-doer functions to characterize someone as a person whose reasons no longer count as mitigations. Our difficulty in understanding the evil-doer stems from an unwillingness to extend a particular type of understanding to them.

Diana Medlicott’s chapter involves understanding the evil-doer in precisely these terms. Her interviews with men convicted of serious crimes are conducted within the framework of the interpretative or Verstehen tradition in the social sciences. The chapter provides an insight into the problems of conducting such research, and suggests the need to understand the reasons these men offer. She locates their narratives in the framework of the discourse analysis pioneered by the French writer Michel Foucault. What these men are all reacting against, she argues, is

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xiv

their constitution as subjects by dominant legal and psychiatric discourses. The image of the pirate is a powerful one here for it offers one method of subverting the image of the criminal offered by mainstream society in its attempt to marginalize these men. The pirate cuts a figure that is both dashing and threatening depending upon our perspective, and as such, captures the sheer ambivalence of evil.

The ambiguity of evil is also a theme that occupies Sandeep Singh Chohan in his discussion of the role of the exorcist in the North Indian religious traditions. The answer to the question of whether the exorcist upholds religious duties or personifies human wickedness can only be addressed in relation to the kind of magic he performs and the wishes of the supplicant. This is connected with a pervasive dualism in the Hindu tradition between good and bad magic. As with Lehtinen’s vampires, the exorcist can be a force for good or a force for evil depending upon the objective and context of his acts.

The figure of Prospero with which we began illustrates the ways in which human beings can respond to evil. We can acquiesce or we can resist. We can condemn or we can attempt to understand. We can stare evil in the face or we can evade it. Rob Fisher’s chapter, which began life as the annual Niebuhr lecture given at Elmhurst College, Chicago, addresses one response from within theology. Reinhold Niebuhr counsels “realism” as the appropriate response to great evil. Realism is often taken to be tantamount to surrender. This is far from the meaning Niebuhr intends. Instead he calls upon us to reject futile protest which often serves to make us feel better rather than helping the victim. He asks us to recognize the limitations imposed on us by our circumstances and to work out the best available means of opposing evil. In effect, we are to follow Prospero when he says:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own. (The Tempest, Epilogue) Jones Irwin’s chapter closes the book with an apparently

dissonant voice. Irwin’s concern is with the possibility of affirming evil in the ways suggested by Georges Bataille. Evil must be recognized as something human rather than something to be overcome. That is, evil partly constitutes what it is to be human and thus cannot be regarded as alien. Irwin’s reading of Bataille challenges the prevailing interpretation of his work as Nietzschean and anti-Christian and paradoxically locates him closer to Augustine than to Nietzsche. Augustine and Bataille share the idea that evil is not something outside the human being, but integral to him or her. An interesting parallel emerges with Singh Chohan’s chapter here, in that the Augustinian response to evil is formulated in opposition to Manicheanism a dualistic view of the universe.

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At the time of going to press, the twin towers of the World Trade Center lie in ruins. Thousands are missing, feared dead. The dogs of war are about to be let loose with untold human cost. The enemy has a name that uncannily parallels our central motif. Like Shakespeare’s character, the Taliban have come to represent all that is different and to be feared. Yet, like Caliban, these monsters are of our own creation. While they did the West’s bidding and fought against the “evil empire,” the Western powers were prepared to turn a blind eye to their more unsavory characteristics. In their rebellion they become evil-doers. At such a time we need to re-assess what is involved in using terms such as evil. Now more than ever we need to stare evil in the face and acknowledge both our complicity with and our distance from it. And just like Prospero returning to Italy, we must also recognize that this acknowledgement is only the beginning.


Birkbeck College, University of London


Acknowledgements

My first debt of gratitude must be to Rob Fisher who instigated this set of discussions and was a sensitive and supportive intermediary between myself, the contributors, and Rodopi throughout the editing process. I would also like to thank Dan Haybron, editor of the companion volume, for his advice, encouragement, and good humour. Juliet Laxton performed the role of co-editor in all but name. Particularly in the final stages, she brought her usual sharp mind and keen eye for detail to this volume, and for this she has my enduring gratitude. I would also like to thank the trustees of the Tate Gallery, London, U.K. and the warden of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, U.K. for permission to re-print the illustrations.

Richard Paul Hamilton I would like to thank Richard Paul Hamilton for taking the lead

role in the editing. It has been a pleasure to work with him, as well as Rob Fisher, on the compelling essays included in this volume.

Margaret Sönser Breen


One

Twentieth-Century Vampire Literature:

Intimations of Evil and Power

Katri Lehtinen

1. Introduction Vampire fiction has changed radically in the past two hundred

years. One of the forces behind this is the shift in the concept of evil during that time. In nineteenth-century vampire fiction, the vampire represents the evil against which religion and society fight. Clive Leatherdale points out that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published at the end of the nineteenth century when faith was fading and was in need of new vitality.1 Leatherdale claims: “Christianity is predicated on the fact of Evil. Dracula is the naked presence of that Evil.”2 When Dracula, the evil force, is defeated by the joined forces of goodness with the aid of religious artefacts, crosses and holy wafers, it must follow that God exists–even if only in fiction.3 Thus, the role that the vampire plays in nineteenth-century fiction according to Leatherdale demands that the character is unquestionably evil, with no redeeming qualities.4

As long as this situation persisted, the vampire could not have been described as anything but evil. But nowadays, when religion no longer dictates the rules for behaviour, the term evil has lost its primarily religious connotations. With the wider range of socially permissible behaviour, especially sexual behaviour, we understand fewer things to be evil. For example, homosexuality, which was once banned as a non-procreative sexual act, is now acceptable. What this means for human beings, and for vampires, is a wider range of acceptable behaviour. Thus, even vampires are no longer evil per se: evil is no longer a nature, it can only be applied to specific deeds. Evil has become a matter of degree. While criminal or un-godly acts were previously characterized as evil, we can now term them immoral, unethical, unwise, unjust, unfair, or just unhealthy, depending on their gravity.

Therefore, we cannot use a religious view on evil in this chapter since it is too limited. In the context of modern vampire fiction, we can define evil as a misuse of power. While it is easy to recognize power, it is more difficult to define it. Webster’s New World Dictionary gives as the first definition: “ability to do, act, or produce.”5 Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary comes closer to a common view about power when it defines a powerful person as having “control over other people or over events or activities.”6 While neither offers an exhaustive explanation of

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power, the Cobuild comes closer to how we will view power here: as the ability to defend ourselves and choose our own actions.

Hence a misuse of power becomes an abuse of the ability to choose our own actions, perverted into the ability to persuade, threaten, or force someone into behaving according to our desires. This approaches the Cobuild definition of evil according to which an evil person is “very wicked by nature and takes pleasure in doing things that harm people.”7 On the basis of this definition, we can posit three pre-requisites for evil: it is something innate; it is wilful; and it is harmful to others. Recent vampire fiction is therefore an ideal place in which to examine evil, for traditionally vampires cannot change what they are, or choose not to feed, and so choose not to kill or harm their prey.

A. Nineteenth-Century Vampire Literature

In nineteenth-century vampire fiction, the vampire is a figure of ultimate evil.8 The vampire is an outcast, living on the margins of society, pretending to be human in order to feed among them. To satisfy his appetites, the vampire feeds on young women and in the process unleashes their sexual potential.9 The bite itself is veiled intercourse.10 Sexual scenes could not be overtly portrayed in Victorian literature. What emphasizes this interpretation of the vampire bite is the fact that the bitten woman herself turns into a sexual predator. The vampire woman becomes the antithesis of decent womanhood: aggressive, demanding, powerful, and sexually uninhibited.

A good example of this is Bram Stoker’s depiction of Lucy, the first English woman whom Stoker’s archfiend, Dracula transforms into a vampire. A beautiful, decent woman in life, Lucy becomes a hellish mockery of womanhood in undeath:

The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness. ... [her] eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes ...11

Not only does Lucy become animal-like and alien after her transformation into a vampire, but she goes on to take the initiative in sexual interaction, telling her fiancé how “hungry” she is for him.12

Lucy’s seduction of Arthur is made even more horrific by the fact that just before she advances on him, she is seen with blood dripping from her mouth, carrying a small child.13 Here is a child on which Lucy has obviously fed and which she drops “callously as a devil” to the ground when she sees her fiancé.14 What could depict a female character’s

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perverse nature better than feeding on children and abandoning them to make sexual advances on a man? In 1897 when Stoker published Dracula, women were not considered to have sexual impulses, finding deepest satisfaction in marriage and motherhood.15 Such a female character was unnatural indeed.

The sexual improprieties of a female vampire do not end here. J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, a delicate looking female precedent to Stoker’s Dracula, reveals another male fear. If women could choose their own sexual partners, could they not choose other women? Carmilla does, as does Thomas Peckett Prest’s only female vampire, Clara. The sexual nature of Carmilla’s attacks on or seduction of young women is highlighted by the place in which she chooses to sink her teeth: the women’s breast.16 Male vampires in nineteenth-century fiction always bite at the neck,17 if the site is identified at all.

Additionally, the attacks of male vampires on their victims are uniformly heterosexual.18 While the possibility of a male vampire taking a male victim can be hinted at,19 it is never described. Therefore, the male vampire is just taking male characteristics to the extreme; after all, men seek out women sexually. The female vampire, meanwhile, perverts even biological sex in her evil, for she breaks the ultimate taboo by taking on a male prerogative: the power to penetrate.

In this context, it is revealing that while female vampires can threaten male victims as Lucy does Arthur in the scene from Dracula, vampire women are only described as feeding on women and children. The full horror of a woman penetrating a man could not be portrayed. We only read a tantalizing description of the seduction that is cut short before being actualized, as a famous scene from Dracula reveals. Here, Stoker’s hero Jonathan is alone with three beautiful vampire women, one of whom advances on Jonathan.

Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. … I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with a beating heart.20

The mixture of “longing and at the same time some deadly fear” that Jonathan feels was probably echoed in the reader.21 When Dracula interrupts the penetration, the Victorian reader could be as disappointed as


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Jonathan is, and as relieved: a man could not be penetrated by anyone, male or female.

While the male and the female vampires break social and sexual taboos, it is the female vampire in Victorian examples of the genre that crystallizes Victorian fears. If women were given the chance to act on their own impulses unchecked, they might no longer be satisfied with what society granted them, but would perhaps turn their backs on marriage, heterosexuality, and even children. In short, they would no longer be women. If the male vampire is the centre of focus in a vampire story, the female vampire threatens the social fabric.

This is why the female vampire meets her end in such brutal fashion: she is punished for transgressing her sexual role by having a wooden stake hammered through her chest.22 The women in Victorian vampire tales are therefore penetrated twice: first by the fangs of the vampire, then by the corrective phallus of society. Yet, the male vampire is never penetrated by either. A male vampire is never the victim of another vampire’s bite, nor is he staked in the end. Even the mighty Dracula is killed by the slash and stab of a knife.23 Nevertheless, few vampires are allowed to live: society mercilessly punishes those who dare to cross socially prescribed boundaries. Society could not tolerate evil, even in fiction.

B. Twentieth-Century Vampire Literature

In mid-twentieth-century vampire fiction, the vampire character began to change. Secularization is one key issue here. A more important factor is the shift in the balance of social power. Forces such as the Black Movement, feminism, and gay and lesbian movements changed society radically. In addition to winning their own battles, these movements forced the white heterosexual male and the culture built around him to acknowledge multiplicity, and the power of the oppressed. Against this background it is hardly surprising that those who rose to challenge the heteronormative, misogynous past of vampire literature were women and gays and, to a lesser extent, African-American, Latinas, and other coloured writers.

One of the first authors of vampire fiction to completely rewrite the vampire figure was Anne Rice in Interview with the vampire, published in 1976. In the tale, the vampire Louis tells his story to a reporter. In the next novel, The vampire Lestat, Rice abandons this distancing device and allows her main character to address the reader directly: “I am the vampire Lestat. I’m immortal.”24 Other writers quickly followed Rice’s lead and vampires became the heroes of their own tales, thereby transforming vampire fiction. Writing about vampires from the first person narrative forces the writer to re-examine fixed notions of

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vampires and vampire fiction: to be able to identify with the vampire, he or she cannot be wholly evil. Yet while the need to drink blood and the superior mental and physical powers of the vampire persist, the context of abuse of power remains.

Nevertheless, the genre became populated with vampires with a conscience in the latter part of the twentieth century. Vampirism came to be seen, not as a violation as it was in the previous century, but as a form of relationship. Now, anything can be interpreted as vampiric, and vampirism can symbolize almost anything. On the pages of recent vampire fiction, we meet vampires who feed on emotions or mental energy; vampires who feed on menstrual blood, vaginal juices, and synthetic blood.25 We meet vampires who sip blood in relationships between consenting adults; vampires who devour several people in one feast, and vampires whose bite is ecstasy.26 We read about vampire flowers, vampire chairs, and vampire houses.27 Marriage becomes vampiric, incest becomes vampiric, and even a child’s demands become vampiric.28

Here lies the greatest difference between nineteenth- and twentieth-century vampire fiction. In the nineteenth-century, writers did not analyze or question the nature of vampires because to them evil was an absolute and vampires were absolutely evil. In the twentieth century, writers can interpret a vampire to suit their purpose. Nineteenth-century texts can be interpreted to exhibit the writers’ subconscious desires, fears, and nightmares. Twentieth-century texts are often highly self-conscious and writers have very clear ideas of the forces behind their fiction. Their message is often about power, evil, responsibility, and the relationship between them.

2. Power In Vampire Fiction

While such an extended range of possibilities liberates the writer, it also presents a problem. If each vampire is unique and unusual, how can we define a vampire text, a vampire tale, a vampire novel? In our context of human relationships, sexual issues, power, and evil, we can propose several pre-requisites for vampire fiction. First, the vampire must have been born a human being and transformed into a vampire by another. This allows the character to experience powerlessness at the moment of initiation, and feelings of power after transformation. Second, the vampire must feed primarily on human beings so that equality and/or love in the relationship between vampire and prey are possible. Third, for the relationships to be physical and more explicitly sexual, the vampire must feed on blood or other bodily fluids.

Yet most vampire fiction writers do not aim to leave the history of evil inherent in vampires completely behind. Instead, in showing how difficult power can be, especially to those who have it, writers like Rice,


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Nancy Collins, and Jewelle Gomez show that power is dangerous if not used with caution. I will examine the vampire tales by these three writers in relation to the views of power they exhibit on the personal, interpersonal, and social levels.

A. Personal Experiences of Power

On a personal level, the newly made vampire questions the nature of evil in facing his or her potential to harm others, and the hostility of surrounding humanity. The moment of initiation is often the defining one for the vampire-to-be. The kind of vampire this creature becomes depends on how he or she is made. A vampire born of a loving and supportive relationship becomes kind and responsible, such as Freda Warrington’s Charlotte, or Gomez’s Gilda. Throughout her human life, Gilda is known simply as the Girl. When the original Gilda transforms her, the Girl inherits Gilda’s name along with her powers:

[The Girl] couldn’t look away from Gilda’s gaze which held her motionless. Yet she felt free … . She curled her long body in Gilda’s lap like a child safe in her mother’s arms. She felt a sharpness at her neck and heard the soothing song.29

The imagery here speaks of freedom, gentleness, and a mother’s care for her child. The new Gilda takes the experience as a guide in her later existence.

Few vampires, however, are as fortunate as Gomez’s Gilda. Often the act of making a new vampire remains an accident or a random act of brutality, and the emerging vampire is often confused or embittered, like Tanith Lee’s Sabella, or Collins’s Sonja Blue. Collins’s Sonja meets a mysterious, charismatic man and accepts his offer of a romantic midnight drive in his limousine. The dream date warps into a nightmare when Morgan reveals his fangs and takes mental control of Sonja:

[Sonja] felt his will enter her, hot as pig iron. … He reached into her head and ordered her to crawl across the backseat, and her body obeyed. She struggled against him the best she could, but Morgan was far too old and far too powerful to be denied by a sixteen-year-old girl.30

After the mental rape, Morgan rapes her with his fangs and then his penis.31 He leaves Sonja for dead, bloodless in a gutter.32

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Sonja’s understandable fear and hatred of Morgan is only quenched when she kills him, but before she becomes powerful enough to overcome him, she has to learn how to understand, accept, and master her abilities.33 Thus, whatever powers vampires have, the key to real power is understanding what they are, as well as their limitations. Above all, it is control.

Apart from other supernatural powers, most vampires share physical strength, and the need to drink blood. Writers often cast this as an addiction. However, even when new vampires manage to control their appetites, they sometimes have to resort to violence to defend themselves against the attacks of human beings or other creatures of the night. In these combats, female vampires show that when both the attacker and the attacked have fangs and superior powers, the outcome is not what gender would predict.34 Experience, wit, and strength of will are what count. Thus, to the female writer and reader of vampire fiction, the female vampire and her superiority over arrogant males can be a welcome power trip.

Many writers realize that it is not enough to reverse the gender roles: the roles would remain the same, only the ascribed gender would change. Women writers describe female vampires that take on male qualities, and manage to transcend gender when they leave humanity behind.

i. Beyond Gender

Becoming a vampire means ceasing to be a human being, and this extends to gender. What were gendered human qualities before the transformation are now Queer vampire qualities. Women writers often realize how liberating vampirism can be, particularly to a female character. Rice voices this directly in the tale of Gabrielle, who is born in the mid-1700s and turned into a vampire at the end of that century. When Gabrielle becomes a vampire, she turns her back on social expectations. She also shows her freedom in appearance by dressing up in male clothing, commenting to her vampire son, Lestat: “But there’s no real reason for me to dress that way anymore, is there?” And Lestat realizes that Gabrielle “was not really a woman now, was she? Any more than [he] was a man.”35

The genital inactivity of Rice’s vampires highlights this interpretation: while the penis can function, it becomes wholly superfluous.36 Blood drinking replaces all physical pleasures. As sucking is gender-neutral, sexuality becomes freed from gender rules and heterosexual norms.

Therefore, in a hundred years, what was the ultimate social evil – crossing genders – has become the ultimate act of liberation. However, not


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everyone is ready for this. Many writers describe strictly heteronormative vampires, especially when they are genitally active vampires.37 The notable exceptions here are Rice, Poppy Z. Brite (1994), and Jeffrey McMahan (1991) who write about gay male vampires, and several female writers who write lesbian vampire short stories.38

The reactions of other vampires and human beings to those vampires that exhibit unconventional gender qualities are often negative. Rice’s Gabrielle may admit that the world cannot tolerate a woman like herself and ends up in the jungle, needing to be alone in order to be truly herself.39 Gomez’s white lesbian vampire, the original Gilda, creates a female sphere for herself when she chooses to be marginalized in a brothel instead of trying to fit into a society that would not accept her.40 Collins’s strong and independent female vampire, Sonja, is almost killed by Morgan, the vampire that made her, because she did not die at the attack that made her into a vampire. When Morgan meets Sonja again, he has to admit to himself: “I stand in awe of her; my lovely, lethal masterpiece. ... I love her. And that is why I must destroy her.”41 What Morgan’s character reveals here is that no one can own or defeat these vampire women: if they cannot be accepted as equal, one will destroy the other.

This discussion raises the question as to whether these three writers are feminists. After all, they concentrate or at least touch on explicit gender issues and problems. Changing the status of women from mere food to heroes in vampire fiction need not be a consciously feminist decision. It may stem from the fact that society has changed. In the second half of the twentieth century, it became politically incorrect to abuse women in literature, even in a vampire context. A scene like the staking in Stoker’s Dracula – involving stake, breasts, hammer, blood, and screams of pain – is no longer acceptable.

Gomez is a self-acclaimed feminist, who incorporates her political goals into her writing.42 Rice, however, concentrates on male characters to the exclusion of women. This makes her problematic from a feminist perspective. Rice’s few female characters can hardly be interpreted as feminist archetypes. Gabrielle finds refuge from society in a jungle.43 Claudia, a vampire at the age of four, never reaches full womanhood.44 Akasha embodies the stereotype of a devouring bitch in her plan to eradicate rape and war by devastating the male population.45 Even Pandora falls under male rule at one point in her existence.46

Collins falls somewhere between the two. Her female vampire Sonja was made a vampire in the late twentieth century when discrimination against women was less apparent than in previous centuries. Collins can make her point subtly in this social climate, unlike Gomez whose scope spans several centuries. Collins’s Sonja comes across as a tough modern woman who does not let anyone underestimate her.

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However, the feminist comment takes the form of undertones instead of explicit statement.

However, the question as to whether the writers are feminist or not is secondary to the fact that all discuss gender in relation to power and ethics. The feminist underpinnings may explain why their female characters seldom succeed in heterosexual relationships. Strong, independent vampire women do not suffer dominant males gladly. B. Interpersonal Power

Once the newly born vampires have re-created their identity, they must feed. How the vampire sees blood drinking and their relationship with others re-defines the concept of evil. A good example is Louis, Rice’s most ethically tormented vampire. Educated by Lestat, a vampire that presents himself to Louis as one without regrets, human considerations, or moral dilemmas, Louis has to re-invent such concepts for himself. Lestat’s only advice to Louis is “Go kill.”47 To Lestat, vampires are “the hand of God”: part of the natural order, but above humanity which vampires were created to prey on.48

Unfortunately, ethics are not that easy even for fictitious vampires. Evil and wickedness are human concerns: animals cannot be evil, because they are part of nature. What Rice is proposing here through Lestat’s character is that vampires are like animals, natural predators, and therefore not evil. But the readers of vampire fiction judge vampires by human standards for several reasons. First, because vampires used to be human; second, because they can still pass for human beings; and third, because vampires feed on human beings. The last reason offends the readers most: being so used to occupying the top rung of the food chain, the idea that something could be above human beings strikes the reader as evil.

ii. Feeding

If evil is no longer absolute then there must be grades of wrongness. This is what the late twentieth-century writers address. On the level of basic feeding, many writers find ways for their vampires to feed in an ethical, or at least non-violent, manner. Gomez’s Gilda and her fellow moral vampires feed on human beings but never take more than what the human being would lose in donating blood. The vampires always leave something positive to replace the blood they have taken. One young man needed the resolve to visit a sick friend.49 Gilda leaves a confused woman who has given up on life with the desire for life, family, and new experiences.50 Taking something the victims will not need and leaving them something valuable behind equals a fair trade in vampire world.

Some vampires are not sophisticated enough for a trade such as this and are forced to placate their consciences in other ways. Lesbian


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writers often replace jugular blood with menstrual blood, like Carol Leonard, or with vaginal arousal juices, like Katharine E. Forrest, which can be enjoyed without doing damage to the vampire’s lover. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germain feeds on his victims in their dreams, erotic and vivid dreams that the victims remember only hazily in the morning.51 Tanya Huff’s Henry Fitzroy prefers willing blood donors, such as Tony. Tony and Fitzroy both enjoy the feeding process, and Tony admits that watching Fitzroy feed is “part of the turn on.”52 Even Collins’s Sonja feeds occasionally on black market blood,53 as if to admit that feeding on human beings is an unethical choice. When bottled blood fails to satisfy, Sonja solves her ethical dilemmas by drinking on murderers and thieves, and eventually on other vampires.54 In the end, Sonja comes to find her place in the scheme of things as a destroyer of non-human prey.55

In Rice’s fiction, human beings are usually nothing more than vampire fodder and some vampires slaughter humans for their pleasure. We find an example of this in Azim, a powerful, ancient vampire who creates a blood cult and gorges himself on his followers. Another ancient vampire, Pandora, watches in horror as Azim sucks dry several worshipers in moments.56 Most vampires, even in Rice’s work, do not tolerate such indulgence, and Pandora condemns the cult as evil.57 Yet she joins Azim in a moment of abandonment to her thirst.

Rice’s vampires tend to moralize yet fall prey to their own desires: like Pandora, Louis also tries to keep his nature in check. Louis admits that a diet of rats does not satisfy him. However, he cannot turn his back on humanity, whether it is the humanity on which he feeds, or that which is a part of him, his past. He cannot let go of his guilt of feeding on human beings, but he cannot stop feeding on them. Only when he is instructing his young protégéé, the child vampire Claudia, can he forget his guilt and simply feed when he is hungry.

Other vampires in Rice’s work struggle with their desire to slake their thirst on one victim and prefer to sip a little from several, as does Magnus:

“The smallest kiss, my precious one.” [The victim’s] eyes closed; his teeth pierced the artery instantly and his tongue lapped at the blood. Only a taste.58

Although this victim does not come to any harm, and cannot recall the event subsequently; her consent was never asked. This may be misuse of power. But can we call this evil?

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iii. Vampire Relationships Relationships suffer from blood compulsion as much as feedings

do. The desire to drink their lover’s blood, even with his or her consent, is just one aspect that can sour a vampire’s relationship with a human being. One major issue here is the overwhelming physical strength of the vampire. To return to Collins, even when Sonja tries to curb her vampire nature, her relationships with human males end in disaster. One relationship is destroyed when Sonja’s vampire personality breaks loose and rapes her lover.59 Another goes wrong when her lover resorts to his fists to keep control in the relationship.60 Human males are no match for Sonja’s vampire nature and her superior physical strength: perhaps this is why Sonja befriends a fellow creature of the night in the end.61 When both have unusual powers, there is some chance of a balanced relationship.

We find the most equal relationships in Gomez’s work, between Gilda and her lovers, and between Anthony and Sorel, a gay vampire couple. When both are of the same sex and both are vampires with equal skills and powers, the relationship has a better chance of working than if the relationship were otherwise. Warrington offers a rare example of an equal heterosexual relationship between the human being Charlotte and Karl the vampire. She describes their first blood kiss thus:

This was no violation. … To be able to give him this was a pleasure as intense as the repletion he drew from her veins. [Charlotte] held him as he drank, her lips against his hair...62

When Karl finally consents to making Charlotte into a vampire, the trust, love, and respect evident in the scene above continue.

Heterosexual vampire romances are more usually battles of will. Let us consider Rice’s Pandora and Magnus. Magnus dominates the relationship while Pandora is still human, and he assumes he knows better since he is older and wiser: a vampire who has experienced more than any mortal. His arrogance does not change when Pandora is also transformed into a vampire. To Pandora, they are now equal creatures and the difference in the length of their existence, and their gender, should have no bearing on the power balance between them as vampires. As Magnus does not agree, their power battle drags on for centuries.63

The greatest polarity in vampire fiction is vampire-human being. All other differences, such as male-female and even adult-child, pale beside this. While the male-female divide can cause problems, as in the case of Pandora and Magnus, the adult-child typically does not. The relationship between Louis and the child vampire Claudia is one of the


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most evenly matched in Rice’s work. Louis has existed for decades, Claudia only for four years – she remains forever a child, even though she has walked the earth for sixty years as a vampire by the end of her story. Thus, their sensual relationship smacks of incest: the two sleep in the same coffin,64 and Louis admits the duality of their relationship in a description to the interviewer: “Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover.”65

Nevertheless, Louis is bound to Claudia by his love for her, and she makes the most important decisions for them both. Louis is so tormented by his guilt that even a little girl stands as his equal. Louis’s relationship to his maker, Lestat, was like that of a slave to his master. Louis does not want to repeat this mistake in his relationship with Claudia. Unlike Lestat who keeps Louis in the dark about vital information on vampire nature, and is a slave to Lestat’s will,66 Louis never keeps secrets from Claudia. Louis realizes the dangers of manipulation and lies that come with greater power.

Primary human relationships between parents and children, and between spouses often receive much more gruesome treatment at the hands of vampire writers than Rice’s example reveals. Most social evils translate easily into vampire relationships. Rape, incest, and exploitation are just other words for vampirism. In Tom Holland’s work, we find a chilling metaphor for incest in vampires who find the deepest satisfaction in the blood of their relatives. While all blood is sweet to his vampires, the blood of a relative is like a drug, made all the more dangerous by the close kinship. Byron, Holland’s vampire version of the poet, is irresistibly drawn to his sister. But he is advised against it by a wiser vampire.67 Byron does not yet know that their kind of vampire will have to completely drain the blood from a relative if they want to stay young, instead of simply existing forever. In Holland’s vampire world, incest is a matter of human morality and only unwise for vampires because of the subsequent need to kill their kin.

Perhaps the reason why subjects such as rape and incest are easier to discuss and tolerate in a vampire setting is the non-genital sexuality that is still common to modern vampires. While the biting and sucking of blood can be interpreted, as it most often is, as a sexual act, it remains sexuality without genitalia. Therefore, we can discuss incest, for example, at a safe distance, since the incestuous act is so far removed from real life situations. Nevertheless, incest often remains one of the most serious violations of power in vampire fiction.

C. Social Power

Many vampire texts offer social comment. Yet, in Rice’s fiction, human beings, humanity, and society are insignificant compared to the struggles between vampires. Rice’s vampires move through history

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unperturbed by human actions, or by human evil. But other historical writers, such as Les Daniels and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, use their vampire characters as tools for narrating history from a single point of view. In so doing, they reveal that it is not the vampires, but human beings that are the true monsters.

Les Daniels depicts the massacre of the Aztecs, the Spanish Inquisition, and the French Revolution as seen through the eyes of a vampire, as examples of human brutality and greed.68 Yarbro’s Saint Germain, a humane vampire if there ever was one, moves through history forever a suspect because of his gentle ways, unusual habits, and skills in medicine. In contrast, the human beings Saint Germain meets are stupid, suspicious, and superstitious.69 Daniels and Yarbro do not depict their vampires attempting to change society. The vampires simply tolerate it.

It takes a woman like Gomez a lesbian and African-American, to take social criticism in a vampire context to its extreme. The tale of Gilda, a slave turned vampire, re-tells vampire history, black past, and the lesbian experience through her black lesbian vampire. Thrice marginalized, Gomez examines power on interacting levels: Gilda faces contempt, fear, and rage from her contemporaries on the basis of her skin colour, female sex, and lesbian identity. As the tale unfolds, Gomez points out how mistrust between different groups of people will destroy society, and eventually the earth. By the end of the tale, it is the year 2030 and the earth has become polluted and partly uninhabitable: food is scarce, yet people remain as homophobic, racist, and sexist as ever.

Gomez’s tale shows the evil social power can do when used by self-interested people. However, her vampires choose to retreat from society instead of trying to change it. The message is clear: if those who have the power to make a difference turn their backs on fellow human beings or vampires, the world will come to an end. While few other writers are as explicit or as politically committed as Gomez, many come to the same conclusion: power is evil, unless used responsibly.

Collins arrives at this conclusion but with more humour and less politicizing. Collins’s vampires notice, in much the same way as Gomez’s do, that leaving human beings to tend for the planet will only result in disaster. Pangloss, an ancient vampire, describes humans to Sonja as “myopic little beasts intent on destroying their world,”70 which is why the oldest vampires have been “husbanding” the human race for centuries.71 In the end, Sonja and Lethe, a daughter of two living vampires, join forces to create a new human breed, a hybrid between the human and the supernatural race. This new human race will not be blind to natural forces, it will be able to see the results of their actions and can thus put to rights “the scales of nature [that] were thrown horribly awry.”72


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Collins’s final message is a grand one: save the world from human beings. While few other vampire writers aspire so high, they often touch on social issues to emphasize the responsibilities power brings with it. Recent vampire fiction has dealt with social issues such as race,73 the homeless,74 AIDS,75 dating,76 the institution of motherhood,77 and that of marriage.78 The writers approach the issues differently through unique vampires and seldom have similar agendas. Despite the overt messages, the hidden message is often that allowing a wrongdoing to continue is tantamount to causing it to happen. Contemporary vampire fiction has come a long way since its nineteenth-century beginnings.

3. Conclusions

Too much uncontrolled power will jeopardize relationships, and destroy society, the human race, and the planet. If few writers offer solutions to all of these problems, their work does examine different power structures and challenge existing views on power and responsibility. In so doing, they rewrite our concepts of evil. When we look back on the examples taken from recent vampire fiction, we may ask which acts can be termed evil. The reply depends on how we define evil. If an act needs to be degrading, painful, or lethal and malicious to be evil, then perhaps none of them are. Feeding is necessary and not something that the vampire would do out of malice; therefore, it cannot usually be defined as evil. Often feeding does not kill or injure the victim: the act may remain non-consensual but not necessarily evil

In this framework, the only acts that are evil are superfluous or needlessly violent feedings, use of unnecessary force in defending oneself against others, and manipulating or coercing a lover in a relationship. This view is supported by the fact that all those vampires who flout vampire society rules – who kill unnecessarily like Rice’s Azim, or feed brutally like Collins’s Morgan – are destroyed by the main characters. The main characters survive their tales, and prosper.

Notes 1. Leatherdale, 1986, 176. 2. Ibid., 185. 3. Ibid., 177. 4. Ibid., 186-187. 5. Webster’s New World Dictionary of American English, 1986, 3d ed.,

s.v. “power.” 6. Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, 1987, s.v. “power.” 7. Ibid., s.v. “evil.”

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8. Belsey, 1994, 88-90. 9. Wolf, 1992, vii. 10. Tropp, 1990, 142; Tracy, 1990, 34-35; and Leatherdale, 1996, 149-

150. 11. Stoker, 1992, 217-218. 12. Ibid., 218. 13. Ibid., 217. 14. Ibid. 15. See Tropp, 1990, 137; Shuttleworth, 1992, 31; Russett, 1989, 43; and

Leatherdale, 1986, 139-140. 16. Le Fanu, 1990, 275. 17. Stoker, 1992, 132. 18. Ibid., 136-137, 157. 19. Ibid., 47. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 46. 22. Ibid., 221-222; Le Fanu, 1990, 310-311. 23. Stoker, 380. 24. Rice, 1992b, 3. 25. See Simmons, 1989; Leonard, 1995; Forrest, 1993; Dyer, 1994. 26. See Yarbo, 1981, 1988, 1990, 1995; Rice, 1988; and Rusch, 1995. 27. Wells, 1997; Koja and Malzberg, 1994; Tremayne, 1992; and

Chetwynd-Hayes, 1992. 28. Tem and Rasnic Tem, 1994; Rasnic Tem, 1992; Rusch, 1995; and

Carr, 1996. 29. Gomez, 1991, 46. 30. Collins, 1994, 83. 31. Ibid., 83-84. 32. Ibid., 85. 33. Ibid., 108-112. 34. Ibid., 117. 35. Rice, 1992b, 172. 36. Rice, 1998, 263. 37. For example, Collins, 1994, 1995b; King, 1977; and Warrington,

1993, 1995. 38. Forrest, 1993; De la Pena, 1996; Brownworth, 1996; Califia, 1993;

and Leonard, 1995. 39. Rice, 1992b, 347-348. 40. Gomez, 1991, 18-24, 27-28. 41. Collins, 1995b, 30. 42. Gomez, 1991, 1997. 43. Rice, 1992b, 347-251. 44. Rice, 1992a, 74-75, 91-95, 102-105.


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45. Rice, 1988, 291-306. 46. Rice, 1998, 338. 47. Rice, 1999a, 71. 48. Ibid., 83. 49. Gomez, 1991, 182. 50. Ibid., 123. 51. Yarbro, 1988, 33, 471-472. 52. Huff, 1992, 43-44. 53. Collins, 1994, 131. 54. Ibid., 151-153, 116-117, and 122-124. 55. Collins, 1995b, 241-242. 56. Rice, 1988, 65-66. 57. Ibid., 66. 58. Ibid., 22. 59. Collins, 1995b, 55-57. 60. Ibid., 76-80. 61. Collins, 1995a, 242-243. 62. Warrington, 1993, 306. 63. Rice, 1988, 271. 64. Rice, 1992a, 104. 65. Ibid., 102. 66. Rice, 1992a, 83-84. 67. Holland, 1996, 254-255. 68. Daniels, 1994. 69. Yarbro, 1995, 1990. 70. Collins, 1994, 139. 71. Ibid., 140. 72. Ibid., 251. 73. Gomez, 1991; De la Pena, 1996. 74. Cadigan 1995b. 75. Belkom, 1997; Simmons, 1992. 76. Cadigan, 1995a. 77. Sturgis, 1996; Carr, 1996. 78. Melanie Tem, 1992.

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Two

Evil Encounters with “Others” in Tayeb Salih and Toni Morrison: The Case of Mustafa Saeed and Sula Peace

Salwa Ghaly

Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined. Toni Morrison, Beloved

1. Introduction Throughout history, “evil” has had different definitions and has

often been synonymous with that which is considered abnormal, undesirable, or threatening, and therefore, condemnable. To probe the junction of marginality and evil, this chapter situates evil within the parameters of the French translation of “evil,” “le mal.” The various meanings of “le mal” and “mal” in the French language, including evil, sickness, and disquiet suggest a web of connections between abnormality (understood as marginality or otherness evil, and pain. In this triad, the evil person is him or herself the victim of society; the sadist becomes a masochist; for the person who, out of self-preservation, inflicts pain on others, is someone who is tortured from within. The interconnectedness of these terms will shed light on the treatment of evil in two thematically contiguous novels.

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1969) and Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) are narratives which question the official stories and stereotypes that the centre disseminates about the margin, or the colonizer about the colonized. They also reassess the values and location of that margin. Rethinking the traditional perspectives on identity and its relation to culture, these authors eschew binary logic to explore multiple forms and root causes of social marginality. In Salih, marginality is imposed by a colonial symbolic order and a monochromic Sudanese culture; these perceive and represent themselves as static orders, but are continually shifting, even fracturing. In Morrison, marginality stems from racism and the blighted legacy of slavery, whose adverse effects on the black community are compounded by this community’s deeply engrained sexism and misogyny. This chapter examines how, against the backdrop of marginality, the notion of evil nourishes the two texts in a manoeuvre meant to question monolithic systems of categorization and traditional definitions or classifications.

When Salih’s male protagonist, Mustafa Saeed, and Morrison’s Sula Peace are ostracized, they retaliate by committing acts that are

Evil Encounters with “Others” 22

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deemed evil by societies which tactically promote hypocritical values and double standards for the purpose of “manufacturing consent.” Faced with an adversarial socio-cultural configuration, these rebellious characters pit themselves against their communities and relish behaving outrageously, antisocially, and criminally. The following discussion will illustrate how both narratives employ the familiar sex-as-weapon theme and present sexuality and violence as inextricably bound. Mustafa and Sula initiate relationships devoid of any recognizable human emotion or motive; they see in excess and sexual posing a semblance of victory over the culture or group that has rejected them. Evil individuates them, but offers them no liberation. It titillates them with a sense of agency that they realize is ultimately feeble. This limited empowerment, which cannot be marshalled against any emblems of power or social discipline, is potent enough to wreak havoc in the lives of those who come into contact with them.

The two novels suggest that their early twentieth-century protagonists are fated to a life of otherness. In Arabic, “Mustafa” means the “chosen one,” and Sula means “sola” (the Latin feminine form of “solo”). While they have ironic last names (“Sa’eed” meaning “happy” in Arabic), both characters are alone in their attempts to unmask social and political hypocrisies. At the end, they are fatally consumed by the battle they wage in the face of traditional morality and authority. Death, their last act of defiance, becomes the final rupture with and escape from society.

2. Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

Tayeb Salih unravels the theme of evil partially within the context of a confrontation between a colonized man and the culture of his oppressor. The novel is framed by a first-person narrative in which an unnamed young Sudanese man triumphantly returns to his native village having completed a degree in English poetry in Britain. Like Mustafa, he experienced life in the West, but unlike him, he looks upon re-integration into his rural community as an unproblematic process. From what he perceives to be a comfortable and unconflicting position, he pieces together Mustafa’s story with the West, a story that, he thinks, counterpoints his. Although he obtains some firsthand information from Mustafa before his death, most of the pieces of the puzzle come from documents found in the house of the deceased or from hearsay in the village.

The following discussion focuses on Mustafa’s life in England, the nebulous North, or “the evil empire.” Through its agents of social control and repression, this colonizing power circulates and reinforces stereotypes about “others,” a move that Homi Bhabha (1994) sees as symptomatic of a destabilized identity that continually needs to reassert itself. Two institutions loom large in Mustafa’s life in England: the

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university and the courtroom, two prime agents of social engineering that anchor European identity in the “stable” values of self-control, courage, and rationality. To peddle these values, these institutions promote the aesthetics and values of orientalism against which the European man can better focus and “define” his sense of self, confirm his superiority, and justify the violence committed in the name of “the white man’s burden.”

At Oxford, Mustafa gets his academic training in economics, a field in which he excels and to which makes a valuable contribution. At twenty-four, he succeeds in carving a niche for himself at the University of London, where he writes The Economics of Colonialism, Colonialism and Monopoly, The Cross and Gunpowder, and The Rape of Africa, all of which have telling titles and appear to defy the colonial registers and ideological correlatives. They also point to the intersection of religion, politics and economics on the colonial agenda. While the university is the locus of his short-lived intellectual and social success, he is courted by aristocrats affecting liberalism as well as icons of the English Left.

The courtroom registers his moral demise and exposes his darker self. In front of his former professors, friends and acquaintances he stands accused of killing his wife and causing the suicide of three women. Mustafa does not deny the charges or seek to defend himself; he sits back and watches the inner workings of a legal system mobilized in the service of the empire. His private and public lives converge in an agonistic court process that endorses the colonialist discourse as much as it corroborates how, even to his erstwhile friends, he remains primarily a black man who issued from the “heart of darkness,” a man around whom obsessive cliché-ridden perceptions linger. Some of the court spectators commiserate, others see this exotic man’s violence as proof of the validity of some of their cherished stereotypes. Friends and enemies reinforce his “irreconcilable otherness” and, referring to his African origins, stress his uniqueness as an Arab-African genius. Flaunting its racism, the court, like other regulatory bodies, explicitly bolsters and authorizes an accumulation of enduring negative perceptions and images that help stabilize the European “subject.” Its aim is not merely to judge a culprit and mete out justice, but also to perpetuate the idea of the permanence of European superiority and indomitable might.

Nevertheless, Mustafa convinces himself that all is not lost. As the marginalized other, he is the hero at the heart of a legal trial; he sees this position of centrality as a subversion of the colonizer’s claims to rationality and infallibility. To him, this confrontation between the two worlds comes in the aftermath of bloody wars and events that belie the West’s claims to any moral authority. That Mustafa anchors his individual grievances within the global context of the imperialist legacy points to the way in which he assesses the heavy burden of history:


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In the court I hear the rattle of swords in Carthage and the clutter of the hooves of Allenby’s horses desecrating the ground of Jerusalem. The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to transport troops; the schools were started so as to teach us to say “Yes” in their language. They imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago.1

Through an elaboration of “the economics of colonization,”2

Mustafa had hoped to narrow “the historical chasm” separating east and west, north and south.3 His writings addressed to English readers in their mother tongue betray a desire to initiate communication with the oppressor, to criticize attitudes, and correct misinformation. In his search for social acceptance, he had sought recognition as a first-class thinker whose ideas could right historic wrongs. Silenced and neutralized, however, he is reduced to the status of a token black brandished as proof of the viability, even the morality, of the West’s mission to civilize “lesser” peoples. He thus amounts to one of many tools used to legitimate political and ideological agendas. The message is “‘Look how tolerant and liberal we are. This African is just one of us. He has married a daughter of ours and works with us on equal footing.’”4 When Mustafa realized that the unflinching imperialist order expected him to play the part of a complicit “mimic man,” a role that marginalized him, he sought to rebel.

Imposed marginality, coupled with Mustafa’s knowledge that in a colonial matrix socialism, justice, and equality are barren concepts, makes of this character an angry, frustrated and dangerous man bent on revenge, albeit symbolically. Rebuffed by England, Mustafa turns the tables against English society by showing how lethal stereotypes can be. Unable to struggle against the establishment of which he became a token part, and seeing himself turned into a buffoon by insidious modes of domination within that establishment, he retaliates by using sexuality as a weapon. In his first-person account, images of the courtroom and his bedroom are juxtaposed to show lines of continuity between the private and the public domains, between sexual politics, the political order of the state, and its emblems of discipline. Through sexuality, he enters into power relationships with gullible women who, to him, represent Victorian Britain. In preying upon them, he is symbolically vanquishing the evil empire, and defeating its discourse of dominance. To him, his “victory” over four Englishwomen is a triumph over the whole of English society.

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Unshackled by any ethical considerations, he gives his predatory nature full expression in the cold and calculating way in which he fragments his self through aliases. In other words, he expediently adopts the identity of many “others” so as to victimize women who have also fallen victim to the Western mystification of the East. They are “easy prey” because they have already been seduced by and assimilated orientalized visions of the other. To some, he becomes an eastern “pagan god,” the child of the Sun, an African demon or a “Nile snake-god,” a malevolent but irresistible force that beckons them.5 To others, he is a Rousseauesque noble savage, harmless and naïve.

Myths and legends that one world propagates about another are concretized in Mustafa Saeed who presents himself to his prey as an “authentic” oriental. As Arjun Appaduarai has argued,6 there is a correlation between the rise in demand for luxury goods and imperial expansion. Packaging himself as someone who actualizes the stereotype of the Arab-African, and proffering himself to his victims as an Othello, Mustafa supplies everything this prey demands. In this manoeuvre, he replicates the process by which he has been commodified and objectified. Like those valuable eastern collectibles that fill his bedroom – those objects that are sought after by European tourists travelling in the Orient and museum curators building up their collections through plunder – Mustafa becomes the object of women’s desire. What they see in him, what they seek to possess is not an individualized man, but the impenetrable African savage exuding exotic charm, the mythologized Other par excellence. They hope to acquire a living “specimen” of the east that stands for that amorphous mass that is Africa (a continent that they in part possess), just as they aspire to own rare Persian carpets or other tokens of the colonized world. Once the women fall victim to his stratagems, which mirror their own fantasies, Mustafa breaks the spell, leaving them wallowing in despair as he prepares to stage his next conquest. When they have succumbed to this “infection” or “disease,” or images that the West has been weaving about the East for a millennium,7 they wither and die.

One glance at Mustafa’s bedroom, or as he calls it “‘the den of lethal lies,’”8 confirms that he has perfectly assimilated how he is perceived by the West, and reveals how he utilizes “the eastern myth” to negotiate his condition as “fetishized commodity” in demand. He designs his bedroom as an orientalist “trap” that has all the accoutrements of the orientalist imagination. When one woman inquires why Mustafa has Arab features like those she has seen in orientalist paintings, but frizzy hair, he responds “my face is Arab like the desert of the Empty Quarter, while my head is African and teams with a mischievous childishness.”9 In the eyes of these women, Mustafa feels he has been transformed “into a naked,


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primitive creature, a spear in one hand and arrows in the other, hunting elephants and lions in the jungles.”10

Mustafa’s accounts of his relationships with the different women possess the vivid colours and thematic predictability of orientalist tableaux. A notable example is the affair with Ann Hammond, one of his first victims and an Oxford student in oriental studies. Mustafa describes her as being intoxicated by the “magic of the east” which she amplifies through role-playing. In the throes of fantasy, he becomes a “master” and she becomes a “slave.”11 She even changes her name to the more romantic-sounding Susana. Ironically, Hammond is more attached to Mustafa’s native than he himself is. As he puts it, “unlike me, she yearned for tropical climes, cruel suns, purple horizons. In her eyes I was a symbol of all her hankerings.”12 Although he ridicules and excludes himself from this fetishistic attraction to the east/south, he still takes advantage of the fact that as a simulacrum, he has paradoxically become the “embodiment” of the orientalist chimera.

Mustafa succeeds in showing how the process by which he has fallen prey to objectification can be duplicated with British women. In this way, he thinks he can wreak symbolic damage on a society in which he cannot be anything but a “lie.”13 After all, Season is highly critical of the brutal way in which Sudanese society de-sexes women through the socially approved act of genital mutilation.14 It is this same society that condones the use of physical abuse to discipline insubordinate wives or daughters. Mustafa sees his role-playing in England as a game that he wins while pandering to the Western stereotypes. This is perhaps because he is the product of a shame culture in which honour is conceptualized in terms of a man’s absolute control over “his women’s” sexuality. It is by “defiling” and “violating” Western women that he thinks he is avenging Africa, the “raped” continent.

Mustafa adopts Western stereotypes to combat England, and re-transmits the modalities of power by which he is oppressed. Ultimately, however, he feels he cannot sustain this battle, and he yearns for death. In killing his wife, he seeks to kill himself, and in court he hopes for, but does not get, the death sentence. Following his seven-year prison sentence, he returns to the Sudan where he is the prisoner of cultural myopia and disabling visions, this time, of the West seen by the Sudanese as Other. When the Western fragment of his identity clamours for recognition, he constructs in his home country a European edifice, just as he had erected an oriental shrine in England. He builds a secret library, a mausoleum near the Equator, to which he transports the Western canon.

Mustafa was a hybrid at a time when hybridity was unacceptable to the West and the East. Straddling these worlds, he stumbled as he endeavoured to find some “in-between” zone where he could enjoy an

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unscripted fluid identity. He was rejected by the two worlds to which he had sought to belong. Salih does not privilege one culture over another. He does not seek to challenge and rebut stereotypes, or counter jaundiced perspectives and misconceptions with “the truth.” He offers no “revised” vision of his homeland. Instead, he contents himself with interrogating different modes of perception and their assumptions.

3. Toni Morrison’s Sula Peace

We turn now to Sula, Mustafa’s counterpart, to examine how Morrison explores marginality by privileging the gender axis. We will highlight Sula’s gendered experience of otherness and the issue of evil attendant on it. Though as a Nobel Laureate, Morrison has been the first African American to be “canonized” by this literary establishment, by virtue of her gender and race she continues to be an “other” in mainstream American society. This prompted her to probe the theme of otherness. She re-envisions and narrativizes the history of her people in their different geographic settings and at critical junctures since the Middle Passage through mapping out the socio-historic trajectory of blacks in America. Her narratives are haunting variations on the theme of collective suffering. They are parabolic tales about a resilient minority doing its utmost to shelter itself against or defeat the forces of evil represented by racism, economic injustice, and patriarchy.

Morrison’s themes revolve around trauma, alienation, madness, self-abnegation, self-mutilation, masochism, and sadism. These are articulated in the confrontation between a centre represented by dominant institutions and a margin populated by disenfranchised African American, mostly female, characters. We must stress the degree to which Morrison has defamilarized and redefined this margin, which, to her, is never the locus of regurgitated stories about victimization, but a “strategic site for autocritique.”15 While traditionally thought of as adversarial and antithetical to the centre, this site has integrated some of the oppressive values of the hegemonic culture, necessitating a revision of the notion of marginality, and the interplay of margin and centre. To Morrison, “the real fundamental human difference is not between white and black, it is between man and woman.”16 She therefore focuses on women’s gendered experience of reality. Furthermore, we can view her texts as “transgressive” to the extent that they deconstruct myths cherished by the centre and/or the margin. Sula is a “transgressive text” that resists idealized literary representations of blacks; its disjunctive narrative compromises oppositions like good/evil, virgin/whore and black/white.17 For McDowell, this work is “rife with liberating possibilities in that it transgresses all deterministic structures of opposition.”18


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Besieged by white culture, Morrison’s world is populated by scores of selfless, stoical women who, retaining their dignity, try to short-circuit socio-political and economic evils by any available means. One such means is the marginalization of nonconformist elements. The fringe mid-western community in Sula sets out to “outlast” evil by neutralizing all forms of otherness. If unsuccessful, it rejects, disciplines, and bands against “deviant” members without necessarily seeking to annihilate them. The people of the Bottom have to tolerate political or social evil, like natural evil, to overcome it. “Evil” is a natural force.

Sula is born into a world that does not forgive “selfishness” in a woman, which is defined as a woman’s desire to improve her lot. When at the age of twenty-seven (in 1937) she comes back to her hometown after ten years of wandering, she is immediately attacked by her grandmother, Eva. Unlike her mother, Hannah, Sula is combative and “manly” in a society that has a sharp demarcation between femininity and masculinity. For a woman to attempt to emulate a man or to claim some of his “rights” is itself an aberration. When she has done what is traditionally reserved for men and “gone away,” things do not bode well for her. Moreover, her refusal to accept the values of a sexist world that incarcerates women in the limited and limiting world of the household guarantees her a marginal position in her community.

Minutes after her arrival, she confronts her grandmother and has to delineate what is quickly perceived as a value-system that is antithetical to the one upheld by Eva. Used to managing crises in her community, Eva asks “When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.”19 An incompliant woman has to be controlled and “settled” by being saddled with backbreaking responsibilities. She has to fit into the scheme of things in the community and accept the baggage that comes with their notion of womanhood, which is inseparable from motherhood. When Sula responds “I want to make myself,”20 Eva angrily calls her selfish and insists that a woman has “no business floatin’ around without no man.”21 Although her grandmother and mother lived without men, they did not do so by choice. When Sula accuses Eva of setting fire to her own son, a drug addict, to relieve him of his wretched life, the matriarch exclaims: “you crazy roach. You the one should have been burnt … . Hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you …”22 Sula, associated with evil and hell, declares that “any more fires in this house I’m lighting them … . Whatever is burning in me is mine.”23 Then she ominously declares: “and I’ll split this town in two and everything in it before I’ll let you put it [the fire] out.”24

Perceiving her as an evil force out to unmask and debunk their hypocritical sexual mores, her people band against her, which causes a violent and self-destructive response from Sula who, like Mustafa,

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retaliates by using sex as a weapon. The text sets out to register how she harasses her people with her outrageous behaviour and perceived wickedness and “immorality.” Indeed, Sula is an “abominable curiosity,” the embodiment of chaos, unruliness, selfishness and violence, which a traditional community denounces, especially in a woman. Single-handedly, she rejects the values of the margin to which she belongs, a margin that mirrors the centre in that it represses any stirrings of discontent. Instead of constructing an alternative vision, she deconstructs her community by declaring war on the traditional values her grandmother cherished, and which kept the traumatized Ohio community together.

Sula has her grandmother, Eva, or “Eve,” the traditional, feminine woman, committed and taken away to an ill run home built by a white church for mentally disturbed people. The next target is her childhood friend, Nel Wright, Miss Right, the “good woman.”25 Without necessarily intending to, she breaks Nel’s home by seducing her husband Jude, only to discard him without explanation: she admits to having never fallen in love with him, which baffles Nel.26 The damage is irreparable, and Jude does what most men in Morrison’s world do: he leaves the community for good. Nel, Sula’s complementary “other,” is presented as the prim and proper child who grows up to be a selfless wife and mother who unquestioningly conforms to the stereotypes of womanhood. She is everything that Sula was supposed to become but did not and would not.

In the eyes of her community, Sula is first a “roach,” then a “bitch,”27 and then a “witch.”28 All three tags symbolize otherness in that they deny her humanity. Like her mother, she pursues any man she desires, and pushes the frontier of transgression into forbidden territory by undermining one of the most intransigent taboos, namely, miscegenation.

We must stress two points here. First, while Hannah saw the sexual act as a means of momentary happiness and an escape from the limitations of her world, Sula uses it as an outlet that leads to a triumph over a community that has marginalized her. The connection between sexual relations and pleasure is not highlighted in Sula’s case. She does not seek the gratification of desire, but the freedom to live a life unfettered by oppressive ideals of womanhood. As Susan Smith has argued, black women activists have “struggled to reconstruct themselves as subjects within the sexual arena, a realm historically rife with black female victimization.29 Sula decentres traditional patriarchal perspectives to gain control over her sexuality in a world that objectifies woman. We can also consider the association of “wickedness” and sex. While the sexual act can be an expression of love and an act of communication, it can also potentially inflict pain and cause injury. This possible connection arouses Sula’s curiosity.30 She does not relish the sexual liaison as much as the freedom to do something that is deemed dangerous and socially


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unacceptable. In so doing, she situates sexuality in a domain beyond ethics where a relationship is putatively dissociated from moral considerations or obligations, and emotional attachments. Sula is claiming the same rights as men, because in wresting those rights from the male domain, she shakes the foundations of a community that relied upon the “predictability” and selflessness of women for its existence and continuity.

The second point is that by attacking miscegenation as the ultimate taboo, Sula is exposing, the double standards at work in her town. The narrator ironically comments that the men and women who saw Sula as an evil witch guilty of the “lowest and filthiest” act, were not deterred by “the fact that their own skin colour was proof that it had happened in their own families.”31 Though black men assume the right to have sexual relations with white women – a relationship they view as “rape” and a symbolic victory over the dominant culture – the converse is unthinkable.32

As teenagers, both Sula and Nel quickly “discovered … that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them.”33 Nel, whose parents “had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had,”34 resigned herself to the grim realities of her world. One day, she passes judgment on Sula’s life declaring her friend to have been an unrealistic failure, because she wanted to have it all. In Nel’s opinion, she should have realized that “you a woman and a coloured woman at that. You can’t act like a man. You can’t be walking around all independent-like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don’t.”35 Sula refuses to accept those “facts of life,” and proceeds to dismantle this world. Her independence and detachment from the usual human pursuits leave members of her town distraught. Worse yet,

Eva’s arrogance and Hannah’s self-indulgence merged in her, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life. … She had no centre, no speck around which to grow. … She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments – no ego.36

In other words, she is a difficult-to-categorize other, straddling

the uncomfortable line between masculinity and femininity, experimenting

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with an androgynous existence without affirming any received values. She passes through life without an ego, without honouring any responsibilities, oblivious to gossip. Further, she acts at whim and never bothers to contemplate the ethical repercussions of her actions.

Faced with her aggression against their moral order and way of life, her community demonizes her. They begin to see in the copper birthmark on her forehead, not a beautiful stemmed rose,37 but a snake or a sign that she is a born other, a witch or devil who causes unusual, inexplicable, and evil things to happen.38 When she has cast her “spell” on the community, unusual incidents begin to take place, such as a man choking on a chicken bone, and a boy dying of a head fracture. They attribute all misfortunes to Sula. People remember that prior to her return, there was a plague of robins,39 and that four robins lay dead on Eva’s walk the day she arrived. Retrospectively, they interpret the plague as a sign that a more forbidding evil force was to descend upon them. This hellish force is Sula, against whom they unite because “the presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, out-witted, triumphed over.”40 With “a devil in their midst,”41 people in the Bottom look at “evil stony-eyed and let it run.”42

According to the narrator, Sula becomes a “pariah,”43 an abnormal other who, had she with the opportunity and talent, could have been an artist. Art would have given expression to her gift for metaphor, would have accommodated her “restlessness,” because, “like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”44 But, contrary to what the town believes, she is more dangerous to herself than she is to others. For sorrow gnaws at her, even in the midst of intense joy. As a teenager, to protect herself and her friend when attacked by the Irish boys who taunted black girls, she cut her finger in an act of defiance that made the boys run away for good.45 It also suggests that from an early age, Sula refuses to bow to male intimidation. In this incident too, self-mutilation and masochism are paradoxical means of self-preservation. Sula always sought to defy the order of things, to unshackle herself, and to attenuate the ills of sexism by warding off objectification. Eventually the fire that rages in her breast consumes her and leads to her premature demise. She dies of an unidentified disease, proving that this fight, though liberating, is unsustainable.

4. Conclusion

We can conclude then that the triad of abnormality, evil, and pain is actualized in the characters of Mustafa Saeed and Sula Peace. Mustafa pits himself against Western society when it spurns him, and drowns, or commits suicide when the Sudan rejects him. Similarly, Sula is an “outsider” who transgresses against the taboos of her culture and affirms a


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woman’s right to question the sexual morality that is traditionally imposed on her gender. Mustafa and Sula, like the characters Georges Bataille studies,46 violate the law of reason and rationality, which leads them to hurt themselves more than they do anyone else. Sula’s gendered experience of marginality, in a quasi-matriarchal community, is triggered by her desire to protect herself in a world where both her sex and race are a liability. Ostracized, she fans the fire that rages inside her by committing acts that are “evil” in the eyes of her community. She becomes the embodiment of evil, regarded as a “devil” or a “witch.”

Perhaps Bataille was right when in he noted that there is a latent desire to sever links with a fallen world in literary acts of transgression against the established moral or social order.47 To know this world best, we sometimes need to discover and uncover what the “everyday” rejects. However, because this struggle against the perceived “enemy” has limited success, our two characters eventually harbour a death wish. So what is initially social malaise or alienation becomes a flirtation with death. What begins as “evil” or sadism is transformed into masochism. Abnormality, evil, and self-inflicted pain are interconnected in Mustafa and Sula. In their characters, a fine line separates life and death, sadism and masochism, and ultimately good and evil. Refusing to capitulate and to co-exist with socio-economic evil, or the evils of empire and patriarchy, they attempt to dent or deconstruct, if not defeat, the institutions that produce, or perpetuate the symbolic order that commodifies them.

Salih and Morrison explore an empowering form of marginality. Despite the characters’ suffering and deaths, this provides an epistemological and aesthetic framework that contests binary oppositions and definitions. Like their characters, the authors view otherness as liberation from culturally conditioned moral orthodoxy, and an escape from the control of hegemonic societies. The protagonists’ gestures of rebellion lead the critic to a better understanding of how otherness influences traditional definitions of “good” and “evil.” We can also situate these gestures in the domain of resistance literature in that they challenge the hierarchical binary logic that anchors the epistemology of imperialism. In this light, we can see literary acts of resistance as a harbinger of cultural decolonization.48

Notes. 1. Salih, 1969, 94-95. 2. Ibid., 58.

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3. Ibid., 60. 4. Ibid., 59. 5. Ibid., 108. 6. Appaduarai, 1986, 37-38. 7. Salih, 1969, 33. 8. Ibid., 146. 9. Ibid., 38. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 146. 12. Ibid., 30. 13. Ibid., 33. 14. Ibid., 81. 15. Gates, 1992, 309. 16. James, 1984, 226. 17. McDowell, 1990, 152. 18. Ibid. 19. Morrison, 1973, 121. 20. Ibid., my emphasis. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 122. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 62. 26. Ibid., 183. 27. Ibid., 145, 147. 28. Ibid., 191. 29. Smith, 1995, 95. 30. Morrison, 1973, 158. 31. Ibid., 146. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 72. 34. Ibid., 110. 35. Ibid., 181. 36. Ibid., 153. 37. Ibid., 72. 38. Ibid., 147. 39. Ibid., 117. 40. Ibid., 152. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 146. 43. Ibid., 157. 44. Ibid., 156. 45. Ibid., 74.


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46. Bataille, 1957, 23. 47. Ibid., 14-33. 48. Harlow, 1987; Quayson, 2000; Parry, 1987, 27-58.

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Tomlinson, John. 1991. Cultural Imperialism. London: Pinter. White, Hayden V. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press. Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. 1993. Colonial Discourse

and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Harlow, Essex: Prentice Hall.


Three

A Visual Theology of Evil and Redemption?

Watts Eve Trilogy and Burne-Jones’s Altarpiece of The Nativity

Kathy M. Bullough

This chapter focuses on four nineteenth-century paintings: She

Shall be Called Woman (c. 1875–1892, Figure 1), Eve Tempted (exhibited 1884, Figure 2) and Eve Repentant (c. 1865–1897, Figure 3) by George Frederick Watts (1817–1904) and an altarpiece by Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), The Nativity, The Annunciation, Visitation and the Flight into Egypt (1862–1863, Figure 4). Watts was an artist on the periphery of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and was introduced to Burne-Jones by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A recent Tate Gallery exhibition entitled “The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts” associated these three artists with the emergence of a distinctive British style of Symbolism which utilizes images and symbols to explore emotions, feelings, and the interchange of ideas.1

The figure of Eve is synonymous with sin, evil, death, and the dangers of feminine sexuality. For centuries, Eve, the first woman of the Judeo-Christian tradition, has functioned as a powerful cultural image that promotes an association between femininity and the origin of evil. I will begin this chapter with an examination of the representation of Eve in the work of George Frederick Watts, focusing on his use of iconography to assess how far his portrayal of Eve is consistent with traditional Christian ideas of the Fall. I will then focus on the Virgin Mary who, as Second Eve, corrected Eve’s sin. I will discuss the doctrine of Mary’s virginitas in partu, the idea that she bore Christ without alteration to her virginity. Drawing on theological parallels between Eve and Mary, this chapter explores how Eve’s introduction of sin and death condemned her to suffer the pain of childbirth whereas, through her reversal of Eve’s curse, the Virgin Mary experiences a painless parturition.

1. George Frederick Watts, She Shall be Called Woman

(c. 1875–1892) Oil on canvas, 2578 x 1168 mm. Tate, London 2000. In She Shall be Called Woman the spectator is confronted with an

ethereal image of the first woman emerging from a whirl of powerful natural imagery. The painting uses traditional motifs of innocence and fertility to symbolize the perfection and beauty of the pre-Fall woman. The lily and the dove in the bottom left of the painting are motifs traditionally

A Visual Theology of Evil and Redemption? 38

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associated with the Annunciation. Hugh MacMillan commented on the “tall, snow-white annunciation lily,”2 which traditionally denotes the purity and innocence of the Virgin Mary. The white dove, another Annunciation motif, is a traditional Christian symbol of the Holy Spirit and can also represent peace, purity, and innocence. A visual parallel is drawn between the pre-Fall woman and the purity of the Virgin Mary. By adopting Annunciation iconography, Watts emphasizes the virginal innocence of the newly created Eve. Similarly, he uses light in the painting to emphasize purity and innocence. Watts intended the painting to represent “Eve in the glory of her innocence”3 He portrayed her emitting light,4 thus implying that purity is inherent in the pre-Fall woman.

Through the contrasting use of darkness, however, the painting alludes to the potential for sin and evil associated with woman in the Christian tradition. The detail of the woman’s upturned face is virtually obscured by darkness and, as Watts commented, “The upturned face is dark in the midst of light, for the human intuitions may take the human mind into a region where reason stops, ‘dark with excessive light.’”5 The darkness alludes to the Fall and its consequences, sin, and death.

Eve’s posture is confident and dominant, and consequently she appears as a statuesque vision of femininity. The ascending movement that pervades the canvas suggests that Eve is the completion of creation instead of an after-thought of creation. Here we can draw a parallel with George Tavard’s interpretation of the creation of woman in his book Woman in Christian Tradition (1973). According to Tavard, “woman is not made as Adam’s helpmate just because he is lonely; she is created as the perfecting element.”6 Also, through the title of the painting, the spectator can witness the moment when Adam sees Eve for the first time and salutes her thus: “this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.”7 However, depicting Eve as the perfection and completion of creation heightens the tragedy of the later events of Genesis 3 as the tragedy of the Fall is grounded in the perfect one’s involvement in sin. Overall, She Shall be Called Woman is a glorification of the feminine qualities of the pre-Fall woman but within this painting, Watts offers a suggestion of the ensuing tragedy.

Kathy M. Bullough 39

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Figure 1: George Frederick Watts, She Shall be Called Woman (c. 1875–1892). Oil on canvas, 2578 x 1168 mm. Tate, London 2000.


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Figure 2: George Frederick Watts, Eve Tempted (exhibited 1884). Oil on canvas, 2578 x 1168 mm. Tate, London 2000.


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Figure 3: George Frederick Watts, Eve Repentant (c. 1865–1897). Oil on canvas, 2591 x 1194 mm. Tate, London 2000.


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Figure 4: Edward Burne-Jones The Nativity, centre panel, (1862–1863). Gouache, 22 1/2 x 20 in. A Private Collection.


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2. George Frederick Watts, Eve Tempted (exhibited 1884) Oil on canvas, 2578 x 1168 mm. Tate, London 2000. Traditionally, Eve has been interpreted as a temptress associated

with the Fall and the introduction of sin. This interpretation is based on the notion that Eve, having been tempted by the serpent, becomes a temptress herself and consequently tempts Adam to sin. Watts’s image of the temptation scene is entitled Eve Tempted and thus suggests Eve is the subject of temptation rather than a temptress herself.

In Eve Tempted the spectator is confronted with a luscious depiction of an Eden bower abundant with images of sensuality and sexuality. Eve’s pose is enticing, her curvaceous figure dominates the canvas and the blossom vividly symbolizes the heat of mid-summer. As Eve leans forward the spectator senses that she inhales the fragrance of the blossom and seductively bites the apple as the foliage and flowers provocatively caress her body. This sensual rendering of woman in the painting reinforces a sexual interpretation of the Fall and perpetuates the idea that sensual weakness is an inherent feminine characteristic. As John Philips comments:

The eating of the forbidden fruit becomes a euphemism for sexual congress between Eve and the snake, or between Eve and her husband; or the eating of the forbidden fruit imparts to Eve a sexual consciousness that leads her to seduce her husband. The idea of Eve as weak thus joins with the idea that Eve is demonic: Having been seduced because of her weakness, she is able to seduce her husband because she is filled with the power of the Devil.8 This is emphasized in Eve Tempted as Eve is represented without

Adam, and woman is firmly cast as the first sinner whose action initiates the Fall. Eve’s feline posture, which denotes “entire weakness,”9 is reinforced by the leopard beneath Eve’s feet. In Eve Tempted the traditional serpent-tempter is absent and a unique motif of a leopard is introduced. As Diane Apostolos-Cappadona comments, the leopard was “an animal with ambiguous meaning ... [which] signified cruelty, sin, the Devil, and the Antichrist (Rv 13:2) in western Christian art.”10 In Eve Tempted the leopard playfully basks in the sunlight, lying on its back, seductively pawing the air, imitating the titillating movement of Eve’s arms. Thus a direct visual parallel is made between Eve and the leopard that associates femininity with evil. This association can be related to the late-nineteenth-century image of the femme fatale or “animal-woman.”11 The femme fatale was a sexually powerful woman and her predatory


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nature was often emphasized by the production of half-women half-monster images or depictions of women surrounded by animals. As Patrick Bade stated, “In many paintings and descriptions of the femme fatale there is a hint of bestiality. The fatal woman is often attended by animals, and a kinship or secret understanding between them is implied.”12 Eve in Eve Tempted corresponds, therefore, with the imagery of the femme fatale, as the playful pose of the feline beast emphasizes an identification between woman, sexuality and sin.

3. George Frederick Watts, Eve Repentant (c. 1865–1897)

Oil on canvas, 2591 x 1194 mm. Tate, London 2000. In EveRepentant the spectator is confronted with an image of

death, debasement, and remorse. It is the exact antithesis of Eve Tempted. As Mary Watts commented, “in the third – the Eve Repentant – all is changed, the earthly paradise is wrecked, and the agony of remorse is expressed by the attitude of the tragic figure.”13 The burgeoning flowers, foliage and luscious fruit of She Shall be Called Woman and Eve Tempted have decayed into the brambles, thorns, and rotten wood of Eve Repentant. The representation of the thorns to symbolize disintegration anticipates the punishment of man in Genesis 3:18 indicating that livelihood will be a struggle and a toil as the ground which man will work is described as bringing forth “thorns and thistles.” Similarly, the first part of the woman’s punishment is to be characterized by pain and toil: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”14

Eve Repentant supports a sexual interpretation of the Fall as the fallen Eve in anguish covers her body by throwing herself against the tree. According to Augustine (354–430 BCE), the interpretation of the Fall as a sexual event is supported by the Genesis text which claims that man and woman covered themselves because they were ashamed of their nakedness. In the City of God (413–426 BCE), Augustine suggested that in Paradise the sexual organs, like other bodily organs, were able to function without being driven or controlled by lustful passion. Sexual intercourse was not sinful in itself; it was the uncontrollable desire that accompanied sexual intercourse after the Fall that was deemed sinful.15 Consequently, the natural process of conception and birth bore the mark of sin and, according to Augustine, original sin was passed on through the generations by the same act that maintained human existence.

In Eve Repentant Eve’s lost innocence is conveyed by the crushing of the lily, the flower that denoted purity in She Shall be Called Woman. Eve appears remorseful for her sin, which creates a context for the advent of redemption and forgiveness. Watts creates a context for the Redeemer and his mother, the Second Eve, who will correct Eve’s sin. In


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order for Christ to redeem mankind he must be sinless and, to ensure this, his conception and birth must be free from the contamination of original sin. Christ’s sinlessness necessitates a miraculous conception and a virgin birth. In Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Marina Warner demonstrates this connection in the second sermon of Augustine’s Sermones de Tempore:

“Let us love chastity above all things,” Augustine wrote, “for it was to show that this was pleasing to Him that Christ chose the modesty of a Virgin womb.” Augustine thus bound up three ideas in a causal chain: the sinfulness of sex, the Virgin birth, and the good of virginity.16

In Eve Repentant the condition is created for the advent of the Virgin Mary whose Son, miraculously conceived, will redeem mankind from the state of sin that was initiated by Eve. 4. Edward Burne-Jones, The Nativity (centre); The

Annunciation, Visitation and The Flight into Egypt (wings). (1862–1863.) Gouache, centre 22 1/2 x 20 in. Wings 22 1/2 x 10 1/2 in. Altarpiece. A Private Collection. The Eve-Mary analogy can be traced back almost to the origins

of Christianity. In I Corinthians15, Paul drew a parallel between Fall and Redemption: “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”17 This parallel between Adam and Christ was later applied to Eve and Mary, and Eve’s role in the Fall was thus balanced by Mary’s association with the work of Redemption. The parallel that originated with Paul probably inspired the early Church Fathers’ understanding of the Virgin Mary as the Second Eve, such as we can find in the writings of Justin Martyr (c.100–65), (Dialogue with Trypho), Irenaeus, (c.130-200), (Against Heresies), and Tertullian (c.160–225), (On the Flesh of Christ). Many contrasts exist between Eve and Mary but here I am going to focus exclusively on a narrative which maintained that the Virgin, unlike Eve, retained her virginity in childbirth.

As the antithesis of the first Eve, Mary’s conceiving and bearing of Christ are understood as miraculous events that constitute the exact opposite of Eve’s pattern of conception and parturition. Eve conceived and bore children in the natural human way that necessitated loss of virginity, whereas the mark of Mary’s miraculous conception and parturition of Christ was intact physical virginity. As the New Catholic Encyclopedia suggests, Mary’s virginity in childbirth or virginitas in partu is a two


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dimensional concept. One aspect of the doctrine emphasizes that Mary retained “her bodily virginal integrity intact” and the second aspect conveys that remaining a virgin in childbirth is a mark of “her exemption from the ordinary pangs of childbirth.”18 Mary represents the reversal of the curse to Eve. Western Christendom tended to focus on the preservation of Mary’s intact virginity whereas the East celebrated Mary’s freedom from the pain of labour.

The narrative of Mary’s virginity in childbirth is found in second-century apocryphal and legendary works, namely The Protevangelium of James, and The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. In The Protevangelium of James, Joseph goes to search for a midwife, leaving Mary, about to give birth, alone in the cave. Joseph tells the midwife that his betrothed “is Mary, who was brought up in the temple of the Lord, and I received her by lot as my wife, and she is not my wife, but she has conceived by the Holy Spirit.”19 The midwife asks if this is true and Joseph said to her “Come and see.” Joseph takes the midwife to the cave that is engulfed by a bright cloud where she responds:

“My soul is magnified today, for my eyes have seen wonderful things: for salvation is born to Israel.” And immediately the cloud disappeared from the cave and a great light appeared, so that our eyes could not bear it. A short time afterwards that light withdrew until the baby appeared, and it came and took the breast of its mother Mary.20

The midwife then tells Salome that “a virgin has brought forth, a

thing which her condition does not allow.”21 Salome refuses to believe that Mary has given birth as a Virgin without proof and subjects Mary to a virginity test. “And Salome inserted her finger to test her condition. And she cried out, saying, ‘Woe for my wickedness and my unbelief; for I have tempted the living God; and behold, my hand falls away from me, consumed by fire!’”22 Salome then prays to God and is instructed to touch the Christ child with her withered hand, which is then healed immediately. The midwives’ function is to attest to Mary’s virginity rather than to assist with the birth, which emphasizes the idea that the birth was free from pain.23

By drawing directly on apocryphal detail, the centre panel of the altarpiece makes a definite allusion to Mary giving birth to Christ without alteration to her virginity. Virginitas in partu would probably have been familiar to Burne-Jones from legendary and apocryphal material and from the work of his hero, Cardinal John Henry Newman. In the central panel of the altarpiece, I suggest that the midwives, only previously identified as


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“two women ... talking at the entrance,”24 are derived from The Protevangelium of James. The women, engaged in conversation, are standing to the left of the stable door with their hands joined. The woman standing with her back to the stable raises her hand to her face. On closer inspection her hand appears to be deformed or withered and we can identify her as Salome, the doubting midwife of The Protevangelium of James.

The rest of the Nativity picture may also rely on the apocrypha for its composition and symbolism. The light in the stable seems to radiate from the Christ child and is connected vertically to the heavenly light of the star and the angels. This divine light which illuminates the darkness can be interpreted as redemptive light and parallels can be drawn between the cave of the Nativity and the burial chamber. According to Gertrud Schiller,

even the doctors of the church, beginning with Irenaeus in the third century, connected the cave of the Nativity with the cave of Hades – in which the dead of the old covenant awaited salvation – and by the same token, Christ’s Incarnation with his Descent into Limbo.25

In apocryphal works, Mary bears Christ alone while Joseph is searching for a midwife. In the altarpiece, the idea of Mary giving birth alone is accentuated by the midwives standing at the doorway and Joseph sitting outside the stable kindling a fire and reading. Thus the space inside the stable is presented as sacred space for the Mother and Child alone. The composition of the altarpiece reflects fifteenth-century paintings as, according to Schiller, “it was not until 1400 onwards that works began to appear which show Mary kneeling alone before the naked Child, who is surrounded by a supernatural light.”26

In the fourth century, Ambrose (339–397) linked the virgin birth more directly with the concept of original sin, claiming that Mary’s virginity functions to protect Christ from inheriting original sin. In other words, Christ’s miraculous conception becomes the mark of his freedom from sin and defilement. For Ambrose the concept of the virgin birth includes virginitas in partu and, in bringing forth as a virgin, Mary is intimately connected with the work of redemption. Virginitas in partu was also promoted by Augustine who maintained that Christ’s birth differed from other births because Mary’s motherhood was virginal. Augustine argued for Mary’s perfect and perpetual virginity and he was the first of the Latin Fathers to claim that Mary’s question in Luke 1:34 “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” was evidence of her vow of virginity.27 Augustine authenticated Mary’s virginitas in partu by drawing parallels


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between the manner of Christ’s birth and his Resurrection and appearances. For Augustine, the belief that the adult Christ, risen from the dead, could physically enter through the closed doors (John 20:19) is paralleled by the infant Christ leaving his mother’s womb without violating it. Contrasts thus emerge between Eve and Mary as mothers. According to Gregory of Nyssa (330–395), Eve’s introduction of sin and death condemned her to suffer the pain of childbirth whereas the Virgin Mary reverses Eve’s curse and experiences parturition in joy.

How familiar Burne-Jones was with the above materials is impossible to ascertain. What is likely is that any familiarity with virginitas in partu, if not directly from the work of the Church Fathers, may have derived from the work of Cardinal Newman. For Newman, the fact of the Virgin birth was proof of Christ’s ability to redeem humankind from sin.28 In other words, because Christ was miraculously and immaculately conceived he was able to save humankind from the corruption of sin. According to Newman, through Mary, Eve’s curse is turned into a blessing, “The very punishment of the fall, the very taint of birth-sin, admits of a cure by the coming of Christ.”29 According to Francis Friedel, in Newman’s thought, Mary was a virgin before, during and after birth,30 and Mary’s virginal parturition is the sign of Christ’s freedom from sin, the sign of his Incarnation and redemptive purpose. Newman supports his view of Mary’s virginity by utilizing the work of the Fathers and he claims that “Mary ... is a specimen ... in the purity of her soul and body, of what man was before his fall, and what he would have been, had he risen to his full perfection.”31

5. Conclusions

What can be drawn from these paintings in relation to evil and redemption? The altarpiece alludes to Mary’s physical virgin-motherhood and attests to a conception and birth that were separate from natural conception. Christ’s conception and birth are presented as the antithesis of natural conception and birth and as such reverse Eve’s curse. The Eve paintings associate the first woman with the introduction of sex and sin. In the paintings and in Christianity, it is Mary’s virginity that becomes the mark of her redemption of Eve’s sin. Thus, through the concept of Second Eve, Mary’s virginity and physical purity are highlighted. This in turn reinforces Eve’s defilement and association with sin and evil. In different ways, Eve and Mary represent a Christian connection between femininity, sex, and sin. Eve’s prominent role in the Fall together with her loss of virginity associate her with the introduction of sin, and the only alternative offered is the paradoxical ideal of the Virgin-Mother.


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Notes 1. Wilton and Uptone, 1997. 2. Macmillan, 1903, 145. 3. Watts, 1912, 1:262. 4. Ibid, 1912, 2:139. 5. Ibid. 6. Tavard, 1973, 8. 7. Gen. 2:23 Revised Standard Version. 8. Philips, 1984, 62-64. 9. Watts, 1912, 2:141. 10. Apostolos-Cappadona, 1986, 304. 11. Dijkstra, 1986, 304. 12. Bade, 1979, 8. 13. Watts, 1912, 2:141. 14. Gen. 3:16 RSV. 15. Pagels, 1985, 82. 16. Warner, 1990, 54. 17. 1 Cor. 15:21-22 RSV. 18. New Catholic Encylopedia, 1967-1979, 14:693. 19. Elliot, 1993, 64. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 65. 23. Hirn, 1958, 252. 24. De Lisle, 1906, 65. 25. Schiller, 1971, 1:62. 26. Ibid., 1:79. 27. Ibid., 1:95. See also O’Carroll, 1983, 364. 28. Friedel, 1928, 225. 29. Newman, 1873, 2:130. 30. Friedel, 1928, 226. 31. Newman, 1862, 410.

References Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane. 1986. Dictionary of Women in Religious

Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Bade, Patrick. 1979. Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating

Women. New York: Mayflower. New Catholic Encyclopedia. 1967–1979. Ed. W. J. MacDonald. 17 Vols.

New York: McGraw Hill.


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De Lisle, Fortunée. 1906. Burne-Jones. 2nd ed. London: Methuen. Dijkstra, Bram. 1986. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in

Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elliot, J. K. 1993. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon. Friedel, Francis J. 1928. The Mariology of Cardinal Newman. New York:

Benziger Brothers. Hirn, Yrjo. 1958. The Sacred Shrine: A Study of the Poetry and Art of the

Catholic Church. London: Faber & Faber. MacMillan, Hugh. 1903. The Life of George Frederick Watts. London:

Dent. Newman, John Henry. 1862. The Glories of Mary for the Sake of Her Son.

In Discourses to Mixed Congregations. London: Paternoster. ———. 1873. The Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

The Reverence Due To Her. In Parochial and Plain Sermons. Vol. 2. London: Rivingtons.

O’Carroll, Michael. 1983. Theotokos: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier.

Pagels, Elaine. 1985. The Politics of Paradise: Augustine’s Exegesis of Genesis 1–3 versus that of John Chrysostum. Harvard Theological Review 78:67–99.

Philips, John A. 1984. Eve: The History of an Idea. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Schiller, Gertrud. 1971. Iconography of Christian Art. 2 Vols. London: Lund Humphries.

Tavard, George. 1973. Woman in Christian Tradition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Warner, Marina. 1990. All Alone of Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. London: Picador.

Watts, M. S. 1912. George Frederick Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life.

3 Vols. London: Macmillan. Wilton, Andrew, and Robert Upstone. 1997. The Age of Rossetti, Burne-

Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860–1910. Tate Gallery Exhibition, 1997–1998. London: Tate Gallery.

Four

Or Image of That Horror? Imagining Radical Evil

David H. Fisher

Kent: Is this the promised end? Edgar: Or image of that horror.

King Lear, 5.3.265-266

There is in man a natural propensity to evil; and since this very propensity must in the end be sought in a will which is free, and can therefore be imputed, it is morally evil. This evil is radical, because it corrupts the ground of all maxims … . We are not … to call this depravity of human nature wickedness [Bosheit] taking the word in its strict sense as a disposition . . .to adopt evil [Böse] as evil into our maxim as our incentives (for that is diabolical); we should rather term it the perversity of the heart, which … because of what follows from it, is also called an evil heart.

Immanuel Kant

As the experience of evil explodes into a sense of the infinite presence of evil … the material overwhelms the art; the rule of probability suffers a shock … the human countenance is obscured.

Geoffrey Hartman

The phrase “radical evil” marks limits of thought, representation, and moral reflection. The first limit has been described by Reiner Schürmann as the challenge of a phenomenology of ultimates. Philosophy, according to Schürmann, should submit to rigorous thinking elements of experience of which we do not have prior knowing. Philosophy must seek a starting point which:

neither abandons ordinary experience nor trans-substantiates it into the extraordinary will have to be looked for in something everyone is familiar with, however poorly … one will have to grasp irreducible traits in everydayness and put them to the test of a historical – systematic investigation. Let us call such an inquiry a phenomenology of ultimates.1

Imagining Radical Evil 52

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Peter Haidu sees this first challenge as one of “thinking Divinity within the dialectics of unspeakability”:

The irruptions into human life of the divine as that which is awesome, that which strikes us with terror, inexplicable because of the unpredictability of its violence as well as the force of that violence … It is a concept of divinity that precedes the moralization of divinity under the aegis of monotheism. . .it is a concept of divinity which culture and civilization… hold at bay, rendering it also “unspeakable.”2

In both cases, “radical evil” suggests an undisclosed, unknown arche; an origin which resists thinking while demanding to be thought.

The second and third limits suggested by radical evil involve those acts whose motivations and consequences can be thought, but which resist imagining and expression in narrative or visual forms. This resistance to imagination and expression respectively challenges the creative abilities of writers, sculptors, or painters, while inadequate imagining or representation blocks moral reflection. In George Steiner’s words, it has often seemed to be the case that “The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason.”3 That which we cannot imagine or express cannot serve as the initial moment in the process of moral reflection. This process begins with an agent’s accurate recognition of a situation’s features as morally significant. Perceiving the morally salient features of a situation permits subsequent analysis and judgment.

The following remarks remain within the boundaries of aesthetics and ethics focusing on the relationship between the second and third limits posed by the phenomenon of “radical evil.” I will begin by discussing how “radical evil” challenges the moral and aesthetic imaginations. I will then turn to a comparative analysis of selected poems by the Jewish Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan, and visual attempts to imagine the Holocaust by Anselm Kiefer, a German painter inspired by Celan. Celan’s poetry and Kiefer’s “Shulamite” series imagine the Holocaust in allegoric, metaphoric, metonymic, and, ultimately, abstract forms. The movement from allegory and metaphor, through metonymy to abstraction in Celan’s poetry and Kiefer’s paintings, suggests the kind of art needed to imagine radical evil. Radical evil, resisting imagination and the boundaries of narrative, is represented through verbal or visual abstractions that allow readers and viewers to attend, reflect on, and respond to it.

David H. Fisher 53

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1. Radical Evil and the Resistance to Imagination and Representation Imagination of a situation or an object defines a figure or figures

against a background. The boundaries that circumscribe a figure establish contrasts between it and a tacit, indeterminate background. Imaginative failure occurs as a result of difficulty in establishing determinate boundaries for a situation or an object. In The Critique of Judgment, Kant proposes two types of object that resist imaginary boundaries. “Mathematically sublime” objects are natural phenomena whose quantitative extent defies the mind’s ability to imagine. “Dynamically sublime” objects are forces whose qualitative aspects resist imagining. Radical evil resists imagining in both quantitative and qualitative ways.

Mass murder and genocide illustrate the quantitative aspects of radical evil. While we can conceptualize such acts, we have difficulty in imagining them because of their complexity and scope, for reasons similar to those given by Kant. Narrative or visual representations of mass death do not capture fully the cumulative aspects of horrors undergone by individual victims, in repeated events dispersed across extended periods and in different locations. Seeing a pile of human bodies provides evidence that an atrocity has taken place. A photograph of that same pile of bodies serves as a representation of the consequences of the event. The sight of the bodies and the evidence of the photograph do not capture the experiences of dying of each individual victim. Rilke’s prayer – “O Herr, gieb jedem seinen eignen Tod” – is denied: none of the victims is accorded the final dignity of his or her death. Sight and photographic or film image are visual equivalents to a statistical abstract.4

Extreme cruelty suggests the qualitative aspect of radical evil. Cruelty adds psychological or additional physiological dimensions to already unmerited harm and suffering undergone by victims. In Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, the cruel nature of the “choice” forced upon Sophie by a Nazi doctor is obvious. Demanding that a mother “choose” in an instant which of her two innocent children will die is cruel to both children and the parent. As with the quantitative aspects of radical evil, a degree of understanding is possible:

Asked why the incessant humiliation and cruelty, since all the victims were marked for extermination in any case, the Treblinka commander answered: “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies ... to make it possible for them to do what they did.”5

Successful representation of the motivation for the doctor’s

“experiment” and its cumulative effect on Sophie in the novel and the film


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based upon it remains elusive. As readers or viewers, we may understand how Sophie’s previous history positioned her to act in ways that caught the physician’s attention at Auschwitz. We may, perhaps, grasp some of the reasons for the doctor’s decision to “experiment” with Sophie. We cannot, however, fully imagine the process that leads from her “choice” to her eventual double suicide with Nathan, her lover. We read or see a sequence of events in the film interspersed with flashbacks, but the sequence read and the flashbacks seen do not convey the cruelty of the forced “choice” or its cumulative impact upon her.

Radically evil acts invert the order proclaimed by morality while retaining the formal characteristics of goal-directed intentionality that characterizes practical reasoning. To the extent that radically evil acts appear to be rational, we cannot dismiss them as instances of pathology or as the product of extrinsic determination. While an order of intending that subverts and contradicts moral norms demands moral evaluation, it invites analysis in the deterministic languages of precipitating psychological, sociological, or economic causes. Such languages remove the intending in part from the moral realm.

The representation of radical evil in visual or literary art also challenges the aesthetic limitations of expressive media and the psychological capacities of viewers and readers. It is difficult to imagine or represent a “whole universe of death” (Milton’s phrase for Hell) in the space of a single painting, sculpture, epic poem, or novel. To the extent that it is possible to do so in ways that resemble the phenomenon in question, the result often appears disgusting, obscene, or grotesque. Viewers reflexively turn away from seeing such images, as do readers from following such texts. Finally, when extraordinary artists or poets discover ways of overcoming both of these resistances to representation, they confront a further limit. The successful artist runs the risk of being charged with aestheticizing evil insofar as works of art or literature make it possible to look upon or read about radically evil acts without suffering revulsion. The artist is condemned for making attractive that which should remain unspeakable and beyond sight.

Pre-modern and modern cultures understand these moral and aesthetic limitations in different ways. In the pre-modern world of medieval Europe, awareness of large-scale natural disasters such as plagues or mass deaths from prolonged warfare led to the representation of radical evil in apocalyptic iconography. Through a complex system of correspondences and metonymies, radical evil was depicted as an uncanny invasion of daily life by demonic forces. Parts of human and animal bodies and ordinary objects were distorted to become parts of monstrous beings; ordinary actions were represented as symbols of the obscene or the

David H. Fisher 55

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disgusting. Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych “The Last Judgment” remains the primary monument to this pre-modern way of seeing radical evil.

Such ways of imagining and representing radical evil assume a distinction between the transcendent and the mundane, and between appearance and reality. In an early modern artist such as Goya, we find evidence of a gradual loss of belief in the credibility of this contrast. Even when Goya uses images from inherited myth and tradition such as the Titan Saturn devouring his children to express the horror produced by mass death, his work shows a clear loss of faith in the probability of divine retribution for human failings. In Nietzsche’s late modern understanding of morality, the distinction between appearance and reality that was central to the moral universe of Platonism and Christianity was rejected in favour of a stance “beyond good and evil.” In the twentieth century, repeated encounters with instances of mass murder caused by human beings have produced two opposing responses: reduction and expansion.

Reductionists reject the validity of “radical evil” altogether. For them, the phrase “radical evil” is nothing more than a way to denote disapproval and shock at multiple wrongful acts performed by individuals. Reductionists may admit that such acts, or the intentions motivating them, are horrifying or shocking. They claim, however, that the way to understand such phenomena is through reductive social scientific analysis. Once we understand such acts as natural consequences of psychological, sociological, economic, historic, or biological causes, the banality of evil in Hanna Arendt’s phrase becomes all too apparent. We can then address the precipitating causes of such acts.

Expansionists respond to radically evil acts by seeing them as instances of a late modern “natural supernaturalism,” or as evidence of the need for a “postmodern sublime” capable of dealing with the “differend.” “Natural supernaturalism” is a way to characterize “the inherited secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking” in Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Shelley.6 When applied to radical evil, the phrase “natural supernaturalism” suggests parallels between radical evil and attempts by literary and visual artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create a humanistic sublime. Both seek to transcend the limitations of mere humanity. The humanistic sublime is the expression in art or action of something more than human. By contrast, those who see radical evil as an instance of a postmodern sublime understand it in aporias characteristic of postmodernity. Radical evil designates phenomena that demand and resist representation and ethical analysis. This suggests a “space” that Jean-François Lyotard calls a “differend”:


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The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. . . .In the differend, something “asks” to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away.7

Lyotard’s primary example of the differend is Auschwitz:

“Auschwitz” is the forbiddance of the beautiful death … the formula would be, if we focus on the SS as “legislator”: That s/he die, I decree it; or, if we focus on the deportee as the one ‘obligated’ That I die, s/he decrees it … . The authority of the SS comes out of a we from which the deportee is excepted once and for all.… The deportee…cannot be the addressee of an order to die, because one would have to be capable of giving one’s life in order to carry out the order. But one cannot give a life that one doesn’t have the right to have. Sacrifice is not available to the deportee, nor for that reason accession to an immortal, collective name. One’s death is legitimate because one’s life is illegitimate…. This death must therefore be killed, and that is what is worse than death. For, if death can be exterminated, it is because there is nothing to kill. Not even the name Jew.8

Edith Wyschogrod responds to the difficulty posed by Lyotard:

the demand of alterity issues from the dead others, the multiple wounded and suffering bodies that form a society of bodies….This past can never be encountered in face-to-face encounter but only as image. To be sure, the visual image disincarnates beings, becomes their reflection, but in so doing, the image opens a space beyond beings…and thus allows for the emergence of an ethical space of disclosure.9

The creation of such a difficult “ethical space of disclosure”

requires a poetic and visual imagination. Such imagination is able to build upon the inherited symbolic system of a culture to describe radically evil events that have occurred, and then to place that same culture and its social instituting imaginary in question. Paintings of Kiefer that respond to images in Celan’s poems illustrate that space of disclosure. We can best

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understand the mode of perception engendered in that space as the tremouring movement of the mind in its encounters with the sublime. Kant describes this movement as follows:

This agitation can be compared with a vibration, i.e. with a rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object. If a [thing] is excessive for the imagination (and the imagination is driven to [such excess] as it apprehends [the thing] in intuition), then [the thing] is, as it were, an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself. Yet, at the same time, for reason’s idea of the supersensible [this same thing] is not excessive but conforms to reason’s law to give rise to such striving by the imagination.10

Celan’s poetry and Kiefer’s paintings bring about such tremouring, initiating a process of moral reflection capable of recognizing what eludes imagination. 2. Imagining Radical Evil: Paul Celan’s Poetic Witness

Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz, the capital of Bukhovina, into an educated Jewish family. He received an education from his parents that combined German and Jewish culture. As a Jew, Holocaust survivor, and poet, Celan’s work embodies tensions between multiple identities and demands for representation of what defies representation. An inmate of a slave labour camp whose parents were both killed in a death camp, he spent the remainder of his life after the war in Paris where he worked as a translator and wrote poetry in German, the language of his parents’ murderers.

When a friend asked Celan how he could go on writing poems in the language that fashioned the Final Solution, Celan replied: “Only in the mother tongue can one speak his own truth; in a foreign tongue the poet lies.”11 He came to believe that only in German – his mother’s first language as well as his mother tongue – could he express the truth of the Holocaust because the murders spoke it. In the wake of the canonization of his best known and widely anthologized “Todesfuge” or “Death Fugue” by the German literary establishment, Celan’s subsequent work became resistant to easy interpretations. Refusing to produce texts that could be taken as hermeneutic keys to the meaning of the Shoah, Celan’s poetry became a witness that demands witness, as he suggests in the concluding words of a late poem, “Aschenglorie”:


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Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen. (Nobody/bears witness for the/witness.)12 Celan composed “Death Fugue” in 1944–1945 following his

return to Czernowitz after eighteen months in a forced labour camp. He had just learned of his parents’ death at the hands of the SS, and had either heard the type of music played by Jewish musicians at camps as a forced accompaniment to deaths, or had heard tales about it from other survivors.

On a rhetorical level, the four stanzas and final two lines of the poem are a complex allegory, built from allusion, metaphor, and metonymy into a synecdoche. The central allusions are to the literary texts of the Biblical “Song of Songs” and Goethe’s Faust, and to the music of Bach’s fugues. The metaphors derived from the texts are the Shulamite woman from the “Song of Songs” and Margarete from Faust.

The Shulamite was interpreted in Rabbinical exegesis as a metaphor for Israel, beloved of YHWH, and in Christian exegesis as the church or the individual soul loved by Christ. Margarete is Goethe’s late Romantic metaphor for “the eternal feminine” linked to nature as a saving power to rescue isolated, modern persons from death. In the first stanza of “Death Fugue,” Margarete is introduced as the beloved of a death camp Commandant. He writes to her when a starry night evokes the memory of her golden hair. Shulamite and her ashen hair appear in the second stanza as one of the victims for whom prisoners dig a “grave in the hair.”

Both women re-appear in the third stanza, with an emphatic contrast between Margarete’s golden hair and Shulamite’s ashen hair. In the fourth stanza, Margarete again appears alone, with both women joined in the final two lines of the poem:

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Shulamith

In the poem’s movement, allusion gives way to metaphor, metaphor to metonymy (hair as a figure for each woman), and finally to a synecdoche: the Holocaust is represented as the joining of blonde and ashen hair.

The title “Death Fugue” is significant in several ways. It indicates the fugal, point-counterpoint form of the poem: the three main characters, Margarete, Shulamite, and the Commandant intertwine as the opposing voices of a fugue. “Fugue” and “master” suggest links between music played at the death camps; the camps as a “dance macabre, a part of the music of what happens,”13 and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the master of the fugue. Bach, a trope for higher culture’s ability to transform

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and uplift, is juxtaposed here with its antithesis, the death camps, where persons were turned into corpses, ascending into the air like smoke and ash:

er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da leigt man nicht eng. (he [the commandant] calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into/air/then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined.)14

Reference to Bach’s mastery also establishes a contrast with

Commandant as a trope for the “master race.” Celan describes the Commandant as “a blue-eyed master of Death from Germany.” The poet presents him playing with vipers instead of making music; ordering his Jewish victims to play their music “more sweetly” as he strikes them with a rod, loosens his hounds upon them, and finally shoots them, all the while dreaming of his “golden haired” Margarete back home. Unfortunately for Celan, “Death Fugue” was too successful:

In Paris, where he eked out a living as a teacher and translator, Celan watched the German appropriation of his poems … . And he would not permit [“Death Fugue”] to be anthologized in collections that included authors sympathetic to Nazism during the war.15

In “The Meridian,” a speech accepting the Büchner Prize in 1960,

Celan offered his audience a rare prose statement of his beliefs about the scope and aims of poetry:

Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way – the way of art – just for the sake of such a turn? And since this strange, the abyss and Medusa’s head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction – it is perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange….The poem becomes conversation – often desperate conversation…. Whenever we speak with things in this way we also dwell on the question of their where-from and where-to …a question which points towards open, empty, free spaces….The poem also searches for this place.16


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Celan’s poetry after “Death Fugue” moves toward “this place” by moving away from allusion and metaphor toward an increasing density of figural abstraction. In “Stretto” (the term for the overlap of musical voices at the end of a fugue), Celan resisted the claim that the “music” of “Death Fugue” had covered up and aestheticized the Shoah with a chilling combination of word and ash:

Kam, kam. Kam ein Wort, kam, kam durch die Nacht, wollt leuchten, wollt leuchten. Asche. Asche, Asche. Nacht. Nacht-und-Nacht. – Zum Aug geh, zum feuchten. (Came, came./Came a word, came,/came through the night,/wanted to shine, wanted to shine. Ash./Ash, ash./Night. Night-and-night. – Go/to the eye, the moist one.)17

The poetic word cannot cause human ashes to “shine” in the night through the cultural density after Auschwitz. It can at most become an irritant, carrying ashes to the eyes of readers, causing tears. At the end of the poem, the ashes are driven into the ground, covered with grass, but not concealed. In “Alchemical,” the gold of Margarete’s hair central to “Death Fugue” becomes a figure for the reduction of flesh into charred remains:

Schweigen, wie Gold gekocht, in verkholten, verkholten Händen. Finger, rauchdünn. Wie Kronen, Luftkronen Um (Silence, cooked like gold, in/charred, charred/hands./ Fingers, insubstantial as smoke. Like crests, crests of air/around.)18

In “Aschenglorie,” one of his last poems, after beginning with an ironic reference to Shulamite’s ashen hair as her “crowning glory” (the “ashen glory” of the title), Celan closes with the threatened loss of witness altogether:

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Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen. (Nobody/bears witness for the/witness.)19

The movement through these later texts is from gold and ashes as metonymies for two women, to gold and ashes as an image for what remains of culture and society after Auschwitz. Despite occasional images of light and salvation in Celan’s later poetry, it is clear that he felt increasingly unable to use his art to mourn those who had died, or what had died along with them. In many ways, Kiefer’s response to Celan’s “Death Fugue” takes up the unfinished work of mourning implied by the poetry in painting. Celan’s witness is represented on the surfaces of canvases.

3. The Truth in Painting: Anselm Kiefer’s Response to Paul

Celan Kiefer was born 8 March 1945, and had just started studying with

Joseph Beuys in Dusseldorf when Celan drowned himself in Paris in April 1970. It is unclear whether news of Celan’s death touched Kiefer at the time it occurred. In works such as “Occupations” and “The Flooding of Heidelberg” in 1969, he had already begun exploring the implications of the Nazi era. Beuys’s insistence on making explicit links between art and life stimulated Kiefer to search more deeply into the historic and cultural roots of the Nazi era.20 His exploration included addressing the question of guilt for events that had taken place before his birth.

From 1970 to 1973, he explored subjects with mythic as well as historic overtones, including dark, thickly planted German forests, and images of his studio surroundings infused with spiritual or religious motifs. In 1974, he began using imagery of a dark landscape that was to serve as the ground for many subsequent works including the Margarete/Shulamite series of the 1980s. “March Heath” completed in 1974 is typical of Kiefer’s transformation of natural landscape into an image for cultural emptiness. By writing the words “markische Heide” (March Heath) across the foreground of the painting, Kiefer transforms a familiar rural location prized as a country retreat, into a barren landscape. In so doing, he works against sentimental attachment to the land as a source of renewal or “sacred” meaning.

During the same period, Kiefer became interested in uncovering the historic and cultural sources in German’s past for the Holocaust. “Ways of Worldly Wisdom” in 1976–1977 links the faces of cultural intellectuals (such as Schleiermacher and Fichte) and artists (such as Stefan George and Friedrich Hölderlin) with vines growing out of a pile of


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burning logs in a forest clearing. The visual reference is to a battle in 9 CE in which three legions of Roman soldiers were killed by a German tribe. Kiefer became interested in art’s alchemical or transformative power to rework problematic features of his culture.

The palette serves as a potent and dangerous image of that power in a 1974 work “Nero Paints.” Through the title and image of a red palette lying over a small village on fire, Kiefer compares Nero’s burning of Rome to the destructive-cleansing work of an artist. In “Icarus – March Sands” (1981), the artist’s palette takes flight above a seared, desiccated landscape like the mythic Icarus, “raising the question whether art, as a spiritual quest, can heal decayed land and ascend to a higher plane as well.”21

A significant technical element for appreciating Kiefer’s Shulamite/Margarete series, inspired by “Death Fugue,” can be found in works such as “Wayland Song (with Wing).” These works are similar in composition to “March Sands” but with a difference: Kiefer now began to use straw mixed into the paint on his canvas. In a 1987 interview, he described this straw symbolically, as a kind of manure: “a form of energy that provides warmth in the winter [which] eventually changes composition through a process similar to fermentation and is thereby ‘transfigured.’”22 Straw figures prominently in paintings on a range of German themes in the 1980s, including Nuremberg and the Meistersingers, Midsummer’s Eve, and the Shulamite/Margarete paintings. Straw is used to represent Margarete’s golden hair, turning an admired “rare” object into a plentiful, inexpensive source of energy that can be appropriated for various purposes. It was during this period that Kiefer first encountered Celan’s “Death Fugue” and began to respond with reductive images of the two women.

In “Your Ashen Hair, Shulamite,” Kiefer juxtaposes Shulamite’s long hair and naked body with an urban background, suggesting the harm done to a defenceless victim by civilization. In “Your Blonde Hair, Margarete,” Margarete is indicated only by words and straw, without any attempt at figural representation. This same device is used in “Margarete,” where the straw is lit with flames reminiscent of menorah candles. It is also used in “Your Golden Hair, Margarete – Midsummer Night,” where the straw and flame stand out against a black background.

Two of Kiefer’s paintings respond directly to the last lines of “Death Fugue.” In “Your Golden Hair, Margarete,” the artist represents the final image of the women’s hair from the poem in an arched figure of straw shadowed by black lines. The black arched lines echo the diagonal rows on an empty, blackened field whose furrows extend towards the viewer. Shulamite and Margarete linked together become a gateway into Germany’s past. Andreas Huyssen writes:

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in the Margarete/Shulamite series … Kiefer succeeds in doing for painting what Celan did for poetry more than forty years ago … . For him, as for Celan … it is indeed fascism that has brought about the ultimate crisis of art in this century. Fascism has not only revealed the extent to which poetry and painting can never be commensurate to the world of historical violence. It has also demonstrated how politics can ruthlessly exploit the aesthetic dimension.23

In “Shulamite,” Kiefer reassigns the dedication of the Nazi architect Wilhelm Kreis’s “Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers” to Shulamite, writing her name at the top left. He thus transforms the space into a monument to the victims of the Holocaust instead of to their killers.

Celan’s poetry and the surfaces of Kiefer’s paintings involve constant shifts between subject positions. In “Death Fugue” the first stanza’s use of “wir” (“we”) at the beginning joins the reader with the Jews about to be murdered. As the blue-eyed master of death fantasizes and writes to Margarete while shouting commands at his victims, readers are shifted into momentary complicity with the killer and his beloved. At the end of the poem, a shift occurs to the position of memory and witness at a sad, remote distance in a final apostrophe. In a similar vein, “Your Golden Hair, Margarete” permits several subject positions but in synchronic rather than diachronic form. By foregrounding the golden straw and black lines with superimposed text, the artist simultaneously conveys a sense of identity with the victim, killer, and beloved positions. He indicates movement between them by the dense dynamism of the furrowed lines. The poem and the paintings close off lines of retreat into the distance of abstract principle.

4. Seeing in the Dark: Ethics after Auschwitz

Contemporary analytic approaches to ethics assume the need to ground everyday-moral beliefs, expressed in rules and embedded in institutions and customs, on abstract, universal principles. Where such principles conflict, analytic ethics seeks to resolve the conflict by a theory-informed hierarchy that establishes the logical priority of one over others. If theoretical conflicts such as those between the right and the good can be resolved, then so can the moral dilemmas of everyday. The persistence of such dilemmas in political and moral discourse has led some ethicists to call for a return to virtue/character traditions of morality. These traditions make culture and character the sources of moral action instead of justifying principles. From a perspective on morality informed by


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Auschwitz, neither approach seems likely to be successful in rehabilitating the possibility of morality.

Theodore Adorno and others noted the paradox: that it was a nation with a long tradition of aesthetic, religious, and philosophical culture that engaged in radical evil questions attempts to make culture or its virtues the primary source of morality. Many perpetrators of genocide justified their actions by appealing to moral abstractions (such as Eichmann’s perversion of Kant’s categorical imperative and ideal of duty). This raises questions about the possibility of distinguishing between the rational language of morality, and the illusions of ideology. These difficulties have led many ethicists to abandon discourse of Auschwitz to political science or aesthetics.

While there are many causes for the abandonment of Auschwitz by philosophical ethics, one worthy of consideration here concerns the different starting points for moral and ethical reflection. Moral reflection, the basis for everyday human action or inaction, always begins with seeing-as; with seeing phenomena as appropriate objects of moral attention. Such attention is a way of configuring details into a pattern demanding response like that which Celan speaks of:

The attention which the poem pays to all that it encounters, its more acute sense of detail, outline, structure, colour, but also of “tremors and hints” … is achieved … by a kind of concentration mindful of all our dates. “Attention,” if you will allow me a quote from Malebranche via Walter Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, “attention is the natural prayer of the soul.”24 Ethical reflection begins with a contrast between competing

principles or theories and seeks to understand these contrasts in the light of yet larger contrasts. Reiner Schürmann’s description of a phenomenology of ultimates that I described earlier is an example of such larger contrasts.

While such conceptual contrasts are important as exercises in justification, their abstract quality misses what is most significant in the imaginary from which everyday moral reflection begins. Here is a sense that assembled particulars, here and now, oblige response prior to analysis. This is because no analysis can ever resolve all levels of contrast present, without loss of the central dynamism involved, outside of the space between these elements. We are always positioned between the need to witness to an inherited past and to live for the sake of a future. As Celan, evoking both his dead parents and the figure of Shulamite and Margarete wrote in “Stretto”:

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Ich bins, ich ich lag zwischen euch, ich war offen, war hörbar, ich tickte euch zu, euer Atem gehorchte, ich bin es noch immer, ihr schlaft ja. (It is I, I/I lay between you, I was/open, was audible, ticked at you, your breathing/ obeyed, it is I/ still, but then you/are asleep.)25

One classical alternative to modern ethics is moral casuistry, a process of moral training through which individuals recognize features of a present case as instances of a paradigm. It defines degrees of right or wrong in the light of moral maxims and analogy with similar cases until a judgment can be made. Casuistry only works in a stable moral or in a specific institutional/practice context such as law.

After Auschwitz, moral reflection is now confronted by instances demanding attention. These instances demand attention while resisting it, against the background of an unstable changing culture. This culture increasingly refuses to attend to the past, optimistic of a bright, technological future driven by free market economics.

In this context, the gift of Celan’s poetry and Kiefer’s painting is the attention to mass death: we can look only so long at piles of bodies and emaciated faces. However, without this attention, there is a loss of “the motive of action”, as Eliot once noted in “East Coker.”

Maurice Blanchot suggests, “to give is to give living and dying not at my time but according to the time of the other, which is the unrepresentable representation of a time without present always returning.”26 If this is true, then what Celan accomplishes in his poetry, and Kiefer witnesses to in that poetry is just such a representation of the unrepresentable. Such art does not permit obligation to happen as a matter of obedience to principle or as a requirement of moral character. Instead, it does so as a response to what is read, heard, seen, and experienced as a contrast. Examples of this include we, here/now, safe, distant, experience the return of a “time without present” in the unrepresentable representations of images, and of gold and ashes.


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Notes 1. Schürman, 1992, 388-389. 2. Haidu, 1992, 284. 3. White, 1992, 43. 4. Rilke’s pray is quoted by Sewell, 1964, 166. 5. Haidu, 1992, 291. 6. Abrams, 1971. 7. Lyotard, 1988, 13. 8. Ibid., 101. 9. Wyschogrod, 1999, 92. 10. Felstiner, 1992, 242. 11. Ibid. 12. Celan, 1995, 178-179. 13. Heaney, 1998, 457. 14. Quoted in Felstiner, 1992, 250. 15. Felstiner, 1992, 249-250. 16. Celan, 1986, 47 and 50. 17. Ibid., 1972, 140-141. 18. Ibid., 178-181. 19. Celan, 1995, 178-179. 20. Rosenthal, 1987. 21. Celan, 1995, 80. 22. Ibid., 95. 23. Huyssen, 1995, 224-225. 24. Celan, 1986, 50. 25. Celan, 1972, 138-139. 26. Blanchot, 1986, 89.

References Abrams, M. H. 1971. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution

In Romantic Literature. New York: Norton. Blanchot, Maurice. 1986. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Celan, Paul. 1972. Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New

York: Persea. ———. 1986. Collected Prose. Trans. Rosemary Waldrop. New York:

Sheep Meadow. ———. 1995. Breathturn. Trans. Pierre Joris. Los Angeles: Sun and

Moon Classics.

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Cornell, Drucilla, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds. 1992. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. London: Routledge.

Felstiner, John. 1992. Translating Paul Celan’s “Todesfugue.” In Probing the Limits of Re-presentation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Friedländer, Saul, ed. 1992. Probing the Limits of Re-presentation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Haidu, Peter. 1992. The Dialectics of Unspeakability. In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Heaney, Seamus. 1998. Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996. London: Faber & Faber.

Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York and London: Routledge.

Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges van den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rosenthal, Mark. 1987. Anselm Kiefer. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago. Schürmann, Reiner. 1992. Conditions of Evil. In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld,

and David Gray Carlson. London: Routledge. Sewell, Elizabeth. 1964. The Human Metaphor. Notre Dame, IN:

University of Notre Dame Press. White, Hayden V. 1992. Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth.

In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wyschogrod, Edith. 1999. An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Five

Hier ist kein warum? Evil at the Limits of Understanding


1. Introduction

Why are academic discussions of evil invariably unsatisfactory when contrasted with literary depictions? In this chapter I argue that the answer lies in the deep structure of our everyday moral grammar. To call someone evil is to describe a form of life. It is a form of life that we refuse to understand. The evil-doer deliberately places him or herself outside the confines of our practices of making sense. We cannot make sense of the evil-doer’s motives, largely because to do so would be to welcome him or her back into our world. Great literature recognizes this; academia, as it is currently organized, does not.

Academic discussions of evil seem preoccupied with the desire to fill in the gaps, offering substitute motives, often in the form of a functional explanation. Much good can be done by such a procedure, particularly in helping us to understand complicity. Nevertheless, even the most sophisticated functional explanation leaves us feeling unsatisfied. We feel that the question has been evaded, put in abeyance. Nowhere is this more the case than in the discussion of Hitler’s evil. Over the last fifty years we have become clearer than ever about the layer upon layer of corruption, cowardice and complicity in the Third Reich, in Weimar Society and in the international community that enabled Hitler to come to power and execute his plans. We know more than perhaps we would prefer about the role of both the mighty German Corporations and the “ordinary” men of the police battalions in carrying out the routine murder of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. At the same time Hitler remains a mystery.

However, if Hitler is synonymous with the evil he perpetrated, then we possibly know more than we think we do. We have a wealth of literature devoted to depicting the evil of the Holocaust and the occupation. In this chapter, I contrast one such literary account, that of Czech author and Holocaust survivor Jiři Weil, with the various academic attempts to understand Hitler described in Ron Rosenbaum’s book Explaining Hitler. Where Weil succeeds and the academics fail is that he does not attempt to provide motive substitutes. Instead, he lays out in front of the reader the sheer horror and strangeness of evil acts. Weil, unlike the academics, does not flinch in the face of evil. He does not attempt to deny the fact of complicity, nor does he make complicity and evil synonymous. He simply bears witness.

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2. Jiři Weil: Looking Evil in the Eye Jiři Weil ends his novel, Mendelssohn Is On The Roof, with a

scene of chilling evil. Two Jewish girls who have survived the war so far, Anne Frank style, are finally captured. The Czech police, too scared, or too corrupt, to save them, turn them over to the Gestapo. As the Gestapo man beats them to death, the girls recite nursery rhymes. It is not so much the graphic nature of the depiction that gives it its power. If anything, this is understated. Partly, it is Weil’s juxtaposition of the Gestapo’s brutality with the innocence of the girls:

Again the Gestapo man lost his temper. He beat them savagely with the keys. The little girls were almost unconscious, but they still sang “Andulka The Goose Girl” and “The lime tree was burning.” These were songs they had learned when they still went to school. Now they used them to defend themselves. “The addresses!” yelled the Gestapo man. But there were no addresses. Only pain, blood, and darkness. They fainted. The Gestapo man struck them with the keys and kicked them with his boots.

More significantly though, it is Weil’s juxtaposition of this scene with the following:

The Soviet army rolled out of the East from the plains of Stalingrad, from Gumrak and Pitomnik, from Rostov and the Don basin, from Kharkov and Kiev and Velikye Luki, with tanks, Panzers, rocket launchers, artillery. Unstoppable it advanced, and it broke, crushed, and ground the once proud Wermacht, all dressed in its finery and armed by the whole of Europe, into the snow. The murderous army fled to the West with its crew of troopers, generals in fancy uniforms, airmen without planes, tank drivers without tanks, and along the way they slaughtered, they still burned down villages, blew up factories, mines and fortifications. They left behind only blood, decay, and scorched earth, discarding their plunder of rugs, icons, and furs.1 What these passages bring out so powerfully is the futility of evil.

There is simply nothing to gain by killing the girls; equally there would be nothing to be lost by letting them go. Their killing, like the retreating army’s vandalism, is pointless. Whatever plausible accounts of the

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German’s motives we might create, we already know that these will no longer count as justifications.

In an earlier passage, Weil’s focuses on the perpetrators and he portrays Reinhard Heydrich in equally chilling fashion:

To be master of a conquered land on its way to becoming a German land is tiring and enervating work. Life was better in those long-ago days before they seized power, when he could fight the enemies of the Reich directly, when he could chase them round the room at meetings and then connect with a fist to the jaw. Life was better when he could see the enemy standing before him, visible blood trickling down his face, and he could stomp on him with his high boots, polished until they veritably glistened. Life was better at Columbia-Haus, where he could interrogate conspirators of the Night of the Long Knives, watching the blood soak through the plaster wall of his office. Life was better in the Polish campaign, dropping bombs on villages from his own plane and then, because the Poles had no anti-aircraft guns, flying low, barely above the ground, in order to see the cottages burning, the confused human vermin racing back and forth, the dead bodies lying on the ground, frying in the flames.2

With a figure like Heydrich, we do not have any of the questions

surrounding his proximity to the killings, as we have with Hitler. Also, we do not see in him a figure such as Himmler who, in Fromm’s description of him, could under different circumstances have been an irascible post office clerk.3 Weil, as an inhabitant of Heydrich’s misnamed “protectorate,” directly experienced the scope of his evil; indeed much of Mendelssohn is devoted to exploring its consequences. Those who knew Heydrich directly confirm Weil’s opinion: he was a man who gave every impression of enjoying his work.

Let us now consider two apposite discussions in Aristotle. In the course of his discussion of akrasia, he describes the condition of brutishness.4 The brute, we are told, is someone who through natural predisposition, or through exposure to brutality him or herself, falls beyond the pale of our normal moral universe. The brute, however, is not considered a significant threat compared with the vicious person. His or her stupidity, and the transparency of the dangers s/he presents, allows us to recognize him or her and protect ourselves. Brutishness may encompass the Gestapo man, a moral imbecile, whose senses are too deadened to


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realize that he is killing a six-year-old girl. But Heydrich, while violent, is no brute. Similarly, although the Czech police who handed the girls over may have been weak, Heydrich himself is no acrates. Either of these descriptions would let him off the hook.

Heydrich is vicious and his sheer calculated malice locates him much more in the context of Aristotle’s account of deliberation. Here, Aristotle draws a subtle and important distinction between deliberating cleverly and deliberating well.5 As I understand this distinction, deliberating well requires the presence of a degree of sensitivity. While cunning may be required to bomb a village, it does not require sensitivity. Like all of Aristotle’s discussions, it is subtle, discriminating, and persuasive, and ultimately unsuccessful. Where it fails, is that like most philosophical accounts, it translates evil into terms with which we are familiar and in doing so diminishes its force. We are reassured by the argument. Heydrich is just like us except for one defect. If only we could sit Heydrich down, we might be able to inculcate him with the necessary sensitivity.

To show what is wrong with the argument, let us create an Aristotelian figure: the sadist. S/he is not a person who engages in the more Bohemian kinds of role-play but someone who obtains a peculiar pleasure from torturing and humiliating his or her victims. The greater their victim’s unwillingness, the more intense their pleasure. Let us imagine that we were to offer this person the opportunity to torture an organic robot that emitted all the appropriate screams and howls. It is likely that the sadist would refuse our offer. The reason for this is that they obtain their pleasure not from the victim’s pain but from his or her humiliation. We have here a course of action that involves deliberation. S/he would, we imagine, need to work out ways to place his or her victims in the required situation and also avoid detection. At the same time it requires sensitivity. His or her satisfaction stems from the fact that all the time they are undermining their victim’s autonomy, they remain intensely aware of it.

The picture this calls to mind is of a group of German gendarmes in the Polish village of Jozefów. They surround a group of Orthodox Jews at gunpoint. The Jews have been ordered to wear the phylacteries and prayer shawls of their faith. One elderly Jew is kneeling, hands in the air, as if praying. A German is hacking at his beard with scissors. What should strike us about this example, like that of the sadist, is that this action only makes sense in the context of the German’s recognition of the religious significance of beards. Why else would they do it? Trimming a horse’s mane would not give them the same joy. The photo was a personal memento, a trophy. In it, the gendarmes are laughing heartily. It was kept


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we can imagine, so that the guard himself could relive his pleasure or so that he could share it with others.

In both cases what we find difficult to understand is the ways in which such people can have a set of recognizable emotional responses and sensitivities and yet be capable of such great evil. For the rationalist, the problem is that Heydrich and the gendarmes betray no obvious intellectual defect. For the Humean, it is that they have sufficient sympathy to be knowingly cruel and to savour their cruelty.

The problem of understanding here is not due to a conceptual deficit. Nor does it consist in a lack of a theory of motivation. We know that if pressed, Heydrich could tell a compelling story about why he hates Jews and Poles. We appreciate the problem more when we reflect upon another connotation carried by our everyday notion of understanding: not being able to understand essentially means not wishing to be understanding. It is not that we lack the intellectual resources to get into the head of an evil-doer who laughs at his or her victim’s fate. We do not wish to go there.

3. Hitler Laughing

This image of evil laughing, while familiar to us from literature, is one that is the hardest for academic discourse to encompass. It is the image that leaves us at the end of Ron Rosenbaum’s book Explaining Hitler (1998). Rosenbaum, who has made an exhaustive study of Hitler explainers, constantly draws our attention back to Hitler laughing at the fate of the Jews “planted” in the East; of Hitler’s references to the laughter of International Jewry, and how he would have the last laugh. He contrasts this with the images of Hitler as a baby. How, he asks, could Hitler the baby, become Hitler the laughing monster?

His question is a rhetorical one, for his primary concern is with the various attempts that have been made over the last fifty years to answer this question. What typifies all of them, he argues, is their evasion of the central question of whether or not Hitler was evil. It is as if by using the word “evil,” we set a seal on possible explanations. Few historians take David Irving’s approach and deny Hitler’s culpability. The only serious historian who comes close, is Hugh Trevor-Roper who has been repeatedly accused of falling victim to Hitler’s spell.6 Allan Bullock, who has been the most willing to confront the scale of Hitler’s depravity equivocates. When confronted by Rosenbaum’s direct question, his response is “If he isn’t evil, then who is?”7 Claude Lanzmann takes another tack. In order to preserve some sense of the magnitude of Hitler’s evil, he argues that only images, and a particular set of images, namely, his film Shoah, can capture it. Thus to engage in asking the question “why” is, in a sense, to be complicit in the Holocaust.8 One of the most


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disturbing sections in the book is Rosenbaum’s description of Lanzmann haranguing an elderly Holocaust survivor who has dared to breach this injunction.

But, in a way, all of these academics are right. Their problem with evil reveals an essential feature of our moral grammar. Evil functions as a membership categorization device. By saying someone is evil, I am putting that person in the category of those whose motives will not be counted as justifications. I am not offering this as a definition; instead I am suggesting that this is the way the speech act of calling someone evil operates. It is for this reason that the old saw that to understand all is to forgive all is both right and wrong. Certain types of understanding are only open to us on the basis of a prior refusal to condemn. At the same time, placing someone in the “evil-doer” category is a verbal equivalent of throwing our hands up in the air.

Nevertheless, this is not to say that we cannot ask a series of interesting and illuminating questions about the evil-doer. What it does entail is that the grammar of these questions will be strictly circumscribed. I think Alfred Schutz comes closest to capturing this in his famous distinction between “because-motives” and “in-order-to” motives.9 While we may continue to ask about both sets of motives in regard to figures like Hitler or Heydrich, what breaks down is the ordinary connection between “because-motives” and justification. Once we have placed someone in the “evil-doer” category, any ‘because-motive’ will simply be extra information.

Rosenbaum expresses this well in his discussion of the various psychosexual theories surrounding Hitler. Did he suffer from mono-orchidism; did he have incestuous relationships with his niece; was he a suppressed homosexual, or a sexual sadist? Rosenbaum’s witty conclusion is that the truth is far more worrying: Hitler appears to have had a normal sexuality, a little repressed, but not excessively so for a Mittel-European; and certainly nothing that would explain the transition from the baby to the laughing Hitler. But here we should stop to consider. What if Hitler did turn out to be a coprophiliac? I suggest that our reaction would be that Hitler was a mass-murderer who was also a coprophiliac. The chain between “because-motives” and forgiveness is broken. Motives can no longer serve as mitigation.

Accepting this position would have no severe consequences and would certainly not license Lanzmann’s kind of mysticism. For if I am correct, then I am merely describing what we do anyway. We can continue to look for a variety of causal and quasi-causal explanations of figures such as Hitler. We can continue also to look at the conditions that allowed him to come to power, and more importantly the conditions that enabled large numbers of people to sleepwalk into the grey zone. We can continue


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to do all the things we typically do when understanding forms of life. Nonetheless, the lessons of David Irving on the one hand and Jiři Weil on the other, ought to caution us that our everyday moral grammar places limits on our ability to get inside the evil-doer’s skin. These limits, I believe, we ignore at our peril.

Notes 1. Weil, 1990, 226 2. Ibid., 76. 3. Fromm, 1974, 199ff. 4. Aristotle, 1976, 237-238. 5. Ibid., 223. 6. Rosenbaum, 1998, 66-67. 7. Ibid., xxi. 8. Ibid., 251ff. 9. Schutz, 1967, 86-96.

References Aristotle. 1976. Ethics. Trans. J. A. K. Thomson and ed. Hugh

Tredennick. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Fromm, Erich. 1974. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. London: Jonathan Cape. Rosenbaum, Ron. 1998. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of

his Evil. New York: Random House. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. Phenomenology of the Social World. Trans. George

Walsh and Frederick Lehnert and ed. George Walsh. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.

Weil, Jiři. 1990. Mendelssohn is on The Roof. Trans. Marie Winn. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.


Six

Condemned to Artifice and Prevent from Being a Pirate: How Prisoners Convicted of Terrible Crimes Recognize

Themselves in Discourse

Diana Medlicott

1. Introduction A strong tradition of reflection exists about evil and human

wickedness in abstract terms,1 as well as evidence of terrible individual acts. The problem of forming a dialogue between abstraction and specificity in this area has been with us since the Enlightenment, when the assumption was born that human reason could definitively answer a wide range of questions fundamental to human life.2 Abstraction has an inherent instability and ideas need to be considered alongside concepts and contexts in order to become intelligible. Problems of theory involve problems of practice, of social relations and historical change.3

This chapter is an attempt to relate the abstraction of human wickedness to the fragmentation of experience. I will be drawing on the experiences of five prisoners who have been convicted of terrible crimes, using material from interviews in which they engaged in personal accounting,4 talking openly about their identities.

Such troubled identities, with highly charged personal histories, are neglected in research,5 except as examples of clinical pathology. I will begin by outlining my particular approach to achieving frank interviews in the difficult environment of prison. I then describe the relevant penal contexts, in terms of the historic evolution of an actuarial and managerial culture. In the context of this culture, I analyze some interview data in response to one significant question. This analysis suggests that prisoners’ responses are usually grounded in discourses that are historically implicated in a process of subjectification, whereby individuals are systematically categorized as subjects of a type, for the purposes of governing subjectivity and regulating behaviour. Finally, I draw upon Rose (1996) to claim that psychology, psychiatry, and related disciplines are the mode through which modern subjectivity in this context has been constituted, but that this is reductionist and masks understanding of and by those who have committed terrible crimes.

2. Talking to Prisoners: Disciplined Empathy as a Research

Tool Prisoners are a valuable but elusive and neglected source of data

about a wide range of penal, institutional and behavioural phenomena.6

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What I sought from prisoners was narrative. Narrative is a life-plot chosen by the narrator.7 “The fact that people believe they possess identities fundamentally depends on their capacity to relate fragmentary occurrences across temporal boundaries.”8 Because my interviewees had histories filled with terror and violence, they were naturally reticent and distrustful of authority figures. So I adopted a strategy of disciplined empathy, based on a philosophy of listening.9 The human sciences are epistemologically grounded in human experience, and willing, feeling and imagining lie at the heart of the knowing subject.10 These categories enhance the model of reason at the heart of Kantian consciousness, and explain our unique capacity to empathize with other minds. The practice of empathy in interviews encourages an intense kind of attentive listening, appropriate for harsh prison environments that produce intense interior experience in prisoners.

It was not difficult to empathize with my interviewees. Prison crushes personal identity, producing anger, loneliness, boredom, guilt, apathy, self-loathing and pain.11 I could mentally take the place of the other, imagining how I myself would cope with the temporal and spatial constraints and the daily humiliations of prison life. But empathy has to be exercised with discipline, so that the overall shape of the interview remains in the hands of the inquirer. The nature and details of the offense were not my concern. Nor was the harm intended and done to their many victims. The discipline of screening out these factors from the interview situation came naturally because of a methodological commitment to empathizing with their current predicament. I was interested in their understanding of themselves: naturally, the factors that I chose to screen out, in my interaction with them would be highly significant in their personal accounting. My criteria of empathy included the setting up and sustaining of a situation where mutual listening and respect were evident through spoken and unspoken cues, the most significant of which concerned the nature of eye-contact between interviewer and interviewee.

Interviews using this strategy are demanding for both interviewer and interviewee. The prisoner, having spoken of painful inner feelings, returns to his cell and to solitude in a potentially more vulnerable state of mind than before. The interviewer, however, with her interview safely recorded on tape, has her “hit” for the day and returns to a free life. The accounts live on in the memory of both interviewer and interviewee, and they will go on functioning as narratives for each. The capacity of such research to do harm is considerable.12 In mitigation, we can claim that we further our understanding of extreme behaviour by uncovering the subjectivities of those who commit terrible crimes.

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3. The Penal Context Aspects of the special contexts prisoners inhabit are influential in

the construction of their subjectivity. The first relevant aspect is historic change. Between about 1750 and 1820, a transition in penal technology occurred. The body became less of a target for physical punishment, and attempts to change the soul became institutionalized through modes of power and knowledge.13 Power materialized not just in overt political relationships but covertly and pervasively in structural and social sites, institutions, strategies and techniques.14 Finally in its most invasive form, it washed through the modern individual as forms of knowledge and practice. The modern prison is a place that actualizes the relationship of power and knowledge upon the body and the soul in expressive and disciplinary ways.15

The second and more micro aspect concerns the tri-partite penal relationship of risk, rights and rehabilitation from the mid twentieth century. The 1950s saw the principle of rehabilitation as the primary focus in discussion and policy approaches. After the subsequent heyday of high expectations and professional power in the 1960s and 1970s, as social and rehabilitative attention focused on the client, professional groups saw their authority eroded as rehabilitation was slated for its lack of effectiveness.16 In the 1980s and 1990s, policy became more punitive, and there was more emphasis on risks and security. These shifts took place against a backdrop of increasing crime, a real rise in the fear of crime, and increasing expectations about crime control. Public identification with victim groups grew. Welfarism and the social work professions increasingly became the object of political attacks, and sneered at for their attention to the needs of clients as individuals.

In the newly politicized penal re-configuration, offence-centred work has taken over from client-centred work. A moral vocabulary is missing: managerialism, bureaucracy and actuarial approaches are the order of the day.17 Risk-assessment and risk-management are politicized and pseudo-scientific ways of categorizing offenders as “types.” Prisons must use sets of actuarial indicators to fulfil targets and show, over time, increased efficiency. This bureaucratic actuarialism helps to make the prison an instrumental institution of punishment, not a morally expressive one. Technical objectives, such as security, control and efficiency, take precedence over wider societal values.18

The new penal managerialism does not focus on the connections between socio-economic disadvantage and patterns of offending. It does not look at individual biography, developmental needs or personal potential, except in terms of types and assessments of risk. It is penal managerialism for a mass age, designed to be capable of processing a mass population. For individual penal establishments, this culture


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translates into an imperative to demonstrate competent performance through sets of actuarial indicators. The culture encourages bureaucratic and defensive mentalities, and statistically justifiable practice. Non-measurable qualitative innovation, unless it helps to meet the actuarial targets, is not encouraged.

During my research, I witnessed an event that neatly illustrated the struggle between bureaucratic efficiency and humane understanding. The medical officer sent a profoundly suicidal man back to the wing. The wing returned him to the medical centre, which refused to accept him. Neither location wanted to take responsibility for the almost inevitable suicide because it would be a tangible sign of inefficiency. Accompanying him on each journey was a fat stack of documents, laboriously completed at a multi-disciplinary case conference that the prisoner was not permitted to attend. On his third journey back to the wing, a wing officer, newly back on duty, took the trouble to talk to him empathetically. He found that his wife had been killed in a car smash seven weeks earlier. His three children had been taken into care and he could not contact them. These causes of his potentially fatal grief, mental disorganization and despair had not been recorded in any of the documentation. Until the wing officer took an interest in him as a suffering person, staff merely measured and assessed him in terms of the risk he posed to efficiency.

4. The Responses

Toward the end of my interviews, when trust and empathy were high, I allowed a long pause to develop, and asked this question: “So what do you see when you look in the mirror?” Up until this point, the interview strategy had been to weave circles of relevance, retreating from points that produced obvious distress and returning to them subsequently.19 So this direct question was startling to prisoners: the question was both prosaic, yet captured symbolic meanings in ways that could only be individually, experienced and expressed. Prisoners do not get much opportunity to look in mirrors in prison. The question invited them to do the work of mirror gazing entirely in their heads, and then represent that material to me. People who have done anti-social things often use excuses and justifications to disclaim responsibility for their deeds.20 This vocabulary of motive can go much deeper than mere speech patterns.21 Scully (1990) showed how her interviewees, all guilty of extreme sexual violence, adopted reflexive roles and imaginatively constructed the attitudes and feelings of their victims in ways that excused or justified the subsequent attack. My question, however, did not prompt or allow for the production of endless disavowal because it only referred to the self-relation and did not encourage reflection on the offense or victim.

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None of the prisoners failed to understand the question: each knew that they should say what sort of a human being he saw in the mirror. It was an extraordinarily arresting moment: some who had been articulate throughout dropped their heads and began to stammer. Most sighed, some wept. At this moment, they confronted the other of the unconscious self, described by Baudrillard (1993) as our last symbolic capital. This symbolic aspect of self is the focus of a cultural imperative in modernity.22 We all seek self-esteem and are offered many ways of achieving it. Self-management and self-regard are fashionable projects in high modernity,23 and techniques of normalization enable the moral task of self-recognition and self-management. So my interviewees were culturally accustomed to thinking about personal identity.

The first of my selected prisoners was at the end of a seventeen-year sentence. As he looked in the mirror, M. saw a person he respected, different from his original self. On the wing, amongst both officers and prisoners, there was recognition that this was a person worthy of respect. M. had been transformed in prison. He had been brought up in an extremely violent family, and behaved viciously and violently from adolescence until nearly halfway through his life sentence. In his first seven years in prison, he attracted a lot of attention from psychologists and psychiatrists, and was classified as incorrigibly violent and aggressive. After a particularly brutal stabbing incident, however, he began to reflect on the sort of person he was. He started to study and reflect on the history of slavery, and over a long period of time realized the futility of hatred as the prime motivating force in his life. He used to feel terror and claustrophobia in his cell. But he thought about the amount of space available to his antecedents when they were shipped over to slavery. He marked out this space in his cell, and as an act of honour, tried to live in this space. He looked into his past from the perspective of black history and examined his relationship with the world. He looked for principles other than hate and violence through which he could live. He consciously chose a different moral and cognitive basis for future thinking. “For my future, I chose to think with love,” he said. His file contained no sign of his profound change. He had progressed from being defined as a pathological subject to being ignored altogether because he was no longer any trouble.

This transition was a story of emancipation, not just from his former behavioural patterns but also from the way in which he was defined by psychiatric and psychological discourse. He turned to other discourses of a more historical and cultural kind, and used what he found there to ground a personal ethic of non-violence and love. This transformation had come about through interior dialogue in solitude, and he could not identify any one person in those seventeen years who had


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been a significant catalyst in his change. As he described the process to me, he repeated conversations he had had with himself, in which he addressed himself by name and interrogated his weaknesses and failings. The nature of his redemption was moral, but psychiatric discourse does not speak in a moral vocabulary, and it had nothing to say about his extraordinary re-birth.

My second chosen prisoner saw himself through the lens of psychology and learning theory. R. looked in the mirror and saw:

a Jekyll and Hyde, a split personality. I like my good side, the side that’s talking to you now. But my bad side, I hate it. I really hate it. But it’s the way I’ve been brought up, and not only that, what I’ve been through, over the years. The things I do….Well, it went from a habit to an addiction, and from an addiction to an obsession. In his narrative, R. had found answers to the puzzle of himself in

superficial typologies taken from psychological discourse, which he had then selectively applied to his identity. He was not prepared to take these too far: he had had an abusive early life and stammered his way through some appalling incidents. He insisted that his home life had been perfect and loving, and that he “didn’t mind” these abusive facets. He attributed all his unpleasant behaviour to his bad side and the friendly, charming and caring qualities to his good side. He described at length his care and concern for fellow inmates, but was just as eager for me to know about his suspicious, selfish and solitary characteristics. “Me, I can change just like the weather,” he said proudly. He wanted any psychological help that was available, because “that’s the way to sort out my split personality.”

The third respondent was at first unable to see himself except in terms of how others had harmed him. When P. looked in the mirror, he expressed indignation:

I see that they really spoiled my life. Lots of people make mistakes when they are young. But I am supposed to pay for the rest of my life. I know exactly what sort of person I am. I am not like the others in here. I am very hard working. I stopped drinking and smoking – they are not easy things to do. When I first talked to P., he expressed guilt and remorse for his

wrongdoing, but nine months later in a subsequent interview, his talk was peppered with legal and juridical terms, the combined effect of which was

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to stress that he was “technically innocent” and did not deserve incarceration. He had managed to construct a narrative in which he was the victim of unreasonable judicial processes, and his lawyer was pursuing an appeal on these grounds. When he looked in the mirror, P. only saw “them,” and blamed “them” for his predicament. His narrative constantly stressed that he was different from everyone else in prison: he possessed the moral virtue so lacking in the other prisoners, and he reinforced this through prayer and reading the bible.

The fourth of my respondents, T., was floundering in notions of evil, and grappling with official discourse that sought to identify him as untreatable. T. saw:

a really evil person looking back at me, because I see everything I’ve done, which only I know about. So you see, I’ve got the darker side of my past, as well as the side that everybody else knows about, looking at me in the mirror. And it scares me that I can be that bad, or even worse. T.’s charge sheet was indeed terrible, but he took pains to detail

how he was an even worse person than it implied, because the worst of his crimes had not come out in court:

I know me now, I want to change, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be this bad person all my life, I want to change. Change is pulling me, it’s something my heart says. But I’m frightened. I’m gonna lose a lot when I change. I’ll lose the confidence – to tell the truth, I got to admit I’ll lose the power. Prison staff had presented T. to me as an example of a

psychopathic personality, incapable of change, but capable of simulating the desire to change. He was identified in terms of his membership in a special high-risk group: his “dangerousness” was estimated and attached to him like a brand. He said calmly that he felt extremely safe physically in prison: “I don’t want to be violent, but if I need to be, I can be.” Emotionally and psychologically he did not feel safe: “I’m no good at protecting my mind or my feelings. I can protect my body, but the rest I can’t protect.”

Psychiatrists defined T. as “incorrigible” and “dangerous.” These reductionist labels seemed to limit any understanding of his personal history, his desire to be different and the small signs of change. He felt himself hovering fearfully on the cusp of change, but knew he would


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receive no encouragement from psychiatrists who had a vested professional interest in proving him untreatable.

J., the fifth and final chosen respondent was different, in that he did not construe himself from the vantage point of psychological, quasi-religious or juridical discourse. He described himself as a committed hedonist, who all his life had experienced an abundance of “bolts of joy and rapture” in his life, often followed by terrible lows. Psychiatrists had labelled him as suffering from bi-polar disorder in his childhood, and tried to put him on medication. He had evaded psychiatric definitions, preferring instead to take responsibility for his identity, enjoying the pleasures and experiences of his high times, and enduring the consequences of the low times. He had made a great deal of money through terrible crimes, and had then used that money altruistically. He expressed terrible guilt and remorse, but he took responsibility for his crimes. In response to the mirror question, he replied:

I don’t know, I don’t like mirrors. Introspection tends to be something I avoid, because it’s quite scary wandering about the blasted crags of the psyche. I don’t really care for the introspective. I’ve lived with so many different personae for so long. I don’t know who the real me is anymore. I think that’s the fairest way of putting it. I feel broken up, like the multi-faceted compound eye of a fly. I don’t know. And I don’t think I want to know, to be honest.

I asked what thoughts he would carry out of prison, if he could be free. He replied with some reflections on the inhumanity of medical staff. Then he said:

“Plus the resolve not to be caught again. To be more careful next time.” “But not to stop?” I asked. “No, not to stop. Like Macbeth, I am in blood, stepped in so far that should I wade no more, it would be as tedious as to go o’er. Quite a nice image really. I mean, you’re at the point of no return. You’re halfway, so if you turn back or keep going, your feet are going to be just as wet. Again, that’s a bit of a solipsism [sic], right? I really don’t know what to say – I’m stuck in my ways I guess.”

A long silence fell, and then he sighed heavily and said,

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You know, I would have loved to have been a pirate, three hundred years ago. The twentieth century version doesn’t seem to have worked too well for me. I don’t think about the future. I never have. The present has always been abundant enough for me. I’ve always sought excitement. I don’t like life if it is flattened out into grey.

5. The Responses as Regimes of Thought All of these respondents had, at one time or another, been defined

through images of subjectivity drawn from legal/juridical, psychiatrized, and psychological discourses. These images caused the respondents, in their personal narratives, to refer to themselves as “if they were selves of a particular type.”24 Others had recognized them as belonging to types, and they threaded their identities, their biographies, and their future horizons onto these typologies. For some, there came a time when these typologies were inadequate as modes of self-understanding in relation to personal change and development.

The issue of personal change points up the limitations of those discourses that are productive of typologies. When M. changed, his identity transcended, in obvious ways, the reductionist way in which he had been typed as a human subject. Psychiatry used a blunt label on him, but “untreatability” could not adequately capture the complex, contingent and subtle phenomenon of his identity.

T. was another respondent who wanted to change and believed that change was possible. He was experiencing official resistance: the dominant psychiatric discourse insisted to him that he was incapable of change. J., the last respondent, had refused all his life to belong to the designated subject type defined by psychiatric discourse. As we shall see, psychiatry made a special effort to fit him to into a typology.

The practical rationality of the first four prisoners stem from regimes of thought, through which they narrated what was significant in their experience, and spoke of themselves, sometimes inconsistently, as agents in ways that historically map onto sets of governance.25 The modern age of confession requires more than that the accused admits having committed the crime.26 Rituals of discourse demand that the speaking subject engages in self-examination, explanation and self-revelation. Through reflection, recognizing themselves in discourse and confession, the guilty must articulate their identities. The psychiatric and psychological discourses, which underpin this self-recognition, are modes of shaping and ultimately governing the private self.


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M., the first respondent, was significant because over a seventeen year period, he had slipped out of the typification applied to him. Quietly he had set about personal change. His resources in this transition were drawn from history, moral discourse and intense personal reflection. When his sentence was over, he walked free, and his records did not relate the nature of the intense interior changes he had made.

Resistance, in a different way, characterized the narrative of the fifth respondent. When he thought and spoke of himself as a subject, it was through the mediation of literature, myth, philosophy and personal desire. This respondent had evaded many attempts to identify and label him in the course of his life through juridical, psychiatric or psychological discourse. He had refused the identity of manic-depressive and the treatment that accompanied the label: in this resistance, he was asserting that the action of his life spoke for itself. He chose to draw on literature and philosophy to explain himself to himself, discourses which, unlike psychology and psychiatry, are not intimately tied to the practices of government and control. He chose a pre-Enlightenment image that fitted his private desires. A pirate would not have to explain himself to himself or to others. He would live out desire, will, violence, greed and imagination, and function best by paying no attention to his so-called type.

Subjectification in post-modernity– the process of being typed as a subject of one kind or another – involves the requirement for the modern subject to identify his or her subjectivity.27 Penal policy is currently organized around modes of subjectification drawn from psychology, psychiatry and sociology Through the rituals of discourse, subjects speak of themselves: they are the subjects of the statements they make, and what they say resonates with dominant discourses. Unconsciously or consciously, they are colluding with the practices of government by interpreting their conduct and identities in typified ways. In prison, they experience timetables, rules, enclosures, deprivations, and the absolute control of personal time and space. These governmental techniques do not only control prisoners physically. They are “webs of tension across a space that accord human beings capacities and powers to the extent that they catch them up in hybrid assemblages of knowledges, instruments, vocabularies, systems of judgment, and technical devices.”28

Individuals, like tribes and nations, historicize their lives in narrative. Into the story of how they came to be the person that looks at them in the mirror, these prisoners inserted their identities in ways derived from sets of particular discourses. These discourses, filtered through to individual consciousness, stem from psychology, psychiatry and law, and share an articulation, in differing forms, of modern power-knowledge relations. For these are discourses that name, divide and control. They define what is normal and what is pathological, and they enable

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individuals to construe their own conduct according to types. In prison, convicted because of terrible conduct, these discourses assume an even more intense governmental role: they provide the lens through which individuals constitute their most private identity. Identity stands conceptually in a problematic space in post modernity. In this space, the self is conceptually dispersed and yet at the same time it attracts intensified government.29 Psychology and psychiatry are examples of disciplines that act as modes of governance and control, constituting individuals in typified ways so as to legitimize their treatment and control.

This process of constitution is an extraordinary accomplishment: subjects not only collude with the practices of government, but define themselves in terms of the underlying discourse. We need to trace the descent of this collusion and self-definition: we need to construct a genealogy of how individual subjectivity appears to the chooser to be voluntarily chosen. “To this extent, a genealogy of subjectification needs to think human being as a kind of machination, a hybrid of flesh, artefact, knowledge, passion, and technique.”30

In constructing this genealogy, the issue of resistance to discourse is significant. Sometimes it can tell us more than the official discourses about the will and desire of those who have done terrible crimes. The discourses of psychiatry, psychology and law often fail to interrogate the desire and will of offenders and almost always fail to explain them. That package of desires and aversions wrapped tightly around the core of separate identity has not been allowed a language in post-modernity through which to speak,31 and it cannot be properly understood. In the governed dimension of the unruly self, where is now the space, and what would be the language, in which to express desire, will and imagination?

The rational categorizations of modern psychiatric and psychological discourse have produced reductionist classifications to explain extreme behaviours in ways that facilitate control, but they do not aid understanding of the crime or self-understanding by the criminal. Some of my interviewees paid lip service to powerful discourses. This served to objectify each self to himself. J., however, drew on a sublimated imagination, and tried to express a deeply held truth from his innermost self. It was part of a narrative that showed a lifelong resistance to constituting discourses that provide “knowledge” of individual types. Perhaps, because it spoke of desire and will, it provided more grounds for understanding the crime and the criminal.

It is in these areas of desire and will that psychiatric and psychological discourse is most deficient. We punish those who have done dreadful things by incarceration, without understanding why they did them, why they wanted to do them, or why they sometimes did them involuntarily. In terms of the justification of punishment, this failure to hit


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the target does not matter theoretically, since justifications veer cynically between retributivist and utilitarian formulations.

In terms of understanding the terrible offenses themselves, and those who have committed them, with regard to change and rehabilitation, this failure does matter. Since prisoners can only articulate themselves through the “explanatory” discourses of subjectification, the opportunity for them to articulate their moral identity, in terms of their desire and imaginative subjectivity, is lost. Subjective desire should form the starting point of any attempt to understand their identities. Unshaped by the straitjacket of discourse, desire expresses more truthfully the originating moral intent and impulse. The moral capacity is a rapacious one that seeks space for wholehearted self-expression, taking metaphysical risks, and engaging in extremes of behavior.32 The over-rational nature of modern discourse does not recognize this ancient ethic of primordial spontaneity that often underpins the acting-out of extreme phenomena. Enquiry into the sort of offenses normally depicted as “evil” has to recognize some of the deterministic consequences of “an accumulation of force, a reserve of activity, which spends itself not for the pleasure of spending itself, but because spending is a necessity of its very existence.”33

This kind of naturalistic ethics has the explanatory capacity to shatter the cold inhuman reflection of discourse. It recognizes that each offense emanates from individual will and desire. The trajectory toward terrible deeds is contingent and highly personal for each individual, and is the outcome of desire, recoil, advance and retreat away from and toward the terrible. Retreat from the terrible has much to teach us, and my first respondent shows that, sadly, extraordinary change in identity and behaviour of this nature does not attract much official attention.

As Rose (1996) points out, our relation to ourselves is historical and not ontological. We can say what we have done, but we cannot say what we are, except through symbol and myth. Personal identity has never functioned in a self-evidently coherent and unified way. But explanatory post-Enlightenment discourses has conveyed offenders into the realms of medical, penal juridical or quasi-religious technologies.34 So there is an unreal expectation that we ought to be able to understand and explain those who have done terrible deeds. This expectation translates into a regime of subjectification which is brought to bear heavily upon serious offenders.35 Discourse defines them, so powerfully that they themselves articulate the explanatory discourses. Discourse passes into the grain of thought of individuals, into their pleasures, attitudes, and beliefs.36 My examples of fragmented experiences demonstrated this passage into hearts and mind, as well as the significant resistance to discourse that ultimately reveals its conceptual inadequacy. Explaining terrible crimes through

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reductionist discourses fails us: the subtle diversity of imaginative subjectivity escapes scrutiny, and artifice masquerades as explanation.

Our culture has a ubiquitous passion for naming and fixing.37 It strives to return to each of us the full responsibility for what we are.38 When we look in the mirror, we are supposed to see a named type, produced from artificial discourse:

It requires that the individual should transform himself into a slave to his identity, his will, his responsibilities, his desire; and that he should start exercising control of all his own circuitry, as well as all the worldwide circuits that happen to cross paths within his genes, nerves or thought: a truly unheard of servitude.39

6. Postscript

Within the year, M. was free, holding down a regular job, and supporting his family. R. and P. were proceeding through the system: they had “fallen into voluntary servitude,”40 and they were speaking subjects, defined by discourse to the satisfaction of the authorities and themselves. T. was still struggling with aspects of the identity that had been fitted onto him, trying unsuccessfully to show that he was not that psycho-pathological self.

Our culture is one in which we simulate and espouse truth and sincerity,41 and each of these respondents had sincerely tried to recognize himself. For M., recognition eventually came through moral discourse and not the dominant discourse of psychology or psychiatry. For R., P., and T., recognition was occurring in ways created externally and inauthentically through discourse:

Man is the eternal actor, certainly, but he is also a natural actor, in the sense that his artifice is congenital - this being, indeed, one of his defining human characteristics … . It is not a matter of urging man to cast aside his mask (behind which there is in any case no face), but what one can ask of man is that he should become aware of his artificial state and confess it.42

Like M., my last respondent J. was distinctive in that he resisted subjectification by discourse. In his resistance, he attracted more attention than M, who retreated to his cell for years in order to study the history of slavery and apply it to himself. In relation to the terrible things he had done, J.’s narrative spanned remorse, guilt, desire, and will. He tried to discard masks and speak of his subjectivity without the artifice of


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discourse, but in a penal era without the words for it. He refused both the medication and the identity constituted for him by psychiatry, which sought to define him as a type of subject requiring government and regulation. His resistance met an extreme solution. J., who had wished to be a pirate and who had no desire to change, was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and removed from prison to a special hospital for indefinite detention. He had not conformed to dominant discourse, and in the end discourse found a definitive way in which to constitute his identity.

Notes 1. Adams and Adams, 1990. 2. Goldmann, 1973. 3. Norman, 1976. 4. Shotter, 1985. 5. Parr and Philo, 1995. 6. Medlicott, 1999a. 7. Josselson and Lieblich, 1993; Widdershoven, 1993. 8. Gergen and Gergen, 1988, 20. 9. Corradi di Fiumara, 1990. 10. Dilthey, 1976. 11. Medlicott, 1999b. 12. Bronfenbrenner, 1952. 13. Foucault, 1974, 1979. 14. Foucault, 1974. 15. Foucault, 1979. 16. Garland, 1990. 17. Feeley and Simon, 1994. 18. Garland, 1990. 19. Douglas, 1985. 20. Scully, 1990; Sykes and Matza, 1957. 21. Mills, 1959. 22. Baudrillard, 1993. 23. Giddens, 1999. 24. Rose, 1996, his italics. 25. Ibid. 26. Foucault, 1978. 27. Rose, 1996. 28. Ibid., 38. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid.

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31. Smith, 1982. 32. Guyau, 1898. 33. Ibid., 211. 34. Foucault, 1988. 35. Rose, 1996. 36. Foucault, 1988. 37. Foucault, 1974. 38. Baudrillard, 1993. 39. Ibid., 165. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 170.

References Adams, M. M., and R. M. Adams. 1990. The Problem of Evil. Oxford:

Oxford University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso. Berkowitz, L., ed. 1988. Advances in Experimental and Social

Psychology, XXI. San Diego: Academic Press. Bronfenbrenner, Urie. 1952. Principles of Professional Ethics: Cornell

Studies in Social Growth. American Psychologist 7, no. 8: 452– 455.

Corradi di Fiumara, G. 1990. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London: Routledge.

Dilthey, W. 1976. Selected Writings. Ed. and trans. H. P. Rickman. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Douglas, Jack D. 1985. Creative Interviewing. Beverly Hills, California: Sage.

Feeley, M., and J. Simon. 1994. Actuarial Justice: The Emerging New Criminal Law. In The Futures of Criminology, ed. David Nelken. London: Sage.

Foucault, Michel. 1974. The Order of Things. Trans. Alan Sheridan- Smith. London: Tavistock.

———. (1977) Prison Talk. Trans. Colin Gordon. Radical Philosophy 16 (Spring):10–15. ———. 1978. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert

Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1979. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan.

Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1988. The Dangerous Individual. In Politics, Philosophy and


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Culture, Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. Trans. Alan Sheridan et al. and ed. L. D. Kritzman. London: Routledge.

Garland, D. 1990. Punishment and Modern Society. Oxford: Clarendon. Gergen, Kenneth J., and Keith E. Davis, eds. 1985. The Social

Construction of the Person. New York: Springer. Gergen, Kenneth J., and M. Gergen. 1988. Narrative and the Self as

Relationships. In Advances in Experimental and Social Psychology, XXI, ed. L. Berkowitz. San Diego: Academic Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge, England: Polity.

Goldmann, L. 1973. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Guyau, Jean Marie. 1898. A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction. Trans. G. Kapteyn. London: Watts & Co.

Josselson, R., and A. Lieblich, eds. 1993. The Narrative Study of Lives. London: Sage.

Medlicott, Diana. 1999a. Prisoners as Knowledgeable Agents: A Resource for Suicide Awareness and Prevention Policies in the Healthy Prison. Prison Service Journal 124 (July):12–14.

———. 1999b. Surviving in the Time Machine: Suicidal Prisoners and the Pains of Prison Time,. Time and Society 8, no. 2:211–230.

Mills, C. Wright 1959. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nelken, David, ed. 1994. The Futures of Criminology. London: Sage. Norman, Richard. 1976. Hegel’s Phenomenology: A Philosophical

Introduction. London: Chatto & Windus. Parr, H., and C. Philo. 1995. Mapping “Ma” Identities. London:

Routledge. Rose, N. 1989. Governing the Private Soul. London: Routledge. ———. 1996. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Scully, D. 1990. Understanding Sexual Violence. London: Harper Collins. Shotter, J. 1985. Social Accountability and Self-Specification. In The

Social Construction of the Person, eds. Kenneth J. Gergen and Keith E. Davis. New York: Springer.

Smith, H. 1982. Beyond the Post-Modern Mind. New York: Crossroads. Sykes, G., and D. Matza. 1957. Techniques of Neutralisation: A Theory of

Delinquency. American Sociological Review 22 (December): 664–670.

Widdershoven, G. 1993. The Story of Life: Hermeneutic Perspectives on the Relationship Between Narrative and Life History. In The Narrative Study of Lives, eds., R. Josselson, R. and A. Lieblich. London: Sage.

Seven

The Apostasy of the Baptized: Christians and the Holocaust

Deirdre Burke

Franklin Littell refers to the Christian “teaching of contempt” and

its implications as false teaching that has “led in our own time to mass rebellion of the baptized against the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to wholesale apostasy.”1 This notion of the “apostasy of the baptized” has particular relevance in a discussion of evil and human wickedness. How was it possible that German society perpetrated “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world”?2 How could a well-educated Christian society support the segregation, concentration, and deportation of the Jews?

The task of understanding what happened during the Holocaust is immense: was this a case of moral incontinence– of individuals failing to do the good that they knew, or was it an example of moral strength? Nazi writings express the belief that praise should be heaped on those who tackled this problem for humanity and were willing to go to the necessary lengths of killing every Jewish man, woman and child.

Douglas Lackey warns: “the evils of the Jewish Holocaust are so numerous, so diverse, and so extreme that at first sight it seems presumptuous to attempt to judge them at all, much less to judge them by ordinary moral norms.”3 However, judge we must if we are to learn from these atrocious events. How could the German public condone the anti-Jewish campaign, even when it became eliminationist? What factors influenced the decision-making process of German Christians?

1. German Christians

Moral questions about the Holocaust loom large. How was it possible for human beings to treat Jews and other victims in such a way? Such questions become more acute when we place them in a religious framework, as religions claim to bind humans to the divine will. Alister McGrath (1997) identifies three components of Christianity: a set of beliefs, a set of values, and a way of life. When we look back to the Holocaust we question Christian actions and responses in light of the expectation that Christianity is based around such components, and can be summed up by the key humanitarian principle “love your neighbour as yourself.”4

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We need to explore the decision-making undertaken by German Christians in this period by setting it within the wider historical context. Conway stated that the Christian churches “commanded the loyalty of ninety-five per cent of all Germans.”5 This figure is supported by D. Barratt’s statistics for Germany, East and West, which remain above ninety per cent at all times during the twentieth century.6 We need to understand how Christians at the time were able to reconcile the Final Solution to the Jewish question with their Christian beliefs, and to consider if they deserve to be called apostates. Apostasy is defined as going against or renouncing religious beliefs; we must therefore investigate how Christian beliefs were related to the Final Solution. This question is particularly important in the light of the Augustinian policy of restraint that requires Christians to recognize that Jewish status within the Christian world was “divinely ordained.”7 Thus, any action by Christians against Jews could be interpreted as a violation of belief and constitute apostasy.

To understand why individual Christians failed to recognize that the anti-Jewish legislation was problematic, we must move from questions about institutional responsibility to individual responsibility. This is illustrated by Szenes’s statement about the Hungarian Roman Catholic Church, which he identifies as “strong, free and influential.”8 With over five thousand churches, the church possessed the only meeting places in society and it also possessed the resources necessary to save Jews. Herczl states that 1944 was the year which “brought the Jewish question to the doorsteps of the Hungarian masses” when the implementation of laws meant that “every minor official and every gendarme became the masters of the lives and fates of the Jews.9

We need to follow Daniel J. Goldhagen and “shift the focus of the investigation of the Holocaust away from impersonal institutions back to the actors, back to the human beings who committed the crimes and to the populace from which these men and women came.”10 This requires a focus on Christian society, which was involved in the Holocaust at all levels: as bystander, victim, and rescuer – but particularly as perpetrator. The term perpetrator encompasses all those Germans who took part in Kristallnacht, and members of the armed forces or police who deported or killed Jews. We can consider most Germans as bystanders who knew about anti-Jewish policies and actions, but did nothing in response.

2. The Moral Decision-Making Process

Historic study involves the exploration of motives and an assessment of whether actions were justified. If we add a religious proviso “not to judge a person until you stand in their shoes,” we need to consider the context within which decisions took place.

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Ray Billington’s exploration of the question “where do we get our knowledge of right and wrong?” provides a useful survey of the range of external authorities that contribute to the development of an individual’s morality. Parents are described as the “pipeline by which norms and values are conveyed.”11 The impact of parents cannot be ignored because “until a child begins to form associations with others outside the home, parental attitudes on virtually any issue that may arise are all that he is likely to experience.”12 This is particularly appropriate for a German society that had as its cornerstones “Kinder, Kirche, Küche” (children, church, kitchen).

The law of the land is an essential ingredient in the moral decision-making process as “many facets of our behaviour ... reflect the acceptance of certain procedures on the grounds that they are legal, and the rejection of other because they are illegal.”13 Within a democracy, the purpose of law is to reflect “the attitudes, priorities, even values maintained by the majority of the community in which it is observed or enforced.”14

Religious beliefs and organizations can also contribute to how an issue is viewed by believers. Billington comments on how “the equation of God with certain forms of behaviour may, for some people, give those forms a sanction they would not otherwise possess.”15

We should consider the influence of external authorities on German society given its Lutheran background and the notion of obedience to the state. German Christians did not act in a vacuum, they acted in the confines of their society and its accepted norms.

3. Influences Upon Christian Decision-Making A. The Impact of the “Teaching of Contempt”

Familiarity with two thousand years of Christian anti-Jewish teaching was part of every German’s legacy. Theological anti-Judaism and negative attitudes towards the Jews were part of the teaching of the New Testament that would have featured in the liturgy and in sermons, especially during the Easter period. Two millennia of negative Christian teaching about the Jews acted as a set of blinkers that prevented Christians from recognizing a problem with anti-Jewish policies and actions. E.J. Fisher asks:

what was missing (or, more chillingly present) in the Christian education they had received for centuries that allowed them to remain blind to what they were doing? Or indifferent to what others were doing in their name?16


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For Goldhagen, the issue is clear cut: “At root, the problem had clearly been a cognitive one, namely the failure of Churchpastors and Germans in general to have recognized that the Jews by nature are not an evil tribe.”17 Karl Barth was the main author of the 1934 Barmen Declaration, which criticized Nazi attempts to control the church. Barth later admitted his feelings of guilt for not having made “[the Jewish] problem central, or at least public, in the two Barmen declarations of 1934.”18

The consequences for ordinary Christians who had grown up on this diet of anti-Jewish teachings were far reaching. Conway reports that “most German Christians at the time felt no sense of apostasy because Jews were not considered as existing within the Christian universe of moral obligation.”19

Thus, Christian teaching demonized the Jew, supported negative Christian attitudes to Jews, and prevented Christians from making judgments about the situation concerning Jews. For the believing Christian, the positive future was necessarily tied up with a change in the state of the apostate and unredeemed Jews. B. Churches’ Support for the Nazi Regime

The churches’ support for the Nazi regime would have encouraged believers to support the anti-Jewish program. Goldhagen is scathing about the “moral bankruptcy” of the German churches, which he claims was “extensive and abject.”20 The support for anti-Semitism was shown by the seventy to eighty per cent of Protestant pastors who allied themselves to the German National People’s Party during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Churches assisted the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws in the 1930s by allowing party officials access to genealogical records to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity. These and other factors lead Goldhagen to conclude: “the corporate voice of a significant part of the Protestant Church leadership in Germany was scarcely distinguishable from that of the Nazis.”21

In addition to “moral support” that may have been passive, Weiss identifies ways in which the churches gave active support: “the church even helped the regime keep the public in line: clergy chastised conscientious objectors, and the bishops issued a joint public declaration insisting that Catholic soldiers must do their duty and obey Hitler.”22

These outward manifestations of support were partly due to the signing of the Concordat in 1933, between the Vatican and the Nazi government. The Vatican’s aim was to protect the German Catholic Church, but this agreement provided official recognition of the Nazi government. R. Rubenstein and J. Roth note how “the Vatican never renounced the treaty, which is to say it never revoked its stamp of legitimacy on the Reich.”23

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This fact, when added to papal statements, would prevent German Catholics from seeing anything wrong with Nazi policies. Pope Pius XII’s words would also have failed to alert Catholics to challenges to their religious beliefs: “Dear friends, do not forget the millions of Catholics serving in the German armies. Shall I bring them into conflict of conscience?”24

The involvement of German military chaplains, who served with the armed forces in all areas of operations, provides one of the clearest links between official Christianity and anti-Jewish policies. We can see this in relation to the police battalions involved in the mass slaughter of Jewish men, women, and children in Eastern Europe. Goldhagen followed the paper trail of Police Battalion 101, who started their killing campaign in July 1942 with the deaths of fifteen hundred Jews in Jozefów. They killed over thirty five thousand Jews and deported around forty thousand to death camps. This means that the five hundred men in this one police battalion were responsible for the deaths of seventy five thousand Jews.

“The openness of the slaughter of Jews” Goldhagen claims, “provides evidence of the perpetrators’ obvious approval of their historic deeds.”25 In addition, the photographic images of “cheerful and proud” soldiers “is compelling evidence that they did not conceive of themselves as having been engaged in crime, let alone in one of the greatest crimes of the century.”26

Goldhagen reports on the religious life of men within the police battalions:

Some of the men went to church, prayed to God, contemplated eternal questions, and recited prayers which reminded them of their obligation to other humans; the Catholics among them took communion and went to confession.27

Such accounts show the involvement of the church in the midst of the killing, which normalized the situation and provided implicit approval for such actions. C. The Anti-Nazi Churches’ Criticisms

Those churches that did oppose the Nazi regime did not make discrimination against Jews or the Final Solution a major point in their criticism. German Christians could also have gained the impression that churches approved Nazi anti-Jewish policies by their failure to apply critical voices to the matter, especially when Christian voices were raised against other aspects of Nazi policy. Goldhagen draws attention to this anomaly:


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These religious leaders were the men who earnestly and openly fought the so-called Euthanasia killings, as well as other governmental measures, such as government tolerance of duelling and cremation (but not the crematoria of Auschwitz, of which they knew).28

Thus, the willingness to criticize some aspects of the regime and remain silent on others encouraged indifference among followers or a tacit acceptance that such anti-Jewish policies were suitable.

Weiss reported two occasions when Catholics protested against government policy. First, Bishop Galen’s protest against euthanasia in 1941, and second, a grassroots protest against the removal of crucifixes that was interpreted as the nazification of churches. The only record of any protest was in Cardinal Bertram’s letter in 1944 that stated that German Christians would be upset if baptized Jews met “a fate similar to the Jews” which was understood to be “extermination.”29 D. The Christian Context of Nazi Anti-Semitism

Nazi thinking about the Jews was presented within a Christian worldview, and shown to be both a continuation and a culmination of such thinking. Hitler states in Mein Kampf that the struggle for German greatness was linked to action against the Jews: “and so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.”30 Such statements link the church’s teaching of contempt against the Jews to Nazi anti-Jewish legislation.

This type of presentation would have addressed any concerns that believers may have had about Nazi polices, by relating the policies to beliefs and religious practices, and thus meeting the requirement set out by Laurence Thomas:

The behaviour at issue must be morally embellished so that it does not appear to conflict in a direct and explicit way with a deeply held moral conviction or with the requirement of another institution that has a considerable hold on the performer.31

Christians were accustomed to hearing negative talk about the Jews, and the record of Christian-Jewish relations provided subjugation and degradation as the norm. This historic acclimatization could have led to many German Christians interpreting the anti-Jewish legislation as the return to the established norm – rather than an aberration. 4. Discussion

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Brenda Almond and D. Hill draw attention to the fact-value distinction within philosophy:

Many events ... have demonstrated in a compelling way the devastating consequences for human beings of allowing facts and values to remain marooned on separate islands, with philosophy – representing here people’s reflective capacities and their striving for ideals – making no attempt to build a bridge between them.32

This historic period demonstrates how men and women of principle were unable to make this connection. The facts of the situation were either never explicit, due to Nazi euphemisms, or were related to necessary wartime measures.

First, we must consider the relationship between authority and autonomy. Thomas identifies potential problems when individuals do not question the judgments of authorities: “the phenomenon of obedience to authority gives us insight into how morally decent people can be moved to perform immoral behavior.”33 In following Billington’s list of external factors that influence morality, we can see that the cards were stacked against German Christians. The established sources of authority provided almost unanimous support for the Nazi government: home, school, the police, the judiciary, and almost all churches. These external factors would have had a crucial influence upon individual morality in a persuasive manner, which could be supported by coercion if necessary. Thomas identified the “moral character” of communities as one of the most significant factors in the development of hatred of the other: “Widespread ambivalence or indifference in a community resounds, creating a tonal quality, if you will, that emboldens evil.”34

Lawrence Kohlberg focuses upon the moral decision-making process in his attempt to determine the stages of moral reasoning. He refers to Hitler and Nazi Germany in discussing right and wrong: “the Germans who tried to kill Hitler were doing right because respect for the equal value of lives demands that we kill someone who is murdering others, in order to save lives.”35

Kohlberg states that it is difficult to define moral principles using the example of Hitler to show how the goals of a state can be elevated to “higher moral values.”36 Kohlberg’s cognitive stage theory claims to possess the potential to stimulate and accelerate the “moral thinking” of individuals within society, to rule out deviance and moral failure.

An additional factor for German society was the influence of religion upon moral thinking. A religious-based morality can be problematic if a person is given a moral code and told what is right and wrong. Such an approach is described by Patrick Nowell-Smith (1954) as


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an “infantile” morality, which keeps people in a state of immaturity, and may prevent individuals from making their own decisions. Thus, religious people, who are used to following directions, may simply transfer their allegiance from one situation to another. The built-in discipline to follow the rules of their faith could be transferred to their obedience as a citizen, particularly when their church provides support for the government.

Therefore, religion that claims to provide a guide for right behaviour can be shown to contribute to human wickedness. This raises questions about the relationship between individual decision-making and institutional guidance, particularly with regard to religions and their followers.

Thomas’s study, Vessels of Evil American Slavery and the Holocaust, considers the influences upon individuals and develops a theory that explained how such evils could occur. He explores the “fragility-goodness model of morality.” This

enables us to make a great deal of sense of how evil can gain a foothold in the lives of ordinary people who have moral aspirations without, in the first place, casting a pall of suspicion on the goodness of their moral character.37

This chapter has identified features of the German experience

which help us to better understand the apostasy of the baptized. One of the main contentions is that the influence of a Christian upbringing was of paramount importance in two ways. First, Church teaching provided negative ideas about the Jews that could help Christians understand why it was necessary to discriminate against them. Second, a religious upbringing helped to instil an obedience to “higher” authority into the believer. Nazi policymakers who sought to tap into this characteristic by extending such obedience to the state recognized this. The link made between Christian teaching and Nazi views helped to legitimize anti-Jewish policies, and to bind believers to the state.

Notes 1. Littell, 1986, 1. 2. Winston Churchill in Braham, 1981, 1111. 3. Lackey, 1991, 141. 4. Luke 10:27. 5. Conway, 1968, xiii. 6. Barratt, 1982, 310, 314.

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7. Katz, 1994, 262. 8. Quoted in Herczl, 1993, 242. 9. Herczl, 1993, 242. 10. Goldhagen, 1997, 477. 11. Billington, 1993, 68. 12. Ibid., 66. 13. Ibid., 70. 14. Ibid., 72. 15. Ibid., 78. 16. Fisher, 1989, 2. 17. Goldhagen, 1997, 114. 18. Conway, 1968, 205. 19. Ibid., 207. 20. Goldhagen, 1997, 107. 21. Ibid., 434. 22. Weiss, 1996, 351. 23. Rubenstein and Roth, 1987, 209. 24. Cohn-Sherbok, 1997, 209. 25. Goldhagen, 1997, 245. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 267-268. 28. Ibid., 111. 29. Weiss, 1996, 351. 30. Quoted by Gilbert, 1986, 28. 31. Thomas, 1993, 38. 32. Almond and Hill, 1991, 1. 33. Thomas, 1993, 38. 34. Ibid., 113. 35. Quoted in Mumsey, 1980, 57. 36. Quoted in Mumsey, 1980, 61. 37. Thomas, 1993, 43.

References

Almond, Brenda and D. Hill, eds. 1991. Applied Philosophy: Morals and Metaphysics in Contemporary Debate, London: Routledge.

Aristotle 1976. Ethics. Trans. J. A. K. Thomson, ed. Hugh Tredennick. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.

Barratt, D. 1982. World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Billington, Ray. 1993. Living Philosophy: An Introduction to Moral Thought. London: Routledge.


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Braham, Randolph L. 1981. The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. 1999. Understanding the Holocaust: An Introduction. London: Cassell.

Conway, John Seymour. 1968. The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–1945. Vancouver: Regent College.

Fisher, E. J. 1989. Why Teach the Holocaust? Paper at Peace/Shalom after Atrocity Conference, Seton Hill, Greensburg, PA, April. Goldhagen, Daniel J. 1997. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary

Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage. Herczl, Moshe Y. 1993. Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian

Jewry. New York: New York University Press. Katz, Steven T. 1994. The Holocaust in Historical Context. Volume 1, The Holocaust and Mass Death Before the Modern Age. Oxford:

Oxford University Press. Lackey, Douglas P. 1991. Extraordinary Evil or Common Malevolence? Evaluating the Jewish Holocaust. In Applied Philosophy: Morals

and Metaphysics in Contemporary Debate, eds. Brenda Almond and D. Hill. London: Routledge.

Littell, Franklin H. 1986. The Crucifixion of the Jews. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. McGrath, Alister E. 1997. An Introduction to Christianity. Oxford:

Blackwell. Mumsey, B., ed. 1980. Moral Development, Moral Education, and

Kohlberg: Basic Issues in Philosophy. Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press.

Nowell-Smith, P. H. 1954. Ethics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rubenstein, R. and J. Roth. 1987. Approaches to Auschwitz. London:

SCM Press. Santayana, G. 1905. The Life of Reason. Vol. 1. .New York: Scribner. Thomas, L. M. 1993. Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the

Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Weiss, J. 1996. The Ideology of Death. Chicago: Elephant.

Eight

The Exorcist: Personification of Human Wickedness or

Upholder of Religious Duties?

Sandeep Singh Chohan

The exorcist holds an esteemed position within Indian religious

traditions. This is due to a highly developed belief in magical powers and the supernatural that harms human beings in a multitude of ways. The exorcist’s role is a dual one: firstly to remove such afflictions and other supernatural malaises; and secondly to impose harm on others as requested by supplicants. However this ambivalent aspect of the exorcist’s nature has yet to be explored in the study of Indian religious traditions.

The ambivalent nature of the exorcist in being able to practice good and bad magic is mirrored in the dual nature of the Vedas, the scriptural basis of the Hindu tradition. The Atharvaveda, the fourth and final Vedic samhita (collection), has a complex system of good (bheshajani) and bad (abhichara) magical practices that are reflected within the exorcist. The dualism of magical practices in the Atharvaveda and the exorcist’s prowess in being able to practice and utilize both forms of magic creates a dilemma in defining the role of the exorcist. As a result, the character of the exorcist as a personification of human wickedness or as an upholder of religious duties must be addressed. In this paper I shall explore the ambivalence of the exorcist in the Indian traditions by first examining the dual nature of magical practices in the Vedas, and then by analyzing the origins and development of the exorcist in both scripture and popular religion.

1. The Dualism of Magical Practices in the Vedas

The Atharvaveda contains the majority of references to belief in supernatural malaise and practices of exorcism, although there are several references in the Rg Veda, the first and most important Vedic samhita in the Hindu tradition. Popular belief is that the Atharvaveda is of a composite authorship by the two mythological rishis (sages or poets), Atharvan and Angiras. Both figures feature in the mythology of the Vedic period, (4000BCE–3000BCE) especially in connection with the Rg Veda. Angiras is thought to have written a large number of hymns contained in the Rg Veda. The authorship of the Atharvaveda is difficult to substantiate, as is the authorship of any other Vedic samhita.

Rishi Atharvan is revered as the son of Brahma in early Vedic mythology. It is unclear at what stage of the development in the early Vedic priestly system Atharvan originates; however as the author of the

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Brahmavidya, he is prominent in the mythology of the Vedas. “Atharvan” of the title of the Veda which refers to the bheshajani group of magical practices. The bheshajani practices focus on good aspects of magic of a benevolent nature focused on helping people through the natural life cycle in order to assist them in their daily work and family life. The bheshajani practices prescribed in the Atharvaveda cater for a wide variety of social, economic, cultural and religious problems that may be encountered by society during the Vedic civilization. Within the bheshajani group, medical problems are treated by utilizing natural products that people believed had magical and healing qualities.

Angiras plays a more formative role in the Rg Veda and is also a prominent priest in Vedic mythology. Angiras is a member of the elite seven Maharishis of Vedic mythology and is believed to be a “progenitor of mankind.”1 The name Angiras is a derivative of “Agni” or fire, and is therefore linked to the fire god Angiras, also known as the lord of sacrifices, the purohit-priestly adviser, and magician of the gods. As fire was principally used for religious rites and rituals, and was symbolic in making offerings to the gods, Angiras’s identification with the fire deity is a representation of his role as the sacrificer of demons. Several mythical stories surround the personage of Angiras and his role in the ordinance of sacrificial rites in the Vedic system. Angiras represents the hostile and malevolent forms of magical practice known as abhichara. The main purpose of the abhichara strand of magical practices is to inflict pain and suffering on enemies. Within the Atharvaveda there is an inherent dualism of practices in which good and bad magic co-exist, and which are personified by the two rishis prominent in the mythology of the Vedas.

As well as the division between the bheshajani and abhichara forms of magic, the Atharvaveda practices can be classified in a number of different ways according to the aims of the magical formulae. Firstly, charms to cure human beings of sickness inflicted by diseased demons are prominent, as are charms for long life and good health. Secondly, charms for royalty pertaining to social and economic harmony in the Atharvaveda act as a commentary on the role of the royal families in Vedic civilization. Thirdly, a group of hymns concentrates on women and their relationship with their husband, close family, and other females who threaten their marriage or family life. The measures taken in these categories to protect kingdoms, royalty, families and individuals are from the abhichara category of magical practice. For instance, women typically use abhichara charms and incantations to protect their husbands from the wandering eyes of other females, or to keep a roaming husband restrained within the boundaries of marriage. Finally, the Atharvaveda focuses on numerous charms and incantations to prevent the effects of sorcery, witchcraft and

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demonic possession. This final category includes the magical practices of bheshajani that aim to prevent and heal the effects of malevolent magic.

Some comment is needed on the magical formulae used in religious healing and the dual relationship between the practices of bheshajani and abhichara categories. The practices of religious healing, bheshajani and abhichara magic provide a comprehensive outline of the major religious practices prescribed in the Atharvaveda and relate to the development of the exorcist tradition in north India and amongst the migrant communities in Britain. The Atharvaveda provides the first scriptural foundation and evidence of magical and exorcist practices and the essential role of a religious conductor in the exorcist tradition. Early indications of the intricate relationship between the physical well being of a person and the effects of demonic possession, sorcery, and witchcraft on a victim occur in the Atharvaveda.

While demonic possession may be blamed for the physical illness and discomfort that a victim may suffer, the stimulus of the attack could be attributed to a number of possible causes: for example animosity amongst friends or family members, which could cause them to employ sorcery. The wrath of gods and goddesses could be another possible reason for being affected by other forms of supernatural phenomena, as a repercussion of a victim’s disobedience to the deities in question. Although broken limbs and wounds were attributed to warfare or accident, Kenneth Zysk suggests that other external afflictions can be “caused by noxious insects and vermin, often thought to be demonic in character.”2

The magical formulae used in bheshajani and abhichara magic are similar to the powers used in the process of religious healing and the performance of exorcisms. The same religious priest can perform bheshajani and abhichara practices despite the difference between them. Margaret Stutley (1980) and Benjamin Walker (1968) view bheshajani and abhichara magic as good and bad respectively, nevertheless the conductor of the magic cannot decide whether such practices are for benevolent or malevolent purposes and must therefore perform both. The essential element in this process is the wish of the supplicant and the practitioner’s duty in fulfilling the wish, regardless of the consequences. The practitioner is bound by the powers he has gained to perform magic at the bequest of a needy supplicant. Although the supplicant’s intentions may not be honourable, the practitioner is not allowed a judgmental stance and must fulfil his commission. A fine line divides the practices of bheshajani and abhichara as supplicants use both to improve their lifestyle, regardless of the outcome on other individuals. For example, if a wife requires abhichara magic to restrain a husband in marriage, or to harm him for having committed an adulterous act, the practitioner of the magic is bound to carry out the supplicant’s wish. Another example of this is the

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use of the bheshajani practices that can protect and thus deflect a curse, sorcery or witchcraft on to the source of the malevolent forces. The intention of bheshajani magic is to protect supplicants, it can inadvertently harm the original offenders nonetheless. If the bheshajani practices used to exorcise a person in turn inflict the pain and suffering upon the source or an enemy, the practice of bheshajani is no different to the abhichara practices.

2. The Origins and Development of the Exorcist

Although the forms of good and bad magic are linked to mythological figures of the Vedic era, the use of these magical practices by the priests and religious leaders of that period are important considerations in this paper. The prevalence of bheshajani and abhichara in the Atharvaveda suggests that the religious priesthood performed both forms of magic within society, as did others who were versed in such practices. Within the mythical tradition of the Atharvaveda and the Vedic society as a whole, the priestly families of Angiras and Atharvan were the chief practitioners of magic and exorcisms. Stutley adds that the gods venerate Agni, of whom Angiras is an epithet, as the chief expeller of demons. The role of the Angiras priest was to protect the gods and their religious rites from the attacks of demons against which the hymns of the Atharvaveda could be used. The Atharvans “were particularly adept exorcists and employed the names of the gods (because of their inherent power) for this purpose.”3

A. The Role of the Brahmin

The role of the brahmin (a priestly caste) or other official religious leaders in the Vedic era, and their practice of exorcism, bheshajani, and abhichara magic are more difficult to define. Walker states that the Atharvaveda was also called the Brahmaveda because it was the chief sacrificial manual used by the brahmins. This argument is problematic in that the trayi Veda, consisting of the Rg Veda, Yajur Veda and Sama Veda, did not initially contain or recognize the fourth Vedic samhita, the Atharvaveda. From the early stages of the Vedic religion, the Atharvaveda has been marginalized because of the contents and focus of this samhita on the popular and folk religion that it encapsulates. The most striking difference between the trayi Veda and the Atharvaveda is the emphasis that the first group places on the sacerdotal forms of religion. The Atharvaveda focuses upon magical practices and belief in the world of supernatural phenomena and malaise. Such focus has proved to be the most contentious part of the Atharvaveda and led to its exclusion from the canon of Vedic scriptures. The Atharvaveda was finally added to the Vedic canon after sections of the Rg Veda were included in the samhita,


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aligning the scripture with the sacerdotal forms of religion emphasized in the trayi Veda.

In examining the role of the brahmin in the Vedic era, it is important to note that the pre-conception of the brahmin as a high caste member of the varna system of Hindu society who is dutifully bound to perform religious rituals and ceremonies is false. The brahmin is the highest caste within the varna system, however within the brahminical priesthood there are further divisions and sub-divisions which affect the role and office of the brahmin. Walker comments on how “the term brahmin, far from being well defined, is vague and elastic in its connotation.”4

The role of the brahmin during the Vedic period and that of the Atharvaveda is unclear. Stutley has argued that the brahmins used the charms and incantations to protect themselves and their possessions, nevertheless no substantial evidence exists to point to their use of the Atharvanic magical practices for the purposes of exorcism. The charms and imprecations brahmins use to protect themselves and their belongings are of a malevolent nature inflicting pain on their attackers. There is little evidence to suggest the brahmins’ use of the abhichara and bheshajani magic for selfish purposes or to assist supplicants. Walker mentions a lower priestly class, referred to as Ojhas, who are linked to the practice of exorcisms. The Ojhas are regarded as social inferiors within the brahmin caste because of their occupation as practitioners of the Vedic rites and rituals and other magical practices. Walker states that the Pujari who performs all forms of worship within the temple, the Jyotisha who prepares all astrological charts and dates for auspicious occasions, and the Maha Patra who presides over the funeral rites are all considered inferior brahmins within the wider brahmin caste hierarchy.

Zysk, in his study of the religio-medical practices of the Vedic civilizations, states that the bhisaj is another example of the prevalent practitioners in magic for religious and medical purposes. The bhisaj is regarded as a specialist in the process of religious healing and possesses knowledge on the use of natural vegetation and herbs. However, it is crucial that he also has a sound understanding of the hymns that refer to demonic possession and their use in the process of religious healing. There is no evidence of the bhisaj’s position in the priestly system of the Vedic civilization, but we can assume that the bhisaj had a competent command of the language and the religious rites of the priestly division in order to perform religious healing.

As we can see, the role of the brahmin within the practice of exorcisms is of a secondary and inferior nature that traditionally attracts disapproval. Little evidence links the brahmin to the practice of exorcisms and their use of the abhichara and bheshajani practices, apart from fleeting

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references such as those of Walker and Stutley. The question of the exorcist’s origins and development in the Indian religious traditions must be addressed.

B. The Role of the Exorcist

It is unclear at what stage non-brahmin or lower brahmins like ojhas and bhisajs took on the role of exorcists. However the prevalent belief in supernatural phenomena, malaise, and magical practices in the Atharvaveda suggests that practitioners of these arts developed simultaneously with the brahminical priesthood. D.M. Knipe (1995) cites the development of the theistic trends in the Indian religions as turning points in the role of the brahmin. As bhakti (loving devotion) became the prominent religious practice, the role of the brahmin as officiator of the religious rites, rituals and sacrifices declined, although the brahmins retained official status as purohits and temple priests to impart Vedic knowledge. As the theistic trends developed in the Indian traditions, the brahminical priesthood became absorbed into the broad base of the Hindu religion. As Knipe states:

Increasingly, brahman priests found themselves to be one category among specialists of the sacred as “Hinduism” slowly broadened its base to accommodate virtually every religious expression of the multicultural subcontinent.5

As the Hindu tradition broadened, the role of non-brahmin priests

and specialists in their respective religious roles increased. Knipe divides the priesthood of the Hindu tradition by the medieval period into three categories. The Vedic brahmins were the first group who retained their focus on the Vedas. The second priestly group, also of the brahmin caste, focused on the great epics of the Hindu tradition along with the Puranas and Agamas. The language of the brahmins also changed from the traditional Sanskrit, to vernacular languages, in keeping with the development of theistic beliefs where vernacular languages appealed to the wider society. A larger group of priests who were uneducated in the scriptures and did not use the scripture as the basis of their religious office developed in the medieval period. This provided an integral part of the religious priestly structure in the Indian religious traditions. This group of priests centred around shrines that venerated gods and goddesses famed for their benevolence within set geographical locations.6

The centrality of the shrine in rural religious traditions makes it possible for the exorcist to centralize and identify with the local religious beliefs and practices of the community. Lawrence Babb (1975),


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W.D.O’Malley (1935), and C.J. Fuller (1992) refer to this form of Indian religion as “Popular Hinduism.” The application of “popular” to a religious tradition implies a tradition that is centralized on the believers’ daily beliefs and practices. Fuller’s definition of popular Hinduism as “the beliefs and practices that constitute the living, ‘practical’ religion of ordinary Hindus” displays the focus of the religious setting in which the exorcist tradition is openly practiced.7 S. Weightman (1984) has labelled this form of religion “the pragmatic dimension,” where the religious beliefs, rites and practices revolve around the pragmatic matters of life as opposed to other dimensions in which the religious scriptures or goals of salvation and liberation play a vital part.8

C. The Moral Ambivalence of the Exorcist’s Role

The ambivalent nature of the exorcist lies in the duality of the magical practices in the Vedas that I mentioned earlier. Stutley states that the magico-religious rites in the Atharvaveda are in a neutral state until the practitioner utilizes the magical rites to assist in the practice of exorcisms, or to inflict harm upon people. At this stage, the true dualistic role of the exorcist is apparent. Although the title “exorcist” suggests that the main purpose of the religious officiate is to expel harmful ghosts, demons, or the causes of harm from a human being; the exorcist can also use the knowledge that he has obtained to inflict pain and suffering on others. Accordingly, the exorcist is not bound by the theory of good or evil, but is bound to uphold his religious duty as the practitioner of these religious rites. This is an underlying problem in the study of the Hindu tradition and the Indian religious traditions as a whole; the connotation of evil that is held in the religious traditions of India do not correspond to the western or Christian understanding of evil. It is therefore possible to misunderstand the exorcist, his role, his practices and the dualism of the magical rites in the Atharvaveda. The Atharvaveda contains the legitimization in which a person can be saved from a disease or magical attack, but in turn can divert the attack to the source.

The diverse and complex belief system of an agrarian populace whose worldview envelops magic, sorcery, witchcraft, spirit possession, and ancestral possession aids the understanding of the exorcist’s paradoxical role in popular belief systems. The array of supernatural malaise that may affect a person or family is extremely large and complex. Witchcraft, for example, is a possible cause of supernatural affliction that may require the services of an exorcist or healer. The exorcist as diviner may also be required to appease local tutelary gods and goddesses whom people have displeased. A person afflicted by the malign gaze or evil eye also requires the assistance of the exorcist. The removal of ghosts or ancestral spirits that may have possessed an individual is achieved by

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fulfilling the wishes of the invading spirit. Finally, others who are adept at and familiar with the processes and powers of sorcery can only cure a person affected by malevolent sorcery.

It is in the removal of malevolent sorcery that the ambivalent nature of the exorcist practices is best examined. Fuller states that within the setting of popular religious tradition in India, the sorcerer and the exorcist are synonymous with each other.9 Although the sorcerer uses magical formulae and chants to harm individuals or families, the remedy is also available from an exorcist who has mastered the practice of sorcery but in order to avert the evil magic of other sorcerers.

G. Dwyer (1996), in his study of supernatural affliction and its treatment in Rajasthan, suggests that the role of the exorcist and the sorcerer as representations of good and evil respectively is ambivalent. While the sorcerer’s role is regarded to be evil because of the negative connotations it carries in western society, this is not always the case in the Indian context. The ambiguity of the exorcist and the sorcerer is again based on their religious and magical practices. Although the sorcerer may use magical practices to inflict harm, the exorcist uses similar magical practices to cure people of the afflictions. This is based on the processes that both exorcist and sorcerer use to gain their powers.

Dwyer states that sidhi (magical powers) are obtained through sadhana (ritual practices and methods).10 Within the Indian sub-continent, especially in north India, several terms refer to the processes of gaining magical powers. Bhakti, for example, refers to the ascetic practices that may be performed to gain such powers. The magical powers, and the process by which they are gained, do not define the way in which such powers will be utilized; hence the process and status of both sorcerer and exorcist are similar. Although believers regard the two figures as opponents insofar as the sorcerer causes supernatural malaise and the exorcist heals such afflictions, the process of gaining their respective powers is the same. Theoretically the exorcist and sorcerer are both able to assist supplicants and exorcise supernatural affliction, or inflict harm and malevolent sorcery upon members of the community. The role of the exorcist as a healer is subsequently placed under suspicion because in order to heal a person of a magical affliction, the exorcist must master the skills with which the magic has afflicted a person. The exorcist, as an upholder of religious duty, attracts suspicion because of the processes of sadhana and sidhi that he has in common with the sorcerer.

The complex beliefs, rites, and rituals that the exorcist practices are problematic and contribute to the ambiguity of his character. In using his sidhi to cure one person, the exorcist may inflict harm on another, either intentionally or unintentionally. Although the aim of the exorcist


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may be to do good for his supplicants through the processes of exorcism, he may cause suffering to others. Dwyer states:

Whether an individual who possesses supernatural powers is considered in positive or in negative terms, therefore, frequently depends upon whether one is blessed or cursed by him. Furthermore, one person at a certain point may see a practitioner in time as performing helpful magic and, at a later stage, as practicing sorcery.11 The duality of the magical practices that are present in the

Atharvaveda remains intact in the popular beliefs systems that are widespread in India. Although originally the abhichara and bheshajani practices were personified by the two rishis Atharvan and Angiras, there is a degree of vagueness surrounding their role in society. The exorcist’s role was promoted, as theistic trends developed in the Indian religious traditions and popular forms of religion became centralized in the rural society. However, the shared powers of sidhi and sadhana with the exorcist further confuse the exorcist’s position as humanly wicked or an upholder of religious duty. Although the practices and magical powers used in sorcery and exorcism are the same, the conception that the use of these powers by the exorcist determines his wicked or good nature is false. The believer’s perception of the exorcist as relatively good or bad –practicing sorcery, or helping others – is fundamental in understanding the personification of the exorcist as either someone who is humanly wicked, or the upholder of religious duties. The definition of the exorcist within these two categories is difficult to ascertain, as the perception of the supplicant is the defining factor. The ambivalent nature of the exorcist as an upholder of religious duties or a personification of human wickedness relies inherently on the supplicant’s needs and purpose for utilizing magical practices.

Notes 1. Dowson, 1968, 16. 2. Zysk, 1985, 8. 3. Stutley, 1980, 2. 4. Walker, 1968, 170. 5. Knipe, 1995, 541. 6. Ibid. 7. Fuller, 1992, 5.

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8. Weightman, 1985, 57-64. 9. Fuller, 1992, 237. 10. Dwyer, 1996, 86. 11. Ibid., 96.

References Atharvaveda. n. d. Trans. B. R. Kishore. New Delhi: Diamond Pocket

Books. Babb, Lawrence A. 1975. The Divine Hierarchy: Popular Hinduism in Central India. New York and London: Columbia University

Press. Chakraborty, C. 1977. Common Life in the Rgveda and Atharvaveda: An

Account of the Folklore in the Vedic Period. Calcutta: Punthi Pustak. Dowson, John, ed. 1968. A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and

Religion, Geography, History and Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Dwyer, G. 1996. Supernatural Affliction and its Treatment: Aspects of Popular Religion in Rural and Urban Rajasthan.. Ph.D. diss., Oxford University.

Eliade, Mircea, ed. 1995. The Encyclopaedia of Religions. London: Blackwell.

Fuller, C. J. 1992. The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Griffith, R. T. H. 1985. Hymns of the Atharvaveda. Translated with a Popular Commentary. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.

Karambelkar, V.W. 1959. The Atharvavedic Civilization, Its Place in the Indo-Aryan Culture: A Cultural History of the Indo-Aryans from the Atharva Veda. Nagpur: Nagpur University.

Knipe, D. M. 1995. Priesthood: Hindu Priesthood. In The Encyclopaedia of Religions, ed. Mircea Eliade. London: Blackwell.

O’Flaherty, W. D. 1976. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

O’Malley, L. S. S. 1970. Popular Hinduism: The Religion of the Masses. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Stutley, M. 1980. Ancient Indian Magic and Folklore: An Introduction.

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Walker, B. 1968. Hindu World: An Encyclopedic Survey of Hinduism.

London: George Allen & Unwin. Weightman, S. 1984. Hinduism in the Village Setting. Milton Keynes:

Open University Press.


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Zysk, Kenneth G. 1985. Religious Healing in the Veda with Translations and Annotations of Medical Hymns from the Rgveda and the Atharvaveda and Renderings from the Corresponding Ritual Texts. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.


Nine

Wandering the Heath: Niebuhr and the Need for Realism

Rob Fisher

In exploring the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, I am always struck

by the word “pretension” which he uses with frequency and emotion – sometimes consciously and deliberately, sometimes unconsciously, and usually in the heat of argument and debate. Niebuhr’s commentators may also have subconsciously absorbed this word into their expositions and analyses, without thinking it significant enough to warrant explicit treatment.1

Throughout all his writings, Niebuhr contends with a complex paradox that operates at an international, national, and individual level, and which he can only begin to unlock through the word “pretension.” In part, the word refers to, and is a reaction to the context in which he works and writes. This situation arises from the end of World War I and encompasses the brutal destructiveness of World War II. In this situation, the credibility of the intellectual climate of liberal theological and philosophical thinking is torn between attacks from conservatism represented by Karl Barth, and a scientific and naturalistic humanism. Niebuhr is clear that the harsh realities of events on the world stage combined with the concrete daily experiences of life call for a more clear-sighted and realistic response. Along with the names of Henry van Dusen, John Bennett, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Walter Horton, Niebuhr is often credited with being the founder of “American Realistic” theology.2

Here the word “pretension” refers to the emergence of an intellectual climate that cannot retain any bond to past traditions. I think this is partly due to Niebuhr’s disappointment with Socialism. He was loyal to the Socialist ideal and believed that it could unite workers and intellectuals in a coalition for action and social ownership. However, the recent events in European history pointed to its destruction, as in Germany, or its discredit, as in Russia.3 The contradiction between the socialist goal and historic reality leads Niebuhr to call for the responsible application of hope within the harsh limits of historic circumstances. Indeed, Niebuhr insistently calls for the American support of Britain in the war against Hitler.

This call for support – even to the point of intervention – gives us a clue to the meaning of pretension here. In his book Christianity and Power Politics, Niebuhr’s disgust is aimed at ineffective and indifferent forms of action. Niebuhr acknowledges that the Socialist perspective on the war as a clash of imperialistic ideologies is true; but he cannot tolerate this perspective is blind to specific circumstances that are of vital

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importance. Indulgence in the utopian luxury of pacifism is not an option. The fault lies in the “vapid” nature of a liberal culture still imbued with implicit Christian values, and whose

will-to-live has been so seriously enervated by a confused pacifism, in which Christian perfectionism and bourgeois love of ease have been curiously compounded, that our democratic world does not really deserve to survive.4

The pretension lies in the paradox of care and concern with events on the world stage, with the indifference to getting involved in these events. The pretension is exposed by our complacency.

Let us consider the scene of appalling devastation in the TV coverage of the floods in Mozambique in February 2000. The television reporter in a helicopter above the floods commentates in a voice thick with pathos “in a helicopter designed to carry twenty-five people, we managed to save twenty-seven lives.” At this point, I explode:

“Yes – and if it weren’t for a reporter, a camera operator and sound person, it could have been thirty! And who, exactly, are the ‘we’ who managed to save these lives? Because I bet you didn’t operate the winch, or pull each poor person on board. I bet you just stood there and filmed the whole blasted lot.” My parade of impassioned moral outrage is therapeutic but

troubling. My verbal barrage is a symbol of my frustration at the inability to do something, an expression of the feeling that “if I were there, things would be different.” But I am not there; it is unlikely that I could get there; and even if I could, there would be little difference I could make. Yet this could also be a pretension. I could get there, if I made the effort. Perhaps I could make a difference if I went there. Deep down, the pretense is the parade of moral outrage.

I hate the reporter for being there and doing nothing; what I hate more is the reporter being there making millions of witnesses to suffering and tragedy, all of whom probably feel exactly the same way I do. What I hate even more, in all the scenes of ethnic cleansing across the world, is the fact that s/he made me aware of it. It is the shattering of those dearly loved ideals of the compassion for fellow human beings, and the desire to put right injustice and misfortune which calls forth the rage against the television. In the wake of that rage, I am left to contemplate what the concrete “cash-value” benefits of those ideals are.

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My reaction is an idealistic tirade against what I feel to be the gross injustices of this world: things should not be like this. My response is the desire to put things right, to alter history, to alter creation itself so that we should not have to be witnesses to scenes of barbarism, suffering, and death. Here lies the irony: with the burning desire for appeasement comes the realization that nothing I can do will make a difference. Once the protests have died down, and the pretension has been exposed for what it is, then a more realistic view is brought to bear. Given who and where I am, and the means at my disposal, what can I do realistically? This is the feeling Niebuhr wants us to have; to leave behind the parade of naive, idealistic moral outrage, and in the cold light of day, work out what is achievable. In passing, there is the danger of another moral pretension, namely the “I can do nothing” used as an act of resignation, or excuse for giving up.

Niebuhr is not alone here. Dostoyevsky captures the force of this paradox in The Brothers Karamazov. Here, Ivan Karamazov – the atheist who (curiously) believes in God – is goading his brother Alyosha, a trainee novice, into making a display of moral outrage such as this. Ivan relates the story of an eight-year-old serf boy who is playing with stones, one of which strikes the paw of the General’s favourite dog. When the General learns of what has happened, he orders the boy stripped and shut up in the lock-up overnight. Next day the General dresses in his full hunting uniform, and in front of the boy’s mother, orders him to run. The boy runs: the General sets his pack of borzoi hounds on the boy, and all the bystanders watch as he is torn to pieces in front of his mother. Ivan ends the story thus:

I believe the General was afterwards deprived of the right to administer his estates. Well, what was one to do with him? Shoot him? Shoot him for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Tell me Alyosha! “Shoot him” Alyosha said softly, raising his eyes to his brother with a pale, twisted sort of smile. “Bravo!” yelled Ivan with something like rapture. “If you say so, then – you’re a fine hermit! So that’s the sort of little demon dwelling in your heart, Alyosha Karamazov!”5

Ivan’s rapture exposes the pretension at work here. He has already realized that what we would ideally like to do – take him to a quiet corner and shoot him – may satisfy our sense of moral outrage. However, this is a course of action that is never likely to happen even if we had the opportunity. Ivan has already reconciled himself to the fact that what was


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achievable in such a situation has already happened. The General was deprived of the right to administer his estates. However slight, what was achievable in relation to that situation had been achieved. Although our loftier moral ideals have not been satisfied, a realistic and realizable response has taken place. It is this question: “what should I do?” that led Martin Luther King to get involved in civil rights issues.

Despite Niebuhr’s comments on democracy, and his refusal to equate love with the avoidance of conflict, he still struggled with the paradox of the evils of war, and with what was achievable. Writing in May 1941, Niebuhr considers the impact on America of a Nazi victory in Europe. He backed down from economic arguments about the “staggering burden of many decades of military and naval expenditures” and an American willingness to “subject its economy to the strain of meeting competition from a system which, for the first time in history, has combined slavery with efficiency.”7 It took a moral argument to expose what he saw as the pretension of non-intervention in World War II. Niebuhr argues that there can be “no possibility of considering national interest without becoming involved in the more general moral questions of what we owe, as a people, to our common civilization.”7 With the parade of moral outrage out of the way, Niebuhr realizes that he wanted American military action to put an end to the atrocities in the camps. But he could not achieve this. Instead, from 1943 he lobbies Roosevelt to allow an increase in immigration numbers for European Jews. He partially achieved this goal when Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board.

The clear-sighted realism he brought to bear on this situation is continued in his book Jews After the War. Niebuhr argues that the Jews needed, and had the right to a homeland in Palestine. It is not enough to guarantee individual rights: the world community is responsible for guaranteeing collective rights. In the case of the Jewish people, this was the right to live as Jews in a homeland that would enable them to develop a national identity. The creation of a homeland for the Jewish people would mean injustice to the Arabs, and the Americans and British would have to use the power of the victors to create such a homeland. Niebuhr does not shrink from stating that justice depends on “imperialistic realism.”8 By imperialistic realism, he means the responsibility of the Allied powers in bringing organization and structure to guarantee peace. If you are a super power, you have “super” responsibility. In accepting or forging the role of being a world leader, you are responsible for avoiding the pretensions that power and economic wealth enables. You are also responsible for creating a space in which the less powerful can act as a balance to the super powers, and have a forum in which their voices can be heard.

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Niebuhr’s realism in this matter is a clarion call for present circumstances. The work of the United Nations is valuable and significant and the proclamation of human rights is a fine ideal. But neither is capable of stopping people getting macheteed to death. The war crimes trials in The Hague act as a delayed appeasement to our sense of injustice at the massacres in Kosovo in 1998. It would have been better not to have needed these trials if there were an armed international force that could be mobilized to protect people’s human rights – with force if needs be. This is a short-term solution; our hope would be that the policies of the United Nations will eventually bear fruit. But until such a time, the short term and achievable goal of saving the lives of the innocent, the minorities, and the dispossessed is of supreme importance. The pretense of action through the imposition of economic sanctions, or reclassification of the problem as “internal civil war” or an “outbreak of sectarian tension” is not. This is the pretense the British government hid behind in the case of the white farmers in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Blair’s cowardice was exposed on the national news when he refused to mount economic sanctions against Mugabe because “it would not be in their best interests.”

Niebuhr does not address pretensions on just the international level or national level. The heart of the paradox and the source of pretension lie closer to home. In the opening paragraph of The Nature and Destiny of Man, he identifies these:

Man has always been his own most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself? Every affirmation which he may make about his stature, virtue, or place in the cosmos becomes involved in contradictions when fully analysed. The analysis reveals some presupposition or implication which seems to deny what the proposition intended to affirm.9

The real question emerges if we interpret Niebuhr’s moral argument in the international context as asking what we owe, as a people, to our common civilization. What does our knowledge of what we have in common commit us to?

Identifying what we have in common is not easy. Niebuhr decries the “easy conscience” bred by modern society. It surprises him that we feel happy to live with the pretension that we can put many of our social evils down to environmental factors. Nothing, he says,

seems to disturb modern man’s good opinion of himself. He considers himself the victim of corrupting institutions which he is about to destroy or reconstruct,


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or of the confusions of ignorance which an adequate education is about to overcome. Yet he continues to regard himself as essentially harmless and virtuous.10

The pretension of our ease with ourselves and others is quickly exposed, particularly when it comes to the exercise of power. Human beings suppose they have “self-sufficiency” and “self-mastery” which breed a false complacency and false security in the way we live our lives. What goes unrecognized is the dependent nature of our individual and social existence. Niebuhr notes: “this proud pretension is present in an inchoate form in all human life but it rises to its greatest heights among those individuals and classes who have more than an ordinary degree of social power.”11

The paradox rests on the insecurity most people feel or come to feel in the way they deal with other people. In living our lives, in seeking a job, we seek to establish ourselves in a role that will bring respect. For Niebuhr, this is where the problem lies:

the more man establishes himself in power and glory, the greater is the fear of tumbling from his eminence, or losing his treasure, or being discovered in his pretension. Poverty is a peril to the wealthy but not to the poor. Obscurity is feared not by those who are habituated to its twilight but by those who have become accustomed to public acclaim.12

The paradox extends to the level of morality. Complacency and security lead to a sense of self-righteousness where others are judged and condemned by our own sense of standards. Again Niebuhr notes: “moral pride is the pretension of finite man that his highly conditioned virtue is the final righteousness and that his very relative moral standards are absolute.”13 The paradox is therefore the unwillingness of the pretentious to recognize their pretensions.

Again, Dostoyevsky helps to illuminate the paradox of this concern. Ivan’s opening skirmish with Alyosha reveals an interesting confession:

I never could understand how one can love one’s neighbours. In my view, it is one’s neighbours that one can’t possibly love, but only perhaps those who live far away … . To love a man, it’s necessary that he should be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.14

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In other words, it is easy to love from the comfort and security of our own homes surrounded by the warmth and familiarity of the relationships we share. It is easy to feel compassion for the ill-dressed beggars who hang around the city centre, easy to express disbelief and indignation for the disfigured victims of ethnic cleansing and wars. It is too easy.

The paradox forces itself home when we come face-to-face with human suffering. Then, the pretense of compassion turns to the realism of disgust, pity turns to contempt, and indignation turns to involuntary relief. The pretensions of our “greatness” – our moral decency, generosity, and care – are exposed for the “easy conscience” for which they are a cover. It also highlights the grounds of what we have in common. The one is present in the midst of the other; and both are necessary if we are to come to terms with our relationships with and responsibilities toward others.

Dostoyevsky and Niebuhr are emphasizing that things need to make sense at a practical, pragmatic, and realistic level at the level of the particular. The danger, however, is that the language and reality of the particular are transported to other contexts where there is not the same sense of urgency or practicality. We have already seen Niebuhr warning of this in the arena of politics and international relations. Now he sides with Ivan’s point that what it is to be a human being has become ideological. It has become an abstraction of the particular and specific reality that persons are. With this abstraction, a new language has arisen. It is the language of universal human rights, of responsibilities, and duties. Sadly, the reverse is also true: the respect for and love of others become easy, and so do hatred, violence, oppression, and extermination. Once the language of our bonds with others becomes abstract, and the human faces and bodies in which this language originates are left behind, we are no longer dealing with real people. Instead, we are dealing with indistinguishable “units.”

Michael Ignatieff offers a powerful critique of this universalized humanism of our day. He notes the complexity involved in our notions of respect, and the intermingling of compassion and contempt. He questions the real “cash value” of our modern mantra of respect as an intrinsic right of all human beings.15 What is there to respect, he asks, “in a poor beggar covered with sores, raving and tearing at his clothes in a deserted hovel in a storm? What respect ... is owed a human being as human being?”16 See also Sen, 1981). It is one thing to answer this question from the comfort of our own homes, and the security of our social community; it is another to answer this question when we stand outside these boundaries.

Confronted by the reality of needy persons from whom we cannot avert our gaze, we are transported to the heath lands of humanity. Shakespeare’s commentary on the heath, an image which has a long and


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rich history in English literature, captures well the shock of recognition forced on us by the paradox of our own nature.17 King Lear, alone at night in the raging storm on the heath with no one but the fool for company, encounters the poor, dishevelled Edgar disguised as Tom O’Bedlam. Lear listens to Tom’s tale of woe and is forced into the confession: “Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”18 Following the confession, Lear tears at his clothes, stripping himself of the vestiges of difference, perhaps in an effort to uncover the commonality he shares with all those on the heath.

The word “unaccommodated” is central to Lear’s confession. We need to understand it in two senses. First, there is the notion of stripping which is physically symbolized by Lear’s tearing at his clothes. The removal of clothing, which marks our personal distinctiveness, reveals that we are but “poor, bare, forked animals.” There is also the notion of dereliction, the sense of abandonment, and of being abandoned. In the modern heath of Europe between 1939–1945, Hannah Arendt captures the force of dereliction:

We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupations, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives. ... We were once somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords as paying our rent regularly.19 Stripped of context, we are aware of the fragility of human

existence, and the unpredictability of human power. It points to the need for personal space, and for personal place in which persons can be – be themselves and be in community. Arendt’s concern with totalitarian regimes places the spotlight on the consequences of removing status from persons. Without status, there is no identity – civil, legal, or personal. Dispossessed of identity and status, the refugee loses the right to speak, to act, and to be. Any sort of action becomes possible in relation to such persons because there is no recognition of your person.20 For Arendt, it is the plight of the “rightless” that points to the “loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever” which has symbolized the dereliction of modern Europe.21 Without recognition of the person, the language of rights and responsibilities becomes pointless.

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Second, with dereliction comes nakedness. The beggar on the streets, though ill dressed, is still dressed. We may cover ourselves up in an attempt to conceal the fact that the human being is vulnerable. Homo sapiens is clothed only in skin, and unlike the other animals that have fur or feathers to cover them, we stand vulnerable in our flesh.

Upon arrival at the concentration camps, families were dismantled, grasping the remnants of their homes, clothed in the remnants of their family life, and carrying what few belongings they could muster. In the heath lands of the camps, they were stripped of their belongings and their families, and left, standing naked, in the cold.

Ours is the first century to make an experiment on this scale: to take millions upon millions of social beings and to reduce each of them to that abstraction, never before seen in such quantity – natural man, the pure human being, the staring victim behind barbed wire, poor Tom, “the thing itself.”22

If the concentration camps are becoming a faded memory, the scene is still too common. In the refugee camps, people fight for Red Cross food parcels, stand in a jungle of waving arms hoping to have their cup filled with rice or water. Ignatieff concludes that in the end, people such as these have only one claim to make:

Lear’s claim, Tom’s claim, that because they are human they deserve to live. This last claim ... is the weakest claim people can make to each other: it is the claim addressed to anyone, and therefore to no one. When there is no family, no tribe, no state, no city to hear it, only the storm hears it.23

Ignatieff echoes Lear’s sentiments: “Is man no more than this?

Consider him well,”24 which echoes the sentiments of the writer of the book of Hebrews 2:6: “what is man that thou shouldst be mindful of him?” When we are excluded and dispossessed, and have been stripped of our context; when we stand naked on the heaths of our own making, only the flesh remains.

The body is what we have in common: nothing else. The body of the human being grants natural equality, and is where the struggle to be human is fought. The levelling power of the heath reveals the vulnerability of our common existence, a creature of flesh with needs and desires. Our commonality speaks clearly through the suffering of the body.


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The test of being human does not lie in constructions around the family and other social groups. Instead, it lies in how we deal with those who are excluded by these abstractions: the disabled, the insane, the strangers. If, unaccommodated, we are no more than poor, bare, forked animals, it is no wonder that compassion hides disgust, and pity conceals contempt. Beneath our pretensions lies something with which we do not feel at all comfortable and which binds us together, namely, the concrete reality of the vulnerable human body.

Niebuhr would also react to an overly optimistic view of human being. However, he would disagree with my reduction of the human being to the boundaries of the body. His position is clear:

If man insists that he is a child of nature and that he ought not to pretend to be more than an animal, which he obviously is, he tacitly admits that he is, at any rate, a curious kind of animal who has both the inclination and the capacity to make such pretensions.25

I would agree with Niebuhr’s caution here about the extremes of a naturalist stance. However, he continues:.

If on the other hand he insists upon his unique and distinctive place in nature and points to his rational faculties as proof of his special eminence, there is usually an anxious note in his avowals of uniqueness which betrays his unconscious sense of kinship with the brutes.26

Here, we discover the paradox that revolves around the ambiguity of what it is to be human.

For Niebuhr, to be human is to be a creature that is not exclusively animal or mind, but which finds the two uneasily conjoined. Naturalism, he argues, fails to appreciate the degree to which “the human spirit breaks and remakes the harmonies and unities of nature.”27 Optimistic idealism does not appreciate that human freedom rises above reason and therefore rests in a false security of our ability to control nature. “Neither naturalism nor idealism can understand that man is free enough to violate both the necessities of nature and the logical systems of reason.”28 The error of these positions is that they do not measure human beings “in a dimension sufficiently high or deep to do justice to either his stature or his capacity for both good and evil or to understand the total environment in which such a stature can understand, express, and find itself.”29

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If Niebuhr is right, then the grounds of all our pretensions at all levels rest within persons. They do so because every person, says Niebuhr, “is a unity of thought and life in which thought remains in organic unity with all the organic processes of finite existence.”30 The ambiguity of what we are as persons stems from the constant oscillation in how we view ourselves. In echoes of Pascal, this is the oscillation between our greatness and our wretchedness. In other words, between being able to transcend nature and direct our own destiny toward creative and destructive ends, and being limited by the physical boundaries of our embodiment. The ambiguity of the creative creature, who lives and falls between the two stools of how we see ourselves, generates the anxiety and insecurity that are the source of pretension. At the juncture of nature and spirit, the realism of what we are as physical creatures always restrains and often undermines the pretensions of our expectations. Being human is difficult; it is a struggle. Our lack of vigilance about our humanity breeds pretension and indicates an abdication of that humanity.

Niebuhr’s call for responsible action in the world returns us to his view of the organic unity of who we are as individuals, and to Lear. The organic relatedness of all things opens the door to understanding realistic and responsible action. We can interpret Lear’s remarks about the human being in terms of persons being “unaccommodated.” But we must interpret this in light of his initial recognition: “thou art the thing itself.” In other words, the heath is the place where we are not yet fully human.

Tzvetan Todorov argues that one of the problems of modern European thought is its failure to accept the fact of living together as necessary; human being is largely conceived in solitary and asocial terms.31 Niebuhr would agree with this. Todorov points to Rousseau as considering the archetypal human being as a being who needs others. From the moment we live in community, we feel the need to attract the gaze of others.

The other no longer occupies a place comparable to mine, but a contiguous and complementary place; he is needed for my completeness. ... We are dealing here with a constitutive need of the species … and not with a vice.32

Social existence partly defines what it is to be human. We are indebted to others for our completeness, indeed, for our very existence: “The need of the other’s gaze is the very definition of man.”33

Todorov argues that only socially are we fully human. When we gaze upon other people, we set the grounds for the possibility of cooperation and relationship. Again, the test is our treatment of strangers.


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Leviticus 19:18 issues the imperative to love thy neighbour like thyself. The definition is enhanced in Matthew 5:43–47 where the Sermon on the Mount identifies the neighbour as s/he who is different from us and who does not belong to the same community as ourselves. The Parable of the Good Samaritan points to the neighbour as being someone who is in need. Todorov draws the conclusion that Jesus’s insight is that we should not distinguish between our own and others; every person is worthy of respect and love simply because they are human. This is love and respect for “specific creatures ... enemies deserve it no less than friends.”34

For Todorov, the idea of the other is “relative” and “positional”: “it implies our constitutive complementarity (and intersubjectivity is organized here around you, not I).”35 The other is different from me by virtue of his/her physical, social, and cultural characteristics. This is only so because of the position in which they stand to me, even if they belong to the same group and same community, or family. The gaze creates the boundaries of the human being.

Arendt extends the argument. She argues that intersubjectivity is the ground of our commonality. Human beings are historically and socially conditioned; but what we are is always changing.36 It is impossible to form an abstract or universal conception of humanity because humanity has no essence. As individual human beings, we are incomplete. We are always in the passing moment from the fluidity of the future and the fixity of the past. Arendt sees the idea of action as the grounds of our togetherness. In acting, I insert myself into the world and the midst of a community. By acting in the context of others, is it possible to build human community. She formulates the idea of community in the notion of “plurality” which is: “the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”37

For Arendt, plurality captures the sense of what we have in common: our humanity, and a context that is sufficiently similar to enable us to live and work together. It also captures the sense of distinctiveness: the development of novelty and creativity that makes me particularly and distinctively me. All this belongs within the boundary of community and the project of human togetherness.

We can add Niebuhr’s thoughts as the final piece in the jigsaw. The key to responsible action and successful community is love. The individual and the community need to be seen in terms of the same organic relationship as the human being in and of him/herself. Niebuhr argues:

Community is an individual as well as a social necessity; for the individual can realize himself only in intimate and organic relation with his fellow men. Love is

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therefore the primary law of his nature, and brotherhood the fundamental requirement of his social existence.38

We cannot see the individual, or social and communal existence

in optimistic or pessimistic terms. Niebuhr states that because we are an organic unity of “vitality and reason,” human community cannot be a purely “rational” ideal. Instead, it must be “an interpenetration of all powers and potencies, emotional and volitional as well as rational.”39

To take an example of the moment, the internet can be a dangerous place where we can find pornography, paedophilia, racial hatred, and holocaust denial. They are there however, because that is what our society is as an organic unity. It is pointless trying to deny their existence, or develop software to filter them out. As unsavoury and as offensive as these things are, they are nevertheless a cold fact about human communities which needs to be recognized and accepted. Niebuhr is clear that our self-transcendence of nature “means that no fixed limits can be placed upon either the purity or the breadth of the brotherhood for which men strive in history.”40 Human community will never be secure because it shares the same oscillating base that belongs to humanity. Niebuhr which faces us: “the indeterminate character of these possibilities of both good and evil in social and political relations justifies the dynamic interpretation of the social process.”41 The challenge for today, in the face of technological progress, is how to relate to an ever-increasing awareness of the breadth of fellow human beings: “the task of creating community and avoiding anarchy is constantly pitched on broader and broader levels.”42

Niebuhr’s insistence on love as the driving force of human community is pivotal to an understanding of modern social action. Love, he says, is the “pinnacle of the moral ideal.”43 Let us not forget what we have said about moral idealism and moral realism. Love “stands both inside and beyond history: inside in so far as love may elicit a reciprocal response and change the character of human relations; and beyond history in so far as love cannot require a mutual response without losing its character of disinterestednes.”44

We can illustrate Niebuhr’s point by looking at Star Trek. Many of the communities into which Jean-Luc Picard beams are primitive and barbaric. Coming from an advanced civilization and with all the resources of a Starship, it would be possible for Picard to use his knowledge and power to intervene in these societies. He could destroy their traditions, moral codes, and tribal structures, and instigate the kind of civil society he represents. The problem here is that while he has acted into the history of their society, he has not acted into their history. Their history has been replaced with something discontinuous with it.


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Star Fleet Command has regulations that prevent this kind of intervention. Under the Prime Directive, Captain Picard must familiarize himself with the customs and traditions of the people. He must integrate himself into their society, and use what is good within it as a basis for inaugurating the way forward to the higher, “civilized” way of living. What emerges will be new, but it will also be continuous with the history of that society. It will have been action into their history, and in and through it. There are continuities and discontinuities.

This is the moral ideal of love and the model of responsible action in the world’s theatres. This is what Niebuhr realizes as being the long-term goal for human community. It is not the destruction of history, community, and society, but its gradual completion. Along the way, there will be conflicts and disappointments. Just as we struggle to be human, so we must struggle to achieve human community. “All human communities,” says Niebuhr, “are more or less stable or precarious harmonies of human vital capacities.”45 That is why responsible action must tread a careful path between the moral ideal of love, and the realism of what love can achieve in relation to such communities.

Niebuhr’s realism needs to be heard again today. There needs to be a careful consideration of the balancing act that we are all required to undertake. In the short term, the realism of our lives emerging from the heath might mean that power, inequality, and violence are the currency which hold sway. In the long term, the moral ideal of love will be drawn from the concrete and particular lives of human beings. It will be possible to find a way of giving all people an organic context in which they can be affirmed, and affirm for themselves, what it means for them to be.

Notes 1. Fox, 1985, and Bingham, 1961. 2. Livingston, 1971, 446-447. 3. See Fox, 1985. 4. Niebuhr, 1940, 47. 5. Dostoyevsky, 1958, 1:284. 6. Niebuhr, 1941, 6. 7. Niebuhr, 1941a, 6-7. 8. Niebuhr, 1942, 255. 9. Niebuhr, 1941b, 1: 1. 10. Ibid., 1:94-95. 11. Ibid., 1:188-189. 12. Ibid., 1:193-194.

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13. Ibid., 1:199. 14. Dostoyevsky, 1958, 1:276. 15. Ignatieff, 1994, 43-45. 16. Ibid, p. 43. See also Sen, 1981. 17. Danby, 1949, and Wilson Knight, 1930. 18. Shakespeare, 1972, 125. 19. Arendt, 1978, 56. 20. Arendt, 1951, and Whitfield, 1980. 21. Arendt, 1951, 294. 22. Ignatieff, 1994, 51. 23. Ibid. 24. Shakespeare, 1972, 125. 25. Niebuhr, 1941b, 1:1. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 1:124. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 1:75. 31. Todorov, 1996a, 1. 32. Ibid., 1996a, 4. 33. Ibid., 6. 34. Todorov, 1996b, 102-103. 35. Ibid., 96. 36. Arendt, 1958, 26-45. 37. Arendt, 1946, 8. 38. Niebuhr, 1941b, 2:244. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 2:244-255. 42. Ibid., 2:245. 43. Ibid., 2:247. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 2:257.

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Federation. Sen, Amartya. 1981. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon.

Shakespeare. 1972. King Lear Ed. G. K. Hunter. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1996a. Living Alone Together. New Literary History 27, no.1:1–14.

———. 1996b. The Gaze and the Fray. New Literary History 27, no.1: 95–106.

Whitfield, S. J. 1980. Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Wilson Knight, G. 1930. The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Sombre Tragedies. London: Oxford University

Press.

Ten

Prohibition and Transgression: Georges Bataille and the

Possibility of Affirming Evil

Jones Irwin

Je crois que l’homme est nécessairement dressé contre lui-même et qu’il ne peut se reconnaître, qu’il ne peut s’aimer jusqu’au bout, s’il n’est pas l’objet d’une condamnation.

Georges Bataille

(I believe that man is necessarily put up against himself and that he cannot recognize himself and love himself to the end unless he is condemned.)

1. Introduction Georges Bataille’s work on the concept of “evil” sounds an

idiosyncratic note in an otherwise homogeneous area of research. Although interpretations of what constitutes evil differ radically, a unanimity exists on one fundamental point: evil is to be avoided. Despite the great divergence in thinking between, for example, Christianity and Nietzschean atheism, the two philosophies can agree on at least this. Bataille, however, is keen to subvert this established consensus on the meaning of evil. For Bataille, evil is to be affirmed: “I believe that evil has a sovereign value for us.”1 He reaches this extraordinary conclusion through a thinking that paradoxically brings him closer to Christianity than to Nietzsche.

In this essay, I introduce the discussion of evil through an analysis of Nietzsche’s lucid survey of the concept of evil in his text On The Genealogy of Morals. I then trace how Bataille’s own analysis leads him away from Nietzsche’s critique of evil towards a paradoxical affirmation of evil. Finally, I conclude with an interpretation of Bataille’s place within the history of philosophy and ethics, problematizing the widespread conception of his work as simply an adjunct to Nietzsche.

2. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Evil

In On The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche traces the distinction between “good” and “evil” to the development of what he terms “slave morality.”2 From a historic perspective, this category of ethics is loosely associated with the development of a Judeo-Christian ethic: “with the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality.”3 It is opposed in principle to the

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development of a parallel ethic, Nietzsche’s so-called “noble morality” that is linked to Hellenism.4 Whereas “slave morality” is said to posit an opposition between good and evil, noble morality posits an opposition between good and bad.5 As Norman (1983) has noted, these categorizations are not accurate from a strictly historic perspective, but they do provide a useful framework within which to understand the genealogy of the ethical.

For our purposes, two main points are worthy of note in terms of this genealogical analysis. First, there is the opposition that is posited between good and evil.6 Initially this movement took its cue from Judaism but it has now developed to encompass culture as a whole: “The slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we no longer see because it – has been victorious.”7

Second, in Essay 1 (and developed in Essay 2), Nietzsche links this emphasis on condemnation with his neologism ressentiment.8 Instead of being based on affirmation, slave morality is reactive in essence from the beginning:

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge ... in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all – its action is fundamentally reaction.9

Here, Nietzsche traces the anxiety over “evil” to the negative emotions of envy and self-abnegation.10 Contrasted with this slave morality is the apparently superior and healthier noble morality that has the alternative binary of good/bad in place instead of the good/evil opposition.11 Noble morality consists in a positive affirmation of goodness instead of a condemnation of “bad.” Indeed, Nietzsche notes a “benevolence” in the attitude that the noble expresses towards the bad:

One should not overlook the almost benevolent nuances that the Greek nobility, for example, bestows on all the words it employs to distinguish the lower orders from itself; how they are continuously mingled and sweetened with a kind of pity, consideration, and forbearance … the “well-born” felt themselves to be the “happy”; they did not have to establish their happiness artificially by examining their enemies, or to persuade themselves,

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deceive themselves, that they were happy (as all men of ressentiment are in the habit of doing).12

In terms of this fundamental Nietzschean opposition, therefore,

“evil” has a most pejorative status as the product of ressentiment and slave morality. Historically speaking, Nietzsche’s claim is that the dominance of noble morality has given way to the ubiquity of its opponent. The slaves, and their preoccupation with “evil,” have become the new masters. Nietzsche reinforces this historic genealogy with an acute psychological analysis. Modern humanity is a being of ressentiment, preoccupied with condemnation and reaction, incapable of authentic responsibility and action. Nietzsche’s self-appointed mission may be the liberation of modern man from such a predicament. Here, he looks to a “man of the future”:

This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness – he must come one day.13

Nietzsche’s “man of the future” is posited as a liberator from the

hegemony of slave morality and, with regard to our own purposes, as a freedom from the ethos of “evil.” To quote another of Nietzsche’s texts, this future will be “beyond good and evil.”14 As an ethical concept and a psychological attitude, Nietzsche dismisses the model of evil as reactive and unhealthy. It is within the context of this influential diagnosis of evil that I want to take up an analysis of the radically alternative interpretation of evil put forward by Georges Bataille.

3. Bataille’s Defense of Evil

Bataille’s La Littérature et le mal is his most extended analysis of the concept of evil. It consists of a series of essays devoted to disparate literary figures (from Emily Brontë to Jean Genet), unified by their affirmation of “evil”:

These studies are the result of my attempts to extract the essence (le sens) of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil (le Mal) – an


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acute form of Evil – which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us.15 One of the most revealing essays concerns Bataille’s analysis of

Baudelaire’s concept of evil. This essay is significant because it challenges Sartre’s reading of Baudelaire and his interpretation of “evil.” Bataille defends Baudelaire’s affirmation of evil against Sartre’s accusation that such evil is merely “childish.” Sartre had observed:

He [Baudelaire] defined genius as childhood regained at will … . But if the child grows older, grows superior to his parents in intelligence and looks over their shoulder, [he may see that] behind them there is nothing. The duties, the rites, the precise and limited obligations suddenly disappear. Unjustified and unjustifiable, he suddenly experiences his terrible liberty [sa terrible liberté]. Everything has to be begun again: he suddenly emerges in solitude and nothingness. That was what Baudelaire wanted to avoid at all costs. 16

Sartre thereby reproaches Baudelaire for his emphasis on evil

insofar as the affirmation of evil could only ever be a childish gesture. For Sartre, to affirm evil against good is to avoid the authentic responsibility of “terrible liberty” which (and here Sartre follows Nietzsche) is “beyond good and evil”: “The deliberate creation of Evil – that is to say, wrong (la faute) – is acceptance and recognition of Good (Bien).”17 Moreover, Baudelaire

sets himself to denying the established order, but, at the same time, preserves this order and asserts it more than ever…were he for a moment to stop asserting it, his conscience would return to peace with itself.18 A line of continuity exists here between the analysis of Sartre and

the earlier genealogy of morals given by Nietzsche. When both consider “evil,” they see it from the perspective of what Nietzsche calls “slave morality.” For Nietzsche and Sartre, it is irrelevant whether one is condemning (Christianity) or affirming (Baudelaire/Satanism) evil. In each instance, one is part of a reactive psychological attitude that fails to take responsibility for affirming freedom. Its origination within a model of prohibition determines the concept of evil: we should not do evil. To affirm evil, as Baudelaire does, is not to break with this model. It is to assert the prohibition as we transgress it. That is, evil is only possible

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when the existence of a distinction between good and evil actions is already accepted. For Nietzsche and Sartre, this is to remain within a circularity of thought and action that can only be broken if we deny good and evil simultaneously.

Bataille, however, seeks to problematize this unsympathetic and “contemptuous” (méprisant) reading of Baudelaire and more generally, of the concept of evil19:

Baudelaire chose to be wrong, like a child. But before we condemn him we must ask ourselves what sort of choice we are dealing with. Was it made for lack of anything else? Was it just a deplorable mistake? Or was it the result of excess? Was it made in a miserable but no less decisive manner? I even wonder whether such a choice is not essentially that of poetry? Is it not the choice of man? (un tel choix n’est-il pas, dans son essence, celui de la poésie? N’est-il pas celui de l’homme?).20

Here Bataille is radically reinterpreting the structure of Baudelaire’s choice and the structure of evil. Evil is no longer a childish aberration which we might hold in contempt. It is the choice of humanity, by which Bataille may mean that it is no longer to be seen as just one choice amongst others. Bataille describes “un tel choix … dans son essence” (“this choice … in his [human] essence”),21 within the essence of poetry and mankind. Evil is now not accidental: it is of the essence.

Bataille defends and reinforces this conception of evil throughout his analyses in La Littérature et le mal (1957). The final essay on Jean Genet serves as a useful clarification of some of the issues addressed in the earlier chapter on Baudelaire. Here again, it is one of Sartre’s commentaries that is the primary target of Bataille’s theory of evil. As with his analysis of Baudelaire, Sartre interprets Genet as being locked into a circularity where good and evil are mutually dependent. On Sartre’s reading, in affirming evil, Genet (like Baudelaire) reconfirms the necessity of good. Bataille attempts to question this Sartrean interpretation again:

Genet has experienced the climax of the forbidden, a delight that is familiar and elemental and yet closed to modern thought. That is why he has to draw his reasons for doing evil (de mal faire) from the horror that evil deeds (mauvaise action) inspired him with and from his basic love of Good (amour original du Bien). This is not as absurd as Sartre thinks …22


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Bataille explicates his point with a more practical and personal example:

I can take any example [une réalité commune] – the taboo against nudity that regulates social life today. Even if one of us pays no attention to this form of decency, his partner’s nudity will excite his sexual impulses. From then on Good, which is decency, is his reason for doing Evil: an initial violation of the rule incites him, by contagion, to violate the rule still more.23

This, for Bataille, is a universal example of the centrality of taboo

and transgression to sexual practice. It is a symbol of an interdependency between good (here, modesty) and evil (here, nudity) which is fundamental to existence. In the following section, I will analyze how Bataille elaborates on this general conception of existence and its relation to Christianity.

4. Evil, Sin, and Bataille’s Relation to Christianity

In a footnote in a translation of his Genet chapter, Bataille refers to a criticism which Sartre had made of one of his public lectures:

I remember a conversation after a lecture, when Sartre reproached me for my use of the word sin: I was not religious, and in his eyes, my use of the word was incomprehensible.24

Sartre misunderstands the thematics of sin in Bataille’s work. For Bataille, this is another symptom of Sartre’s misunderstanding of the problematic of existence. Sartre (like Nietzsche) interprets the concept of sin as a mere product of slave morality, concentrated in the historic development of Judeo-Christianity, and something which can be left behind as part of a misguided, childish past:

But if the child grows older, grows superior to his parents in intelligence and looks over their shoulder, (he may see that) behind them there is nothing. The duties, the rites, the precise and limited obligations suddenly disappear.25

The concept of evil, for Sartre and for Nietzsche, has no

legitimate place in a post-Christian universe. Nietzsche’s expresses his most vehement criticisms of Christianity as a “slave morality” in On the Genealogy of Morals. They set the context for Sartre’s discussions of

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Baudelaire and Genet.26 A fundamentally anti-Christian worldview forms the basis of the Baudelairian and Genetian philosophies of evil. They represent an inversion of Christian values. This inversive movement, however, remains wedded to a Christian framework in its recognition of the value of “evil” that originated within a Christian context. To escape this inversion requires an attitude of complete indifference to good and evil. This means striving to be neither good nor evil, but “free.”

In my introduction, I referred to a paradox within this scene of interpretation. The specificity of Bataille’s advocacy of evil puts him at odds with the Christian worldview that advocates a privileging of good over evil. However, it also puts him at odds with the above Nietzschean and Sartrean worldview. This view sees the concept of evil as dated and bounded up with a religious metaphysic. Paradoxically, I want to claim that Bataille’s philosophy of evil is closer to the Christian view than it is to the post-Christian view.

How can this be possible? Let us first remember Bataille’s disagreement with Sartre: “Sartre reproached me for my use of the word sin.”27 The apparent crux of this problematic of sin is Bataille’s relation to Christianity. Unlike Nietzsche and Sartre, Bataille inherits his vocabulary and terminology from Christianity. At the same time, with reference to his emphasis on evil, he inverts the traditional Christian conception of the place of evil within the general scheme. Whereas evil was the lowest point, it has now become the highest point. Bataille is simultaneously faithful and unfaithful to the Christian tradition. Is such a paradox conceivable?

Part of the problem in attempting to explicate Bataille’s relation to Christianity, in this context, derives from problems in identifying a homogeneous entity that we could designate as Christianity, or the Christian Tradition. From a Thomistic perspective,28 for example, Bataille’s emphasis on sin and condemnation is excessively chaotic. It would appear to divest the human being of autonomy and responsibility for moral action and to cast aspersions on the harmony of God’s created universe. However, to take an alternative example from the Christian canon, from an Augustinian perspective Bataille’s apocalyptic emphasis is in keeping with a Christian theology of pestilence and damnation. Do we not, for example, recognize an Augustinian air in the following extract? “This is the point of my book. I believe that man is necessarily put up against himself and that he cannot recognize himself and love himself to the end unless he is condemned.”29

Augustinian Christianity demonstrates an analogous sense of condemnation. Augustine gives an exposition of this concept in his text, the Retractations.30 Here Augustine seeks to explain the apparent paradox


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that humanity is ignorant of goodness and responsible for evil by invoking the concept of a divine punishment:

But all this applies to men as they appear on the scene after the condemnation of death … if man would be good if he were constituted differently, and he is not good because he is in his present condition; if he has not the power to become good, whether because he cannot see what he ought to be, or because he sees and yet cannot be what he ought to be, or because he sees and yet cannot be what he sees he ought to be, then this surely is a punishment.31

In the Augustinian world of humanity, evil is not just predominant, it is all encompassing. For Augustine, the human being, on his or her own terms, is completely incapable of moral action. We are slaves to sin and the only route out of this moral malaise is through the grace of God. This has led some commentators, such as John Rist (1972), to criticize Augustine for moral irresponsibility: if the human being is only capable of sin, is this not an implicit affirmation of sin?

To some extent, Rist is making the same point against Augustine that Sartre makes against Bataille. The accusation is that the emphasis on the necessity of sin absolves humanity of responsibility. Indeed, Rist notes that some commentators might even question Augustine’s Christianity on this point.

The pagan (non-Christian) influence on Augustine is strong at this point,32 and includes the influence of Manicheanism.33 Mani, the leader of the Manicheans, had claimed that good and evil were equal principles in the universe, in constant combat for dominion. Augustine had been a Manichean for a period earlier in his life, and eventually converted to Christianity. As a Christian, Augustine could no longer hold with the conception of good and evil as equal principles. His continuing emphasis on human evil is, however, a residue of Manicheanism in his later thought. It is within this context of a powerfully paganized Christianity that we can best understand Bataille’s relation to Augustine. Augustine interprets the Garden of Eden story in a Manichean light; as if from a human perspective, evil had triumphed over good. Henceforth, evil rules over humanity and humanity can only save itself through such evil. This Augustinian insight leads Bataille to posit a link between transgression and redemption. As Mark C. Taylor observes:

Bataille’s appropriation of Catholicism is a dialectical reversal that establishes a coincidentia opposiorium in

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which differences collapse into identity. In this perverse religious economy, redemption is a function of transgression … . The religion of surrealism, Bataille maintains, resurrects the original link between transgression and the sacred.34

It is as if Bataille, like Augustine, is writing in direct opposition

to Pelagius. Pelagius had claimed that it was only through moral action and moral responsibility that human beings could achieve grace and salvation. Redemption, according to Pelagius, is only possible through merit, through the Good. Augustine, on the contrary, disavowed any human capacity for good and for merit. Salvation can only come through the grace of God but such grace is only possible, from a human perspective, in the context of interminable evil and sin. In a passage from his text La Part Maudite (1967) (The Accursed Share (1988a)), Bataille clarifies this point:

Salvation in Christianity liberates the ends of religious life from the domain of productive activity … . Hence those deeds by which a Christian tries to win his salvation can in turn be considered profanations.35

Strictly speaking, salvation therefore occurs in and through sin and evil; redemption becomes a product of the transgression of the good. 5. Conclusion: From Evil to Hyper-Morality

I believe that the Evil – an acute form of Evil – which it [literature] expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a hypermorality [mais cette conception ne commande pas l’absence de morale, elle exige une hypermorale].36

The most influential contemporary reading of Bataille sees his

work as little more than a development of Nietzschean themes in a contemporary setting.37 Indeed, Sartre reads Bataille in an even less forgiving light as some sort of sub-Nietzschean libertine.38 My analysis of his concept of evil has been leading towards the conclusion that Bataille’s philosophy should be viewed as a kind of heterodox Christian meditation on existence instead. This has its roots in an Augustinian tradition. Similar interpretations make sense of Baudelaire and Genet, and the thought of Pierre Klossowski (1989) is another example of analogous work.


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Ironically, many of these thinkers are currently interpreted as being vehemently anti-Christian. One of the main reasons for this interpretation relates to the dominance of Thomism as the Christian philosophy. Bataille and Klossowski, for example, are anti-Thomistic but this should not lead us to interpret them as necessarily anti-Christian. Much work remains to be done on this complex philosophic and theological problematic. Undoubtedly, much of the difficulty will involve people recovering from the shock that evil may not be such an alien phenomenon after all.

We may wonder at the consequences of this new-found proximity of evil. I have already mentioned John Rist’s conception of an Augustinian irresponsibility. Does Bataille’s affirmation of evil lead to complacency with regard to responsibility, morality? Bataille himself refers to a hyper-morality that must accompany any philosophy of transgression. How are we to make sense of this rather vague conception of hyper-morality?

In order to clarify this Bataillean concept, I will refer to Richard Norman’s discussion of the problem of defining what is or is not moral action.39 Norman sets up a useful thought-experiment in relation to the possibility of genuine moral action. He asks the reader to take the example of a neighbour who asks us for help. We have, argues Norman, three possible motivations for response in this situation that he enumerates as follows.

First, we help the neighbour because it puts them in our debt, a debt they will have to repay at a later date. This is an example of an unequivocal kind of egoism that sees other people as instruments for our own ends and does not qualify as genuine moral action.

Second, we help the neighbour because helping others leads us to enjoy happy and thriving lives. Helping others is something worthwhile because on this level of motivation it leads to self-fulfilment. Norman makes the point that difficulties re-emerge here in ascribing to this kind of action the title of moral action. The problem stems from the fundamentally egoistic motivation of this second kind of action. We help our neighbour because it is self-fulfilling; it leads to happiness, and a sense of thriving, for us. Do we require, Norman asks, an attitude of altruism instead of egoism to make an action genuinely moral? If so, this second kind of action remains too egoistic to be properly moral.

Taking this line of argument, however, leads into serious difficulties in terms of our interpretation of the history of ethics. Much of what considers itself to constitute morality in our contemporary world (personal morality, state morality, and religious morality) takes its cue from the originators of the ethical tradition, Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s discussion of justice in the Republic and Aristotle’s discussion of the good life in the Ethics have had a major determining influence on culture. The

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morality of the Western world, for example, remains determined by a variation of Platonic-Aristotelianism. We could make a similar argument for the East. Aristotle influenced the development of Islamic and Judaic ethical thought from the medieval period onwards.

On Norman’s terms, however, both Platonic and Aristotelian ethics are within this second category of fundamental egoism and should be divested of the title of genuine moral systems. Plato (1941) first refers to the metaphysical existence of the Form of the Good that is beyond Being. He nonetheless seeks to motivate people to moral action by his arguments for the co-dependency of happiness and goodness in the Republic. If this were not enough, in Book 10 of the work, he concludes with a declaration that any sins in this life will be punished ten times over in the next world. This system of rewards and punishments is, as Norman claims, aimed at egoistic motivation for ethical action.

With Aristotle (1953), the case is similar. Whereas Plato never qualifies the metaphysical ascendancy of the good, Aristotle goes so far as to subordinate the good to the demands of individual happiness. It is happiness, and not goodness, which is the supreme end of human life. In broad terms, we can say that if we define ethical action as altruistic action, then neither Plato nor Aristotle defends properly moral action. Such a reconsideration of what it means to be ethical has serious implications for our discussion of Bataille and evil. Here we can refer to Norman’s third category of ethical motivation.

The third possibility is when we help our neighbour because they need help. Here, our motivation centres exclusively on our neighbour. The questions of self-fulfilment and personal happiness are no longer relevant. Norman notes how this category of action appears to correspond closely to what we normally mean by altruism, that is, selfless action, action done exclusively for the sake of the other.

This employment of Norman’s discussion of moral motivation leads us back to our question concerning Bataille. How can a philosophy of evil lead to what Bataille calls hyper-morality? In a rare positive statement concerning Bataille, Sartre refers to the philosophy of evil being not about human nature, but about the human condition. If we develop this interpretation, we can say that Bataille’s emphasis on an evil humanity is contextual. It relates to the plight of the twentieth-century human being and let us remember that much of Bataille’s work was written during or under the shadow of the Second World War and Fascism.40 Augustine’s description of humanity is also contextual. It is more concerned and directed at the human condition than human nature (in this case, the context is the Fall).

While the contexts are different, the fact of contextualization warns against reading Augustinian or Bataillean evil as the final or


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definitive analysis of humanity. By definition, a context has limits and is transformable. The finitude of context and its inherent transformability are most relevant to our problematic of ethics. Taken as definitive, Bataille’s association of evil with hyper-morality appears nonsensical. An emphasis on evil per se can only lead away from the possibility of morality, towards nihilism. The same argument constitutes the basis for the Pelagian (and Thomistic) riposte to Augustinian thinking on humanity.

As I have argued elsewhere,41 this is to forget the contextual aspect of Augustinian (and here Bataillean) philosophy. The vehemence with which Augustine (in The City of God (1984)) argues against human virtue is not just negative. It is also part of his attempt to question human complacency and pride. The danger of asserting human virtue à la Pelagius is that, from a Christian standpoint, we neglect the proper worship of God; we start to worship humanity instead. To this extent, Augustine’s emphasis on human evil represents a heightened moral vigilance against the danger of human conceit and arrogance, a hyper-morality. The parallels with Bataille’s stress on evil are evident. Bataille’s claim that his philosophy of evil is a hyper-morality succeeds if we read it as vigilance against the false and conceited claims of traditional morality. Norman’s categories are instructive here. From a Bataillean or Augustinian perspective, Plato and Aristotle’s claims to represent the Good fail in terms of the fundamental egoism which directs their philosophies. In contrast, the apparently irresponsible and nihilistic evil of Bataille and Augustine is directed by a sense of human limitation and sin that, contrary to appearances, can have positive and negative consequences. For example, a proper sense of human limitation might induce a sense of humility inconceivable to Plato or Aristotle. Such humility may be the missing link in the Platonic-Aristotelian chain, a fatal lapse that (on Norman’s terms) puts them ultimately outside the arena of genuine moral action.

Nothing can be certain amidst the evil, sin, and transgression of the Augustinian and Bataillean world. Paradoxically, it is perhaps this most horrific description of the human condition that leads us closer to the wellspring of selfless altruism.

Notes 1. Bataille, 1997, 8. 2. Nietzsche, 1967, 36. 3. Ibid., 33. 4. Ibid., 28. 5. Ibid., 31.

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6. Ibid., 36. 7. Ibid., 33. 8. Ibid., 36. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 33. 11. Ibid., 30. 12. Ibid., 38. 13. Ibid., 95. 14. Nietzsche, 1973. 15. Bataille, 1997, 8. 16. Sartre quoted in Bataille, 1997, 39. 17. Quoted in Bataille, 1997, 39. 18. Sartre quoted in Bataille, 1997, 38. 19. Bataille, 1997, 52. 20. Ibid., 43. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 217. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 206. 25. Ibid., 35. 26. See Baudelaire, 1980 and Genet, 1965. 27. Bataille, 1997, 206. 28. Aquinas, 1998. 29. Bataille, 1997, 43. 30. Augustine, 1973. 31. Ibid., 67. 32. Dodds, 1965. 33. For a discussion of Manicheanism, see Lieu, 1985. 34. Taylor, 1973, 187. 35. Bataille, 1988a, 120. 36. Bataille, 1997, 8. 37. Land, 1992. 38. Sartre, 1947. 39. Norman, 1983. 40. Bataille, 1988b. 41. Irwin, 2000.

References Aquinas, Thomas. 1988. Selected Writings. Ed. and trans. Ralph

McInerny. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Aristotle. 1976. Ethics. Trans. J. A. K. Thomson, ed. Hugh Tredennick.


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Harmondsworth: Penguin. Augustine. 1973. Retractations. Trans. Dom M. Pontifex. In Philosophy in

the Middle Ages, eds. Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh. New York: Hackett.

———. 1984. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson, intro. J. J. O’Meara. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Bataille, Georges. 1957. La Littérature et le mal. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1967. La Part Maudite. Paris: Editions de Minuit. ———. 1988a. The Accursed Share. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York:

Zone. ———. 1988b. Guilty. Trans. Bruce Boone. San Francisco: Lapis. ———. 1997. Literature and Evil. Trans. Alaistair Hamilton. New York:

Marion Boyars. Baudelaire, Charles. 1980. Œuvres Complètes. Paris: Gallimard. Dodds, E. R. 1965. Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Oxford:

Oxford University Press. Genet, Jean. 1965. The Thief’s Journal. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hyman, Arthur, and James J. Walsh, eds. 1973. Philosophy in the Middle

Ages. New York: Hackett. Irwin, Jones 2000. Augustine and the Impossibility of Moral Action. Paper

at North American Patristics Society Conference, Chicago, May. Klossowski, Pierre. 1989. “Roberte Ce Soir” and “The Revocation of the

Edict of Nantes.” Trans. A. Wainhouse. New York: Marion Boyars.

Land, Nick. 1992. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. London: Routledge.

Lieu, S. N. C. 1985. Manicheism in the Later Roman Empire and in Medieval China. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Markus, R., ed. 1972. Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. S. Hollingdale. New York: Random House.

———. 1973. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R. S. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Norman, Richard. 1983. The Moral Philosophers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Plato. 1941. Republic. Ed. and trans. F. M. Cornford. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rist, John. 1972. Augustine and Predestination. In Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. Markus. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1947. Situations I. Paris: Gallimard.

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Taylor, Mark C. 1993. Nots. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Notes on Contributors Margaret Sönser Breen is Associate Professor of English at the

University of Connecticut, where she specializes in gay and lesbian literature. She has served as Associate Editor of The International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies and has edited Understanding Evil: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003). Her co-edited collection Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies will be published by Ashgate in 2004.

Kathy M. Bullough completed her doctoral thesis on the

protrayal of Eve, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalen in the art of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Watts. She studied at St. Martin’s College, Lancaster, UK, where she taught undergraduate courses on Christianity in art and literature.

Deirdre Burke is Subject Coordinator for Religious Studies in

the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Sciences at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. She completed her Ph.D. on “The Holocaust in Education: Teacher and Learner Perspectives” in 1998. Her current research focuses on educational and religious issues related to the Holocaust. Burke’s publications include: “Attitudes to Death during the Holocaust: Writings from the Ghettos,” Journal of Beliefs & Values: Studies in Religion and Education, 20, no. 2 (1999):173–183, and “Holocaust Education: Issues of Pedagogy and Content” (2001). In Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, eds. John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell. London: Macmillan.

Sandeep Singh Chohan is a research student in the Religious

Studies Department at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He is currently conducting his doctoral thesis on “The Role of Exorcism in North Indian Religious Traditions and its Adaptation amongst Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims in Britain.” Chohan’s publications include “The Religious Dimension in the Struggle for Khalistan and its Roots in Sikh History” in the International Journal of Punjab Studies and the forthcoming “Punjabi Religion amongst the South Asian Diaspora in Britain” in South Asians in Diaspora: Histories and Religious Traditions, published by Brill.

David H. Fisher is Professor of Philosophy and a faculty

member in the History of Ideas Program at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. His current work focuses on topics that combine philosophy of law, ethics, aesthetics, and cross-cultural approaches to revenge violence. He is the author of an essay on “Theory” in The

Notes on Contributors 148

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and has published articles in The Journal of Value Inquiry, Soundings, The Journal of Aesthetics, and Anglican Theologican Review. He is active in the Association for Integrative Studies, the annual Law, Culture, and Humanities Conference, and the International Association for Philosophy and Literature.

Rob Fisher was Course Leader at Westminster College, Oxford,

and Principal Lecturer in Philosophy, Theology, and Theodicy. He is presently Founder and Managing Director of Conference Connections Ltd, and CEO of Learning Solutions. The latter promotes interdisciplinary research, teaching, and publishing in Vocational, Secondary, and Higher education. His research interests include the problems of evil and suffering, and he has launched wickedness.net as an online resource for exploring perspectives on evil and human wickedness and a new e-journal to promote a multidisciplinary forum for the discussion of issues central to evil. He is also interested in all aspects of persons, being on the Steering Committee for the International Forum on Persons.

Salwa Ghaly is Assistant Professor at the University of Sharjah,

United Arab Emirates. Her research attempts to establish aesthetic, stylistic, and ideological lines of continuity among writers of the core and the periphery in the work of Sylvia Plath and Hanan Al-Shaykh or Joseph Conrad and Buchi Emecheta. She has long been interested in the theme of borderlands and geographical sites where cultural, racial, and gendered identities are disrupted and called into question. More recently, however, she has turned her attention to identities constructed behind walls and in bunkers in war situations. She is currently writing a book on how heterological narratives on war promote intersubjectivity and tolerance.

Richard Paul Hamilton was an associate lecturer in the

Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK, and is now working for the national Subject Centre for Philosophy and Religious Studies Learning and Teaching Support Network at Leeds University, UK. He is also a research student in the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London. His major research interest is the extent and limits of scientific explanations of human conduct, from a perspective informed by ordinary language philosophy and phenomenology and he is currently completing a Ph.D. on social scientific explanations of love. Hamilton’s publications include: “The Insignificance of Learners’ Errors: A Philosophical Investigation of the Interlanguage Hypothesis,” Language and Communication 21, no. 1 (2001):73–88. He also has a number of articles forthcoming which attack the current fashion of evolutionary psychology.

Notes on Contributors 149

Jones Irwin did his undergraduate Philosophy degree and his Philosophy Masters at University College Dublin and completed his Ph.D. on Plato and Derrida at the University of Warwick, UK. He has taught Philosophy at the University of Limerick and the University of Warwick, and he is currently Lecturer in Philosophy in St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, in the Republic of Ireland. He is also Reviews Editor of The Philosopher journal. His main research interests are ancient and medieval thought and contemporary French philosophy under the general headings of religion, thanatology, nihilism, and poetics. He is the editor of Understanding War (Rodopi, forthcoming 2004).

Katri Lehtinen is a research student at the University of

Helsinki, in her native town. Her Master’s thesis focused on gender issues in the works of four major writers of nineteenth-century vampire fiction. Following this, she published an article in a Finnish language women’s studies journal, on the role of women in these writings. The themes that she explores in the present volume are expanded in her doctoral dissertation, which has become more of a hobby than a work in progress, because, as she explains, “life happened.” She currently lives in Brussels.

Diana Medlicott is Professor in the Department of Human

Sciences at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, UK. She received her M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and her doctorate from Middlesex University. Her research interests focus on imprisonment, violent crime, and young offenders, and she is particularly interested in inter-disciplinary approaches. Medlicott’s publications include Surviving the Prison Place: Narratives of Suicidal Prisoners (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).


Index

References to illustrations are in bold italics.

A abhichara, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111 abnormality, 21, 31, 32 Abrams, M.H., 55, 66 acrates, 72 Adam, 38, 43, 45 Adorno, Theodore, 64 aesthetics, 23, 52, 64, 147

aesthetic, 32, 52, 54, 63, 64, 148 Africa, 23, 25, 26 African, 4, 13, 23, 24, 25, 27, 34 African-American, 4, 13, 27, 29, 30, 34 akrasia. See incontinence alienation, 27, 32 Almond, Brenda, 99, 101, 102 altruism, 140, 141, 142 ambivalence, xii, xiv, 99, 103 Ambrose, 47 androgynity, 31 Angiras, 103, 104, 106, 111 Anglican Theologican Review, 147 Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane, 43, 49 Appadurai, Arjun, 34 Aquinas, Thomas, 137, 143

Thomism, 137, 140, 142 Arab-African, 23 arche, 52 Arendt, Hannah, 55, 122, 123, 126, 129, 130 Aristotle, 71, 72, 75, 101, 140, 141, 142, 143

Aristotelian, 72, 141, 142 Aristotle.

Aristotelianism, 141 Association for Integrative Studies, the, 147 Atharvan, 103, 106, 111 Atharvaveda, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113

Augustine of Hippo, xiv, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144 Augustinian, xiv, 94, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142 Auschwitz, 52, 54, 56, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 98, 102

B Babb, Lawrence, 108, 112 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 58, 59 Bade, Patrick, 44, 49 Bakerman, Jane S., 34 Barmen Declaration, 96 Barratt, D., 94, 101 Barreca, Regina, 16, 19 Barth, Karl, 96, 115 Bataille, Georges, vi, xiv, 32, 34, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144

Bataillean, 140 Batailles, Georges

Bataillean, 141, 142 Baudelaire, Charles, 134, 135, 137, 139, 144 Baudrillard, Jean, 81, 89, 91 Belkom, Edo van, 14, 16 Belsey, Catherine, 2, 16 Bennett, John, 115 Bertram, Cardinal, 98 bestiality, 44 Beuys, Joseph, 61 Bhabha, Homi, 22, 34 bhakti, 108, 110 bheshajani, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111 bhisajs, 108 Billington, Ray, 95, 99, 101 binary oppositions, 32 Bingham, June, 115, 130 Bjork, Patrick Bryce, 34 Blair, Anthony, 119 Blanchot, Maurice, 65, 66

152

blood, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 70, 71, 84 Bloom, Harold, 34, 35 Bosch, Hieronymous, 55 Böse, 51 Bosheit, 51 Braham, Randolph L., 102 Brahma, 103 Brahmaveda, 106 Brahmavidya, 104 brahmin, the, 106, 107, 108 Brite, Poppy Z., 8, 17, 18, 19 Bronfenbrenner, Urie, 78, 91 Brontë, Emily, 133 Brownworth, Victoria A., 17, 19 brute, xi, 71

brutality, ix, 6, 13, 70, 71 Bullock, Allan, 73 Bullough, Kathy M., v, xii, 37, 147 Burke, Deirdre, v, xiii, 93, 147 Burne-Jones, Edward, v, vii, xii, 37, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50

___Works, v, vii, xii, 42 ___Works, 37

C Cadigan, Pat, 14, 17 Caliban, xi, xii, xv Califia, Pat, 17 Carlson, David Gray, 67 Carr, Jan, 14, 17 casuistry, 65 Celan, Paul, xiii, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67

___Works, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63 Chakraborty, C., 112 Chetwynd-Hayes, R., 17 Chohan, Sandeep Singh, vi, xiv, 103, 149 Chrisman, Laura, 35 Christ, xiii, 37, 45, 46, 47, 48, 58 Christianity, 1, 45, 48, 55, 93, 96, 97, 102, 115, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 147

Christian Churches, the, xiii, 45, 48, 50, 94, 96, 100

Christians, v, xiii, xiv, 37, 38, 43, 48, 50, 58, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 109,

116, 130, 131, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 144, 147

Lutheran, 95 Protestant, 96 Roman Catholic, 45, 46, 49, 50,

94, 96, 97, 98 Cohn-Sherbok, Daniel, 97, 102 Collins, 8 Collins, Nancy, 6, 10, 13, 17 colonialism

colonial, 21, 23, 24 colonialist, 23 colonization, 24 decolonization, 32

community, 21, 22, 28, 29, 31, 32, 69, 95, 99, 108, 110, 118, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128 complicity, xii, xiii, xv, 24, 63, 69, 73 concentration camps, 122, 123

death camps, 58, 59 labor camps, 57, 58

contempt, xiii, 93, 98, 121, 124, 135 Conway, John Seymour, 94, 96, 102 Cornell, Drucilla, 67, 91 Corradi di Fiumara, G., 78, 91 Cox, Greg, 17 criminal, xiv, 87 criminals, xiii, 77, 78, 83, 84, 87, 88, 94, 97, 119 cruelty, ix, 26, 53 cruelty, 73

D Danby, John F., 122, 130 Daniels, Les, 13, 17 darkness, ix, xi, 23, 38, 47, 70 Datlow, Ellen, 17 Davis, Keith E., 92 De la Pena, Terri, 14, 17 De Lisle, Fortunee, 47, 50 death, 16, 19, 22, 26, 32, 37, 38, 44, 45, 48, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 70, 97, 102, 117, 119, 138, 147 deaths, 32, 54, 58, 97 definition, xii, xiii, 1, 2, 74, 87, 109, 111, 125, 126, 142

153

definitions, xiii, 21, 32, 84 DeKelb-Rittenhouse, Diane, 17 democracy, 95, 118 Devil, the, 43 differend, the, 55, 56 Dijkstra, Bram, 43, 50 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 78, 91 discourse, v, xiii, 23, 24, 34, 35, 63, 64, 73, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89

psychiatric, xiii divinity, 52

divine, the, 47, 52, 55, 93, 138 Dodds, Ernest R., 138, 144 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, ix, 117, 120, 121, 130

___Works, 117, 130 Douglas, Jack D., 91 Dowson, John, 104, 112 dualism, xiv, 103, 104, 109

dualistic, xiv, 109 Dusen, Henry van, 115 Dwyer, G., 110, 111, 112 Dyer, S.N., 17

E Eagleton, Terry, 34 Eichmann, Adolf, 64 Eliade, Mircea, 112 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 65 Elliot, J.K., 46, 50 embodiment, 26, 29, 32, 125 empathy, 78, 80 Enlightenment, the, 77, 86, 88, 92, 130 epistemological, 32 epistemology, 32 ethics, xiii, 9, 30, 52, 63, 64, 65, 88, 131, 140, 141, 142, 147

ethical, 9, 10, 25, 55, 56, 64, 133, 141

the ethical, xiii, 31, 132, 140 European, 23, 24, 25, 26, 74, 115, 118, 125 Euthanasia, 98 Eve, v, vii, xii, 29, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 62 evil, i, iii, v, vi, ix, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14,

21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 37, 38, 43, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 83, 88, 91, 93, 96, 99, 100, 102, 109, 110, 112, 124, 127, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147

banality of, 55 evils, ix, 12, 28, 32, 93, 100,

118, 119 paradox of, xi, 64, 115, 116, 117,

118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 137

radical, xiii, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 evil-doer, the, xi, xiii, 69, 73, 74, 75 exorcism, 103, 106, 107, 111 exorcist, the, xiv, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110, 111

F Fall, the, 37, 38, 43, 44, 45, 48, 141 fascism, 63, 141 Feeley, M., 79, 91 Feldman, Ron H., 130 Felstiner, John, 57, 59, 67 femininity, 28, 30, 37, 38, 43, 48

feminine, 22, 29, 37, 38, 43, 58 femme fatale, 43, 44

feminism, 4 feminist, xii, 8, 9

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 61 Fisher, David H., v, xiii, 147 Fisher, E.J., xiii, 95, 102 Fisher, Rob, v, vi, ix, xiv, xvii, 115, 147 Forrest, Katherine V., 10, 17 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 115 Foucault, Michel, xiii, 79, 85, 88, 89, 91 Fox, Richard, 115, 130 freedom, 6, 7, 29, 30, 46, 47, 48, 124, 133, 134 French Revolution, the, 13 Friedel, Francis, 48, 50 Friedländer, Saul, 67 Fromm, Erich, 71, 75 Fuller, C.J., 109, 110, 112

154

G Galen, Bishop, 98 Garland, D., 79, 92 Gates, Henry Louis, 27, 34 gender, 7, 8, 9, 11, 27, 32, 148

gendered, 7, 27, 32, 148 genealogy, 87, 132, 133, 134 Genesis, 38, 44, 50 Genet, Jean, 133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 144 genocide, ix, 53, 64 George, Stefan, 61 Gergen, Kenneth J., 78, 92 Gergen, M., 92 German Corporations, the, 69 Gestapo, the, 70, 71 Ghaly, Salwa, v, xii, 21, 148 Giddens, Anthony, 81, 92 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 58

___Works, 58 Goldhagen, Daniel J., 94, 96, 97, 102 Gomez, Jewelle, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17 good, xii, xiv, 2, 27, 29, 31, 32, 45, 55, 63, 69, 83, 93, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 111, 120, 124, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141 Good Samaritan, the, 126 Gordon, Joan, 17 Goya, Francisco de, 55 greed, 13, 30, 86 Greenberg, Martin H., 17 Greenblatt, Stephen, 34 Gregory of Nyssa, 48 Griffith, R.T.H., 112 Gunn, Giles, 34 Guyau, Jean Marie, 88, 92

H Haidu, Peter, 52, 53, 67 Hambly, Barbara, 17 Hamilton, Richard Paul, iii, v, xv, xvii, 69, 148 Harlow, Barbara, 34 harm, xii, 2, 6, 10, 53, 62, 78, 103, 105, 109, 110

Hartman, Geoffrey, 51 Heaney, Seamus, 58, 67 Hebrews, Book of, 123 Hell, 54 Herczl, Moshe, 94, 102 heterosexuality

heteronormative, 4, 8 heterosexual, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11

Heydrich, Reinhard, 71, 72, 73, 74 Hill, D., 99, 101, 102 Himmler, Heinrich, 71 Hindu, xiv, 103, 107, 108, 109, 112 Hirn, Yrjo, 46, 50 Hitler, Adolf, xiii, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 96, 98, 99, 102, 115 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 61 Holland, Tom, 12, 18 Hollinger, Veronica, 17 Holocaust, the, v, xiii, 52, 57, 58, 61, 63, 69, 73, 93, 94, 100, 102, 147

Final Solution, the, xiii, 57, 67, 94, 97

holocaust denial, 127 Shoah, 57, 60, 73

homophobia, 13 Horton, Walter, 115 Huff, Tanya, 10, 18 human, ix, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 22, 27, 30, 38, 44, 45, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 60, 64, 71, 77, 81, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 99, 100, 103, 104, 109, 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 148 human rights, 119, 121 humanism

humanistic, 55 humanity, xi, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 29, 55, 93, 122, 125, 126, 127, 133, 135, 138, 141, 142 Huyssen, Andreas, 62, 63, 67 hypocrisy, 22, 28

I identities, 57, 77, 78, 85, 86, 88, 148 identity, ix, xi, 9, 13, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 63, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 118, 122, 139

155

ideology, 64 ideological, 23, 24, 121, 148

Ignatieff, Michael, 121, 123, 130 immorality, 29 imperialism

imperialist, 23, 24 imperialistic, 116, 118

incest, 5, 12 incontinence, 93 innocence, xi, 37, 44, 70 insensitivity, ix International Association for Philosophy and Literature, 147 International Forum on Persons, the, 148 International Journal of Punjab Studies, 149 Irenaeus, 45, 47 Irving, David, 73, 75 Irwin, Jones, vi, xiv, 142, 144, 148 Isaac, Jeffrey, 93, 130 Islam

Islamic, 141

J James, C.L.R., 34 Jameson, Frederic, 34 Jewish, 52, 57, 58, 59, 70, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 118, 130 Jews, xiii, 56, 57, 63, 69, 72, 73, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 118, 130, 131 Jones, Stephen, 18 Journal of Beliefs & Values: Studies in Religion and Education, 147 Jozefów, massacre at, 72, 97 Judaism, 95, 132

Judaic, 141 Justin Martyr, 45 Jyotisha, the, 107

K Kant, Immanuel, 51, 53, 57, 64

___Works, 53 Kantian, 78

Karambelkar, V.W., 112 Katz, Steven T., 94, 102 Kawash, Samara, 34

Keesey, Pam, 17, 18 Kiefer, Anselm, xiii, 52, 56, 57, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67 King, Martin Luther, 118 King, Stephen, 18 Klossowski, Pierre, 139, 140, 144 Knipe, D.M., 108, 112 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 99, 102 Koja, Kathe, 18 Kosovo, 119 Kreis, Wilhelm, 63

L Lackey, Douglas, 93, 102 Land, Nick, 139, 144 language, xi, xii, 21, 24, 56, 57, 64, 87, 108, 121, 122, 123, 148, 149

speech, 52, 59, 74, 80 Language and Communication, 148 Lanzmann, Claude, 73, 74 law, the, 32, 57, 65, 86, 87, 95, 127, 147 Le Fanu, J.Sheridan, 3, 4, 18 Leatherdale, Clive, 1, 18 Lee, Tanith, 6, 18 Lehtinen, Katri, v, xii, xiv, 1, 148 Leonard, Carol, 10, 18 lesser peoples, 24 Leviticus, Book of, 126 liberal, 24, 115, 116 Lieu, S.N.C., 144 Littell, Franklin H., 93, 102 Livingston, James, 115, 130 logic, 21, 32 love, 5, 8, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 29, 34, 45, 81, 93, 116, 118, 120, 121, 126, 127, 128, 131, 135, 137, 148 Lucifer, xii Luke, Saint, 47 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 55, 56, 67

M MacMillan, Hugh, 38, 50 madness, 27 magic, xiv, 26, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111 Maha Patra, the, 107 Makdisi, Saree, 35

156

mal, le, 21, 34, 133, 135, 144 Malebranche, Niccolo de, 64 Malzberg, Barry N., 18 Manichean, 138 Margaret Sönser Breen, xvii, 147 Margarete, xiii, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64 margin, the, 21, 27, 29 marginality, xii, 21, 24, 27, 32

marginalized, xii, 8, 13, 23, 24, 29

Markus, R., 144 Mary, 37 Mary, The Virgin, xii, 37, 38, 45, 47 masculinity, 28, 30

male, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 21, 30, 31 masochism, 27, 31, 32 masochist, the, 21 Matthew, Book of, 126 Matza, D., 80, 92 McDowell, Deborah E., 27, 35 McGrath, Alister, 93, 102 McMahan, Jeffrey, 18 Medlicott, Diana, v, xiii, 77, 78, 92, 149 Mein Kampf, 98 Mills, C. Wright, 80, 92 Milton, John, 54, 112 misogyny, xii, 21 monster

monstrous, xi, 54 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 35 moral beliefs, 63 moral dilemmas, 9, 63 moral reflection, 51, 52, 57, 64, 65 morality

moral order, 31, 32 mores, 28 slave, 133, 134

Morrison, Toni, v, xii, 21, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35

___Works, v, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35

motives, 69, 71, 74, 94 motivation, 53, 73, 140, 141

Mozambique, 116 Mugabe, Robert, 119 Mumsey, B., 99, 102 murder, xiii, 53, 55, 69 myth, 25, 55, 86, 88

N natural supernaturalism, 55 naturalism

naturalist, 124 Nazis, the

Nazi, 53, 61, 63, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 118

Nazism, 59, 67 Nelken, David, 91, 92 New Catholic Encyclopedia, 45, 49 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 46, 48, 50 Niebuhr, Reinhold, vi, xiv, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiv, 55, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 144 Nietzschean, xiv, 131, 133, 137, 139 Norman, Richard, 77, 92, 132, 140, 141, 142, 144 Nowell-Smith, P.H., 99

O O’Carroll, Michael, 47, 50 O’Flaherty, W.D., 112 O’Malley, W.D., 109, 112 ojhas, 108 Ojhas, 107 Orient, the, 25 Oriental

orientalism, 23 Other, the, 4, 10, 25, 26, 35, 91

alterity, 56 otherness, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29,

32

P pacifism, 116 Pagels, Elaine, 44, 50 pain, 8, 21, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 44, 46, 48, 70, 72, 78, 104, 106, 107, 109 Parr, H., 77, 92 Parry, Benita, 32, 35 Pascal, Blaise, 125 Paul, Saint

Letter To The Corinthians, 45

157

pedophilia, 127 Pelagius, 139, 142

Pelagian, 142 Penal policy, 86 perpetrators, 94 persons, ix, 58, 59, 121, 122, 125, 148 perversity, 3, 139 phenomenology, 51, 64, 148 Philips, John, 43, 50 Philo, C., 77, 92 philosophy, 51, 91, 92, 101, 102, 129, 144, 147, 148 pirate, the, xiii, xiv, 85, 86, 90 Plato, 140, 141, 142, 144, 148

Platonic, 141, 142 Platonism, 55

poetry, xiii, 22, 52, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 135 police battalions, the, 69, 97 Pope Pius XII, 97 pornography, 127 postmodernity, 55 power, xi, xii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 22, 24, 26, 43, 58, 62, 69, 70, 71, 74, 79, 83, 86, 106, 118, 120, 122, 123, 127, 128, 138

abuse of, 5 Pre-Raphaelites, the, 37, 147 Prest, Thomas Peckett, 3, 18, 19 pretension, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125 prison, 26, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 90 Prometheus, xii Pujari, 107 punishment, 44, 48, 79, 87, 138 purity, 2, 38, 44, 48, 127

Q Quayson, Ato, 32, 35 Queer, xii, 7

gay, 4, 8, 11 homosexuals, 69 lesbian, 4, 8, 13

R race, 13, 14, 27, 32, 59

racism, 21, 23, 27 ethnic cleansing, 116, 121 miscegenation, 29, 30 racial hatred, 127 racist, xiii

rape, 6, 8, 12, 30 rationality, 23, 32, 85

reason, 52, 78 realism, vi, xiv, 118, 119, 121, 125, 127, 128 rebellion, xi, xv, 32, 93 redemption, 44, 47, 48, 82, 138, 139 religion, 1, 23, 99, 100, 103, 106, 108, 109, 111, 139, 148

religious, xiv, 1, 61, 64, 72, 84, 88, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 136, 137, 139, 140, 147

representation, xii, 37, 44, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 62, 65, 104, 147 representations, xiii, 27, 53, 65, 110 ressentiment, 132, 133 Rg Veda, 103, 104, 106 Rice, Anne, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 18 Rilke, Rainer Marie, 53 Rist, John, 138, 140, 144 Roche, Thomas S., 18 romanticism

romantic, 55, 58, 66 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 118 Rose, Nikolaus, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92 Rosenbaum, Ron, xiii, 69, 73, 74, 75 Rosenfeld, Michael, 67 Rosenthal, Mark, 61, 67 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 37, 50 Roth, J., 96, 102 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 125 Rowe, Michael, 18 Rubenstein, R., 96, 102 Rusch, Krisitine Katharyn, 18 Russett, Cynthia E., 18 Ryan, Alan, 18

S sadism, 27, 32

158

sadist, the, 21, 72, 74 Said, Edward, 34, 35 Salih, Tayeb, v, xii, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 32, 34, 35

___Works, 21, 22, 26, 34, 35 Santayana, George, 102 Sartre, Jean Paul, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 144 Satanism, 134 Schiller, Gertrud, 47, 50 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel, 61 Schürmann, Reiner, 51, 64, 67 Schutz, Alfred, 74, 75 Scully, D., 80, 92 selfishness, 28 selflessness, ix, 30 Sen, Amartaya, 121, 130 Sewell, Elizabeth, 53, 67 sex

sexual, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 22, 24, 28, 29, 30, 32, 43, 44, 74, 80, 136

sexual intercourse, 2, 44 sexuality, 7, 12, 22, 24, 26, 29,

30, 37, 43, 44, 74 sexism, 21, 31

sexist, 13, 28 Shakespeare, William, xi, xii, xv, 122, 123, 130

___Works, xi, xii, xiv, 51, 122, 123, 125, 130

Shelley, Percy Bysse, 55 Shires, Linda M., 18 Shotter, John, 77, 92 Shulamite, xiii, 52, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64 Shuttleworth, Sally, 18 Simmons, Dan, 14, 18 Simon, J., 79, 91 sin, 37, 38, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 136, 137, 138, 139, 142 slavery, 21, 81, 89, 118 Smith, H., 29, 87, 91, 92 Smith, Susan L., 35 social sciences, xiii

human sciences, 78 interpretative or Verstehen

tradition, xiii socialism, 24, 115

socialist, 115 The Left, 23

society, xii, xiv, 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 56, 61, 93, 94, 95, 99, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 119, 127, 128 Song of Songs, 58 Soundings, 147 Spanish Inquisition, the, 13 spite, ix Spivak, Gayatari Chakravorty, 35 Sprinker, Michael, 35 SS, the, 56, 58 Star Trek, 127 Steiner, George, 52 Stephens, John Richard, 19 stereotypes, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29 Stoker, Bram, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 18, 19

___Works, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 18, 19 Sturgis, Susanna J., 14, 19 Stutley, Margaret, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112 Styron, William, 53 subjectivity, 77, 79, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89 sublime, the, 53, 55, 57 supernatural, the, 7, 13, 47, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111

natural supernaturalism, 55 Sykes, G., 80, 92

T taboo, 3, 30, 136 Takieddine-Amyuni, Mona, 34, 35 Taliban, the, xv Tavard, George, 38, 50 Taylor, Mark C., 138, 139, 145 Tem, Melanie, 19 Tem, Steve Rasnic, 19 temptation, 43 Tertullian, 45 The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 147 The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, 46 The Journal of Aesthetics, 147 The Journal of Value Inquiry, 147 The Philosopher, 148 The Protevangelium of James, 46, 47

159

theology, xiv, 115, 137 Third Reich, the, 69 Thomas, Laurence, 98, 100, 102 Todorov, Tzvetan, 125, 126, 130 Tomlinson, John, 35 Tracy, Robert, 19 tragedy, 38, 116 Tremayne, Peter, 19 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 73 Tropp, Martin, 19 Twitchell, James B., 19

U understanding, xiii, 7, 32, 44, 45, 53, 55, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 83, 85, 87, 88, 93, 107, 109, 111, 125, 127 un-godly, 1 United Nations, the, 119 Upstone, Robert, 37, 50

V vampire, xii, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 148

vampiric, 5 vampirism, 5, 7, 12

Varma, Devendra P., 18, 19 Vatican, the, 96, 130 Vedas, the, 103, 104, 108, 109 Vedic period, the, 103, 107 Vedic samhita, 103, 106 victims, xiii, 3, 9, 10, 25, 26, 53, 58, 59, 63, 72, 78, 80, 93, 121 violence, 7, 22, 23, 24, 29, 52, 63, 78, 80, 81, 86, 121, 128 virginitas in partu, 37, 45, 47, 48

W Walker, Benjamin, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112 war, xv, 8, 29, 57, 59, 65, 70, 115, 116, 118, 119

World War One, 115 World War Two, 115, 116, 118,

141 Warner, Marina, 45, 50 Warrington, Freda, 19

Watts, George Frederick, v, vii, xii, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 50

Eve Repentant, 41 Eve Tempted, 40 She Shall Be Called Woman, 39 The Nativity, 42

___Works, vii, xii, 37, 39, 43, 44, 45

Watts, Mary, 44 Weightman, S., 109, 112 Weil, Jiri, xiii, 69, 70, 71, 75

___Works, 70, 71, 75 Weiss, J., 96, 98, 102 Weisskopf, T.K.F., 17 Wells, H.G., 19 White, Hayden V., 35, 67 Whitfield, S.J., 122, 130 wickedness, xiii, xiv, 9, 29, 46, 51, 77, 93, 100, 103, 111, 147 Widdershoven, G., 78, 92 Williams, Patrick, 35 Wilson Knight, G., 122, 130 Wilton, Andrew, 37, 50 Wolf, Leonard, 19 womanhood, 2, 8, 28, 29 Wordsworth, William, 55 World Trade Center, xv Wyschogrod, Edith, 56, 67

Y Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn, 10, 13, 19

Z Zimbabwe, 119 Zysk, Kenneth, 105, 107, 113

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暗之此物：论恶和人类的邪恶