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Radical Evil:
Psychoanalytic-Ethical Perspectives
17 December 2007
“The human being is (by nature) either morally good or morally evil” (Kant,
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 47).
“The truly ethical subject doing a truly
ethical act does not choose among
the options offered by the power structure or status quo; it changes the
rules of choosing” (Huang, Horror and Evil in the Name of Enjoyment
I.
123)
The philosophical scene
A. Kant
1. moral formalism
2. maxim: the subjective principle of volition
3. categorical imperative
4. three degrees of evil: frailty, impurity and perversity
5. diabolical evil: opposition to Law becoming the absolute maxim
devoid of any pathological dispositions
[I]n addition to the perversion of human nature from its root and choice of evil
maxims, radical evil also involves the misrecognition, perversion of contingency as
necessity and enslavement by the latter. What else can we identify as the cause of
totalitarian evil, when the leader perverts his status as nothing but the servant of the
People or History?
Then, another fundamental question arises: is it possible to
overcome the radical evil conceived this way?
One path worth taking is to read
Kant seriously when he claims that radical evil is
a corruption that lies in all human beings and cannot be overcome except
through the idea of the moral good in its absolute purity, combined with
the consciousness that this idea belongs to our original predisposition and
we only need to be assiduous in keeping it free of any impure mixture, and
to accept it deeply in our disposition.
(Religion 98)
The remedy that Kant proposes requires not gradual reform but “a revolution in the
disposition of the human being” (Religion 68), a violent act that doubles the founding
gesture of the Law, reasserts human’s a priori freedom and confronts him with a state
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of abyssal rootlessness, which is severed from all premeditated parameters of what
is possible and impossible, good and evil.
Such an act entails a radical
transformation of “form” rather than “content” or empirical actions.
Put in the
psychoanalytic terms, the subject has to break with its fantasmatic framework on the
fundamental level to keep a proper distance toward the enjoyment it acquires form
serving “necessity” or the Master.
The Kantian “traversing the fantasy” designates
the authentic ethical act through which the subject asserts its a priori freedom,
constitutes the atemporal, trans-subjective moral law devoid of empirical,
pathological contents, and, hence, points to the Highest Good in Kant’s moral
philosophy. (Horror and Evil in the Name of Enjoyment 162-63)
B. Arendt
1. totalitarian terror
a. erasure of the subject’s individuality, autonomy and integrity
b. making “human” superfluous
c. lawful transgression
2. banality of evil
a. thoughtlessness, shallowness, loss of autonomy
b. conflation of legality and morality
c. perversion of the Law from its root
Wherein does Eichmann’s radical evil lie, in spite of his semblance of ordinariness,
thoughtlessness and superfluity?
Eichmann’s full submission to legality as the sole
authority of morality and his alleged (mis)reading of Kant pervert the “form” as such,
rather than the “content”: in the Kantian terms, Eichmann is morally evil in his nature
through his choosing evil maxims. If a truly Kantian ethical subject establishes the
universal law through his choosing good maxims, an impossible assertion of its
noumenal freedom, such an evil man as Eichmann perverts the moral law from its
root: his reliance on the Law, or the Other, does not assert his free Being but, on the
contrary, testifies his total enslavement by the Other.
Here we witness the
interpassivity at its most horrible: Eichmann displaces his passivity to the Other and
evades his full responsibility for his actions and the enjoyment generated through his
surplus obedience, his excessive obedience more than necessary. (Horror and Evil
in the Name of Enjoyment 165)
II.
The psychoanalytic scene
A. Freud’s theory of the superego
1. desexualization and sublimation
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2. aggressivity from id
3. sense of guilt and humility
4. stronger instinctual renunciation, crueler aggressivity and violence
toward the ego: moral masochism
B. Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis
1. desire as a question of “Che vuoi?” (What do you want from me?)
2. “Love your neighbor”
3. Father-jouissance
C. Žižek’s theory of ideological fantasy
A. the supposed subjects of ideology
B. the Nation-Thing
III.
The politico-cultural scene
A. multiculturalist call for “Respect for the Other”
B. post-September 11 political discourse
1. Neil J. Kressel---cause of the global rise of genocide and terror in
America’s essence: “tolerance for diversity, separation of religion and
state, electoral democracy, free flow of information” (Mass Hate: The
Global Rise of Genocide and Terror xv)
2. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit: call for “understanding those hate
the West” in order to “stop them from destroying humanity”
(Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies 12)
3. James Waller: “When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary
evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting
contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil”
(Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass
Killing xiv)
IV.
Ethics of Trauma(內傷倫理學): antidote to radical evil??
A. radical democracy
B. excremental identification
C. ethics of radical love
Is there any ethics beyond tolerance, the tolerance in the multiculturalist sense?
Perhaps, but first we need to recapitulate the meaning of authentic love from the
ethical perspective of psychoanalysis: “I love the other not simply as alive, but on
account of the very troubling excess of life in him/her” (Žižek, “The Only Good
Neighbor” 101). What is this “troubling excess” in question, if not the imperfection in
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my relationship with the neighbor qua the Other, the object a in the Other that always
kicks some dirt in my eyes, confronts me with the dilemma between too little and too
much enjoyment, and threatens to derail my desire or psychical balance?
Ultimately, the authentic love according to the ethics beyond tolerance should not be
“a love which turns the contingency of an encounter into necessity of a relationship,
but a love which cherishes both the marvel and the uncertainty of the first accidental
meeting” (Nobus 97).
In such a radical act of love, the subject desublimates its love
objects, loses the support of the fantasy, renounces the enjoyment paid for its
subservient reliance on and ensnarement by the Master, and faces the abyssal
freedom unbound by any pre-established moral, ideological parameters. (Horror and
Evil in the Name of Enjoyment 124)
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