Radical Evil, Subjection, and Alain Badious Ethic of the Truth Event World Congress of The International Society

for Universal Dialogue Pyrgos, Greece May 18-22, 2003

Paul C. Santilli Siena College

Abstract: In his recent book, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001), Alain Badiou argues that an ethics of human rights depends upon an a priori notion of radical evil, whose modern interpretation stems from Kants Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Badiou, however, asks us to abandon radical evil and what he terms the impotent morality of human rights in favor of a theory of evil as terror, betrayal and disaster in relation to political goods and authentic truth events. In this paper I examine the idea of evil as it appears in Badiou and explore its connections with Kant. Following this, I argue for a shift in ethical thinking from its persistent emphasis on evil as that which a subject does to the evil that a subject suffers or to which it is subjected. This essay seeks to balance the attention Kant and Badiou give to the agency of a universal subject with a plea for a moral focus on the universal condition of human subjection. ****************

Evil is back! Philosophers in droves are turning their attention in these post metaphysical times to a problem that hitherto seemed relegated to the dusty corners of pre-modern theodicies.1 In this they are joining American Presidents who have mined the
1

Recent philosophical works on evil include: Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), Joan Copjec, editor, Radical Evil. (London, Verso, 1996), John Kekes, Facing Evil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, Jennifer L. Geddes, editor, Evil After Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Susan Neiman, Evil

2 rhetorical value of shaping world politics in terms of the evil empire and axis of evil. The revival of the question of evil surely stems from the massive scale and horror of the genocides, famines, diseases, and terrors in an era where science, technology and education have not had dramatic success in mitigating general human suffering. Standard concepts of ethics like justice, rights, interests, and utility do not capture the moral and metaphysical significance of the mutilation, torture, and murder of millions of people in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The question still remains, however, in the midst of all this attention to evil, whether evil on such a scale can be conceived at all within a post metaphysical horizon? Or whether it calls for a return to some transcendent, even religious, notion of an absolute which functions as a normative background against which evil would then be defined as transgressing?2 Modern philosophy in its thinking about evil focuses with a fascination it shares with the general public on the perpetrators of the horror, the agents of human misery. In the absence of a metaphysical background which prompts the agonizing question of how a good and powerful God could allow such things to happen, all attention turns to the human subject, to its free and often perverse will, to its instincts, and to the instruments it has forged for causing suffering. As Susan Neiman has noted modern conceptions of evil develop in the attempt to stop blaming God for the state of the world, and to take responsibility for it on our own. 3 But this responsibility rarely involves reflection on suffering itself, that is, on the way evil is borne by those who are subjected to it. Philosophy seeks to understand evil in the depths of wrongdoing and not in the wrong done to. One author captures the prevailing orientation straightforwardly and asserts that the measure of evil cannot be human suffering. It must be drawn from an understanding of human agency.4 We are curious about the monsters and can name their names: the Hitlers, the Osamas, the Ted Bundys and the Richard Dahlmers. But their victims are lost, even to thinking. Indeed the barrenness of thought with respect to

in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Maria Pia Lara, editor, Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
2 3

Alessandro Ferrara, in Pia Lara, Rethinking Evil, 173. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 4. 4 Maria Pia Lara, Rethinking Evil, 2.

3 suffering is reflected in the absence of words to identify those who suffer. We would need to invent a new, perhaps awkward language to speak of the other side of the relation, not the agents but the patients, not the evildoers but the evil done to, not the subject but the subjected. In the failure of thought to measure evil by suffering, the killers live on named and analyzed, while their victims are forgotten, their very absence made absent. In what follows I shall attempt a little experiment at shifting the emphasis to the other side of the relation and locating the measure of evil and of moral responsibility in those who undergo and suffer the miseries of human existence, namely all of us. I shall try to make clear how the other side is really the other side of the subject, taken not in its modern sense as an autonomous, free agent, but in its root meaning of one who is subjected to the power and potential violence of the world. These reflections proceed from a reading and critique of Alan Badious book, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001),5 a recent example of a philosophy of the subject which disdains to probe the nature of suffering.

Badious Critique of Radical Evil and his Ethics of Truth The terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 has already become a benchmark for a certain kind of evil in our world. It has very quickly joined the Nazis genocidal murder of Jews as a kind of absolute reference point from which measure might be taken of other evils. It is, however, not itself like the Holocaust. Because of its uniqueness it can stand, almost without commentary, as another perverse exemplar of evil. Thus, just as the memory of the Holocaust has filtered mass killings in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, shaping them as Nazi-like genocidal acts, so also has September 11 become a kind of Ur-terror to which new violence in Kashmir, Israel, and the Philippines has been already compared. When evil so defines itself as a prototype then it is no longer the negation of the good or the absence of being, as it was for traditional western metaphysics, but the impossible, demonic Thing haunting our everyday reality. Such evil is the horrible undead plaguing the living, growing more
5

All references to Badious Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001) will be inscribed parenthetically in the text.

4 powerful, not weaker, in the passage of time. So the face of Hitler is the imago we see in Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Slobadan Milosovec, and some see in George Bush. In the same way the images associated with 911 seemed destined to endure as powerful psychological apparitions naming for years to come various kinds of murderous violence as terror. Why do the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries tend to bring forth such exemplary crimes to orient political and ethical stances against other crimes? The language of absolute evil becomes a barometer of moral wrong, the true north of ethical being, because the absolute good is no longer available to modern culture to do the job. Alain Badiou convincingly contends that ethics is now regarded as an a priori ability to discern Evil; good is what intervenes visibly against an Evil that is identifiable a priori. (p. 8). Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the predominant language of human rights and liberal notions of procedural justice. This, says Badiou, is really a language of evil rather than a language of good. Violations of rights can be easily named: the rape, the murder, and the dispossession from a homeland, the lies and manipulation of opinion. For the damages done to our bodies, our property, and our dignity we can envision a moral and political consensus reaching across nations and instituting international laws and courts. But the Good cannot be named in and for itself. Badiou terms this paradigmatic evil, radical evil, acknowledging thereby its roots in Kant. He, however, scathingly rejects it along with the ethical ideology of human rights it sustains for three reasons. First, it turns man into a victim, a suffering beast, an emaciated, dying body, which equates man with his animal substructure, while denying him his subjectivity and his immortality (p. 11). Badiou states that human beings transcend the condition of mere animal life to the extent that they express something more than their abject suffering, mortality, and shame: For this living being is contemptible, and he will indeed be held in contempt. Political interventions in the name of human rights taint those who suffer from famine, disease, and cruel oppression with the pathetic passivity of victimization and deny them their full humanity as beings of thought, intention, and transcendence, in short as immortals. Secondly, the ethic of human rights justifies intervention by hegemonic powers (i.e. the United States) into societies that are

5 struggling to build positive goods according to their own values. From the standpoint of the ideology of human rights, ever alert for torture, genocidal acts, terrorism, and violations of democratic procedures, every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good creates Evil(p. 13). What is fostered by an ethics driven to scout out the ultimate evil of crimes against humanity is a stodgy conservatism that resists utopian thinking as well as the risks, dangers, and sacrifices that accompany such thinking. Finally, the fantastic linkage of particular crimes with the horrifying paradigms of absolute evil prevents ethics from thinking the singularity of situations as such. All victims become the same victim; all tyrants become Hitler; all violence against the state becomes terror; and so forth. One demonic figure rolls into the next in the axis of evil and obscures the real needs of real individuals. As an example, Badiou cites the doctor who is caught up in an official medical bureaucracy that sets out categories of illness and abstract rights to health care, but who has no difficulty accepting the fact that this particular person is not treated at the hospital (p. 15). Against this, Badiou holds out for an ethics of singular situations without the coloration of abstract rights and totalitarian evils. Badiou, then, asks us to abandon the concept of radical evil, of the measure without measure, and to follow him on another path in which evil will be derived from an ethic of truth and an encounter with the good. For Badiou, evil consists primarily and originally in the terror of the simulacrum of truth, the betrayal of truth, and the disaster of totalizing the power of truth. To understand this we need first to ask about the meaning of truth and its relation to ethics for Badiou. Truth is an event that breaks into the order of being and understanding. It is an interruption of the normal way of conducting science, doing politics, creating art, and going about ones daily business. Badiou offers examples of truths-that-happen from revolutionary politics (e.g. the French and Chinese Cultural Revolutions), art (Haydns classicism or Schoenbergs twelve-tone compositions), science (Grothendiecks creation of Topos theory), and ordinary human relations (falling in love). Truth characterizes the extraordinary, unpredictable and indeed miraculous interruption of the ordinary, orderly processes of production, knowledge acquisition, relationships, and politics. A primary example of a truth-event for Badiou is Pauline Christianity. As noted by Slavoj _i_ek,

6 Saint Paul articulates Christs resurrection as an intrusion of a traumatic and scandalous Truth, which revolutionizes the world and transforms human beings who are faithful to this event into new men, or what Badiou would call subjects: I call subject the bearer [le support] of a fidelity, the one who bears a process of truth. The subject, therefore, in no way pre-exists the processWe might say that the process of truth induces a subject (p. 43).6 Before bearing or being caught up in the truth, a Christian or a revolutionary is not a subject, but what Badiou terms an anonymous human animal, a mere some-one, or, to speak Heideggerese, Das Man, just one of them. Subjectivity comes to be by a kind of grace in which one is caught up in events that are transcendent and immortal. From this idea of truth as a subject-making, break-through event, Badiou derives his ethics. An ethic is the principle that enables the continuation of a truth-process (p. 44), and consists fundamentally in a single imperative: Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you (p. 47). He calls this the principle of consistency or fidelity to fidelity. Its maxim is Keep Going, especially when it is tempting to forget about the Truth that has happened to you and to settle back into the ordinary way of doing and thinking about things. The ethical subject, then, is one who experiences a split in his or her being between the mundane, self-interested situations of life and the extraordinary disinterested spirit of truth and who is able to sustain this split in all its tension, without giving up on one side on the other. It is in relation to this ethic of the truth event that one is to understand evil. What then is evil for Badiou? Evil essentially consists in the subjects violation of the consistency principle. This can happen in three general ways. First, as with the Nazis, one can give ones allegiance to a false imitation of the event of truth, a simulacrum or pseudo-event. Nazism structurally resembles an authentic truth event (convulsion of the ordinary, revolutionary practice etc.), but, because it doe not champion a true universal for all humanity, only the dominance of a specific tribe, it is a mere simulacrum. Its fakeness is demonstrated by its terrorist drive to annihilate the Jews rather than address an eternal truth to all (p. 76). Secondly, as with Stalinism, one can create a
6

_i_ek, Tarrying with the Negative, 130, 143. See also Alain Badiou, Saint Paul et la fondation de luniversalisme, 1997.

7 disaster by attempting to totalize ones truth and remake the whole of Being according to its principles. Authentic truth events in politics and science, while universal and transcendent, are only appropriate for specific traditions and circumstances. It would falsify a biological discovery, for example, to apply it everywhere outside of a limited context (as was done with Darwinism for example). So truth is disastrous when it absolutizes its power: Rigid and dogmatic (or blinded), the subject-language would claim the power, based on its own axioms to name the whole of the real and thus to change the world (p. 83). Religious fundamentalisms, to the extent that they are based on truth events and are not fakes in the first place, would seem to be particularly susceptible to this kind of evil. Finally, the subject can be guilty of the simple disavowal of Truth. From fatigue, cowardice, doubt, the unbearable tension of living that split in being, or simple self-interest, one can give up on the truth that has happened to one and fall back into the world: I must betray the becoming-subject in myself, I must become the enemy of that truth. (p. 79, Emphasis added). Let us then locate the precise difference between Badious ethics and its account of evil and that of the ethical ideology of human rights and radical evil. For Badiou ethics originates in transformative ideals that envision new possibilities for all human beings (a requirement of universality). Ones primary obligation is to remain faithful to the transformative event and to the particular finite situations to which it applies, without terrorizing those who do not subscribe to it. For Badiou the Platonic vision of the Good is primary, with evil appearing only as a deviation or swerve from ones obligatory allegiance to this Good. In contrast, an ethics of human rights, defines the good as that which battles the radical evil of rights violations brought about by those who have acted on those very ideal visions of the Good.

Badiou and Kant How are we to assess Badious theory of evil? How coherent and convincing is it? Is it really an improvement on the image of radical evil that guides the ethics of human rights and universal justice? It would be helpful to address these questions by first looking briefly at Kants own discussion of radical evil as it appears in Part One of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.

8 For Kant, radical evil is not at all the absolute and incomparable horror it is for Badiou, but on the contrary, the universal and innate propensity of all men to do wrong. Radical evil is the freely chosen subordination of the moral law to sensuous and self regarding incentives perverting the human heart, undermining moral duty, and, in the right circumstances, bringing about the kinds of abominations we see from the Nazis and Al Qaeda murderers. In that sense Kants evil really is radical, that is the inextirpable root of all crime and the corrupting ground of all maxims. 7 It is found not in a few extreme instances but throughout the entire human species, in what Kant calls the inscrutable depths of freedom, inscrutable because Kant thinks that our basic predisposition as human beings is to do good and there is no conceivable ground for us, therefore, from which moral evil could first have come in us.8 There is, then, for Kant no possible way to explain the appearance of this root maxim that disposes us in all other specific maxims to contravene the moral law. If we retain this original sense of radical evil as it appears in Kants ethical thinking, the thinking that is the source of contemporary ethics of human rights according to Badiou (p. 8), then it turns out that Badious own proposals look very Kantian indeed. Notice, first of all, that for Badiou as for Kant the ethical imperative does not derive from the experience of being or of a multitude of empirical facts about human beings, but from something immortal and transcending. The truth event, although prepared somehow in the order of being, comes to the subject, or rather, somehow transforms the human animal into a subject, from a horizon that is outside of space, time, and causality. Badiou could easily affirm Kants contention that it is a contradiction to look for the temporal origin of the moral constitution of a human being.9 Kant stresses pure reason as an immortal source of the moral law, while Badiou is content to leave nature of the revelatory power of eternal truth open and undefined. But for both this immortal calls for an allegiance to itself on the part of a subject who is disinterested in anything but the requirements of universal truth. For Badiou, a truth event generates a single, formal imperative: the sole maxim of consistency (and thus of ethics): Keep going! Keep going even when you have lost the thread, when you no longer feel caught up in the process, when the event
7 8

Kant, Religion, 83 Ibid., 88. 9 Ibid., 86.

9 itself has become obscure, when its name is lost (p. 79). (Does this not look like another version of the categorical imperative that obligates the will independently of any material content)? Precisely in the way that Kant describes radical evil, Badiou too speaks of the human being falling from grace by betraying the formal imperative of consistency, by putting self-interest and self-love ahead of the immortal truth. Evil emerges for Badiou, not because of the effects of human action on others, but because of a disorder in the way the subject responds to a revelation of truth. Evil is measured in other words, not by what is done to others, that is, by the horrible suffering even well-intentioned men cause (that would smack too much of the ideology of rights for Badiou), but by failures in what Kant would call the subjective will. Badiou does not speak of freedom the way Kant does, but one would have to surmise that for him, this fall or swerve from the truth is freely undertaken: one willfully relaxes back in to the status quo, one gives up on ones principles, and one chooses totalizing power and contingencies, rather than the concrete universality of truth. Evil represents a contamination of the purity of ones insight, whether it is political, artistic, religious, or amatory. So, my claim here is that Badiou shares with Kant 1) a formalistic ethics grounded in a subjectivity transcending the ordinary universe of cause and effect and 2) a conception of evil that stems from false choices or from a will that deranges the primacy of truth. To this we can add another resemblance: 3) a non-gradualist approach to moral reform. For Kant, radical evil stems from the wills original distorted ordering of incentives that puts self love ahead of a disinterested allegiance to the moral law. The only way to change that root orientation or propensity to sin in the human species is by an act of will. The gradual acquisition of virtue, for example, will not change the will since that acquisition itself could have evil motives. True virtue, for Kant, represents an effect and not a cause of a change of heart; it is the result of a pure resolution to stay true to the demands of reason and the moral law, come what may. Citing John 3:5, Kant says, And so a new man can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation and a change of heart.10 From an empirical, phenomenal standpoint such a change is as utterly unpredictable, as inexplicable as evil itself. Badiou shares Kants
10

Ibid., 92.

10 belief that a commitment to truth requires a total transformation of the human subject and not a gradual reform. In an interview with Peter Hallward, the translator of his Ethics, Badiou uses words like seizure, irruption, and the incalculable, (109, 125), expressing his appreciation for the French Revolution and the Maoist Cultural Revolutions for their faithfulness to their truth events. Badiou has no patience for the detail work of legal and political institutions of liberal democracies that strive to bring about gradual reforms in the human condition. Rather, as Kant or indeed Kierkegaard does, Badiou seeks a conversion in being that makes man new in an instant, or at least in an instant places him on a righteous path. Elsewhere, Hallward notes that Badiou embraces what we could call the puritanical virtues of a dedicated revolutionary: "Criteria of rectitude and 'purity' certainly play an important, perhaps fundamental, role in many aspects of Badiou's work." 11 For both Badiou and Kant, then, the emphasis is on the subject as an agent of moral good and evil. The suffering that is brought to the world as a consequence of the subjects behavior is for both thinkers secondary. Thus, the absolute good or evil for Kant could be only the maxim of the will and consequently the acting person himself as a good or evil person.12 This is a crucial passage. We are still under its spell in modern ethics, as signaled by Maeve Cookes claim: To be congruent with the normative selfunderstanding of late modernity, therefore, any account of moral evil must conceive moral disposition as something for which the individual subject ultimately has to bear responsibility.13 This, however, sidesteps any account of moral evil as that which those who are in subjection have to bear, as though victims were merely contingent conditions, while vicious hearts were necessary conditions for the existence of evil. For the philosophy of the subject, evil lies somewhere in the intention or at least the in character of the evildoer and not in the abyss of suffering. Without the agent and the perversion of the heart suffering would be merely an empirical, pre-moral condition found in all nature. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant tells us that suffering or woe (Weh) cannot serve to define moral evil, for it is a matter of subjective feeling only, while
11

Hallward, "Ethics with Others: A Reply to Critchley on Badiou's Ethics," Radical Philosophy, 29. 12 Kant, Religion, 63. 13 Cooke, in Pia Lara, Rethinking Evil, 128.

11 morality must be a matter of a reason accessible to everyone.14 For his part, Badiou takes human suffering to be beneath Good and Evil, unworthy of the some one who would be a subject (p. 59). Ordinary suffering, he says, is a part of the life processes of the human animal for which there is no ethics, only self-interested judgment about successes and failures. In suffering, then, for both philosophers, we find no truth and no genuine morality. One would like to reverse this with a blunt assertion: The annihilation of people is evil; the crushing of childrens bodies is evil; the ravages of diseases like Aids or cancer are evil. Evil does not reside solely in the twisted wills of the Nazis or of any other killer beings; it exists in the evil bearers, the done-to, and the subjected. Men, of course, bring about evil, but its evilness is not that they did it. Its evilness is due to pain, humiliation, destruction, and silence. Indeed, the attention we pay the sources of evil too often deflects attention from standing misery, whose presence may in fact have no simple causes. 15 In what follows, I would like to propose a different way of looking at radical evil, to examine it and ethical response to it from the standpoint of the one to whom evil is done, whom we could call, "the subject bearer of evil." The basic moral question, from this standpoint, would be, not why men do evil or even what is to be done about the evildoer, but rather, what is to be done about evil? The basic moral act would derive not from duty or virtue, but from a response to evil in the world, wherever it comes from, God, man, the devil, free will, or animal instincts.

Toward an Ethics of Subjection It is well known that the sight of evil fascinates while the sight of suffering repels. The demonic possibilities of the free will in the acting subject and not the repulsive

14 15

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 187-88. Consider the case of the street children in Bucharest, Romania, as documented in Edet

Belzberg's film, Children Underground." (2002). The film tells the story of the abject misery of children who live apart from families in subway stations, who sniff metallic paint, mutilate themselves, prostitute themselves, and expose themselves to violent beatings from shopkeepers. How could we discern what failed truth event or maxim led to these conditions?

12 effects of the act on the subjected intrigue us. Perhaps this is proper. It makes sense to take seriously imperatives that command us to universalize maxims, to maintain fidelity to truth and to act differently than a Nazi. But what would it mean to say, Do not cause suffering like that experienced by the Jews? Suffering like that is an abyss, which no reason can comprehend, from which prayers and lamentations may arise, but into which no speech can enter. And yet, if we did not understand suffering, how would presume to address evil. Is not evil, evil because it causes suffering? Without the subjection to that which harms and mutilates we could not recognize evil at all, not even in the most grotesque perversions of reason and the will. Typically, there really is nothing radical or deep about criminals, their henchmen or their bosses. Sad, stupid, sick, perverse, retarded-- bad men do not have Miltonic qualities and philosophy should not waste its efforts at reflection by pondering their natures. Hannah Arendt commenting on her famous phrase, the "banality of evil," said evil is "thought defying" "because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its banality. 16 This is I think correct, but, and this was what disturbed people about her characterization of Eichmann as "banal," the risk is that once one looks into the heart and mind of evil doers and finds boring, trivial idiots, that is people like us, who are us at times, evil itself will tend to fade, as though it could only absorb us by being identified with extraordinary monsters. But for the one who suffers, evil it is everything; it is the abyss; it is the horror and the depth that we cannot understand and yet must address. The chasm in which infants are swallowed should hold us and not the poor pathetic woman who killed her children. The monster is real and is a monster not because of the creator but because of the victims it devours. The lack of metaphysical depth in the evildoers should not allow evil itself to disappear. In the subject bearers of suffering, evil is radical and of infinite depth. And in this depth there are no categories to help us understand or empathize, but there is an imperative to help. What, then, is the ground of moral duty with respect to suffering? The response to horrible suffering should not be empathetic feeling but a rational decision to do ones
16

Hannah Arendt, Jew as Pariah, 251. Cited by Fabio Ciaramelli, Post Modernism and the

Holocaust, 1998, 102.

13 duty. Kant is right about this. For Kant that decision springs spontaneously from the subjects pure practical reason. But unless there is recognition of the horror in the first place, unless one recognizes a call to action in the phenomenon of evil perceived, then the formal procedures for deliberation would not even be set in motion. One needs an imperative from the other, some signal that says, This is worth your attention. This is cruel. This is worth the exercise of practical reason. There is a non-spontaneous, passive moment in the exercise of moral reason binding it to suffering or the collapse of happiness and joy in human beings. Although we cannot know what is going on with the person in and for itself, we have to recognize the signs of the void in the tears, the broken bodies, the cries, and all the other symptoms of that void. Kant rejects the pathology of suffering as a condition for moral judgment because, being pathological, it will be dependent on feelings and sensibilities and, therefore, disqualified for universal and autonomous judgments. Only a moral law, purified of all content and material substance, withdrawn from the circuit of natural bodies, desires, and contingencies, could have the force of a standard to which all rational beings are subjected. Nevertheless, even Kant recognizes that to apply the moral law practically one needs to think of it typologically or imagine it as regulating nature and natural bodies.17 The subject in other words has to be reinscribed into the world of suffering and into a circuit of exchanges from which the moral law was abstracted. If the logical intent of the categorical imperative is that I substitute myself as a rational being for any other rational being, then it equally requires a more concrete exchange of bodies in which, for example, a moral prohibition of torture must recognize torture as an offense against the person. How would reason know, for example, that it would be madness to torture someone in order to assist his or her well being, if there was not form the beginning an understanding of the universal condition of the human beings natural needs and vulnerabilities. The susceptibility of the subject18 or its subjected, passive nature is then an ineradicable condition of moral understanding, even one that seeks to suspend particular, lawless contingencies in favor of pure reason. Built into the very articulation of pure practical reason is an imperative that one ought a priori to care for the needs of others
17 18

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 73. Ibid., 20.

14 like oneself, is a circuit of fleshly need and dependence. I would not know my duties to angels. This Kant recognizes when he says, Man is a being of needs, so far as he belongs to the world of sensehis reason certainly has an inescapable responsibility from the side of his sensuous nature to attend to his interests and form practical maxims with a view to the happiness of this and, where possible, of a future life.19 Suffering calls for a response; it is a stimulus to judgment and action. Without it, the operation of universalizing reason would not kick in. This condition of suffering I call subjection to indicate its position in the concept of a subject. It is the other side of pure spontaneity with which the dignity of man has been identified, by Kant, by Badiou, and so many others. This praise of spontaneous freedom in modern moral philosophy has obscured the truth about our passivity and our vulnerability. After all, if it is in ethics that we achieve some of our dignity, then let us recall that without our vulnerability there would be no ethics. The dignity of angelic figures, no matter how good and free they are, could not be ours. Without the recognition that any ethical analysis of evil must give primacy to the suffering undergone by those who bear evil, one risks a certain incoherence and bad faith. In his critique of 'radical evil' as the Altogether-Evil (p. 62), Badiou argued initially that in contemporary ethical ideologies there is a presumption of a deep ground or norm of evil that is beyond measure, exhibited in an incomparable event like the Holocaust or the World Trade Center destruction (my example, not Badious). And yet, an ethics of human rights will use such events as exemplary evils by which all other historical crimes are judged: As the supreme negative example, this crime is inimitable, but every crime is an imitation of it. (p. 63). That the same event could be both an abysmal, immeasurable evil and an exemplary crime generates a paradox for ethics. On one hand, if an historical event is a paradigm of evil, then it cannot be incommensurable with all other cruelty and suffering. If, however, as Hannah Arendt famously declared,20 the Holocaust is the absolute and incommensurable evil, then it cannot serve as a paradigm by which to assess all other evils. The original and abysmal crime would have to be both comparable and not comparable to all other crimes.
19 20

Ibid, 64. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 459.

15 Nevertheless, Badiou himself cannot resist appealing to the Nazi genocide as a prime example of what he regards evil to be. He wants to convince us that a certain kind of politics is actually a simulacrum of the real thing because it uses the vocabulary of plenitude or of substance and not the void (p. 72). Since the Nazis seize upon a folk or racial characteristic to carry out their program, their truth does not aspire to universality, a necessary feature of a political truth. Badiou would like us to believe that because the political vision of the Nazis is a sham it is already bent toward terrorism. But we must ask, does Badiou cite the Nazis as an exemplar of evil because Nazism is a pretty good model of a political simulacrum? I think it would be bad faith on Badiou's part not to admit that it was the horror of what was done and to whom it was done that makes the Holocaust a test case for his theory of evil. It is not the case that the Nazis are benchmarks for evil because they were not real! What was evil were not the false goods of a twisted truth eventthough they may well have caused evils. What was evil were the body counts, the sheer magnitudes of the mutilation, deprivation, and murder. Despite his stated refusal to regard the Holocaust as the incomparable anti-paradigm of evil, as do the ethical ideologies he criticizes, Badiou too cannot avoid using the Holocaust as a normative test case for his theory. Of course, any theory of ethics and of evil worth taking seriously must repudiate the truth of Nazism because of what it did to humanity. But the evil is not in its lack of truth. Imagine a political movement to be ideologically as crazed as the Nazi's. It would not serve as a test model for any philosophical account of evil if it did not lead humanity to misery and woe.21

21

In a way, it is possible to speak of evil without a subject, only subjection. One can appeal to the

old Christian idea that truth is on the side of the poor, the suffering, the abject, and humiliated. Christ did not say blessed are those who do their duty or remain faithful to the truth event; he said rather blessed are the poor and naked and those who suffer. If _i_ek is right to characterize Badiou's work as profoundly Christological(The Ticklish Subject, 228), it will be because it is the Christology of a revelation or of a Pauline break of truth into the repetitious order of Being, that fill the believer with "laicized grace." It is not however the Christology of the Gospels. _i_ek actually says in another vein that it is the radical evil of the other that one is command to love in the gospels: "the Other as a properly inhuman partner, 'irrational', radically evil, capricious,

16 By urging a relocation of the moral imperative to respond to evil from the subject to the subjected, I am not claiming that evil comes from no where and I have no desire to absolve individuals from their specific liabilities, legal and otherwise, for causing suffering. Rather I wish to broaden the notion of moral responsibility beyond cause, even the negative causes of neglect that are so important to utilitarianism.22 Ethics typically places the subject as standing under a judgment. The focus is on the self--Am I good or bad? Am I advanced in virtue? Have I done my duty with the right motivation? These are not improper questions, but in relation to the agonies of the world, they have been over emphasized. Suppose we do not dwell on evil as that which comes from the self, but on evil as that which comes upon the self and to which the self is subjected. Even if we did not know from whence it came, --God, the devil, despotic regimes, madness, beautiful artists, viruses--, would we not still be summoned to a moral response to suffering? The presence of evil suffered by those subjected to it positions us in a different way. For the ethical questions now become what is needed and what is the best way to relieve the misery of those who suffer. What is assessed is not whether I am moral but whether the right thing was done in relation to the experience of subjection. In my view, the elemental moral issue is not whether I have a truth event, a revelation, or a duty to anyone. It is rather the recognition of damage in the subject-bearer of evil and of the imperative that emerges from that. If my daughter cuts her finger, I dont ask if I have a duty to remedy it or whether I would be a better, more authentic person if I help her. I try to heal it! The issue is whether there is evil there, who bears it, how is it to be helped, not whether I am evil.

revolting, disgustingin short beyond the Good. This enemy--Other should not be punished (as the Decalogue demands), but accepted as a 'neighbor' (The Fragile Absolute, 112).
22

It is the great merit of Benthams utilitarianism to recognize the significance for ethics of

emphasizing the suffering undergone by man and beast. Bentham asked us to think about our responsibility for increasing or diminishing the agony of the world and not our abstract duties or the state of our moral health. The problem with utilitarianism, even in its non-hedonistic variants, is that it identifies suffering with a pain that can be measured according to some scale. In fact, suffering is not equivalent to pain and there is no measure of suffering.

17 Indeed the paradigm of parent and child is a useful one to an ethics of the subjected. If we follow an agent-centered ethics, the source of evil will lie in my failure to live up to some notion of duty or truth in relation to my young children. But, in fact, the issue is not about me at all. Parents are concerned about whether their children are crying, hurt, feverish, or lonely. In a sense, parents are not specifically concerned about suffering itself. Suffering is the missing element, the abysmal void from which an imperative comes, but it is nothing to ask about. Rather a parent attends to the symptoms and asks about how they are to be dealt with. I should not ask whether I am a good parent but whether good is being done to my children. On this model therefore, which I think is the same as that of Christ in the gospels, a citizen does not wonder about being a dutiful citizen, a Christian about progress in Christianity, but about whether the hungry are being fed, the homeless sheltered, and the sick tended to.

Levinas and the Superfluity of Suffering The language I have used so far-- subjection, suffering, vulnerability-- as well as my criticism of a subject oriented ethics will remind many of Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote of the self in terms of "radical passivity," alterity, and a susceptibility to sickness, suffering, and death, which pre-exist the spontaneous, deliberative moral judgments of a subject.23 And indeed one way to regard this paper is to see it as a minor meditation, in a different language with different emphases, on the profound implications in Levinas's statement, "The self is sub-jectum; it is under the weight of the universe and responsible for everything. Levinas has elevated the suffering of the other to a supreme ethical principle and his entire philosophical work can be interpreted as a response to evil.24 This is not the place to develop the debt that an ethics of subjection owes to the thinking of Levinas, but it may be appropriate to say something about Badiou's own relation to Levinas.

23

See Levinas, Entre Nous, especially his chapter on Useless Suffering. See also, Helmut

Peukert, "Unconditional Responsibility for the Other: The Holocaust and the Thinking of Emmanuel Levinas," in Postmodernism and the Holocaust, 162.
24

Bernstein, Radical Evil, 167.

18 In his Ethics, Badiou distinguishes between the ethics of human rights, which has its foundation in Kant, and an 'ethics of the other' or an 'ethics of difference', whose origins lie in the theses of Levinas (p. 18). Badiou shows the utmost respect for the thinking of Levinas, which displaces the privilege of the subject and of the same through the operation of the alterity of the face. Badiou points to the non-Greek, Jewish dimension of Levinass proposal to conceive of the "radical, primary opening to the Other" as "ontologically anterior to the construction of identity;" Levinas proposes a whole series of phenomenological themes for testing and exploring the originality of the Other, at the centre of which lies the theme of the face, of the singular giving [donation] of the Other 'in person', through his fleshly epiphany, which does not test mimetic recognition (the Other as 'similar', identical to me), but, on the contrary, is that from which I experience myself ethically as 'pledged' to the appearing of the Other, and subordinated in my being to this pledge (pp. 19-20). In comparison to the Levinas's thought, the contemporary, "post-modern" ethics of difference, multiculturalism, and of tolerance, all of which Badiou thinks derive from the kind of configuration of the other proposed by Levinas, are trivial, with "neither force nor truth." What makes Levinas profound, according to Badiou, is that radical alterity, which appears in the "face" and speech of the other, attests to an Altogether-Other'' or God: "There can be no ethics without God the ineffable" (p. 22). Without the supposition of an epiphany of the infinite in the expression of the other, shaking me from my comfortable complacency, any contemporary ethics of difference, otherness, or multiculturalism becomes "pious discourse without pietyand a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons" (p. 23). If there is no absolute Difference, then all there is are differences between human beings, "the infinite and self-evident multiplicity of humankind," an obvious fact, without particular ethical value or interest for thought (p. 26). Badiou admits that for him there is no God and no Altogether-Other behind the infinite multiplicity and alterity in the human race. Therefore, despite his admiration for Levinas, he cannot follow him in annulling Greek philosophy in favor of a religiously grounded (groundless?) ethics. As we have already seen, Badiou will look for his ethics

19 in the encounter with a truth event, that he designates as a revelation of the Same, in keeping with the Platonic spirit of regarding truth as a universal "indifferent to differences" (27). The result, as Peter Hallward has declared, is that "the whole abject register of 'bearing witness'" and "the anti-philosophical conviction that only the Altogether-Other can 'know' and validate this decision" to give oneself over to the face of the other, are dismissed. 25 What Levinas actually means by the Other who "remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign"26 and whether it can be so neatly identified with the God of Judaism as Badiou states, are complex questions calling for a close exegesis of Levinass writings. If, however, what Badiou says about Levinas is roughly correct,27 then it does diverge from what I envision as an ethics of subjection. The experience of what Levinas calls my "radical passivity" in the face of the powers of the world, of my finitude, vulnerability, and certain death, belong to me as much as my own spontaneity, freedom, and reflexivity. Subjection is simply the other side of what modern philosophy has identified as subjectivity and is no less central to my being and to my dignity. When I encounter another human being, I recognize in the abrasions, wounds, tears, and cries a fellow subjectum. Without this recognition of my own lack of safety and my exposure in the vulnerability of the other I do not think there can be any ethics. What I do not witness is anything like an infinite depth, as such, or a theological Altogether-Other in the face. There is, of course, more stirring in the wounds and cries of the other than what can be described phenomenologically, and this is what I earlier called the void of suffering. The immense hole in being left by the deaths of those who were murdered in the World Trade Center on September 11 and the rips and agonies in their friends and relatives are nothing I have access to either in understanding or empathetic compassion. There is in that way some "altogether-other" and it cannot be comprehended. Religiously, I may believe that
25 26 27

Hallward, from the Introduction to Badiou's Ethics, xxxv. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194. Catherine Chalier, in her exquisite comparison of Kant and Levinas, also takes Levinas to be

appealing to God in the core of the ethical relation: "It is, in the first place, to the mind of the responsible subject that the idea of God comes (down), at the very instant of the subject's obligation, at the instant of its uniqueness before its neighbor," What Ought I to Do? 162.

20 this is the epiphanic appearance of the Infinite; I may name this as transcendence or as God. But I agree with Badiou, that to assume that our ethical responsibilities toward the other require this is to assume too much for philosophical ethics. I don't need the echo of the infinite in the particular abject nature of suffering to be kicked from my egocentric complacency and aroused to moral action. The sheer evidence of dismembered bodies, burns, scars, blind eyes, and weeping will have to suffice. From the standpoint of an ethics of subjection there is even something unnecessary or superfluous about the void of suffering in the subject bearers of evil. For Levinas, the return to being from the ethical encounter with the face and its infinite depths is fraught with the danger the subject will reduce the other to a "like-me," totalizing and violating the space of absolute alterity. As Chalier puts it, "Levinas conceives of the moral subject's awakening, or the emergence of the human in being, as a response to that pre-originary subjection which is not a happenstance of being."28 But if there really is something inaccessible about suffering itself, about the 'other' side of what is manifestly finite, subjected, and damaged, then to a certain extent it is irrelevant to ethics, as irrelevant as the judgment of moral progress in the subject-agent. Let me take the parent-child relation again as an example. Suppose the child to exhibit the symptoms of an illness. Are not the proper "ethical" questions for the parent to ask questions of measure and mathematical multiples: How high is the fever? How long has it lasted? How far is the hospital? Can she get out of bed? Has this happened before? These are the questions of the doctor, the rescue squads and the police. They are questions about being, about detail, causes and effects. Ethically our response to the needs of must be reduced to a positivity simply because we have access to nothing but the symptoms, which are like mine. Our primary moral responsibility is to treat the symptoms that show up in being, not the radically other with whom I cannot identify. Say we observe someone whose hands have been chopped off with a machete. How would we characterize this? Would it not be slightly absurd to say, "He had his limbs severed and he suffered," as though the cruel amputation were not horror enough. Think of the idiocy in the common platitude: "She died of cancer, but thank God, she did not suffer", as though the devastating annihilation of the human by a tumor were not evil itself. For ethics, then, the only
28

Ibid., 58.

21 suffering that matters are the visible effects of the onslaught of the world. All other suffering is excessive and inaccessible. Therefore, it is in being, indeed in the midst of the most elemental facts about ourselves and other people, that we ethically encounter others by responding to their needs and helping them as best we can It is precisely by identifying being and not pretending that we know any thing about suffering, other than it is a hollow in the midst of being, that we can act responsibly. What worries me about Levinas is that by going beyond being to what he regards as the ethics of absolute alterity, he risks allowing the sheer, almost banal facticity of suffering to be swallowed in the infinite depths of transcendence. Indeed, it seems to me that Levinas too often over emphasizes the importance of the emergence of the subject and the inner good in the ethical encounter, as though the point of meeting the suffering human being was to come to an awareness of the good within oneself and not to heal and repair. I agree with Chalier's observation that Levinas's "analyses adopt the point of view of the moral subject, not that of a person who might be the object of its solicitude."29 Ethics has limits; there are situations like the Holocaust where to speak of a moral responsibility to heal and repair seems pathetic. But an ethics that would be oriented to the vulnerabilities of the subjected (which are others, of course, but also myself) needs to address the mutilation, dismemberment, the chronology of torture, the numbers incarcerated, the look of the bodies, the narratives, the blood counts, the mines knives, machetes, and poisons. Evil really is all that. When the mind does its work, it plunges into being, into mathematical multiples and starts counting the cells, the graveyards, and bullet wounds. Rational practical deliberation is always about the facts that encircle the void inaccessible to deliberation and practical reason.30
29 30

Ibid, p. 162. Suffering is often identified with pain, precisely because pain appears to be that aspect of the

inner experience of suffering which is comprehensible and comparable. Suffering itself is not an incomprehensible void if I can regard it as a pain "like" mine and compassionately identify with it. Pain of course is not superfluous to the ethical situation, but it is not the inaccessible remainder behind the objective evidence of death and mutilation, hunger and sickness. We know what pain is. Indeed, whereas philosophers have been remarkably silent about suffering over the centuries, they have had a great deal to say about pain. But I take pain to be another symptom of suffering,

22

Conclusion: Victimization and Other Risks In this paper I have put forward a perspective that holds suffering to lie in the root condition of the human being. It is a universal condition to which all men in their finitude, corporeality, and contingency are subject, exposing them to the suppression or annihilation of their exuberant life; and that is nothing else than an exposure to evil, however, it comes to be. Root or radical evil, therefore, resides not in the bent will as Kant thought, or in the perverted truth event, as Badiou has claimed, but in the ineradicable propensity to be devastated and to be murdered. The point of studying how evil comes to be is to stop it! The aim of ethics is to help those who suffer, the multitude of the help-less. I have contended, furthermore, that this passive, subjected condition is part of our subjectivity and is not any less human or dignified than our freedom and spontaneity. It is part of our being, and in fact, in ethical relationships it is all that we have access too. I reject the idea that one human being can empathize with, feel for, grasp, or minister to the void that is the inner reality of suffering. Not only are the experiences of those destroyed in the Holocaust (the dead and the deadened), of those destroyed in the September 11 murders (the dead and their families), of those million Tutsis brutally killed in the course of a few weeks of massacre in Rwanda, lost to us who think about such horrors, but even the minor agonies of a single individual are an abyss we cannot enter or compare. That is why I have provocatively said that suffering, and indeed evil itself, are superfluous for an ethics that concerns itself with the very visible wounds in being. In this sense suffering is nothing beyond the facts. For an ethical consciousness there is not the disease of Aids plus suffering; there is Aids. There is not torture plus
not suffering itself. It is a common aspect of subjection, which may or may not be evil, may or may not accompany other manifestation of evil like disease and genocide. Getting rid of pain is part of what I would call the "police work" of ethics. But it is not the whole of suffering, which is the inaccessible specter haunting the brutal facts to which we have access. For an interesting comparison of Levinas with nonwestern views on suffering, specifically Mahayana Buddhism, see Annabella Pitkin, "Scandalous Ethics: Infinite Presence with Suffering," Journal of Consciousness Studies, 231-46.

23 suffering; there is torture. Suffering functions as a spectral absence calling forth a response that knows and can only know the facts of Aids and torture. Without the suffering, of course, there would be no imperative to help. There would be only the "so what of the events and numbers, and that is what is right about Kant's, Badiou's, and Levinas's reluctance to ground an ethics in being. But the suffering is a formal call to action that comes to us through the tears and lacerations. Suffering itself cannot be remedied by action. What can be remedied are the numbers, the facts, the identifiable and countable needs, that is, those very tears and lacerations. I would like to conclude by mentioning two important difficulties this ethics of subjection faces: the problem of justice and the problem of victimization. By shifting the focus from the doer to the evil bearer one risks ignoring importance of moral guilt and accountability for one's actions. One reason so much emphasis has been placed on the evildoer in philosophical ethics is because justice demands it. The point of trying to understand and judge the causes of evil, particularly in the choices and actions of men, is not simply to aid their victims, but to find rational principles for administering justice and punishment. If everyone can in some way be construed to be a "victim" or, as I prefer to say, a subject in subjection, then how would we know how to distinguish our duties to the suffering murderer, say, from those we owe to the one murdered. If ethics is to be taken as a response to suffering, do we not need to be careful about whose suffering it is? There is the matter of what Levinas called duties to the third party, to the one who is herself damaged by the other whose damage one is trying to repair. Is there any way an ethics of subjection, with its stress on evil as suffered, to account for justice and just discriminations? This is a very difficult problem and, at this stage, I fear, I have no adequate reply. What I do believe is that conceptions of justice in our ethical and legal thinking have paid far too much attention to the perpetrators of human misery. That is why I applaud the efforts of someone like the wonderful Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, to give a name and a face to those who suffer, without the illusion that these efforts of themselves will right wrongs or bring evil men to justice. Murakami has written a book of interviews with victims of the 1996 sarin gas attack on the Japanese subways in which thirteen people were killed. He states in his introduction that "The Japanese media had

24 bombarded us with so many in-depth profiles of the Aum cult perpetrators--'the attacker'-forming such as slick, seductive narrative citizen--the 'victim' was almost an afterthought." It was to correct this that Murakami interviewed survivors and relatives of the dead, "to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas."31 Murakami does not ask himself whether the "victims" were themselves evildoers or whether they had themselves caused more harm than they suffered. The point of philosophical ethics, as I see it, is to provide theoretical support and conceptual tools for the kind of approach Murakami has taken to evil. This does not exclude considerations of justice, but places them in the context of what those who have been subjected to evil need. Judgments about the propensity of men to do wrong and the ways in which they may be dealt with in a legal system are also part of what it means to assist people. Sometimes all that can be done to help the annihilated is to see that justice is done. A second problem. In his book, The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj _i_ek, echoes the concern Badiou expressed about the tendency of a human rights ethics to reduce the other to a victim, whose status for the "do-gooder" is not that of an imaginative, free subject.32 The same concern pertains to an ethic of subjection, since to provide help and remedies for someone whose subjectivity has been reduced to a kind of passivity before the onslaught of the world may indeed frustrate the subject's demand to be taken seriously as a subject. What a person desires is not just remedies for her suffering. She may be hungry but want more than bread. He may be homeless but want more than a room. I may be naked, but I want more than clothes. For Zizek and Badiou ethical action must be tied to a liberating politics to break the "suffocating closure" of solicitation and "give expression to a dimension beyond particularity." 33 No ethical theory should be so obsessed with evil and suffering that it works to stifle the creative imagination of the human subject. One of the points Badiou stresses is that any of our adventures, achievements, and revolutions will create misery. Evil and suffering are the inevitable byproducts of visions of the good, which ruptures the status quo. Wouldn't a concern with
31 32 33

Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, 6. _i_ek, Ticklish Subject, 204. Also, The Fragile Absolute, 58-9. Ibid., p. 205

25 subjection and the debased condition of mankind shortchange human growth, our need to reach for visionary ideals, and hence the very freedom and maturation of humanity? Indeed, _i_ek provocatively contends that given the strictures of contemporary capitalist society and the global economy, the good will inevitably appear to many to be a radical evil, for such a good would be linked to utopian, revolutionary politics that shakes the world.34 This certainly creates difficulties for my subjection-oriented point of view and here too I have no strong response to offer. I agree that an ethics that speaks of a universal condition of subjection runs the risk _i_ek and Badiou raise. Too often, when social and political mechanisms try to address suffering, through welfare programs for example, they tend to de-humanize the human subject by reducing a person to a set of particular needs and demands, without respecting the buoyant subjectivity, the infinite free self, the engaged imagination of "the other." I have, however, taken special care to avoid the term "victim" in this paper. To characterize someone as a victim is already to spin the reality of suffering into something that happens to "an other," who in his or her passivity needs "my help." and who is not "like me" an active, free agent, Being a victim of famine, of genocide, of leukemia or of Aids, can be taken to be a bit of rotten luck for which one can try to feel compassion from a superior standpoint of health and autonomy, but which can never be identified as the universal, all embracing condition of mankind. Victim-hood is the state of the anti-subject, of the object over and against the autonomous moral agent. What I have suggested, however, is that subjection to the onslaught of the world is not an accidental facet of the human being, less noble than subjectivity. It is subjectivity's other side, a moment of subjectivity itself. The way to avoid seeing others as victims unlike us, strange and pitiable objects of our attentions, is to recognize that in them we see our own wounded and traumatized being. That is why I have used instead of "victim," ungainly terms like the "subjected subject-bearer of evil." But I must add a sobering coda to this. We have to recognize a limit to what we can know about the effects of our actions and to admit that acting for the sake of others must in some way logically perpetuate their subjection. All forms of assistance risk
34

See _i_ek, The Fragile Absolute, 122, in which he defines Christianity as radical evil in

relation to the complacent Roman empire.

26 humiliation and new forms of suffering. From my standpoint, radical evil is located in the fact that we are always subject to the motions and actions of another. Hence, even in the gestures of ethics, someone is being subjected to the care of someone else. But that is inescapable since the very act of ethics is already placing someone else into subjection, transforming them into a passivity. Whether these gestures produce evil or not we cannot know a priori, since suffering and evil undergone are mysteries apart from their phenomenal symptoms. My care for those who suffer goes into a void that is suffering itself, whose effects in space and time cannot be predicted. It makes sense to respond to human hurt by managing weapons, building and/or tearing down prisons, repairing injuries, serving food, providing medicine and clothing. We cannot presume to know, however, what all this will accomplish ultimately. We do our best, but really whether the inner cry and anguish of suffering is relieved or not, or even whether that is a good thing for a particular human being, we cannot tell. When our child has a fever we try to bring down the fever. With the accident victim we try to repair the wounds. But it must be admitted that our very solicitations may already victimize, debase and traumatize the person. We need, then, to act with practical folly as much as with practical wisdom or with what Levinas called "holy impudence." That is a much as to say, an ethical act is always one of hope, that one has subjected the needs of the other to the good rather than to deeper evil.

27 References

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951).

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001). Originally published as Lethique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal (Editions Hatier, 1998).

___________. Saint Paul et la fondation de luniversalisme (Paris: PUP, 1997).

Bernstein, Richard J. Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002),

Chalier, Catherine. What Ought I to Do: Morality in Kant and Levinas. Translated by, Jane Marie Todd. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

Copjec, Joan, ed. Radical Evil. (London, Verso, 1996).

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of practical reason (1788) 3rd Edition. Translated by Lewis White Beck. (New York: Macmillan. 1993).

_____________. Religion within the boundaries of mere reason (1793). Translated by George di Giovanni in Immanuel Kant: Religion and Rational Theology, Allen Wood and George di Giovanni editors. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Kekes, John. Facing Evil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Hallward, Peter. "Ethics without others: A reply to Critchley on Badiou's Ethics. Radical Philosophy 102 July/Aug 2000. 27-30.

28 Levinas, Emmanuel. entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

________________. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Murakami, Haruki. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel. (London: The Harvill Press, 2000).

Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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Peukert, Helmut, "Unconditional Responsibility for the Other: The Holocaust and the Thinking of Emmanuel Levinas" in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, editors. Postmodernism and the Holocaust. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1984.

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Ramsey, Nancy. "A Story of Hope and Horror on Romania's Streets," New York Times, June 30, 2002.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute (London and New York: Verso, 2000).

__________. Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

__________. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999).