There is a kind of evil which is mysterious because its motive seems not to be to destroy specific beings for specific reasons, but to negate being as such. Shakespeare’s Iago seems to fall into this rare category. Hannah Arendt speculates that the Holocaust was not so much a question of killing human beings for human reasons, as of seeking to annihilate the concept of the human as such.4 This sort of evil is a Satanic parody of the divine, finding in the act of destruction the sort of orgasmic release which one can imagine God finding in the act of creation. It is evil as nihilism – a cackle of mocking laughter at the whole solemnly farcical assumption that anything merely human could ever matter. In its vulgarly knowing way, it delights in unmasking human value as a pretentious sham. It is a raging, vindictive fury at existence as such. It is the evil of the Nazi death camps rather than of a hired assassin, or even of a massacre carried out for some political end. It is not the same kind of evil as most terrorism, which is malign but which has a point.
The other face of evil appears exactly the opposite. This kind of evil wants to destroy non-being rather than create it. It sees non-being as slimy, impure and insidious, a nameless threat to one’s integrity of selfhood. This dreadful infiltration of one’s identity has no palpable form in itself, and thus provokes paranoia in its supposed victims. It is everywhere and nowhere. It therefore breeds a desire to lend this hideous force a local name and habitation. The names are in fact legion: Jew, Arab, Communist, woman, homosexual, or indeed most permutations of the set. This is evil as seen from the standpoint of those who have a surfeit of being rather than an insufficiency of it. They cannot accept the unspeakable truth that the slimy, contagious stuff they wage war upon, far from being alien, is as close to them as breathing. Non-being is what we are made of. Above all, they cannot acknowledge desire, since to desire is to lack. Instead of holding fast to their desire, they stuff it full of fetishes. To do this is also to disavow the purest vacancy of all, death, which the hollow at the heart of our longing prefigures.
Perhaps this can help to explain why so many were murdered in the Holocaust. There is a diabolical attraction in the idea of absolute destruction. The perverse perfection of the scheme, the unflawed purity of it, the lack of messy loose ends or contingent left-overs, is what seduces the nihilistic mind. In any case, to leave even the slightest fragment of this non-being intact is to allow it to spawn and smother you once more. The trouble is that non-being, by definition, cannot be destroyed. The entire enterprise is insanely self-defeating, as you try to exterminate non-being by creating even more of the stuff around you.
Caught in this savagely despairing circle, the whole project is incapable of coming to an end, which is another reason why it devours so many lives. A further reason is that the urge to annihilate is really in love with itself – rather as the drive to accumulate ends up by taking itself as the object of its own desire, tossing aside the various objects it stumbles across like a sulky child, and reaping satisfaction only from its own perpetual motion. In any case, as long as you are alive, you will never be able to extinguish the non-being at the heart of yourself.
The kind of evil which fears for its own fullness of being involves a megalomaniac overvaluing of the self. Hell is the living death of those who regard themselves as too valuable to die. Whereas the kind of evil which reaps obscene delight from the dissolution of the self, fuelled as it is by what Freud knows as the death drive, seeks to expunge value itself. In the epoch of modernity, these two drives become lethally intertwined -for the point about the rampantly assertive will, the sovereign source of all value, is that it crushes the things around it to nothing, and thus leaves them worthless and depleted. It is this deadly combination of voluntarism and nihilism which among other things characterizes the modern era. There is a stark image of it in Gerald Crich of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, an animated vacancy leashed together only by the sheer inward force of his will-power. The manic affirmation of the self becomes a defence against its sweetly seductive emptiness. Evil is just this dialectic pressed to a horrific extreme.
The typical modern dilemma, in short, is that both expressing and repressing the death drive leave you drained of being. Indeed, the rapacious will is just the death drive turned outwards, a way of cheating death which flees straight into its alluring embrace. The subject of modernity asserts his Promethean will in a void of his own creating, one which reduces the works of the will itself to nothing. In subjugating the world around it, the will abolishes all constraints upon its own action, but in the same act undercuts its own heroic projects. When all is permitted, nothing is valuable. The godlike self is the one most anguished in its solitude. Postmodernism likewise dissolves away constraints, but it breaks the deathly circuit of nihilism and voluntarism by liquefying the will as well. The autonomous self is dismantled, as freedom is detached from the dominative will and relocated in the play of desire.
The two faces of evil are secretly one. What they have in common is a horror of impurity. It is just that this can sometimes present itself as an unspeakable slime which invades your fullness of being, and sometimes as the sickening surplus of being itself. For those who feel that being itself is obscenely spawning, purity lies in non-being. Their desire, to adopt Wittgenstein’s words, is to scramble from the rough ground to the pure ice.
The fundamentalist, of course, is not necessarily evil. But he reaches for his watertight principles because he feels an abyss of non-being yawning beneath his feet. It is the unbearable lightness of being which causes him to feel so heavy. The most popular alternative to fundamentalism at the moment is some form of pragmatism. Indeed, the United States is split down the middle between the two. But to pit the latter against the former is in some ways like proposing oxygen as a palliative to fire. Pragmatism may usefully counter the bigotry of fundamentalism, but it also helps to breed it. It is because a pragmatic social order spurns fundamental values, riding roughshod over people’s pieties and traditional allegiances, that men and women begin to assert their identities so virulently. Family values and sex for sale are sides of the same coin. For every corporation executive in search of a fresh corner of the globe to exploit, there is a nationalist thug who is prepared to kill to keep him out.
In any case, states which worship the anarchy of the marketplace need to secrete a few absolute values up their sleeve. The more devastation and instability an unbridled market creates, the more illiberal a state you need to contain it. As freedom comes to be defended by more brutally authoritarian means, the gap between what you actually do and what you claim to believe in grows disablingly apparent. This is not a problem for the kind of Islamic fundamentalism which simply wants a brutally benighted state, rather than enlightened values defended by increasingly benighted means.
When the very foundations of your civilization are literally under fire, however, pragmatism in the theoretical sense of the word seems altogether too lightweight, laid-back a response. What is necessary instead is to oppose a bad sense of non-being with a good one. We have seen that there is a fascination with non-being, as well as a disavowal of it, which are typical of certain kinds of evil. But there is another sense of non-being which is constructive rather than corrosive. One recalls the Irish novelist Laurence Sterne putting in a good word for the idea of nothing, considering, as he remarks, ‘what worse things there are in the world’. There is a fertile form of dissolution as well as a sinister one. It can be glimpsed in Marx’s reference to the proletariat as a ‘class which is the dissolution of all classes’, signifying as it does ‘a total loss of humanity’. It represents the ‘non-being’ of those who have been shut out of the current system, who have no real stake in it, and who thus serve as an empty signifier of an alternative future. And this is a constantly growing population.
It is, to be sure, exactly among the wretched and dispossessed that fundamentalism finds its most fertile breeding ground. In the figure of the suicide bomber, the non-being of dispossession turns into a more deathly kind of
negation. The suicide bomber does not shift from despair to hope; his weapon is despair itself. There is an ancient tragic faith that strength flows from the very depths of abjection. Those who fall to the bottom of the system are in a sense free of it, and thus at liberty to build an alternative. If you can fall no further you can only move upwards, plucking new life from the jaws of defeat. To have nothing to lose is to be formidably powerful. Yet it is clear that this tragic freedom can take on destructive forms like terrorism quite as much as it can lead to more positive currents of social change.
Our present political order is based upon the non-being of human deprivation. What we need to replace it with is a political order which is also based upon non-being – but non-being as an awareness of human frailty and unfoundedness. Only this can stem the hubris to which fundamentalism is a desperate, diseased reaction. Tragedy reminds us of how hard it is, in confronting non-being, not to undo ourselves in the process. How can one look upon that horror and live? At the same time, it reminds us that a way of life which lacks the courage to make this traumatic encounter finally lacks the strength to survive. Only through encountering this failure can it flourish. The non-being at the heart of us is what disturbs our dreams and flaws our projects. But it is also the price we pay for the chance of a brighter future. It is the way we keep faith with the open-ended nature of humanity, and is thus a source of hope.
We can never be ‘after theory’, in the sense that there can be no reflective human life without it. We can simply run out of particular styles of thinking, as our situation changes. With the launch of a new global narrative of capitalism, along with the so-called war on terror, it may well be that the style of thinking known as postmodernism is now approaching an end. It was, after all, the theory which assured us that grand narratives were a thing of the past. Perhaps we will be able to see it, in retrospect, as one of the little narratives of which it has been so fond. This, however, presents cultural theory with a fresh challenge. If it is to engage with an ambitious global history, it must have answerable resources of its own, equal in depth and scope to the situation it confronts. It cannot afford simply to keep recounting the same narratives of class, race and gender, indispensable as these topics are. It needs to chance its arm, break out of a rather stifling orthodoxy and explore new topics, not least those of which it has so far been unreasonably shy. This book has been an opening move in that inquiry.
Index
Adorno, Theodor 30, 70, 77, 174, 210
Althusser, Louis 1, 2, 34, 37
Anderson, Perry 16, 51
Aquinas, Thomas 78, 108
Archer, Jeffrey 3, 101
Arendt, Hannah 216
Aristotle 6, 78, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128–9, 130–31, 135, 142, 168, 170
Arnold, Matthew 82, 154
Augustine, St 189
Austen, Jane 3, 96, 101
Badiou, Alain 155, 174
Barthes, Roland 1, 2, 34, 37, 5i. 65, 77
Baudrillard, Jean 50
Beckett, Samuel 57–8, 65
Benjamin, Walter 30, 180
Bentham, Jeremy 163
Berkeley, George 208
Best, George 113–15
Blake, William 14
Bloch, Ernst 30
Bourdieu, Pierre 1, 35
Brecht, Bertolt 17, 46, 65, 87, 131
Burke, Edmund 151
Bush, George 160
Byron 89
Carlyle, Thomas 82
Celan, Paul 78
Cixous, Héléne 1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 75
Condorcet, Marquis de 33
Connolly, James 32
Conrad, Joseph 215
Darwin, Charles 81
Davidson, Donald 65
Dawkins, Richard 177
Derrida, Jacques 1, 2, 14, 35, 51, 65, 70, 75, 92, 153–4, 174
Dostoevsky 194
Eliot, George 78, 133
Eliot, T.S. 65, 75, 179
Fanon 25, 32
Fielding, Henry 113, 117
Fish, Stanley 54, 58
Foot, Philippa 124–5
Foucault, Michel 1, 14, 35, 36, 37, 50, 51, 65, 77, 81–2, 86
Freud, Sigmund 5, 63, 78, 86, 87, 138, 169, 208, 210
Gandhi, Mahatma 32
Goldmann, Lucien 30
Gonne, Maud 44
Gramsci, Antonio 31, 46
Gramsci, Walter 30
Habermas, Jurgen 1, 81–2, 169
Hall, Stuart 40
Hardt, Michael 136
Hegel 59, 123, 209
Heidegger, Martin 4, 65, 70, 210
Herrick, Robert 3
Hitler, Adolf 142
Horkheimer, Max 30
Hume, David 208
Huxley 81
Irigaray, Luce 1
Jagger, Mick 125
James, Henry 143, 144
Jameson, Fredric 1, 30, 77, 143
Jesus 146, 147, 176, 204–5, 107
Johnson, Lyndon 27
Johnson, Samuel 75
Joyce, James 64, 78
Kafka 64
Kant, Immanuel 124, 153
Kissenger, Henry 200
Kristeva, Julia 1, 34, 36, 37, 65, 81
Lacan, Jacques 1, 51
Larkin, Philip 96
Lawrence, D.H. 70–71, 95, 218
Leavis, F.R. 154
Lefebvre, Henri 35
Lenin, Vladimir 8, 32
Levi-Strauss, Claude 1, 34
Levinas, Emmanuel 4, 153
Lewis, Cecil Day 86
Locke, John 163
Lukacs, Georg 30
Lyotard, Jean-Frangois 34, 37, 38, 50,71, 153, 174
MacIntyre, Alasdair 155, 157, 168, 169
Man, Paul de 153
Mann, Thomas 64, 90
Mao Tse-tung 46
Marcuse, Herbert 25, 30, 31–2
Markievicz, Constance 44
Marx, Karl 6, 31, 42, 123, 143, 144, 158, 170, 171, 172
Maxwell, Robert 89–90
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 32, 212
Miller, J. Hillis 153
Morris, William 44
Musil, Robert 158
Negri, Antonio 136
Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 14, 58, 63, 155, 187, 197, 198
Nightingale, Florence 89
O’Grady, Paul 104
O’Neill, John 120–21
Orwell, George 75
Paisley, Ian 177
Pascal, Blaise 194, 209
Paul, St 145, 147, 175
Picasso 17
Pitt, Brad 54
Plato 23
Proust 64, 65
Reagan, Ronald 43
Reich, Wilhelm 25, 30, 31
Rimbaud, Arthur 17, 40
Rorty, Richard 54, 58, 72, 151
Rousseau 81
Ruskin 32
Said, Edward 1, 10
Sartre, Jean-Paul 30, 36, 81
Saussure, Ferdinand de 2
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 23
Schoenberg 65
Schopenhauer 178, 209–10
Sebald, W.G. 188
Shakespeare, William 137, 181–4
Sontag, Susan 81–2
Spinoza 194
Stalin, Joseph 37
Sterne, Laurence 220
Stirner, Max 210
Streisand, Barbra 54
Taylor, A.J.P. 201
Thatcher, Margaret 43
Thomas, Edward 209
Tolstoy 32
Voltaire 81
Waugh, Evelyn 91
Wilde, Oscar 14, 40, 44
Williams, Bernard 104, 109
Williams, Raymond 1, 35, 81–2, 136
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 130, 133, 190, 191–2, 206, 209
Yahweh 174–5, 77
Yeats, W.B. 44, 163, 181
Young, Robert J.C. 32
1 . By ‘postmodern’, I mean, roughly speaking, the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to huma
n existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is sceptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity.
2 . Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, London, 1998, pp. 86 and 85.
1 . See Andrew Bowie (ed.),Friedrich Schleiermacher: Hermeneutics and Criticism, Cambridge, 1998, p. xix.
2 . Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford, 2001, p. 142. I am indebted to this excellent study for several of the points made here.
1 . ‘Taig’ is a derogatory term for Gaelic-Irish Catholics.
2 . Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, London, 1983, p. 91.
3 . See, for example, Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge, 1989, and Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, Oxford, 1989.
4 . See Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, London, 1999, ch. 4.
5 . Quoted in Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, p. 27.
1 . Some examples: Theodor Adorno on Brecht, Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire, Paul de Man on Pr oust, Fredric Jameson on Conrad, Julia Kristeva on Mallarmé, Geoffrey Hartman on Wordsworth, Roland Barthes on Balzac, Franco Moretti on Goethe, Harold Bloom on Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. The list could be greatly extended.
1 . For an excellent defence of the notion of truth as absolute, see Paul O’Grady, Relativism, Chesham, Bucks, 2002, ch. 2. See also Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton and Oxford, 2002, p. 258f.
2 . See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, Mass., 1985, p. 156.
3 . See John O’Neill, The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics, London, 1998, ch. 1. See also Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford, 1996, pp. 97–104.