Radical Evil, Subjection, and Alain Badiou’s 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 Kant’s 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.

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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 PhilosophicalInterrogation. (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

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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 Bundy’s 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 UniversityPress, 2002). Maria Pia Lara, editor, Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2001).

2 Alessandro Ferrara, in Pia Lara, Rethinking Evil, 173.3 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 4.4 Maria Pia Lara, Rethinking Evil, 2.

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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 Badiou’s 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.

Badiou’s 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

Nazi’s 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 Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001) will beinscribed parenthetically in the text.

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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

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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 one’s daily business. Badiou offers examples of truths-that-happen from

revolutionary politics (e.g. the French and Chinese Cultural Revolutions), art (Haydn’s

classicism or Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions), science (Grothendieck’s 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,

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Saint Paul articulates Christ’s 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 process…We 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. It’s 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 subject’s violation of the

consistency principle. This can happen in three general ways. First, as with the Nazis, one

can give one’s 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 fondationde l’universalisme, 1997.

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disaster by attempting to totalize one’s 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 Badiou’s 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). One’s 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 one’s 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 Badiou’s 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 Kant’s own discussion of radical evil as it appears in Part One of

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.

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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 Kant’s 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 Kant’s ethical

thinking, the thinking that is the source of contemporary ethics of human rights according

to Badiou (p. 8), then it turns out that Badiou’s 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 Kant’s 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 Kant, Religion, 838 Ibid., 88.9 Ibid., 86.

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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 one’s

principles, and one chooses totalizing power and contingencies, rather than the concrete

universality of truth. Evil represents a contamination of the purity of one’s 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 will’s 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 Kant’s

10 Ibid., 92.

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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

subject’s 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 Cooke’s claim: “To be congruent with the normative self-

understanding 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 children’s 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 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 187-88.15 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?

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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 one’s

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

Holocaust, 1998, 102.

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duty. Kant is right about this. For Kant that decision springs spontaneously from the

subject’s 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 being’s 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 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 73.18 Ibid., 20.

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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 sense…his 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 Badiou’s). 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 Ibid, 64.20 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 event—though 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 don’t 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, disgusting…in 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 Bentham’s 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 Levinas’s 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 piety…and 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 Levinas’s 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 sub-

jectum. 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 Hallward, from the Introduction to Badiou's Ethics, xxxv.26 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194.27 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 Ibid, p. 162.30 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 by-

products of visions of the good, which ruptures the status quo. Wouldn't a concern with

31 Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, 6.32 _i_ek, Ticklish Subject, 204. Also, The Fragile Absolute, 58-9.33 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

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___________. Saint Paul et la fondation de l’universalisme (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).

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_____________. Religion within the boundaries of mere reason (1793). Translated by

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28

Levinas, Emmanuel. entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B.

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