evilandtestimony

Hypatia vol. 18, no. 2 (Spring 2003) \u00a9 by Ewa Ziarek

Evil and Testimony:

Ethics \u201cafter\u201d Postmodernism

EWA ZIAREK

Two different books share the same concern about the relation between ethics

and postmodernism. As its title suggests, the collection of essays, Evil after

Postmodernism (2001), edited by Jennifer L. Geddes, approaches this question

by focusing on the problem of evil, while Giorgio Agamben\u2019s Remnants of Aus-

chwitz (1999) investigates this relation through an ongoing ethico-political

commentary on the holocaust survivors\u2019 testimonies.

Taken as a whole, Evil after Postmodernism, an interdisciplinary collection

engaging philosophy, history, sociology, literature, and sociology, asks not

only whether postmodernism has changed our thinking about evil, but more importantly, whether it can provide resources for approaching evil beyond the opposition between fundamentalism and moral relativism. Conversely, it

explores the ways in which historical experiences of evil challenge postmodern

thought. The essays are grouped into three sections: \u201cHistories,\u201d which explores

the implications of the postmodern break for moral re\ue000ection, \u201cNarratives,\u201d which explores the ways stories form the cultural understanding of evil, and \u201cEthics,\u201d which focuses on the dilemmas and rede\ue001 nitions of moral judgment in postmodern culture.

The \u201cHistories\u201d section opens with Berel Lang\u2019s essay, \u201cEvil Inside and Outside History: The Post-Holocaust vs. The Postmodern,\u201d which focuses on the place of the holocaust in the moral history and on the genealogy of the ethics in postmodern thought. Although the importance of the essay lies in

the acknowledgment of the importance of the holocaust for postmodern ethics,

the essay ultimately contests the postmodern break by inscribing the holocaust within the continuous history of evil. What is at stake in this rejection of the historical and epistemological rupture of postmodernity is not only a call for the historical and moral re\ue000ection on the signi\ue001cance of the holocaust but

198

Hypatia

ultimately an attempt to rescue a coherent sense of moral history, historical

evidence, and \u201ca causal or explanatory material history\u201d (17).

This ethos of recovery of the categories contested by postmodernism also per-

meates the next essay in this section, Larry D. Bouchard\u2019s \u201cOn Contingency and

Culpability: Is the Postmodern Post-Tragic?\u201d Bouchard wants to rescue a tragic paradigm as an enabling context not only for witnessing suffering and evil but also for safeguarding religious imagination. By revising tragedy in the context of

postmodern fragmentation, he argues that tragedy can again become compelling

as a mode of inquiry \u201cinto areas of contingency that bear upon religious imagina-

tion\u201d: such as the contingencies of mystery, communities, and grace (33).

Opening the \u201cNarratives\u201d section, Roger Shattuck\u2019s \u201cNarrating Evil\u201d is the

strongest indictment of postmodernism from a high moral ground. Not surpris-

ingly, in this essay, the \ue001 lm Pulp Fiction (1994) becomes an emblem of the post-

modern \u201ccool\u201d in complicity with criminal violence, a complicity that has been

anticipated, however, by modern narratives that transform evil into a seductive

category of transgression. After such a predictable rejection of postmodernism, it was a relief to read a thoughtful and complex article, David B. Morris\u2019s \u201cThe Plot of Suffering: AIDS and Evil.\u201d Combining cultural speci\ue001city and theoretical originality, Morris\u2019s essay is one of the highlights of this collection. The essay inquires into the ways the pandemic of AIDS has reshaped postmodern notions of evil, suffering, illness, and sexuality. By exploring the multitude of con\ue000 icting narratives that either blame the AIDS patients or present them as helpless victims in the grip of a hideous disease, Morris examines the complex

intersections between medicine and ethics, between the biological and cultural

practices structuring the meaning of illness and suffering. In response to these

narratives, especially those that blame the patients, Morris explores the possible

ethical resources in a postmodern transformation of the meaning of evil: instead

of regarding evil as the cause of suffering, Morris, after Emmanuel Levinas, sug-

gests that suffering, especially the suffering of the other, is itself evil and calls for

a response. There are two implications of this postmodern revision of evil. On

the one hand, it means that suffering no longer appears as a private but rather as

an \u201cinterhuman\u201d phenomenon, constructed by the proliferation of public \u201ctalk.\u201d

Yet, on the other hand, \u201cthe implicit promise\u201d of postmodern ethics resides not only in the contestation of cultural narratives but in the obligation to \u201credress the suffering that we have so thoroughly helped to shape\u201d (72).

The last section, \u201cEthics,\u201d begins with an ambitious attempt to replace the metaphysics of evil with a \u201csociology of evil.\u201d By contesting sociology\u2019s reluctance to analyze evil, Thomas Cushman\u2019s essay, \u201cThe Re\ue000exivity of Evil: Modernity and Moral Transgression in the War of Bosnia,\u201d provides a bril- liant rede\ue001 nition of evil as a form of social re\ue000ective action, aiming to in\ue000 ict

extreme harm on others. This new logic of evil also accounts for the \u201cagency\u201d of

global media and information \ue000ows. Within this double theoretical framework

Ewa Ziarek

199

the author discusses the atrocities committed during the war in Bosnia. The essay ends with a provocative and innovative rede\ue001 nition of the postmodern problematic of alterity.

In his \u201cOthers and Aliens: Between Good and Evil,\u201d Richard Kearney,

a name well-known to anyone interested in postmodern ethics, proposes to

supplement Jacques Derrida\u2019s ethics of hospitality with a hermeneutics of moral

judgment, phronesis, and catharsis. While deconstructive ethics contests the

paranoid polarization of alterity into welcomed, friendly others and threatening,

hostile aliens, and the corresponding division between the other and the self,

the ethics of judgment and cathartic mourning, according to Kearney, enables a

transition into praxis, a possibility of \u201cactive complaint\u201d and protest (111). The

important question that Kearney poses is how to think about ethics of hospital-

ity from the perspective of the victims of domination and violence.

Apart from Morris\u2019s, Kearney\u2019s, and Cushman\u2019s illuminating and provocative

essays, the rest of the collection presents its engagements with postmodernism in a somewhat genteel and general manner. This admirable lucidity comes at the price of avoiding the most important challenges, dif\ue001culties, and demands of postmodern thought. With the exception of the substantive discussions of Derrida and Paul Ricoeur by Kearney and of Levinas by Morris, there is a stunning paucity of interpretations of postmodern thinkers. In fact, there are

more references to Augustine, Emmanuel Kant, Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel,

or Fyodor Dostoyevsky than to Zygmunt Bauman, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, or Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard (each of these thinkers is alluded to only once and they are the only major postmodernists that are directly mentioned). My second reservation is intertwined with the \ue001 rst one: the very title \u201cEvil after Postmodernism\u201d implies that the problematics of evil and ethics is not an inherent inspiration of postmodern re\ue000ection. And in the context ofHyp a t i a it is especially disappointing that, with the exception of the introduction by Jennifer L. Geddes, there is no single contribution from a woman.

By focusing on the signi\ue001cance of Auschwitz for moral re\ue000ection, Agamben\u2019s

Remnants of Auschwitz challenges precisely the separation of the postmodern

and the ethical. If we can use the term \u201cpostmodern\u201d in reference to this text,

then Agamben\u2019s work is a stunning instance of postmodern thought grappling

with the political, philosophical, and ethical implications of the unprecedented

crime of the concentration camps. Continuing his previous investigations of bare life, language, negativity, and potentiality, Agamben forces us to rethink anew the intertwined questions of ethics, testimony, subjectivity, and modern biopower. As he puts it in the introduction, although the historical circum-

stances of the Nazi extermination of the Jews have been well documented, \u201cthe

same cannot be said for the ethical and political signi\ue001cance of the extermination, or even for a human understanding of what happened there\u2014that is, for its contemporary relevance\u201d (11).

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