Talking about Evil

Psychoanalytic, Social, and Cultural Perspectives

Rina Lazar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138100596
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317328421
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How can we talk about evil? How can we make sense of its presence all around us? How can we come to terms with the sad fact that our involvement in doing or enabling evil is an interminable aspect of our lives in the world? This book is an attempt to engage these questions in a new way.

Written from within the complicated reality of Israel, the contributors to this book forge a collective effort to think about evil from multiple perspectives. A necessary effort, since psychoanalysis has been slow to account for the existence of evil, while philosophy and the social sciences have tended to neglect its psychological aspects.

The essays collected here join to form a wide canvas on which a portrait of evil gradually emerges, from the Bible, through the enlightenment to the Holocaust; from Kant, through Freud, Klein, Bromberg and Stein to Arendt, Agamben and Bauman; using literature, history, cinema, social theory and psychoanalysis.

Talking about Evil opens up a much needed space for thinking, in itself an antidote to evil. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars and students of philosophy, social theory and the humanities.

Chapter 1

Evil

Yolanda Gampel

We may ask ourselves two key questions regarding evil: how can we grasp the nature of evil, in both the individual and the socio-political space? And what is the place of memory in confronting evil?

We experience evil in a single, personal moment at the time of the attack or onslaught, yet we can only report it retroactively (“apres coup”), and each time we narrate the evil event, we delineate a further aspect of the situation where evil was revealed to us. Only through these depictions will it become possible to find a path which will allow us to think about evil. Memory tolerates the configuration, in different magnitudes and dimensions of that which is either absent or too traumatically present. It may allow the survivors of evil afterwards to find a representation in words, a metaphorization or mythologization of that which cannot be described.

Evil is one of the most ancient concerns of mankind. Mythology openly presents the forces of evil that lurk within people and that destroy every attempt to attain happiness. There is no world view that does not allocate a place to the powerful forces of evil, and there is no theology that does not include “bad” gods. Evil continually changes its form and content; it expresses and attaches itself in countless ways. Nevertheless, the existence of evil is a certainty. Evil cannot be stamped out or eradicated.

Ancient knowledge and the development of ideas alone are not sufficient to justify our interest in the problem of evil. Rather, events occurring around us shape our interest in this topic. In the last century we came to know the ultimate shape of evil as manifested during the Shoah, a unique, unprecedented historical event. The witnesses to the terrible events of the Shoa provide us with a portrait of evil based on turning the Other into an object, into nothing. This personification of sadism is actually less horrifying than the deadly efficiency of the “excellent” results, attained without any fear and with only one goal: to eliminate the existing order and replace it with an order of “tidiness and cleanliness” achieved through annihilation, in this case the annihilation of the Jews of Europe. The Shoah indeed ended with the cessation of the Second World War, but it represents a significant leap in the perpetration of evil, for nothing remains as it was before.

Alan Badiou (2001) discusses the problem of evil in an interview:

Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the good that compels me. The real question underlying the question of evil is the following: What is the good? All my philosophy strives to answer this question. For complex reasons, I give the good the name “truths” (in the plural). A truth is a concrete process that starts by an upheaval (an encounter, a general revolt, a surprising new invention), and develops as fidelity to the novelty thus experimented. A truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal. New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal: that which can interest, rightly, every human individual, according to his pure humanity (which I call his generic humanity). To become a subject (and not remain a simple human animal) is to participate in the coming into being of a universal novelty. That requires effort, endurance sometimes, and self-denial. I often say it’s necessary to be the “activist” of a truth. There is evil each time egoism leads to the renunciation of a truth. Then, one is de-subjectivized. Egoistic self-interest carries one away, risking the interruption of the whole progress of a truth (and thus of the good). One can, then, define evil in one phrase: evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.

One Shabbat morning, my five-year-old twin grandsons began to discuss God with me, and to question whether He really exists. I understood that they had earlier discussed this topic with Yonatan, my oldest grandson aged 11, who claimed that God was dead. The twins have great respect for Yonatan’s views, so then they tried to figure out how there could be a God after all. “If God does exist,” they said, “there must be one God for good people and another God for bad people. No way can there be one God for both the good and the bad.” I didn’t answer them at that moment, but now I can say what one possible answer might be, based on what I have learnt about the theory of evil and the Klipa (the husk or shell) in the Kabbala of Ha-Ari in the book by Isaiah Tishby (1942). During the Second World War, Tishby wrote his MA thesis on “The doctrine of evil and the Klipa in the Kabbala of Ha-Ari”, under the supervision of Gershom Scholem. The thesis was published as a book, and the second edition, published some 40 years later, carries a double, shockingly laconic dedication: “To my father and mother, who are imprisoned in the kingdom of Satan and hoping for a speedy redemption” (1942) and below that, a second line: “In memory of my father and mother who were imprisoned in the kingdom of Satan and hoped for a speedy redemption” (1984).

According to Tishby, whose work is based on Ha-Ari and on Ibn Tabul, evil has always been an inseparable part of creation and of godliness, contrary to earlier Kabbalah precepts where evil is regarded as a foreign element, external to godliness. Evil is deeply embedded within godliness, as a primeval dualism, as a tool for the Hanhaga (guidance) of the world. But here the myth is reversed and it turns towards the dimension of human freedom. It is indeed the presence of evil that enables the existence of the world and the continuation of the Creation by the hand of man, by means of human acts of Tikkun (repair).

Yahad-In Unum is a global humanitarian organization dedicated to identifying and commemorating the sites of Jewish and Roma mass executions in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. The organization was founded by Father Patrick Desbois, the Archbishop for Jewish Affairs and director of the Episcopal Committee for Catholic-Judeo Relations, under the auspices of the French Conference of Bishops.

Father Desbois’ grandfather was captured by the Germans during the Second World War and imprisoned at the Rawa Ruska camp on the Poland–Ukraine border. At the time Rawa Ruska was a village in the Ukraine with a 60-per-cent Jewish population, and the grandfather witnessed the killing of the Jews in that village. He himself survived thanks to the fact that he was a French prisoner of war.

Father Desbois (2007) embarked on his research because he felt that his grandfather had entrusted him with the task of raising awareness of the unknown and unreported events of the past. Desbois’ research covers what was then Soviet territory and includes the Ukraine, Romania, Moldavia and part of Poland. Until that time, the people living in those areas during the Second World War had refused to speak of the events of the war. They claimed that the killings had been carried out in secret and therefore they had known nothing of the locations or the methods of the executions. But the more Father Desbois delved into the past, the greater the number of people who came forward to speak.

“One day the head of the village took me to Rawa Ruska and introduced me to about fifty farmers who had been present at the killing of Jews. He encouraged them to speak while standing next to the ditch (where the Jews had been shot). Thus I learned that the executions had taken place in public, and that the witnesses were willing to speak. It became clear that the people whom we interviewed had not only seen the events, but had actually taken a role in them.”

These witnesses were now speaking about these events of their childhood for the first time, thanks in no small part to the influence of Father Desbois, himself a Catholic priest, on the local Catholic population, as well as widespread assistance from the local priests.

Following the analysis of the interviews, the villagers were grouped into several levels of involvement. The largest group were those who witnessed the semi-public executions. Some people reported that the Germans sent them away, but not so far away that they would be unable to see what was happening. The second group were those who freely chose to go and see the executions, after the whole village had been invited to do so.

Father Desbois (2007) related that in the village of Medjybij in the Ukraine, one of the women told him: “I will never forget the sound of the women’s shoes crunching on the gravel path as they walked towards the graves. This sound will always be the sound of the Shoah for me” (she said “Shoah” in Russian). He was astounded. This woman later added: “Oh yes, I forgot to tell you . . . ! My mother would return from the market and say: ‘We need to get dressed now; we are going to see the execution of the Jews.’”

Some people remained indoors, but watched the killings from their homes. This group includes those who found themselves close to the site of the executions simply by chance. Father Desbois remembers the testimony of a woman who, on her deathbed, said to her priest: “I will never understand why they killed more than 1,000 Jews right under my window.” And indeed, one could see the mound of earth piled up below her window from the grave that had been dug there. Some of the villagers had been ordered to dig the graves, to collect the corpses of the Jews, and to cover the graves.

There were also those who succeeded in profiting from these executions. Some went to the execution site to steal personal items from the murdered Jewish victims before the Germans looted the bodies, or to sell or trade cigarettes, alcohol or other goods. They even extracted gold teeth from the mouths of the victims and sold them secretly.

How did the interviewees interpret their behaviour at the time of the killings? Many people maintained a religious-Christian interpretation of the events. Those who witnessed the executions made the sign of the cross to protect themselves. The death of the Jews was regarded as a kind of reversal of the Way of the Cross (Via Dolorosa). In their understanding, Jesus had walked on his way to the cross, surrounded by Jews, and they had killed him. Now it was the Jews who were walking, surrounded by Christians, and it was the Jews who were about to be killed. In addition, the Christians drew a parallel between the conquering German army and that of the Romans. These people regarded the events as a kind of apocalypse (they frequently said: “We believed that the end of the world had come”).

Others felt that the death of the Jews was a kind of revenge on the Soviet system, on the Bolsheviks and the Kulaks. For those witnesses who had been victims of the Soviet regime, whose property had been confiscated and who had suffered the great famine, the murdering of Jews was regarded as an act of justice, intended to compensate the people for their suffering and the loss of their property.

The existence of this corpus of material, which now includes roughly 3,000 testimonies, shatters the exclusive dichotomy between victim and perpetrator, and adds the voice of a third party, that of the witness.

We are confronted with one such specific testimony in Otto Dov Kulka’s memoir, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death (2013), where he writes of his childhood in Auschwitz. His unique testimony is the product of many years of thinking and reflection. Kulka, born in Czechoslovakia in 1933, was deported together with his mother in September 1942, first to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz. His father was sent to Auschwitz in the same year, after first being interned in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. After the liberation, father and son immigrated to Israel; the mother did not survive. In Israel, Kulka became a professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this book he breaks his long silence and investigates the memories which have haunted him for seventy years. There are some horrifying moments, such as the torture of prisoners just before their execution, where he depicts the boundless evil of those dark days: he describes the execution of Russian prisoners of war who had tried to escape. This execution took place early in the evening. Row upon row of prisoners were arranged in a U- formation. In front of them were a number of gallows, and nearby several SS men and the condemned. In addition to the visual image of punishment, he remembers a tremendous silence, like a great muteness, and in both cases that image of punishment, of torment, the familiar command is heard: “Mütze-e-e-en ab!” – “Caps off!”. The prisoners, in one motion, removed their caps all together, and again – silence. Then the condemned were led to the gallows and their cries of heroism, of resistance, were shocking in the silence: “Za Stalina! Za rodinu!” – “For Stalin! For the homeland!” He remembers that at the first moment he refused to look, but then he looked straight ahead and watched the act of execution, and was present for the entire duration of the ceremony.

He interiorized these things and engraved this event in his heart! He felt that he must remember it, and must take revenge at a time of justice and retaliation. And at the same time, in stunning contrast, Kulka describes his first encounters with Beethoven and Schiller. The book provides a testimony of the most atrocious acts perpetrated by humans on their fellow men, and at the same time, an inspiring portrayal of the soul’s capacity for survival.

The historian Christopher Browning (1992) and the political scientist Daniel Goldhagen (1996) confront the topic of following orders and instructions by the Germans from a retroactive, much more recent perspective.

Both authors show that ordinary people, Germans who were not members of the SS, who were neither fanatical nor ideology-driven, later became the perpetrators of genocide after having been selected and indoctrinated by the Nazi regime. They differ sharply, however, in their attempt to explain the phenomenon of following orders and instructions. Browning contends that group dynamics are structured by universal human characteristics and socio-psychological factors, such as conformism, obedience to authority, and the pressures typically found in the army or the police. Goldhagen emphasizes the role of German culture and particularly of the “extermination” and the anti-Semitism which are so deeply rooted in that culture, and which led all the Germans to wish for the death of the Jews and to murder them in a frenzy of evil whenever the opportunity arose.

To quote Goldhagen:

My explanation – which is new to the scholarly literature on the perpetrators – is that the perpetrators, “ordinary Germans”, were animated by a particular type of antisemitism that led them to conclude that the Jews ought to die. The perpetrators’ beliefs, their particular brand of antisemitism, though obviously not the sole source, was, I maintain, a most significant and indispensable source of the perpetrators’ actions and must be at the center of any explanation of them. Simply put, the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say ‘no’.

During the preparation of this article and the profoundly distressing perception of evil which it engendered, I learned about the phenomenon of the Maras gangs in central America. These gangs of heavily tattooed young men, who will unhesitatingly commit any evil act or crime, evince a level of incomprehensible and intolerable evil. In order to be initiated into the gang, each new “applicant” is required to kill somebody. The killer then tattoos a tear on his face, around his eyes, one tear for each victim.

When did these boys ever play? When did they ever get a hug from their families? Do they have mothers? Their lives are filled with killing and torture. It seems that their only option for survival is to belong to such a gang.

What is the place of Freud’s “death drive” theory in the understanding of evil? In 1920 Freud put forward the existence of a force in human nature that operated against the pleasure principle and its imperatives of human self-preservation and gratification. Freud called this counterforce the Todestrieb – the “death drive”. The death drive is the most concealed element of the unconscious: it resides beyond the “pleasure principle”.

The First World War revealed to him that Death was an active force in the unconscious. It was no longer sufficient to explain the complex weave of drives on the basis of the sexual drive alone. There was also the inexorable presence of a drive toward destruction. Freud’s conviction on this point is so deeply rooted that he not only emphasizes the contrast between the two drives in still stronger terms, but he even reproaches himself and his previous work for his defensive attitude toward this scandalous discovery. Death was now seen as an active force in the unconscious. Freud’s somewhat pessimistic solution took the eventual form of an evil “death instinct” (Thanatos) doing eternal battle with a good “life instinct” (Eros), with evil ever dominating this tragic duel.

This pessimistic view of psychic reality as structurally bound by conflict and frustration leads Freud to suggest that evilness is primaril...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Talking About Evil
• The Relational Perspectives Book Series
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Evil
• 2 The Banality of Radical Evil
• 3 From The Universal to the Particular: An Intersubjective Psychoanalytic View of Evil
• 4 Three Forms of Post-Genocidal Violence in Beni Wircberg’s Memoir
• 5 The Two Holocausts of Avot Yeshurun
• 6 From The Scream to the Pieta: Murderous Mourning and Evil
• 7 Reflections on “Doing Evil”
• 8 The Evil of Banality in the Modern Era: Remarks on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem
• 9 The Kingdom of Evil
• 10 on Godly Evil, Human Evil and Humanism
• 11 A Touch of Evil: Cinematic Perspectives
• 12 The Restorative Power of Reading Literature: From Evil to Dialectics
• 13 Talking about Evil – in Retrospect: Trying to Conceive the Inconceivable
• Index