>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 12/23/99 03:47AM >>>
>From Henry Staten, "'Radical Evil' Revived: Hitler, Kant, Luther,
Neo-Lacanianism," _Radical Philosophy_ 98:
***** [Joan] Copjec and [Jacob] Rogozinski are both concerned, though in different ways, to save Kant from his optimistic turn in order to liberate from his text what they consider his crucial insight: the ineradicable evil of human nature. But if this is what they are looking for, why not look to Luther and Calvin, who do truly assert just such a doctrine?
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CB: Hell, why not look to the snake in the garden and original sin, the original source of Luther and Calvin's doctrine. The idea of ineradicable evil of human nature is not original with these guys.
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No doubt Luther and Calvin lack the philosophical authority of Kant, but that is not the only reason they will not serve Copjec's and Rogozinski's purpose; they also deny the freedom of the will, which Copjec and Rogozinski want to save.
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CB: I thought Christian doctrine attributes free will, given by God, to humans. The repressive paradox is that not only are humans (supposedly) born in sin, but they also have free will and are thereby somehow responsible for their actions. The original damned if you do and damned if you don't.
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Copjec and Rogozinski are, however, equally intent on rejecting the optimistic voluntarism of the Enlightenment, the belief in the freedom of the human will to perfect itself (secular equivalent of what is known theologically as the 'Pelagian heresy'), because they see in this belief the roots of the immanentizing or 'subreption' of transcendence that [they think] eventually produces totalitarianism. Thus the free will they propose to hold responsible for evil must be one that, although free, nevertheless fails to will the Law and is therefore perpetually 'guilty'.
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CB: Still sounds like that old time religion.
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This feeling of guilt, recall, is the way in which the Law announces itself and is therefore essential and ineradicable -- hence the ineradicability of the will to evil....The free will proclaimed by Copjec and Rogozinski is a will that cannot choose good but only evil, and in choosing evil discovers its guilt under the Law and by virtue of this guilt its 'transcendence' of nature. This transcendence is what they are really interested in, and it is what they call freedom -- not freedom to choose good or evil but _freedom from the embrace of nature of something about the subject_. Since the free will they propose is ineradicably skewed toward evil, however, it is practically indistinguishable from the 'will in bondage to evil' of Luther and Calvin....
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CB: OK so Copjec and Rogozinski rather be evil than natural, sort of a Sadistic twist on Christian doctrine. This is an expression of the original human dialectic of nature and supernature, animals but transcending their animalness with culture and symbols and good and evil or do's and dont's. Adam and Eve sinned by taking a bite of fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So, the original sin was to aquire morals, ideas about do's and dont's, through a natural process, eating a fruit, a drug or hallucinagen or something. Adam and Eve fell out of nature into culture.
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...A great deal rides on the claim of the radical evil theorists that they can explain the true nature of the holocaust, for if their explanation is valid it means that the entire adventure of modernity since the Enlightenment was always on the track for disaster.
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CB: This sounds teleological. Was there no contingency, no free will ?
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The real target that Copjec and Rogozinski are attacking is the notion that human beings are merely mortal, finite beings and nothing more; as Copjec puts it, if the subject becomes 'totally assimilated to its mortality', it follows that the transcendent dimension of the subject, 'the fact [sic] that the subject _is free_', must reassert itself in the assertion of totalitarian power by which human beings deny death and the existence of any 'checks on the power of the human will'.[23]
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CB: Totalitarianism is a fraudulent concept. Fascism was not inevitable. The problem since the Enlightenment has been capitalism, not free will or a revisionist version of original sin. We still need to get rid of capitalism.
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Reduced to its bare bones, there is nothing new about this claim: it is the idea that when human beings stop believing in God, they start to think they _are_ God.
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CB: God _is_ alienated "man" , in the sense of humanity. God is a fantastic projection of what our human potential is in communism.
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In the aftermath of Kant, Heidegger and Lacan, this claim is restated in a way that preserves the structure of the old claim while volatilizing...the God-concept into notions like 'the empty place of the Law' and 'the invisible horizon of transcendence'....
[23] Copjec, "Introduction: Evil in the Time of the Finite World', in _Radical Evil_ (Verso, 1996), p.xx.
(9, 13) *****
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CB: The "Law" again. Natural and cultural scientists both like to use metaphors from jurisprudence. Even Sokal the physicist must do a self-critique of use of legal metaphors in physics, not only in metaphysics.
CB