> I kind of reserve evil for
> sociopathic personalities, people who do bad things for no reason at
> all.
>
> For example, in the anthrax discussion you were having earlier,
> either the anthrax letter-writers are part of this conspiracy or they
> are just people who get their kicks by harming as many people as they
> can. Bad acts in both cases, but only one set of bad acts is simply
> evil. The other set of bad acts, the ones attached to the terrorists'
> agenda, are bad acts that flow from a rationality and a plan and
> design we oppose.
How, on Fish's premises, can the claim that "people who get their kicks by harming as many people as they can" are "evil" be justified? Even without considering the "reasons" that a psychoanalytic interpretation would point to, they are doing it for a "reason" aren't they, albeit not an instrumental one?
Surely he knows of Foucault and Zizek and through them of the summum bonum of the "transgressive" limit experience. This is, after all, another of those "rationalities" that's managed to obtain for itself a six figure income, academic celebrity and adulation, "booty" (though absent the ugly elderly chaperones I presume), etc.
In the rest he inconsistently claims again that, on his premises, (a) we can "know" the "rationality" of the "bad" person and that, when we get it, this "knowledge" gives us "a better chance of trying to figure out what they might do next and then moving to combat it" and (b) we have objective grounds on which to conclude that "that moral vision [Hitler's] is one we rightly reject, and we should fight against it with every reserve that we have".
Ted