Abstract
Simona Forti is one of the most interesting Italian philosophers today. She is known for her studies on Arendt, and lately for her philosophical work on “totalitarian thanatopolitics” and neoliberal biopolitics. Her latest monograph, New Demons: Rethinking Evil and Power Today, is a challenging and innovative book that, in my opinion, is destined to become an unavoidable point of orientation for studies and scholarly investigations on the topic. Moreover, it’s a courageous book.
First of all because it deals with an imposing subject—the relationship between evil and power—without putting forward yet another philosophical history of the idea of evil. Of course, though unconventionally, the authors of the canon are interrogated. From Kant, to Lévinas, through Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, and many others. But the book does not aim at a gallery of portraits, but to foreground two different, and in many ways opposed, genealogies that lay unthought in their paradigmatic meaning. The book is courageous because it critically challenges two philosophical perspectives that are hegemonic on the matter in contemporary continental political philosophy. On one hand are those evoking “radical evil” to designate and make sense of the excesses of power that marked the tragedies of the last century. On the other hand are those who, in the wake of Nietzsche, or rather of certain Deleuzian readings of Nietzsche, think they can shrug away the relationship between evil and power for the simple reason that the question of evil is nothing but a theological and metaphysical hypostasis. Thus, on one hand we have an excessive emphasis, sometimes unconscious, of one’s theological heritage, on the other a futile denial that ends up contradicting itself because one cannot escape the bond between the two terms when one tries to think through power.
Forti asks in the introduction: “which direction to take if one shares—as she does—the premises of critical and deconstructive thought, but also believes that the problem of evil is not only still relevant, but also an a priori in the human animal’s search for meaning in ethical and political matters? What stance can we take if we do not feel close to the abstractions of normative political philosophy, but we feel equally remote from an ontological vitalism, for which the idea of evil is simply the legacy of a theological and metaphysical conception of the world that denies life?” Forti maintains the urgency of continuing to pose the question of evil, and of a power that, becoming dominium, can transform into a scene of evil. But she suggests that this question be asked outside the binaries followed by the authors who have traditionally brought together evil and power. She retraces a path that radicalizes Kant’s discovery of “Radical Evil” to the point of overturning it, until transgressing the law, whether divine law or the imperative of reason, becomes identified as the main objective of evil. Thought of as a disease of the will or as an instinctual drive, as the delirium of reason or as a passion for the absolute, in many cases evil always has been featured as involving the forces of transgression and disorder: in a word, evil has always been identified with the power of death.
Forti identifies an eloquent, exemplary synthesis of this constellation of concepts in what she calls the “Dostoevsky paradigm.” She thus names the paradigm not so much because we find in the pages of the Russian author a philosophical post-Kantian reflection on evil, but because Dostoevsky’s protagonists—particularly in Demons and The Brothers Karamazov—powerfully flesh out this kind of radicalization of radical evil. The pages in which Forti shows how each of the Dostoevskian characters misuses their free will in a different way are conceptually rich, and at the same time mesmerizing. For Dostoevsky, the various demons, corresponding to the various ways in which evil makes itself visible, share the same desire: to take the place of God and his infinite freedom. Yet, as finite creatures, incapable of creating, they can only destroy. This is how evil comes into the world, for Dostoevsky and for many who follow in his tracks, as a diabolical disease of power exceeding all limits, a pure energy of oppression and domination.
Nihilism, evil, and power form a conceptual triangle within which, by secularizing theological assumptions, many of the philosophers of the twentieth century inscribed the tragedies of history. Similarly, a close constellation of concepts—will, omnipotence, and nothingness—also in a secularized key, will be reworked by later philosophers who continue to think of evil as a result of the perversion of the will, as the result of a sovereign subject who, by raising itself up to the All, creates Nothingness. This is the conclusion of the first part of the book. Forti is convinced that this “simple,” unidirectional vision of power that remains stuck on a dualistic model also informs many of the philosophers of totalitarianism, even those authors who see in Auschwitz not so much the apex of nihilism but the paradoxical realization of the tendencies of modern biopolitics. According to Forti, even the important works of Agamben, Esposito, and in a certain way also my own, although they question some of the traditional categories of thinking relations of power, fall prey to this schema: an omnipotent subject, the bearer of death, and a subject reduced to a mere object, because he or she has been made totally passive by the other’s violence. This way of thinking—she assumes—is likely to rigidify our understanding of reality. In the end the emphasis is given to the dark, transgressive face of a subjectivity that is avid for destruction.
In some ways it is true that Agamben’s “bare life” still assumes an idea of power and the subject that can be traced to the “Dostoevsky Paradigm,” as Forti conceives of it. On the other hand, the new figure of the victim brought to the fore by the genocides of the twentieth century and the new forms of conflict of the twenty-first century, which I propose in my book Horrorism, is in no way embroiled in the dualism Forti criticizes, but rather invokes the need to bring to light a new phenomenology, which the history of traditional political thought has neglected. Beyond disagreement on particular issues, I share the conviction that the Dostoevsky paradigm must be challenged. Because it is true that our biopolitical times no longer allow the representation of power as a simple polarized relation between the center of power and individuals. Political evil—even the political evil that lurks in our Western democracies—can no longer be understood simply as the result of few wicked and malevolent subjects. There is, according to Forti, a metaphysical and theological a priori that continues to affect us, often unconsciously, preventing us from looking deeply into the intricate web of political relations and from becoming aware of what happens before we arrive at that final scene of domination, where asymmetry reigns. Hence the need to identify an alternative geneaology to think the relationship between evil and power: one that puts into question the recurrent hegemonic link between transgression, power, and death and let us see a new paradigm: the paradigm of “mediocre demons” or “the normalcy of evil.”
Forti’s debt to the Arendtian “banality of evil” is obvious here, but she does not think that Arendt on her own can give us the set of ideas that connect the evil of domination to the structure of subjectivity. To flesh out the paradigm of “mediocre demons” Forti brings together Nietzsche and Foucault, the dissidents of Eastern Europe, and Primo Levi. She reads their works so as to break down rigid dichotomies, simple oppositions, and to transform the relation of evil and power into a field of forces and tensions, in which the antinomies lose their substantial identity. She turns to Nietzsche to unmask the contradictions of passivity and meekness, and to Foucault for the possibility of re-naming political evil and of locating it at the highest point of subjective dependency, in those “states of domination” that suppress the play or the movement between freedom and power. Forti draws on his writings on governmentality and pastoral power, and on his late lectures on the “care of the self” and parrhesia, to answer the question of what kind of subjectivation was inaugurated in the Christian West, to make the relationship of care and protection a perfect mechanism for the production of generalized dependency. How to conceive, then, the conditions of possibility for resistance to political evil? Forti, again, searches possible answers to this question by reconstructing the ties between the Foucauldian idea of parrhesia and the philosophy of dissent from Central and Eastern Europe. She also reads the work of Primo Levi, especially The Drowned and the Saved as a masterpiece of political thinking about the relation between evil, power, and desire for life.
The paradigm of mediocre demons, then, puts forward a non-substantive idea of evil, conceived yes as a system but only in the sense of a tangle of subjectivities, a network of relations, whose threads knit together wicked actors (a few), zealous committed agents (also a few), and acquiescent not simply indifferent bystanders (many). She thinks that today it is important to question not so much why we become malevolent subjects but rather, and above all, how we become compliant, meek subjects. We need, of course, to understand what sort of delirium of omnipotence inspires us. But even more we need to explain which desires motivate our anxiety to conform, to maximize life’s chance. For Forti, thinking within the paradigm of “mediocre demons” means not only questioning the exclusive role of the will to and desire for death, but most of all viewing the scenes of evil as powerfully inhabited by the will to life, as the result of an attempt to maximize life itself, and to strive for recognition. It also means focusing less on the “guilt” of transgression and more on the devious normativity of non-judgment, celebrated by a morality that sees judging as a sign of pride. “Mediocre demons” do not replace “absolute demons,” of course, but if absolute demons are successful it is because they seamlessly integrate into the desire of all those who, being too occupied with consolidating their life opportunities, adapt without reacting. According to Forti, in conclusion, we do not have to pursue the impossible goal of taking leave from the subject. Trying to leave the subject behind means continuing to think of it according to an old philosophical scheme that sees it as sovereign and moved by the will to power. Instead, today it is more challenging and important to ask how power and subjectivity constitute each other and are mutually reinforcing; how social and political powers are nurtured by our desires and anxieties.