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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Evil and Utility « Previous | |Next »
May 18, 2004

Gary,

I am glad you are back to talking about Bataille. I’ve got all I am going to get out of the discussion of Heidegger, although it is interesting to note how the number of hits on the site went up when we were going strong on that topic.

I think it is stretching things a fair bit to link what happened to Nick Berg to Bataille. To start with, I don’t know who killed Nick Berg (assuming such a person ever existed). My information comes from a mass media unified behind the Bush administration line. In Australia, the state broadcaster, the ABC has to continually demonstrate its lack of bias – meaning anti-Bush bias – while they continue to refer to Iraqis fighting invaders as ‘insurgents’. The only people fooled by this are willing fools, the ignorant, the culpably ignorant. If the Bush administration want me to see a certain image I have to ask myself why.

Putting all this aside, Nick Berg was executed and not sacrificed. What’s the difference? An execution has an external purpose, a utilitarian purpose. A sacrifice is done for the sake of the killing itself. In Bataille’s sense, a sacrifice is an act of pure evil, and none of the killing associated with Iraq, Osama and the boys, et cetera, is evil in this sense. The Americans aren’t humiliating, torturing and killing the people in their custody for the pleasure of it, even if the odd individual finds that the torture makes him cum, while he feels remorse afterwards. The Americans have been doing what they are doing for two reasons: 1) for immediate strategic advantage, and 2) to indicate to the rest of us that this is what is going to happen to you if you don’t submit. It’s the same strategy the Israeli’s are using. I’m not condemning them – I’m just describing what they are doing. It’s not particularly a capitalist strategy. The Europeans have been at it for eons. Look where it’s got us! Look what it’s achieved! That’s progress for you.

I have a problem with talk of evil. A mutual mate of ours makes this notion into a concept with which he explains world events. Nazism, for instance, is to be explained in terms of the spread of evil, or the web of evil, and so on – you get the idea? It’s something that spreads and infects people, like the flu. I have to ask myself these questions about this view:

1. what is its philosophical justification?
2. what is it literary background?
3. with whose worldview does it confirm?
4. why is it advanced in the first place?

The answer to the first question is that it has none. Instead it operates with the ordinary everyday sense of evil, which is undifferentiated. If you consider Bataille’s differentiation, you can immediately see that two quite different kinds of acts are just lumped together.

I am still waiting on the answer to the second question and I’ll have to get back to you on that. My suspicion is that it has no reputable literary background.

The worldview it confirms is that of the Bush administration, who presents itself as in a struggle for good against evil. It’s pretty puerile stuff and even then the kiddies start to think that there has to be a connection between means and ends for the goodies, otherwise you can’t tell them from the baddies.

In the particular case I’m discussing, I think the theory is advanced to displace history and take over its role in social analysis. But whereas history provides us with established concepts – in this historical concepts approach scientific concepts – the undifferentiated evil theory with concepts that are largely independent of experience and prior to it. They are a reversion to metaphysics. Adorno would call them a re-mythologisation. Myths always look to the eternal and so they are always opposed to history.

This is the difference between people on the far right like Hannah Arendt – and in Australia the late Bob Santamaria – and our mutual friend. Arendt is an historical materialist in The Origins Of Totalitarianism, which is the main thing, even if she reverts to myth in Eichmann In Jerusalem with her banality of evil thesis. Bob Santamaria was an historical materialist when it came to the analysis of contemporary world history, despite his Catholicism. I think that what Santamaria feared in organised workers’ movements was the drive to secularisation that they embodied, which he saw as leading to ‘Godless communism’.

Fascism, simply an administrative process (i.e. corporatism in the public sphere), is indifferent to ideology, and depending on the circumstances will go for history, or myth, or a combination of the two. Expediency is the only criterion.

If the myth of evil has a precedent, to me it is the Strasser brothers and what generally was called ‘left-wing Nazism’, where a generally libertarian attitude is tied to a mythical tale. Alfred Rosenberg is an example of one of the corporate boys peddling this line to help organise the masses. This is just a short step from all the awful wind that used to blow out of Goebbels (spelling?) and Hitler.

Which brings me back to the topic of evil. It’s not just our mutual friend who thinks that if anybody was evil Hitler was. But evil is close to sovereignty. The guy who gets around in a military uniform is the antithesis of a sovereign. He’s a kind of salesman.

All the same, the other night I was talking about Hitler with a guy from university, an academic with a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, a liberal, a wine-lover, an intellectual, and he was sure that the Bush administration was different from the Hitler administration – not that I’d argue for a minute that they were the same but whenever you call Bush a fascist this is the standard response. Hitler really was evil, he thought. He’d heard that he did some nasty things to some young girl who was a nice of his, or something like that. It happened before he became a successful politician. Here we are dealing with genuine evil. But so what? J. Edgar Hoover liked to slip into slinky black cocktail numbers with shoe-string straps. He was definitely bent. But did it interfere with the performance of his corporate functions? Not at all! But then, a lot of the people at the top manage to mix evil with sound utilitarian thinking. That’s because the two of them go together. There is no evil without utility – at least, that’s what Bataille thought.

| Posted by at 12:05 PM | | Comments (0)
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