Radical Evil

The second volume in the "S" series, this book marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Immanuel Kant's "Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone", where Kant first proposed, and quickly withdrew in horror, the concept of radical evil - an evil at the very heart of the ethical problematic [...]
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The second volume in the "S" series, this book marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Immanuel Kant's "Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone", where Kant first proposed, and quickly withdrew in horror, the concept of radical evil - an evil at the very heart of the ethical problematic. It also marks the recent publication in English of Lacan's "Ethics of Psychoanalysis", one of Lacan's more important and influential seminars, in which he discusses the rise since the 19th century of a certain "happiness in evil". The contributors focus on the modern or political notion of evil as it takes shape in Kant, and as it is prefigured by Machiavelli and later developed by Schelling. What are the conditions of the transformation of the concept? Why and how does evil become detached from human finitude and attached to human freedom? After Auschwitz, however, no one would deny that the problem of evil cannot be confined to these conceptual questions alone. Accordingly, the contributors also consider the occurance of evil in the calumnies of racial hatred, its awful exercise of power and its drive toward the extermination of the other.Hannah Arendt's examination of totalitarianism, Pasolini's filmic denunciation of Italian Fascism, and the legal battle over hate speech are all discussed in relation to this terrible evidence of the radical nature of modern evil. Joan Copjec is the author of "Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists", and the editor of "Shades of Noir" and the first volume of the "S" series, "Supposing the Subject".