Introduction: Evil in the Agora

This set of papers emerged out of a discussion held at the National Communication Association in November 2002. Organized by Ned Vankevitch (whose response to the forum follows the essays), that panel was called "Evil in the Agora: Public Reaction Following the Events of September 11th." A group of scholars committed to democratic practice talked about the rhetorical uses and misuses of evil with an audience who packed a very small meeting room. Because I found the ideas presented there to be both fascinating and crucial for understanding contemporary political discourses about nation and war, I felt that they should circulate more widely among our colleagues. I queried Marty Medhurst, editor of this journal, about the possibility of putting these papers into print. I am very grateful to him and to all of the authors for the opportunity to put together and introduce these essays for this special forum.

When I first listened to each of these arguments, I thought that the perspectives offered were more different from each other than similar. Indeed, each of the articles rests its argument on a distinct theoretical and critical foundation. Each also expresses its author's unique voice and experience. Yet, out of the diverse perspectives, a profound common insight about rhetoric emerges. Taken together, the essays elaborate what might be called a pragma-rhetorical approach: in other words, a perspective that emphasizes how "evil" is produced, deployed, used, and misused in public discourse, bracketing the question of the ontological status of evil itself. Where the authors disagree is on the question of whether we should embrace or even see the possibility of the "proper" use of the trope of "evil" in political rhetoric.

Hariman, for example, describes the various modes of the rhetoric of evil: in political discourse, in popular culture, in the world of pain, and at the level of system and structure. He argues that we still need a discourse about evil in order to mark and challenge the brutality of political, economic, and social structures that are otherwise legitimized.

Aune takes a somewhat different tack, arguing that the argument from radical evil is a conservative rhetorical strategy that is corrosive to democracy. He concludes that progressives and democrats should eschew and criticize the use of the term "evil" in political contexts.

In his response to Aune, Campbell suggests that one "only rarely obtains secular ends by only secular means." For Campbell, the rhetorical trope of evil is deeply embedded in our shared rhetorical traditions and therefore cannot simply be banished—it must be understood and used with care. Cloud's essay argues, also in a pragma-rhetorical vein, that we should regard evil as rhetorically produced in specific historical situations out of particular motives and interests. However, Cloud rejects an entirely relativized nihilism with regard to moral judgment, posing the humanist tradition of Trotskyism against the cynicism of a Nietzschean approach.

McDaniel likewise seeks an approach rooted in philosophical critical traditions, going to Sartre to ground his argument that there are three typologies or modes of attributing evil. In other words, there are three ways in which tropes of evil appear in action-oriented discourse: evil-in-itself, evil-for-itself, and evil-for-others. Roughly, these three modes of attributing evil refer, respectively, to an unspeakable feeling about evil that McDaniel associates with premodern consciousness; a self-interested and opportunistic deployment of evil that McDaniel associates with modern industrial society; and finally a postmodern tribalist notion of evil that regards all claims to moral judgment as products of ideological fanaticism. McDaniel prefers the middle way, which corresponds somewhat to Cloud's exhortation to understand the partisan motivations of the rhetorical production of evil.

Rosa Eberly's essay offers a similar insight from a pedagogical vantage point. Describing how she and her students were unsatisfied with explanations of the 1966 Tower shootings at the University of Texas in terms of Charles Whitman's "evil" nature, Eberly argues that the invocation of evil ends...