Figures of Evil: A Triad of Rhetorical Strategies for Theo-Politics

Postmodern terrorism raises a vast array of policy issues for societies throughout the world. Most fundamentally, perhaps, it gives rise to basic problems of aesthetic as well as moral description and judgment. How we do, and don't, speak about Evil matters.

The grand style, which typifies much of the USA's rhetoric today, has many costs: "So the tongue is a little member that boasts great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!" (James 3:5). Without sufficiently nuanced reflection on the current rhetorics of terror and Evil, among the more powerful of "the passions that are at war in your members," to quote James again (4:1), there is little hope for a fuller democratic discussion of policy. "Evil" does not belong to theologians nor should it become the property of the Right. While a theological term, it also is political, a consequence of complexity. "Every policy is," after all, "a policy of lesser evil." ¹

The most compelling and challenging dimensions of the concept of Evil remain hidden from view by the typical poverty of its uses by our national leadership. To this poverty corresponds a surplus, however, and so we make another kind of mistake when resorting to such notions as "simplification" to account for current strategic policy language. Thus, the rhetorical figures shaping and channeling public moral consciousness demand critical creative thought. Hyperbole and its corresponding affect, self-certainty, reign the passions currently emanating from the State today, while irony and its corresponding affect, humility, remain relatively unapparent and in need of imaginative reconstitution. The danger of comprehensive relativism, which could fund either nationalistic adoration or apathy or both, looms on the horizon of each of these attitudes: as the warrant for submission to aggressive executive power, on the one hand, and for cynical detachment from politics, on the other.

Today, the dominant attitude toward threats posed by "rogue states" and pseudo-non-nationalist groups could be called theo-political. The repertoire of characterization evoked to judge actions and to publicly justify strategic responses stems from an enormously elastic employment of an equally slim version of the Christian lexicon. Such terms for our civil religion conspire to compose what the poet Wallace Stevens called "The American Sublime." Through this rhetoric of nationalistic grandeur, political conflicts become "moralized" and "theologized" on the grand scale of the struggle between Good and Evil. From such a "fundamentalist" rhetorical stance, we run the risk of developing policies—broadly, "recipes for living"—radically dependent on a view of the world at once too narrow and too ambitious to allow for authentically democratic public determination. The Sublime rhetoric of terror voiced by the representative of our State today tightens the ideological/lexical screw in such a way as to intensify executive power while also, as a consequence, minimizing opportunities for a wider, more inclusive and diverse discussion of the issues. I offer a triad of figures with which we may begin to characterize, subvert, and reconstitute this theo-political imaginary of the American Sublime. ² I suggest we draw, from the European tradition of dialectical critique, three concepts for re/de/composing theo-political discourse: Evil in-itself, Evil for-itself, and Evil for-others.

Sketching the Triad

From Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which closes with reflections on how existential analysis relates to "moral description," ³ the strategies form a triad of possible relations to others as well as to self. My approach substitutes the term "Evil" for Sartre's term "Being"; that is, where he writes "Being-in-itself" I rewrite "Evil-in-itself." It also substitutes issues of strategic social composition for those of existential phenomenology, but only partially, not completely. In other words, in-itself, for-itself, and for-others represent analytic pivots from which to redescribe Evil rhetorically without sacrificing the option of also redescribing it morally in relation to its ultimate horizons...