Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought by Damian Catani (review)

Damian Catani’s thoughtful book seeks to evaluate the way in which evil has been a common topic for a range of French writers from the nineteenth century up to the present day. The book also questions the ways in which the concept of evil can be used both as a tool for literary evaluation and as a means of framing key contemporary ethical and political questions. Catani’s arguments are marked by a strong sense of the inadequacy of existing ways of approaching the question of evil in literary studies, where, he maintains, a predominantly aesthetic treatment has prevailed. He is also wary of the ways in which, within, say, historical or political discourses, the understanding of evil has often been limited by the particular theoretical or methodological preoccupations specific to the discipline, with the result that the insights gained tend to be onesided or overselective. His approach, therefore, is self-avowedly interdisciplinary, with philosophical, theological, political, scientific, and historical or sociological discourses all being marshalled alongside the literary texts and contexts discussed. The result of this broader approach is a rich, complex, and nuanced set of comparative arguments that relate the interrogations of evil made by the authors discussed to a wider critical, philosophical, and ethical questioning. Each of the six main chapters couples the figure of evil with another concept and discusses this coupling in relation to two writers: so ‘Evil and Modernity’ focuses on a comparison of Balzac and Baudelaire; ‘Evil and Science’ yields a highly original discussion of Lautréamont and Zola; Gide and Proust are brought together under the twin motif of evil and self; Bernanos and Céline under that of ennui; Sartre and Foucault in relation to the questions of power and knowledge; and Hugo and Maurice G. Dantec under the coupling of history and politics. Along the way an enormous range of philosophical and theological points of reference are also called upon to play important roles, for example the work of Ricoeur, Augustine, and Arendt, among many others. There will inevitably be those who will query some aspects of such a broad approach. One might, for instance, question the characterization of Bataille’s La Littérature et le mal as a simple celebration of evil and transgression, or the assertion of Nietzsche’s supposed complicity with social Darwinism. In both cases scholarly debate reveals these to be contested and complex issues. Yet such moments are more than compensated for by the strength and rigour of the overall comparative and synthetic framework that Catani builds. At the heart of this work is a profound intellectual commitment to the development of the concept of evil as a responsible instrument of critical thought. Such a critical conceptualization is all the more necessary, Catani argues, in the wake of normative and ideological instrumentalization of evil since the advent of the ‘War on Terror’. In this context one of the most important achievements of Catani’s work is to demonstrate that literature, as a discourse of knowledge that can intersect with science, theology, politics, and history, deserves to play a decisive role in deepening and complexifying the terms of public debate.