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  • Evil’s Political Habitats
  • Jodi Dean (bio)

In his 2002 State of the Union address, George W. Bush invoked an “axis of evil.” What available rhetorical fields enabled the President to link together North Korea, Iran, and Iraq and then judge the result as evil? What could hold this unstable train of signification together? Within what discursive registers was such a monstrous, bizarre moral geography even comprehensible?1

“Evil” finds a hospitable environment in Bush’s presidential addresses because of the speculative identity of two seemingly opposed patterns of belief prominent in contemporary America — pervasive relativism and absolutist conviction.2 Through a retrospective on “evil” in presidential speeches, I show how this coincidence of opposites first inhabits the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, arguably the figure Bush most seeks to emulate as president. At work in the words and personae of both the fortieth and the forty-third presidents is a powerful combination of conviction and vacuity such that resolve exists simply for its own sake. In Bush’s speeches this resolve culminates in a vision of himself and America as instruments of the will of God. “Evil” could inhabit the 2002 State of the Union address not simply because of Bush’s fluency in the language of the faith, but because of the coincidence of conviction and the broader culture of relativism in which the term “evil” floats so freely. “Evil” is powerful, efficacious, because its very lack of meaning (or the excesses of meaning over-determining it, which is the same thing) enables the term to produce a conviction-effect: no matter what “evil” means, people can be confident in Bush’s conviction — he knows.3 Hearing the 2002 State of the Union address, we believed that he was convinced there was an axis of evil.4

Many Evils

At first glance, it might appear that “evil” could inhabit the 2002 State of the Union address because of the ready availability of a discourse of fear and terror following the events of September 11th, one, and of the prominence of religion in American life, two. Although “evil” no doubt flourishes in these discursive environments, to focus on either distracts attention from the pervasiveness of “evil” and the multiplicity of its modes of appearance.

September 11th has been said to have changed everything.5 It exposed the pernicious danger of postmodern relativism and the soul-destroying impact of irony. It proved decisively the reality of evil in the world. And, it has reconfigured reality by challenging us, the civilized (according to Bush and Samuel Huntington), to confront, wage war on, evil. These claims for September 11th are rooted in a discursive habitat formed by and nourished through the culture wars. They stem from the assumption that over the past forty years Americans have lost their moral sense, their capacity to speak seriously about evil. This loss is said to be significant, a truncating of the moral world insofar as the category “evil” is necessary for evaluating experiences, harms, sufferings, and dangers. This concern about the amputation of Americans’ moral sense, moreover, shares its discursive habitat with critical claims regarding the culture of irony, a fecund environment already in the post WWII era as the presumption of the general secularization of American society took hold.6

That these claims for September 11th stem from the discursive environment of the culture wars is also attested to by a second assumption, namely, that relativists hate America. A number of conservative thinkers contend that the problem with liberals or postmodernists is not that they are relativists, but, on the contrary, that their apparent ethical pluralism is in fact ideological. Liberals and their ilk aren’t really relativist at all. Rather, they believe that America itself is evil.7

For these conservatives, relativism, and its multicultural, ecumenical, and ethically pluralist kin, serves as the ideological guise of a treasonous anti-Americanism. These conservatives assume that “evil” remains part of a postmodern worldview, a worldview that is antithetical to American values and that September 11th revealed to be a threat to American unity and security.

The problem with the idea that September 11th provides the conditions of possibility for Bush...

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