Routledge Talking about Evil: Psychoanalytic, Social, and Cultural Perspectives (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

How can we talk about evil? How can we make sense of its presence all around us? How can we come to terms with the sad fact that our involvement in doing or enabling evil is an interminable aspect of our lives in the world? This book is an attempt to engage these questions in a new way. Written from within the complicated reality of Israel, the contributors to this book forge a collective effort to think about evil from multiple perspectives. A necessary effort, since psychoanalysis has been slow to account for the existence of evil, while philosophy and the social sciences have tended to neglect its psychological aspects. The essays collected here join to form a wide canvas on which a portrait of evil gradually emerges, from the Bible, through the enlightenment to the Holocaust; from Kant, through Freud, Klein, Bromberg and Stein to Arendt, Agamben and Bauman; using literature, history, cinema, social theory and psychoanalysis. Talking about Evil opens up a much needed space for thinking, in itself an antidote to evil. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars and students of philosophy, social theory and the humanities. Review 'Evil is not a new topic. However, the Holocaust, manifold military conflicts, the emergence of ethnic and forced migration waves, and the rise in corruption require that we situate it in the different contexts where it acquires meaning. Evil is an action that threatens the ethics of life and causes the collapse of essential values. What place does it occupy in our minds, in human relations, in psychoanalytic practice? Evil creates a category that defies psychology manuals. Defining it accurately is a pressing need, because be it natural, rational, irrational, or banal, evil lies on the border between the sayable and the bearable. This book offers a unique and important effort to address these old yet timely questions. Drawing on a truly interdisciplinary range of contributors; philosophers, psychoanalysts, historians, sociologists, literary scholars and theologians, this book achieves an unusual breadth of engagement with the question of evil in its many contexts and effects. It will become a necessary reference for scholars and practitioners in many fields of thought and research.' - Janine Puget, senior Psychoanalyst, Buenos Aires; Sigourney Award-Winning author of Discontinuous Subjectivation and Psychoanalysis: Uncertainty and Certainties (2015); numerous other contributions to psychoanalysis. ‘This book on evil amounts to a great deal: it counters the "evil-skeptics" who believe that the concept of evil has no explanatory power and that all it does is to serve as a rhetorical device of strong condemnation. Evil, the book tells us, is manifested by morally despicable acts, but despicable doesn't mean ineffable. By looking at evil from diverse disciplines and varied points of view, the essays in the book make a genuine contribution in answering two vital questions: Why morally despicable actions are done, and is it true that the people who are doing evil are constitutionally different from people who don't?’ - Avishai Margalit, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and George F. Kennan, Professor at the institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, winner of Israel Prize for philosophy (2010) and Ernest Bloch Prize (2012), and author of The Ethics of Memory (2002) and On Compromise and Rotten Compromises ( 2009). ‘This compelling set of meditations on evil will consistently engage all who are troubled by the paradoxical human propensity toward inhumanity. In their entirety, the essays provide a remarkable wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary conversation about the problematics of understanding evil. As individual contributions, each essay offers a unique and deeply thought-provoking perspective on those aspects of the human condition that permit the violent erasure of other humans. In all, this captivating