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Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

Friday 19th - Wednesday 24th March 2004
CERGE-EI,
Prague, Czech Republic

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

On Language and Silence, and Jean Amery
Alan Udoff
Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, St. Francis College, New Jersey, USA

In 1964, when the great Auschwitz-trial in Frankfurt began, I wrote the first essay in connection with my experiences in the Third Reich, after twenty years of silence. [ . . . ]But when the latter work was finished, I felt that it would have been impossible to let the matter stand with that. Auschwitz. After all, how had I arrived at that place?"  Thus Amery begins the Preface to Beyond Guilt and Atonement. Like that man in Kafka's parable who comes before the impassable door of Law, Amery comes from the safety of the predicative "Auschwitz-trial," to the name: Auschwitz.  At that moment, the text performatively comes to an impassable halt.  It is not simply the case of the author pausing, stopped by what he sees. The text that tells us what he sees enacts the effect that it had had on him. It is the text as ground zero.
One of the most instructive aspects of Amery's book is the way in which the body of the text is made to bear the marks of what it is charged with expressing.  It is against the grain of the false security of an aestheticizing language, the refuge of language in the commerce of its sure everyday exchange, that Amery proceeds.  We gain thereby an entry into evil. The paper that I am proposing will examine some of the ways in which Amery composes a literary language, particularly through allusion, and irony.  It will concentrate on the question of how one begins to speak about the things that are beyond guilt and atonement, how one takes the first step beyond silence.

Writing for Want of a Better World : Agota Kristov and the Trilogy of all Evils: Le Grand Cahier (1986), La Preuve (1988) and Le Troisième Mensonge (1991)
Jean-Philippe Imbert
Dublin City University, S.A.L.I.S., French Section, Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland

Many writers attempt to articulate, fathom and search for meaning in the evil that leads to social turmoil. The Hungarian-born Agota Kristov (1935 - ) coldly tells of a world of chaos, echoing the silent shrieks of pain all victims of all conflicts fail to scream.
Wandering amongst the ruins of a post-Orwellian civilisation, the doomed fate of two pervert twins drag the reader in a world devoid of any social, cultural or structural values. But, behind the description of a world inherently entropic, sinking in its own aesthetic, socio-cultural and linguistic magmas, Kristov writes the trauma of the original loss, that of the failed desire to acknowledge reality, as we are going to see in a first part.
In a second part, we are going to see how haunted by the archetypal events which turned the XXth century into the most terrible period of Occidental civilization, these three books do not accuse, do not describe. With them, Kristov merely voices the void. Her trilogy stands out in the literary production of the second half of the last century, not so much as the condemnation of a world in which no ideology can claim to survive, but as a cold expression of her lack of faith in a realm ruled by the ideology of despair. The writing of exile will hence be discussed.
Finally we will discover how the be-all and the end-all of her literary endeavour ineluctably leads Kristov to denounce the wicked nature of its very own medium: language is to be feared, language betrays, language is evil. Kristov's artistic accusation of a weak and flawed language places her in the category of the writers of evil as social conflict which use a non-objective language, thereby offering a short-lived and painful sublimation of reality, writing for want of a better world.

Writing Trauma, Writing the Body: Some Reflections on the Representation of Evil and Suffering
Laura Di Prete
Università degli Studi di Roma per lo Sport e il Movimento (IUSM), Rome, Italy

In his recently published Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) Dominick LaCapra captures a crucial dilemma within trauma theory and any investigation of unexplainable forms of human wickedness and evil: the search for a narrative voice that articulates trauma and suffering adequately and effectively. In advocating a language that resists “undecidability” and the “blurring of all distinctions” (22), LaCapra critiques modes of writing (and reading) that prove inimical to working through in their structural affinity to the processes at work in a psyche disrupted by trauma. Thus he denies the efficacy of modes of “disseminatory writing” (24) and deconstructive criticism that are “traumatic” or “post-traumatic” in their support of endless melancholia, impossible mourning, and generalized anxiety. Critical theorists such as Ronald Granofsky, Deborah Horwitz, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Kali' Tal have similarly investigated the notion of “voice” in relation to a number of texts by addressing the artists' choice of embracing a relatively literal language or figuration in their representation of human suffering.
This paper proposes to examine some of the current reflections on the possibilities and limits of voicing trauma. Yet, it also intends to suggest that any theoretical reflection on this issue—including debates on representational distance, objectivity, and faithfulness to the psychic dynamics at work—cannot exclude corporeality as one of the central figures of this telling. In fact, for a number of writers (Toni Morrison and her Beloved are exemplary here) bearing witness to traumatic experience, means to attend not only to verbal signs but also to that non-verbal, sensorial, and perceptual experience that remains locked within the body. In its privileged relation to the traumatic core that, not accessible to cognition, cannot find verbal expression, the body becomes a site for the “latent readability” of trauma and human suffering. For this reason, textualizing the body also responds effectively to the fundamental problem posed by LaCapra and other theorists of a writing that removes trauma from actuality, displaces its experience onto other genres, and does not preserve its truth. For writers that write the body value corporeality as part of a dynamic (LaCapra calls “articulatory”) that situates trauma within a specific historical and cultural context and enacts forms of “textual working through.” If it is true that the trauma victim experiences his or her body in its foreignness, “body writing” actively seeks therapeutically to return this foreign body to the experience that has turned it foreign in the first place.

© Wickedness.Net 2004