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9th Global Conference
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness
Monday 10th March - Thursday 13th March
2008
Salzburg, Austria
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 11: Portraying Evil
Chair: Nicola Goc
Historians and the Concept of Evil: Adjective or Noun?
Robert Butler
Donald W. & Betty J. Buik Chair, Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, IL USA
No abstract is presently available
Psychological Warfare and Extreme Cruelty:
Cordwainer Smith’s Science Fiction and Psychology
Pawel Stachura
School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger is remembered today as the author of the authoritative Psychological Warfare and of fiction which he wrote under different pen-names, the best known being Corwainer Smith of the science fiction fame. Undoubtedly, his work counts among the most bizzare and disturbing specimens of American popular fiction of the 1950s. His science fiction stories are remarkable for their existential pessimism, scenes of cruelty, anxiety caused by the conviction that people are material machines, eliticism, fascination with unusual powers and skills, and fascination with diverse, 'exotic'; cultures. It is also marred by experiences of near death, pain, and rites of passage (Elens 2000). The paper focuses on the link between explorations of wickedness, cruelty and brutality in Linebarger's fiction and his background as a psychologist and military expert. Cordwainer Smith's science fiction stories can be read as encrypted memories, criticisms of racial discrimination, national misrule, and social injustice (Elens 1991), or as fictionalised reflections of a cultivated polyglote, connesieur of cultures, literatures, and traditions (Pierce 1973; Wolfe 1977). Linebarger was a military expert on psychological warfare, who called himself "a resident of small wars" in the Far East, including British counterinsurgency in Indonesia, the war in Corea, and Vietnam. The link between fictional monstrosities, professional background, and military career will be analysed in psychoanalytical terms (Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan), in an attempt to explain Linebarger's uncanny use of those terms in his fiction.
Download Draft Conference Paper - 
Life After Death: The Suffering Body in Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’
Ying-chiao Lin
Pre-college Department of Foreign Languages, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC
Suffering . . . is the sign of man’s dependence on a divine Law.
----Julia Kristeva, Black Sun
This study traces the cultural uses of a body within the cultural and historical context that proclaims the subjectivity through the undoing of the mutilated corporeality that has articulated the relationship between faith and history found in the mid-seventeenth century England. Samson Agonistes bears the mark of Milton’s aspiring desire for both his country to be the site of his testimony that interprets the violent act endowed with the divine purpose, and, individually, the reconstruction of an identity from a living-death self that suffers from the deprivation of body parts which is threatening the unity with the image of God at the time when the belief of somatic unity is seen as the integration of the self and would eventually bring resurrection. Thus, the body becomes the locus for attaining the Miltonic heroism that, for Samson, sees corporeal suffering, like psychic torment, as the rite of passage leading to divinity. Samson’s body is the text inscribing the apocalyptic message that, through the lingering on a deep grief and body pain, the self regenerates. The body becomes a merited body, an elevated body, for its dying for the people, achieving a Christian legacy. The corporeal mutilation enables the subject to undergo the psychic castration and thus to make the self a whole one. The body has to be deprived, fragmented, castrated so as to become the other, so as to frame its identity visible in meaning-making. Thus, the body is the site for meaning-making, the suffering that is written in the body and inscribed in memory, points to a transcending unity with the image of God, the eternal inaccessible Other.
Physicality is entangled with morality in Milton’s world, as he juxtaposes the contraries of the worlds of the material and the metaphorical: the physical light of day is equated with the moral light of the law, the physical darkness of night the moral darkness of sin; the bodily circumcision of foreskin the holy, the foreskined Philistines unholy; the hardening body the prideful; the mutilated body the pure. Body is the primary arena staging Milton’s hypothesis that the transcendence of a “moving grave” into a regenerated phoenix is accomplished by the use of physical/ corporeal assault (aggression). This hypothesis provokes, like his contraries schema, a controversial criticism on how violence and cruelty as demonstrated by Samson, the hero of the play, could be admitted as attaining any sense of victory, of law over sin, in so far as it is no less than a mode of terrorism as argued by some critics. This paper, then, argues that, rather than on the issue of the identity of Samson in regard to the final catastrophe, corporeality empowers the exercise of free will, an act of selfhood and self-knowledge, that corresponds to the divine calling where the Miltonic subject is situated. The body that suffers and subjugated has animated the castrated self from the imprisoned “moving grave” to an autonomous existence. The body of the despaired hero is both the monster that devours Samson in his early contact with and subordination to Dalila and the purgatory that burns and torments him to become a refined entity. At this point, Samson’s bodily sufferings have linked himself to a Stoic hero that is prevalent in English Renaissance tragedy, in which, in the Senecan sense, adversity and pain are the anvils for making the signification of a hero. As Seneca informs, “calamitas virtutis occasion est,” [calamity is the opportunity for virtus.] (Ad Orivudebtua 6).
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