Framing Evil

305 Pages·2008·2.28 MB·English

Edited by

Nancy Billias
&
Agnes B. Curry
Framing Evil:

Portraits of Terror and the Imagination

th
Papers Presented at the 7 Global Conference
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

March 2006
Salzburg, Austria

Edited by

Nancy Billias & Agnes B. Curry

Oxford, United Kingdom
Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher
Dr Nancy Billias

Advisory Board

Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Owen Kelly
Professor Margaret Chatterjee Martin McGoldrick
Dr Wayne Cristaudo Revd Stephen Morris
Mira Crouch Professor John Parry
Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Professor Peter Twohig
Dr Jones Irwin Professor S Ram Vemuri
Professor Asa Kasher Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 77
A volume in the At the Interface project
‘Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness’
Published by the Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom

First Edition 2008

8 Inter-Disciplinary Press 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

ISBN: 978-1-904710-76-9
Table of Contents

Introduction ix
Nancy Billias and Agnes B. Curry

Part 1: Investigations of the Nature of Evil in ‘Imaginary’
Contexts

Aesthetics of Evil: Adorno vs. the Ethical Turn 3
Anders Johansson

Allegories of Evil: Kafka’s The Castle and Auster’s 13
The Music of Chance
Ilana Shiloh

The Face of Evil: Emmenberger in Dürrenmatt’s 23
Der Verdacht
Vera Profit

Contesting Claggart: Evil in Herman Melville’s 31
Billy Budd, Sailor”
Luc Small

“Unrepenting Sorrow and Deliberate Sin”: Milton and 41
Hawthorne’s Understanding of Evil
Gregory A. Wilson

Ecoterrorism, Climate Change and the Politiciaation of 55
Science in Michael Crighton’s State of Fear
Margarita Carretero-González

The Language of Evil: Popular versus ‘Higher’ Culture 65
Neil Forsyth

Sex, Sin and Redemption: The Critique of Christian 71
Rhetoric in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby
Ann-Marie Cook

Villainy, Disability and the Moving Image: A 85
Psychoanalytic Perspective
Martin F. Norden

Innocent or Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity? The 93
Role of Film in the Holocaust 1939-1945
Julia Victoria Doyle

Ur-Real Evil and Wickedness in a Virtual World 103
Marlin C. Bates, IV

Portraits of Evil in Wittgenstein: From Poetry to 117
Disenchantment
Silvia Lanzetta

Part 2 Boundaries and Frontiers - Finding Frameworks for
Addressing Current Challenges

You are What You Eat: Cannibalism, Autophagy and the 131
Case of Armin Meiwes
Roger Davis

The Externalization of Justice 141
Kristy J. Buckley

Perspectives of Cyberethics in the Information Society 153
Robert Bichler, Christian Fuchs, Celina Raffl

Predicting Evil: I-D Orientation and Its Implications 163
for Human Nature
Greg M. Turek & Darin J. Challacombe
‘The Splendour of Little Girls’: Social Constructions of 179
Paedophiles and Child Sexual Abuse
Sarah Dalal Goode

Interviewing the Embodiment of Political Evil: An 191
Ethnographic Reconstruction of the Experience of
Meeting with President Echieverriá
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson

III. Evil and Terror
i. Evil, Terror, and Rhetoric

How Civilians Became Targets: The Moral Catastrophe 207
of ‘Collateral Damage’
William Andrew Myers

The Rhetoric of Evil: How Failure is Turned to One’s 215
Own Advantage
Joshua Mills-Knutsen

Posturing Fear in a World of Performed Evil: Terrorists, 227
Teachers, and Evil Neo-liberals
Namita Chakrabarty & John Preston

ii. 9/11 and beyond
Post-Modern Narratives of Evil and 9/11: The Case 241
of Frédéric Biegbeder
Scott M. Powers

Terrorism - Then and Now 253
Agnes B. Curry

Terrorism - Within and Without 267
Nancy Billias
Terrorism and Human Rights: Confronting Evil and 277
Remaining Good
Shlomit Harrosh

Introduction

Nancy Billias
and
Agnes B. Curry

The papers in this volume were first presented at the 7th Global
Conference on Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, held in
Salzburg, Austria for five days in mid-March 2006. The conference and
subsequent written volume are part of the ongoing At the Interface project, a
broad portfolio united by its exploration of cutting-edge ideas and emergent
social challenges. The project is resolutely inter-disciplinary and multi-
disciplinary, and the Salzburg conference united psychologists, health
professionals, specialists in literature, film and computers, historians,
anthropologists, linguists and philosophers in a shared quest to examine the
phenomenon of evil in a variety of contexts. Many were colleagues of several
years, while others were newcomers to the gathering. The papers herein
present a glimpse of the work presented at the conference, at its stage of
development at that time.
Evil and human wickedness are by their ‘nature’ intense topics.
Their intensity at once demands and thwarts sustained exploration. While the
status of evil as an ontological category may itself be an open question in this
postmodern age, the social inducements to and repercussions of human
wickedness are readily apparent. Thus the urge to explore both the soil and
the flowers, so to speak, arises, in part at least, from a sense of responsibility
- the call to understand as a call to respond, to bear witness, and in so doing
to repair the frayed fabric of shared humanity. On the other hand, the move to
examine and explain can result in intellectualizing the problem away,
proffering neatly- tied-up arguments and pat answers that are self-delusional
and profoundly cruel to those who suffer evil’s effects; in the face of
suffering and loss it can seem that most appropriate response is a respectful
silence. The investigator thus finds some of the more insidious possibilities
for evil at the centre of her enterprise and in her own personal urge to chatter
on. More deeply, one must wonder whether a phenomenon that literally
shatters experience, and that renders whatever it touches in the heart and in
the land at first scrambled and then later flat and empty - absent - can be at all
amenable to conceptual explication. Yet succumbing to the shattering seems
likewise to further the work of wickedness. Two sorts of silence - the
pregnant silence of respectful solidarity and the sterile silence of flattened
possibility - thus intertwine. The explorers of evil must continually work to