Confronting Evil Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the 21st Century

1 & 2 March, 2019 9 am to 5 pm

Lecture Room 1

India International Centre - Annexe

QIP – Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

in partnership with Institut Français Delhi, Embassy of France In India,

Embassy of Switzerland in India, and Penn State University

Conference Schedule

Day 1 – March 1, 2019

Opening Remarks: 9 am Divya Dwivedi (IIT Delhi)

Bertrand de Hartingh (Counsellor for Cooperation & Cultural Affairs, Country Director, French Institute in India)

Tamara Mona (Minister Counsellor and Deputy Head of Mission, Embassy of Switzerland in India)

Session 1: 9.30 – 11.30 am CHAIR: Subarno Chattarji (University of Delhi)

Robert Bernasconi – Evil Being: Heidegger and Levinas Shaj Mohan – Between Something and Nothing

Coffee: 11.30 – 11.45 am

Session 2: 11.45 am – 12.30 pm

CHAIR: Babu Thaliath (JNU) Daniel James Smith – Five Theses on the Concept of Evil: Thinking with and against the Idealist

Tradition

Visual Presentation I: 12.30 – 1 pm BARCELONE OU LA MORT 2007, film by Idrissa Guiro

LUNCH: 1 pm – 1.45 pm

Session 3: 1.45 – 4 pm

CHAIR: Laurence Joseph (Hermann Psychanalyse) Jean-Luc Nancy – Inaugural Address (video conference)

Divya Dwivedi – ’Tis Ill that I Came

Coffee: 4 – 4.15 pm

Session 4: 4.15 – 5 pm

CHAIR: S. Anand (Navayana Press) J. Reghu – The Missing Concept of Evil

Day 2 – March 2, 2019

Session 5: 9 – 10.45 am

CHAIR: Debjani Bhattacharyya Aarushi Punia – Comprehending Evil through Superfluity

Simon Trüb – With Georges Bataille and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe toward a Poetic ‘Hypermorality’

Coffee: 10.45 – 11 am

Session 6: 11 am – 12.45 pm

CHAIR: Simon Trüb (University of Freiburg & University of Basel) Laurence Joseph – Underworld and Other Places

Vijay Tankha – Ignorance and the Wandering Cause

Visual Presentation II: 12.45 – 1.15 pm BRAGUINO

2017, Film by Clément Cogitore

LUNCH: 1.15 – 2 pm

Session 7: 2 – 3.45 pm CHAIR: Daniel Smith (University of Memphis)

Raj Ayyar – Theodicy and Evil: From a Gnostic Perspective Babu Thaliath – Nietzsche's Ästhetisches Phänomen: Beyond Good and Evil

Coffee: 4 – 4.15 pm

Session8: 4.15 – 5 pm

CHAIR: Raj Ayyar (IIIT Delhi) Adam Knowles – I am the Evil that is Done to Me

The inaugural address on the topic of the conference will be given on 1 March at 1.45 pm by

Jean-Luc Nancy over video conferencing. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. He is also the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair

and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School. He has been a guest professor at numerous universities, among them the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California, Berkeley. His wide-ranging thought is developed in many books, including The Literary Absolute, The Inoperable Community, The Sense of the World, The Experience of Freedom, Being Singular Plural, The Nazi Myth, The Retreat of the Political,

The Muses, The Evidence of Film, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity Noli me Tangere, and more recently Expectation: Philosophy, Literature; The Possibility of a World; The

Banality of Heidegger; and The Disavowed Community.

Paper Abstracts

Aarushi Punia – Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Comprehending Evil through Superfluity

In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt says that “To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others, to be superfluous means to not belong to the world at all”. Superfluous means both: to be excessive and unnecessary, and Arendt argues through the text that totalitarian regimes had a way of making certain human beings appear superfluous. It was not sufficient that they be deprived of their rights or their land, they must be seen as excessive and hence unnecessary and vice versa. In her letter to Karl Jaspers, she writes that radical evil is responsible in "making human beings as human beings superfluous”, that men’s capacity for spontaneity, their ability to initiate something new, their desire to enter in a world of men created through words and deeds and thus their desire for solidarity too must be eliminated. Superfluity does not mean that men have ceased to be men, but that they are no longer seen as men and are viewed as expendable. The evil that makes men superfluous cannot be easily identified precisely because it has infiltrated into the everyday. Evil has lost its conventional markers when it is understood outside theology, and is difficult to locate in certain conflicts like that of Israel and Palestine precisely because it has made itself a part of a daily routine through the structure of the Occupation. Whether its the apathy depicted when the bodies of three Palestinian men in a tank who suffocated death in an attempt to cross the border in Ghassan Kanafani’s fictional story Men in the Sun are thrown over a garbage heap, or the ludicrousness of how difficult it was for Suad Amiry to obtain a Palestinian Residency Card and how easy it was for her dog to get an Israeli Passport, Palestinians narratives attempt to comprehend evil through humans who have been made superfluous (following Arendt’s understanding of comprehension as “examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us - neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to and resisting of, reality - whatever it may be”.

Adam Knowles – Assistant Professor, Department of English and Philosophy, Drexel University

I am the Evil that is Done to Me How can we begin to locate evil in market forces? As a neoliberal order transforms our very existence into commodities, or into what Wendy Brown calls “little capitals,” who or what—if anyone or anything—is imposing these insidious conditions upon us? This paper will attempt to develop a concept of evil independent of a victim/perpetrator divide. As nomadic armies of laborers without access to medical care and little savings move through American highways to camp out in front of their seasonal positions at an Amazon warehouse, or sleep in their car until the ping of their next Uber gig, the American university turns increasingly to a similar labor model of dispensable labor. With the steady increase of precarity, an ideology of resilience emerges, thriving off the heroic valorization of an ethos of skipping holidays, working through illness, “pulling all-nighters.” An endless proliferation of energy drinks, stimulants and synthetic painkillers fill the gaps where physiology fails. This logic has but one possible end: a life in which we are never not working, never not accruing value, whether for our own personal brand or for the corporations that farm the data we produce for them. This evil is not banal, nor is it diabolical. It is at once more inconspicuous and more insidious, for in some sense it is what I am.

Babu Thaliath – Professor & Chairperson, Centre of German Studies School of Language, Literature & Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Nietzsche's Aesthetic Phenomenon In Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) Nietzsche emphasises that "only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified". The fusion of existence and art, as suggested here, is predicated on a synthetic individuation of the Apollinisch and the Dionysisch that Nietzsche seems to tacitly contrast with an ethical-moral phenomenon. However, the prevailing social-conventional polarisation of values - especially of good and evil - is barely repealed in an aesthetic phenomenon. Nietzsche's later reflections in the middle phase of his philosophising point to the fact that the aesthetic goes beyond the opposition of good and evil. In my talk I try to show how Nietzsche seeks in his conception of the aesthetic phenomenon a certain substitute for the principium individuationis that he inherits from Schopenhauer, and how this motif unfolds in his later works into a basic idea of "mask" that "is constantly growing around every profound spirit".

Daniel James Smith – Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis Five Theses on the Concept of Evil: Thinking with and against the Idealist Tradition What can we learn from classical idealist philosophy as we attempt to rethink evil today? This paper presents the main conclusions of a long-term research project on the development of the concept of evil in German idealism. I argue that the extended intra-idealist debate about this essential concept contains important lessons for contemporary attempts to rethink evil, which I present as five theses: 1) theodicy - in all its forms - must be overcome; 2) evil should not be thought, first, as a moral concept; 3) evil is real; 4) there is a resemblance, and even a certain identity between good and evil; 5) it is not primarily individuals, but the world that is evil.

Divya Dwivedi - Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Tis Ill that I Came The negation of existence itself through the destruction of sense comprises the evil in nihilism, of which example abound from ancient to modern thinkers. It is grounded in the understanding of existence as that which is the potential for evil in the form of the human being which is given by the absence of a hyper-sense that would have rendered all actions meaningfully directed. It would then be ill that I came at all since my coming brings unborn possibilities that are equally capable of being good as of being evil. Different thinkers seek to contain this evil to different degrees, some negating existence as such, and others negating the relation of human existence to everything else that exists. This way of thinking shows us how the moral distinction of good-evil arises as a perspective on existence but then exchanges, in certain kinds of thinking, what should be a good concern with “how to exist” with the concern for existence as such. This exchange, which can be called calypsological, dissolves the distinction of means and ends and makes a judgment on existence itself. The judgment that speaks through the terms good and evil should be restored from its mistakenly enlarged ontological dimension to the dimension of politics.

Laurence Joseph - Psychoanalyst, Clinical Psychologist, Director of Publications, Hermann Psychanalyse Press

Underworld and other places The ancients had a precise geography of the underworld and first of all the kingdom of the dead, Hades. Place of a unilateral journey of the living towards the dead, it becomes with Odysseus then with Demeter and Persephone the place of a possible return, of a passage of a bank to the other. The word of their inhabitants becomes audible (Tiresias) and a witness becomes possible (Ulysses). We want to look at this figure of the witness, who by the speech he brings will introduce in the other an ethical change. For this we will rely on the figure of the Saint, verbal column, carrying a speech that does not belong to him, borrowed from Real and separated from the rest of the community can create a new from a report every time singular to the truth. The Saint whom we will work will be less that of the religious tradition than the figure taken up by Lacan. A saint without moral ideal or heroic speech. We believe that this impact of the Saint's discourse can only be made after a crossing of an Underworld, which will not be the great Yes to a creative cruelty of Nietzsche, nor that of the great Sadian dream of a world stronger than the Nature, even if these worlds will hold our attention by their literary force. The Greek topography in this sense seems to us the best able to approach the idea of a thought facing the Evil since it highlights the thresholds, the passages and the entrance of the speech. The saint will be the one who carries this ethical passage without necessarily being heard.

Reghu Janardhanan – Former Editor of Department of Encyclopedia Kerala, political thinker

Indic Tradition and the ‘Missing’ concept of Evil

This presentation will explore the reasons why the concept of ‘evil’ is missing in ‘Indic’ tradition of thought. Evil as a phenomenon arises in history in accordance with our ability to recognize it and oppose it. What is called “western thought” from classical Greece, had been profoundly concerned with the problem of evil. but evil, neither as a theoretical concept nor as empirical phenomena ever appeared in Indic tradition. By 6th century BC, the ideas of ‘Samsara’, of the transmigration of the soul, the wheel of birth and death, and the law of ‘Karma’ had become a single paradigm, in which all the soteriological systems of Brahmanism, Buddhism and Jainism operated and consolidated. Based on this paradigm, the ideas of ‘purusharthas’ — ‘artha’ (wealth), ‘kama (enjoyment), dharma’ (duty determined through birth into caste), and ‘moksha’ (liberation from the worldly existence) –— and the ‘law of karma’ (law of action in accordance with caste ‘dharma’) had consolidated into the fundamental axis around which the entire Indic tradition started revolving. Whereas ‘western thought’ could define man very early on as the self-affirming rational animal, the Indic traditions never distinguished between man and other forms of life. According to the idea of transmigration, transition from human to animal, or even to plant life, and also, from the animal to the human is a possibility. As Hegel observed, concrete man has never been posited in Indic thought. In this way of thought, all historical and political categories such as progress, reason, science, law, good, evil, etc. were found unworthy of thinking. What the laws of transmigration and karma allow is a thinking or ‘non-thinking’ of complete liberation from the worldly existence. Once one has fallen into the ‘subjective falsehood’ of transcending temporal existence one can live in total insensitivity and indifference to that which would be political responsibility. This attitude of insensitivity to human predicaments is what characterises the Ŗsis or wise-men of India, who were thought to be the epitome of ‘Indic’ wisdom traditions. In this tradition, history and humanity had been condemned as forces tempting the ‘atman’ to cling to the worldly desires. Involvement and attachment with the world and its activities are the expressions of being human. But this attachment to the world and life are what, for the ‘Indic’ mode of thought, resists the sotereological goal of moksha.

Raj Ayyar – Visiting Full Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi

The Gnostic Answer to the Problem of Evil: Creative Subversion and Recuperation The Gnostic answer to the problem of evil is arguably the most challenging and subversive, reducing traditional theodicy to a set of limping, apologetic rationalizations to ‘clear’ God in the face of the massiveness of evil. According to one of the root myths found primarily in the Sethian Gnostic texts, this world is a prison planet governed by a capricious, blind and limited/evil creator God. This God, rather than his human creation, is the ‘original sinner’. There is an ‘alien’ God-Goddess existing in a faraway realm of light—we have a few sparks of that light trapped within us, but most of us find it difficult to escape the dark matrix created by Ialdabaoth/Sammael (the creator god) and his bureaucratic goons the Archons. Clearly, this powerful vision influenced many contemporary fantasy and science fiction writers and film makers. We find traces of the root myth in Star Wars, The Matrix, The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter novels, as also in the work of Philip K. Dick. Gnostic cosmology ‘recuperates’ aspects of Christian iconography and mythology, but often in an inverted way. Thus, Sophia the female creative principle is accorded Goddess rank. Mary Magdalene is the lead disciple of Jesus, not a reformed sex worker-saint. Resurrection is symbolic and ‘inner’, rather than an ‘external’ event out there. The Gnostic texts are relatively woman-friendly; some subvert gender by affirming androgyny.

Christ is the teacher-liberator, not a savior in the standard Christian sense. On the other hand, we can also find key Gnostic texts that don’t even mention the root myth as described above. A clear case in point is the Gospel of Thomas, as also Valentinian texts such as the Gospel of Philip. This ‘second strand’ in Gnosticism can be fitted into ‘panentheism’, as in the later work of A.N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne’s writings. There is also a resounding parallel with non-dual metaphysical traditions such as Advaita Vedanta. My presentation will explore the tension between both Gnostic strands and suggest modes of resolution.

Robert Bernasconi- Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies, Pennsylvannia State University

EVIL BEING Within the greater part of the history of Western philosophy, evil has been consistently presented as a problem that threatens the framework into which it has to be inserted. To account for its possibility its very existence was in effect denied. It was presented as a privation in the sense that it was simply an absence of the good: evil lacks being. But in the aftermath of the Holocaust two of the most prominent philosophers, Martin Heidegger, who was implicated in National Socialism, and Emmanuel Levinas, whose family in Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis, both declared that Being is evil. What does this mean for our understanding of human existence and, above all, for our understanding of the good. This lecture poses the question “what is evil?” in two senses. First, what are we to understand by evil? And, second, if being is evil, what is our access to it?

Shaj Mohan – Philosopher based in the subcontinent

Between Something and Nothing There are two basic problematics of evil—the theological and the moral—which differ with one another according to the exclusion or reduction of the primary concepts. They can be characterized also as a concern with evil in the known. The moral problematic can be defined, as the first order condition, as the concern with that which suffers in accordance with its passion; and, as the second order condition, is given by that suffering under which the very condition of the passion is either reduced or removed. In this sense evil corresponds to the essential determination of a particular thing – for this reason the blindness of the stone is not its privation. The theological problematic is the account of the Essence (God) which determines the suffering of all its possibilities in their reciprocity from which nothing can escape. In other words, this model is mechanical in that it conceives the possibilities determined by the Essence in their actuality as components in motion where the freedom of motion is specified by the Essence; the periodicity of the components is comprehended as the expression of the Essence in this case. However, what has been our concern since the last century is the political problematic of evil. If we define politics as the fight for freedom, and philosophy as the creation of freedom, then, both politics and philosophy, inherit the responsibilities of the moral and the theological. We find that this responsibility can be experienced—to come to a relationship with—only when we can conceive reason as the faculty of the pre-Essential. Simon Trüb – Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for North American Studies, University of Freiburg & Visiting Lecturer, University of Basel

With Georges Bataille and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe toward a Poetic ‘Hypermorality’ This paper offers two potentially polemical arguments. It maintains, firstly, that Georges Bataille is able to offer an intriguing perspective on the problem of evil, and secondly, that the contemporary rethinking of ‘evil’ needs to take into account the realm of literature, or of art more broadly. Even though ‘evil’ and related notions such as guilt, sin, or transgression play crucial roles in Bataille’s writings, Bataille does not figure prominently in recent discussions of ‘evil’. This paper briefly considers why this might be so before exploring some of the insights that can be gained from Bataille’s conception of ‘evil’. Literature, among other things, according to Bataille, is ‘evil’, and in Literature and Evil, Bataille maintains that literature demands a ‘hypermorality’. In this regard, Bataille has a rather unlikely ally in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who imagines in Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry the possibility of what he calls an ‘archi-ethics’ based on poetry. This paper concludes by establishing some connections between Bataille’s ‘hypermorality’ and Lacoue-Labarthe’s ‘archi-ethics’ and by reflecting on what literature might be able to contribute to the present reassessment of ‘evil’.

Vijay Tankha – Former Head, Department of Philosophy, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi

Ignorance and the Wandering Cause We regard many things as evil, as a category it is so amorphous that it seems difficult to pin down, The plurality of evils, the swarm that Pandora unleashes on the world, are seen as an aspect of being human, abstractly often reduced by philosophers to a single cause. The ubiquity of evil in the world is matched only by strategies which deny or defuse it rather than examine and confront it. This paper looks at two common ways in which traditional thought has managed the problem of evil even as it is admitted as a constituent of the world. Those who struggle with such theodicies adopt one or more of a limited set of solutions. In this paper I will try to show that these attempts avoid rather than face the real problem of and singularity of evil as we find it in the world and in the life of man.

In a Cannibal Time

Naveen Kishore

Naveen Kishore, 2002, silver prints, 35mm

This exhibition is a series of 12 black and white images created by Naveen Kishore (Publisher, Seagull Books: Delhi, London, New York). They are photographs taken by Kishore of an installation designed by

him as a response to the provocation of events often known through the metonymy of a date – in particular 2002 in India – to explore the relation between emotion, ethics and aesthetics. The installation consists of

clay figures that are reminiscent of human beings on the one hand, and of the many experiments in modernist sculpture on the other. The figures, in various poses of anguish, are lit up with beams of light (1000 watts planos used for stage lighting) and made semi-visible with fog, while images from a range of cinematic and documentary sources pertaining to another metonym, Auschwitz, are projected on them. Through these layers which are partly pristine and partly covered over with memory the artist, Kishore,

explores photography as choice, and raises the following issues:

How close do you get to your ‘subject’?

Proximity and distance; ‘objectivity’ and ‘pathos’. Shame. Guilt.

Emotion as a source of action or paralysis.

Images as repositories of ‘bafflement’, ‘frustration,’ or other possibilities of art as ‘creative response’ which is the opposite of erasure.

Anatomy Lessons 1, 2, 3

K. G. Sybramanyan

K. G. Subramanyan, 2008, courtesy The Seagull Foundation for the Arts

You do not have to go To anatomy rooms To see dismembered bodies. You can see them on the street. Eyes blown out of sockets Faces ripped apart Torsos crushed and mangled Torn limbs strewn around Like playthings in the pathways For stray dogs to tug and tear. Streets are now open playfields For wild men on the prowl Masked out of identity With black dress, hood and gloves Seeking to blast the bodies Of unwarned fellow beings. To assert a waning manhood? To express an inner hurt? To avenge an ancient grievance, Or serve a faceless God Made out of stone or timber Or a non-material myth Born out of countless stories

That spew from many mouths Where each new wash of spittle Reshapes a previous tale Painting in shadow patches That lead one's mind astray Cloud it with dark suspicions Seed it with bars of hate Streets no more ring with laughter Doors stare like vacant eyes Hold whispers in shaded corners Wails in the corridors. The wails are warped with anger, Tears hiss like molten lead. The heart's once smiling garden Is a patch of deadened earth Spewing new bugs of hatred In each human, beast or thing Cramping their growth and action Shrinking their inner selves. Trees chop the sky like hatchets Grass flares like blown-up fire Birds slash the air with curses Beasts glare with gory eyes And each man sees his neighbour A monster in human dress.

Poem by K. G. Subramanyan,

Organised by

Divya Dwivedi (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi)

Simon Trüb (University of Basel, University of Freiburg) Adam Knowles (Drexel University)

Supported by