Introduction: Special Issue on “Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil” ROBIN MAY SCHOTT There is for human beings no greater hell to fear than the one on earth. -Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret ofJoy Toward the close of Alice Walker’s novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1993), Adam realizes-after witnessing the lifelong trauma of his wife Tashi/Evelyn, who had undergone “female circumcision” as a young woman in her (fictive) African tribe of Olinka, and after speaking with a young man dying of AIDS-that “There is for human beings no greater hell to fear than the one on earth” (250).Adam gives final testimony to the ruined body and dreams of this young man, who had worked for a pharmaceutical company rumored to have been responsible for spreading AIDS in Africa by developing a vaccine against polio that may have carried the immune deficiency virus from green monkeys to humans. The problem of evil is older than the story of Job, a just and faithful man who experienced evil events through the loss of family, health, and property. His story poses the question: why should any individual or community, especially those who seek to live justly, suffer inexplicably?Job ultimately accepts the voice of God from the whirlwind, recognizes that humans are not competent to judge whether God is just, and is redeemed. Many of Job’s successors have followed his example by demanding to know the explanation of unjust suffering, but have refused to accept Job’ssolution. For modern authors, it is not God but human beings who become judges of the significance of evil in human affairs (see Cicovacki 2001, 83-94). The question of unjust suffering has haunted modern thought. As Susan Neiman argues in her book, Evil in Modern Thought; An Alternative History of zyxwvu zyxwvutsr zyxwvu Hypatia vol. 18, no. 1 (Winter 2003) 0 by Robin May Schott 2 Hypatia Philosophy (2002); the problem of evil most broadly understood is the problem of how to make sense of the world when that world is ineradicably a place of suffering (2). The specifically modern conception of evil refers to moral evils, to evils that human beings are responsible for, as opposed to the catastrophes of natural disasters or the suffering implicit in the finitude of the world, both of which have been classified earlier as forms of evil. Joan Copjec (1996) observes that Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1960)enacted a conceptual revolution by which evil “ceases to be a religious or metaphysical problem and becomes, for the first time, a political, moral and pedagogical problem” (xi). By situating evil as an effect of freedom rather than as an effect of human finitude, Kant opened the way to what Maria Pia Lara (2001) calls a postmetaphysical understanding of evil ( 1).2 Though Neiman (2002) criticizes much of twentieth-century philosophy for ignoring the problem of evil (for example, see 288), a cursory glance at the themes of humanities conferences and new publications over the last five years or so indicates that the issue has become quite fashionable. “Evil”has definitely caught the attention of scholars again. Although philosophical discussions of the problem of evil seem to go in and out of fashion, the reality of evil, in the broad sense of meaningless suffering, has never retreated from human existence. Nor has the problem of “evils” in the narrower sense, defined by Claudia Card (2002) as “foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoings” (3); It is to the plurality of evil acts to which most discussions of evil in this Special Issue of Hypatia refer. A quick recap of the astonishing increase in the number of civilian deaths in wartime conflict is just one reminder of the modern world’s capacity for evil. In the first ninety years of the twentieth century, there were over four times as many war deaths as in the preceding four hundred years (see Vickers 1993). In 1990, battlefields included Afghanistan, Angola, Columbia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Mozambique, Peru, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Tibet (Vickers 1993,2). In the 1990s one must add the battles of the Gulf War, the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the genocide in Rwanda. And this list does not include the death, torture, and suffering inflicted by the major wars during the second half of the twentieth century; for example, World War I1 and the Holocaust, and the Vietnam war. So why do philosophers return to “evil” now, if it is a problem that has never left humans’ hearts and minds? Is this shift linked to the renewed political rhetoric of evil? In the demonstrations against the Vietnam war that I went to with my older sisters, the language used to denounce the war was the language of imperialism, not of evil. And yet since the 1980s, conservative leaders in American politics have embraced the term “evil,” as in former president Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars rhetoric denouncing the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire.” Now that the United States and Russia have entered into a new zyxw Robin May Schott zyxw 3 NATO brotherhood, President George W. Bush has found other countries to target as part of the “axis of evil”: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (State of the Union Address, 2002): Is “evil,” then, merely the term used by conservative leaders of this “first world” superpower to deflect attention from an analysis of the political oppressions that are at stake in international relations? Many leftist intellectuals have denounced the term “evil” in the pages of the Nation as just such a moralizing term that diminishes the possibilities for carrying out effective political critique (see, for example, Slavoj iiieck 1999). Nonetheless, I think it is important to defend the concept of evil against this imputed charge of moralization and depoliticization. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the term “evils” still marks out the intolerable transgressions to human life and consciousness that must be perpetually resisted, and thus marks out crucial territory for political critique. Moreover, the term evil focuses attention on inescapable philosophical questions. The fact that American culture has long tended to represent the world in Manicheistic terms, distinguishing between the good “us” and the evil “them,” is not reason for intellectuals to abandon the task of thinking through the complexity of evils (see de Beauvoir 1998, 75). The resurgence of intellectual interest in the question of evil in the United States and Western Europe can be explained by at least three factors. One factor refers to the psychological effect of the proximity of the evils that have marked the 1990s. While atrocities in Africa-represented as a racialized other, as Sherene Razack notes in this volume-may not seem threateningly close, the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia do hold that threat. Yugoslavia was, after all, the place for numerous conferences and vacations for Western Europeans and Americans alike, and hence the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia hit close to home. The second factor is connected to changes in historical consciousness that have taken place through the burgeoning of literature and scholarship on the Holocaust, especially the publishing of people’s memoirs after decades of ~ i l e n c eThis . ~ literature has led to a greater awareness about genocides in general, although philosophers after Hannah Arendt (1963) may have been slower than other researchers in turning their attention to this theme. The third factor is linked to changes in the philosophical discourse of the last decades. Ewa Ziarek (2001) argues in her review essay-to be published in the “Special Cluster on Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil” in the next issue of Hypatia-that evil is an inherent inspiration of postmodern reflection, which she views as particularly suited to focus on the irreducible dimension of antagonism and power in discourse, embodiment, and politics. But why should the existence of evils be a problem that feminist philosophers in particular should confront? What can feminist philosophy contribute to the analysis of evil?This Special Issue of Hypatia and the subsequent Special 4 zyxwvuts Hypatia Cluster are unique in posing such questions. In recent years, feminist ethics in English-language discussions have mostly focused on the debate between “care ethics” and “justice”; the concept of evil has not been widely debated.6 But as the material included in this volume attests, feminist theorists do make crucial contributions to an understanding of evils and of possible responses to these acts. One reason for feminist philosophers to address the problem of evils is that many evils are gender-specific. Think, for example, of the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), which has been performed on some 100 million to 130 million women and girls worldwide-a practice that also takes place in the United States (Burstyn 1995,2).7Think of the random attacks against women in Bangladesh by men who throw acid over them, causing permanent pain and grotesque disfiguration, thus ruining the futures of these young women (Jantzen 2002). Think of the mass war rapes in recent years in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Feminist scholars have a sharp eye for such situations in which women are sufferers of evils.8 In this volume, the concern for women as sufferers of evil acts is evident in Margaret Denike’s essay on the witch craze, Debra Bergoffen’s essay on the verdict issued by the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal against three Bosnian Serb soldiers accused of rape, and Mary Anne Franks’ essay on women under the Taliban regime. These essays indicate that the genealogy of women as sufferers of evil is both depressingly long and still of pressing contemporary concern. These discussions can be viewed as an extension of the more general feminist concern to locate and critically analyze gendered forms of oppression, in conjunction with oppression linked to racialized and ethnicized differences. Feminist scholars’ attentiveness to the suffering of victims also leads to a critical attentiveness to ideologies that laud suffering. In this issue, this theme is evident in Jennifer Geddes’ discussion of the “uselessness” of the knowledge of extreme suffering in Charlotte Delbo’s works. In the “Special Cluster on Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil” forthcoming in the next issue, Lynne Arnault critically discusses the logic of redemption in American culture-which authorizes a masculinized and commericalized reaction to suffering. But many evils are not gender-specific, as Card notes in her contribution to this volume. Both men and women suffer under the evils of genocide, and for that reason this issue risks being overlooked by feminist scholars. But it is crucial for feminist philosophers to analyze both gendered and non-gendered forms of evil, as part of a general commitment to incorporate feminist values and methodologies in analyses of ethical and political relations. Women philosophers such as Arendt have been particularly important in bringing the issue of evil to debate in a non-metaphysical way? For women philosophers, it is often an analysis of the particularity of evils that enables reflection on Robin May Schott zyxw 5 moral judgment. Some of the contributions to this volume illustrate these methodological interests. Card’s essay draws on the feminist habit of attending to emotional response and concrete particular relationships in her analysis of social death. Ada Jaarsma’s essay illustrates how Luce Irigaray’s insight into the evil committed by the refutation of sexual difference provides strategies for reworking ethical and theological discourses. Some contributions to this volume focus on issues of representation; for example, on how evil has been represented by the feminine (for example, both Denike and Franks discuss the representations linked to woman as “other”). Still others focus on alternative links that must be forged between representations of “woman” and of “human.” For example, Bergoffen calls attention to the way in which women’s vulnerability points towards the vulnerability of all human beings, a condition that must be acknowledged in a democracy. Peg Birmingham reads Arendt alongside Julia Kristeva to suggest that the superfluity of human beings-the source of radical evil for Arendt (1992)-is rooted in the abjection of natality. Learning to live with ambiguity and abandonment through a “politics of natality” may, Birmingham suggests, offer the only remedy to the threat of radical evil. The awful contemporaneity of the problem of evil was brought home by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (which housed companies from 28 countries) and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, killing more than 3000 persons. Five days after the attacks, Laurie Shrage, coeditor of Hypatia, made the suggestion that I expand this special issue on evil to include a forum on terrorism, with short commentaries by feminist philosophers invited to write on the recent tragedies. Given the willingness of conservative intellectuals and politicians to point to the existence of “the radical evil emanating from the Muslim world” (Peretz 2001,2), it became all the more pressing to address the question of whether the term evil could be used in reference to these terrorist attacks. And given the fact that all the suicide attackers were male, that according to reports in the New York Times on September 15, three of the terrorists had spent a few hundred dollars on lap dances and drinks at a Daytona Beach strip club the night before the attack, and that young male Muslim suicide bombers are reportedly promised that they will be greeted by 70 black-eyed virgins in heaven, the question of gender seemed troublingly relevant.l0 O n September 11, women and men alike were victims of this terrible tragedy. Can feminist perspectives provide significantly new insights for understanding and responding to terrorism as an act of evil? The answer, I think, is yes. In the “Forum on September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives on Terrorism,” Bat-Ami Bar O n brings feminist methodological perspectives to bear in understanding the phenomenological experience of suffering and the plurality of evils-as in both Israel’s repression of the zyxwvuts 6 Hypatia Palestinians and Palestinian terrorism-rather than positing any essential relation between masculinity and terrorism. She argues that the hegemony men have over the means of violence is merely a contingent fact, and that for some women terrorists, the success of their mission is a function of their performance of their femininity. Card, on the other hand, is interested specifically in the question of the gender of terrorists-not only in relation to the suicide bombers who attacked on September 11, but also in relation to domestic terrorists. She argues that domestic abuse is also a form of terrorism, though “war” is not the appropriate strategy for fighting either domestic or foreign terrorism. Other contributors to the “Forum on September 11,2001”discuss the question, who are the victims of this crisis?They point not only to the immediate victims of the collapse of the World Trade towers and their families, but also to the hidden victims of this situation, which generated terror and the threat of a war of reprisal. For example, Drucilla Cornell calls on us to support the women in Afghanistan who have suffered under both the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, and Constance Mui and Julien Murphy write of the children who grow up in hunger and anger, as these young suicide bombers themselves may have done. As an extension of the question about hidden victims, Alison Jaggar argues that women have a special interest in finding alternatives to military strategies against terrorism. Jaggar notes that military responses are disproportionately harmful to women-as refugees, and as victims of rape, of the sexist and violent culture promoted by militarism, and of the pollution to the environment caused by military action. Cornell also focuses on the gendering of the imaginary representation of the nation, as well as on the gendered assumptions in the political response to terrorism. Iris Marion Young argues that the current governmental response follows the logic of the protection racket, a notion introduced by Susan Rae Petersen (1977). Young argues that the state’s claim to be the paternalistic, chivalrous protector should be criticized by feminists, who must be committed to global democratic citizenship. Sara Ruddick argues that in terms of individual relations, a response that is gendered as “feminine” can be gleaned. During the crisis, the response by victims (in which category she includes the families of people who were killed) indicates that “feminine” ideals of intimacy and attachment were sustained for both men and women in the face of this tragedy. In addition to discussion of the victims, and of the gendered imaginary at work in political and emotional responses, contributors to the forum also focus on the nature of representations of the “other” in Western and non-Western societies. Lara argues that under the new totalitarianism in some Muslim societies that are experiencing what she calls the vertigo of secularization, women, as in the case of the Jews in Nazi ideology, become the embodiment of evil. Razack reminds us that not only gender but also racialized imagery is crucial in Robin May Schott 7 understanding how first-world countries represent their relation to third-world countries, and she warns us against the mythic drama that contains no thinking and acting third-world subjects. Thus, forum contributors share some of the strategies used by the authors of articles in this volume: a focus on the victims of evil acts and on the concrete relations that are violated; on the ideology that is invoked in response to evil acts; on the negative representations of the other that are used to justify aggression, as well as on the ways in which the “feminine” may be invoked as a positive resource for safeguarding human relations. Although discussions of “evil” only recently have begun to attract a wider audience amongst feminists and philosophers, feminist scholars have been involved in research on issues of evil and related questions of violence and horror for many years. Because the material collected for this Special Issue exceeds the boundaries of one volume, all book reviews and review essays will be published in the “Special Cluster on Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil” in the next issue of Hypatia. This volume offers the following perspectives for an analysis of evil: 1) Work on this issue is multivalent, where the multiple sites of analysis include analyses of victims, of representations, of ideologies, and of methodologies. Studies of evil contribute to a wide-angled approach to ethics-probing questions that lie behind and beyond issues of individual agency and responsibility. 2) Feminist perspectives on evil exemplify the fact that feminist theory has emerged as a major dialogic partner in analyses of (not necessarily gender-specific) dilemmas that are central to contemporary societies. This attests to the maturation of feminist philosophy, and is evidence against those philosophers who view feminist theory as of marginal interest and hence as thoroughly dispensable. 3 ) Feminist work on the problem of evil carries on the spirit of engagement with those contemporary ethical, social, and political issues that originally attracted many of us to the field of feminist philosophy. zy NOTES Producing a volume of this nature requires a substantial engagement on the part of those responsible for the publication of Hypatia. I would like to thank Hypatia coeditors Laurie Shrage and Nancy Tuana for their valuable support and feedback during this project. I would also particularly like to thank Hypatia managing editor Alexa Schriempf for her tireless work in carrying this volume from inception to final production. 1. See my review of Neiman’s book, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002), forthcoming in the “Special Cluster o n Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil” (henceforth cited as “Cluster”). zy 8 Hypatia zy zyxwv zyxw 2. See Eduardo Mendieta’s review of Lara’s book, Rethinking Evil (2001), forthcoming in the “Cluster.” 3. See Hilde Lindemann Nelsen’s review of Card’s book, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (2002)’forthcoming in the “Cluster.” 4. “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, aiming to threaten the peace of the world, ” Bush said. 5. Claudia Card, personal correspondence, 24 May 2002. 6. Some feminist theorists have, however, discussed this theme, notably Nel Noddings (1989) and Claudia Card (1996 and 2002). 7. Accessed 15 May 2002 at http://www.theatlantic.com/unbaounnd/flashbbks/ fgm/fgm.htm. 8. Feminist scholars have also begun to focus on how women themselves can be agents of evil (see, for example, Card 1999,3-26). However, there were no submissions on this theme for this volume. 9. Lara, personal correspondence, 23 May 2002. To her mention in 2001 of Arendt as a woman philosopher who has drawn attention to evil in a nonmetaphysical way, I would add both Simone de Beauvoir (1952 and 1998) and Luce Irigaray (1993). 10. Susan Brison included this information in a note on the Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) listserv on 15 September 2002. REFERENCES Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York, Penguin Books. . 1992. Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers: Correpondence 1926-1969, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, ed. Lotte Kohler and Jans Saner. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovick. Burstyn, Linda. 1995. Female circumcision comes to America. The Atlantic Monthly (October): 1-13. Bush, George W. 2002. State of the Union address, 29 January. Retrieved 13 September from the World Wide Web: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2OO2/ 01/20020129-ll.html Card, Claudia. 1996. The unnatural lottery: Character and moral luck. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. -. 1999. Groping through gray zones. In Onfeminist ethics andpolitics, ed. Claudia Card. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. .2002. The atrocity paradigm: A theory of evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cicovacki, Predrag. 2001. The trial of man and the trial of God: Reflections on Job and the grand inquisitor. Diotima: A Philosophical Review 2 (2):83-94. Copjec, Joan, ed. 1996. Introduction: Evil in the time of the finite world. In Radical evil, London: Verso. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1952. The second sex, trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Robin May Schott 9 . 1998. America day by day, trans. Carol Cosman. London: Phoenix. Irigaray, Luce. 1993. An ethics of sexual difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. London: Athlone Press. Jantzen, Ulrik. 2002. Aetsede for altid (Corroded forever). Berlingske Tidende, 12 May. Kant, Immanuel. 1960. Religion within the limits of reason alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt Hudson. New York: Harper and Row. Lara, Maria Pia, ed. 2001. Introduction to Rethinking evil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Neiman, Susan. 2002. Evil in modern thought: An alternative history ofphilosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Noddings, Nel. 1989. Women and evil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peretz, Martin. 2001. Israel, the United States, and evil. The New Republic, 24 September, 1-3. Petersen, Susan Rae. 1977. Coercion and rape: The state as a male protection bracket. In Feminism and Philosophy, ed. Mary Vetterling Braggin et al. Totowa, N. J.: Littlefield, Adam. Vickers, Jeanne. 1993. Women and war. London: Zed Books. Walker, Alice. 1993. Possessing the secret ofjoy. London: Vintage Books. Ziarek, Ewa. 2001. An ethics of dissensus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. iii;eck, Slavoj. 1999. Against the double blackmail. The Nation, May 21. zy zyxwvut