| Abstrakt: |
Is it possible to have, or make, a rational response to evil? Responses to evil are generally emotional: fear, rage, denial, despair, disgust, and sublimation. As philosophers, we pretend to explore the limits of what can be thought, not only what can be felt. Kant spoke of evil as '…a product of human reason under the natural conditions of its full development, which are found in the social condition.' If evil is a product of reason, is a rational response to evil also possible? If so, what shape might it take? Articulating a rational response to evil may demand a new understanding of agency, subjectivity, and rationality itself - at the very least, a new understanding of language. Giorgio Agamben (among others) has advocated for an 'ethics of testimony' in response to the atrocities of moral evil. 'Auschwitz represents a historical crime aiming to destroy the duality of enunciation…[one]…that transforms and disarticulates the subject to a limit point in which the link between subjectification and desubjectification seems to break apart.' Testimony, in this sense, is an ethical act of survival that testifies to the impossibility of the total destruction of the human. Yet, it is a survival in a double sense: if the human survives the nonhuman, the drowned, whose bare life persists beyond the death of the human, survives the human.' My chapter explores the notion that, pace Adorno, poetry is in fact an appropriate, rational, and ethical response to the problem of evil; how, and why, the nature of poetic language may make this possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
