Talking about Evil

'Evil is not a new topic. However, the Holocaust, manifold military conflicts, the emergence of ethnic and forced migration waves, and the rise in corruption require that we situate it in the different contexts where it acquires meaning. Evil is an action that threatens the ethics of life and causes the collapse of essential values. What place does it occupy in our minds, in human relations, in psychoanalytic practice? Evil creates a category that defies psychology manuals. Defining it accurately is a pressing need, because be it natural, rational, irrational, or banal, evil lies on the border between the sayable and the bearable.

This book offers a unique and important effort to address these old yet timely questions. Drawing on a truly interdisciplinary range of contributors; philosophers, psychoanalysts, historians, sociologists, literary scholars and theologians, this book achieves an unusual breadth of engagement with the question of evil in its many contexts and effects. It will become a necessary reference for scholars and practitioners in many fields of thought and research.' - Janine Puget, senior Psychoanalyst, Buenos Aires; Sigourney Award-Winning author of Discontinuous Subjectivation and Psychoanalysis: Uncertainty and Certainties (2015); numerous other contributions to psychoanalysis.

'This book on evil amounts to a great deal: it counters the "evil-skeptics" who believe that the concept of evil has no explanatory power and that all it does is to serve as a rhetorical device of strong condemnation. Evil, the book tells us, is manifested by morally despicable acts, but despicable doesn't mean ineffable. By looking at evil from diverse disciplines and varied points of view, the essays in the book make a genuine contribution in answering two vital questions: Why morally despicable actions are done, and is it true that the people who are doing evil are constitutionally different from people who don't?' - Avishai Margalit, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and George F. Kennan, Professor at the institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, winner of Israel Prize for philosophy (2010) and Ernest Bloch Prize (2012), and author of The Ethics of Memory (2002) and On Compromise and Rotten Compromises ( 2009).

'This compelling set of meditations on evil will consistently engage all who are troubled by the paradoxical human propensity toward inhumanity. In their entirety, the essays provide a remarkable wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary conversation about the problematics of understanding evil. As individual contributions, each essay offers a unique and deeply thought-provoking perspective on those aspects of the human condition that permit the violent erasure of other humans. In all, this captivating and enlightening book yields a rare amalgam of psychoanalytic, philosophical, and historical insights into our most bedeviling concerns in a manner that adds a hopeful wisdom to our struggles toward a humane world.' - Sam Gerson, Ph.D., founder and Past-President of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP) and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and winner of the "Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of Genocide and the Holocaust" (2007).