Why Is Evil So Sexy, and So Profoundly Glamorous?

By Terry Eagleton, Tikkun
Posted on March 18, 2011
Crosspost with http://www.alternet.org/story/150261/

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Palin is just one of the many rightwing women who hide hideous views behind beautiful packages.

Only in being in atrocious pain can the evil persuade themselves that they are still alive. This is why they cling perversely to their sufferings, since without them they would be dead. They would rather cling to this obscene enjoyment of forcing others and themselves to suffer, which is a kind of nothingness, an inability to live truly, rather than risk the much more terrifying nothingness of abandoning themselves, in the faith that out of this kind of nothingness something positive, some new life, may finally emerge. The wicked are terrified of giving themselves away and cling to themselves for dear life as if to a lover.

Tragedy is the form that recognizes that if a genuine human community is to be constituted, it can be only on the basis of our shared failure, frailty, and mortality. This is a community of repentance and forgiveness, and it represents everything that is the opposite of the American Dream. This means, in the terms of Jacques Lacan, that the symbolic can be founded only on the Real. Only by acknowledging the monstrous as lying at the very heart of ourselves, rather than projecting it outward onto others, can we establish anything more than a temporary, imaginary relationship with one another, one which is not likely to endure. This means relationships based on the recognition that at the very core of the self lies something profoundly strange to it, which is utterly impersonal and anonymous but closer to us than breathing, at once intimate and alien. This has had many names in Western civilization: God, Language, Desire, the Will, Language, the Unconscious, the Real, and so on.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Considered by many to be the most influential British literary critic, Terry Eagleton has written more than forty books, including Reason, Faith and Revolution (2009) and most recently On Evil (2010). He is currently a visiting professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

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