Excerpts from Power, Love and EvilI: Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damaged (Rodopi, 2007). To order http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=ati%2Fptb+42 What is real is generative. That is, the real is what creates subsequent events, subsequent actions, subsequent facts. What is generative is thus by definition a power. This book takes seriously the idea that love and evil are powers. They are generative and hence as real as any material forces. More, of all the powers of life, these are the two most pregnant with meaning, hence the most generative of what is specifically human. It is not true that all we need is love, but it is true that where love is lacking nothing else amounts to very much at all. And, if love really is the means for overcoming evil, its absence is the guarantee of despair and destruction. … the truth of a sign is to be gauged by the potencies it generates, which also means that the truth resides in both the religious and the secular, or, in Hegel’s terms, the infinite and the finite. In the end, it is the real itself that every philosophy must seek to grasp and to express and to realize. That means refusing to accept the dogmatic limitations of naturalism, especially its failure to grasp the depth of insight into reality embedded in religious rituals and symbols and speech-ways. It also means moving beyond and outside the circulatory system of the established rituals, texts and names of God and his prophets and holy ones - the totality of life’s significations is always more than the totality of significations of books, rituals, and customs. Only thus is the genuine sacredness they contain preserved from the evil done in their names. The hypostatic act of every religious fanatic is the equation of their personal understanding of God with God. If we believe that of all life’s powers it is love which provides us with our greatest guidance for the organization and orchestration of life’s other powers, that it is love which staves off the darkness and heals our despair, which is to say if we really believe what we now seem to be ceaselessly telling ourselves through our songs and stories, irrespective of what we believe about this or that or even the existence of God, then it is absurd, sinful even, if we are permitted a theological term, to shield lovelessness behind the sign of religion. In changing our vocabulary we change our world and the stuff of ourselves. … trauma is life’s way of opening us to the painful truths which we do not want to confront, which we would rather flee or forget. Trauma is the eye of the wound: through trauma our wounds force us to feel what our eyes were too blind to see. The damaged those who are broken and violated by catastrophe - know this. Catastrophe awakens. And this is so privately and collectively. The human hunger for a meaningful life/ death is so great that there are always those ready to be the sacrifice for some purpose. The human capacity to spawn idolatrous purposes, purposes which throw people into the nothingness of stupidity’s endless appetite, might lead us to believe that any who are willing sacrifices in the midst of life’s catastrophes are but fools, or equally foolish, are saints or martyrs. But there is one way
to distinguish the difference: whether one is a sacrifice to love or to hate, or, what amounts to the same thing, to die for loving love’s expansion or loving hate’s expansion. Love’s ultimate demand is a sacrificial one; but that is also evil’s ultimate demand. The life and death of the one sacrificed reveals the power that is served through the sacrifice. The truth that love’s ultimate demand discloses is evident in the life and only in the life. It is not a truth reached by argument. Indeed argument, while relevant to certain kinds of truths, has nothing whatever to do with the truth that is one’s life. Arguments rarely wake one up from existential slumber… Without love there can be no evil. This is why Augustine called evil a privative, a nothing. It needs something good to destroy, whether that is innocence, beauty or someone’s possessions. Ultimately it is love itself that evil seeks to negate through the substitutions of the love that ultimately leads to the nothing. The phantasmic appropriates the sign of love’s creative presence, bringing with it a range of orientations - hard facts and seemingly inviolable reasons - and moral obligations that serve no other purpose than the phantasm’s own persistence. Nothing, absolutely nothing that was once the sign of love’s Holy Spirit is immune from phantasmic attachment: not the Bible, not the sign of the star, nor the cross, not the meditating Buddha, not the words of the moral imperative. Love is a spirit whose form must ever keep changing shape so that it can be. Its presence seems perpetual because its manifestness continues to break through the chambers of hell that we continually create on earth. Its presence can be found everywhere: the act of generosity of victor to vanquished, the gesture of comfort to the impoverished, the defiance of murderous rules, the love that transgresses ethnic and racial and religious and gender strictures, the lover who bends over his beloved to protect her from the stoning of the righteous, the repentant murderer. we should never underestimate the capacity of human beings to love hell. Love sends forth one spirit after the other to realize its immortal longing; every time we attempt to contain it as just this belonging to those just like us, it dies, and we die with it, which is what (the d)evil wants. The tears of the God of love are but the tears from our own bloody flesh when (the d)evil triumphs.