Elements of a phenomenology of evil and reconciliation.

In this chapter I highlight the topic of trauma, truth, and reconciliation from the perspective of a phenomenology of evil. My basic intuitions are threefold. First, acts of evil have affective, interpersonal, political, and existential components (among others). The power and destructiveness of extreme acts of evil can, nevertheless, not be understood entirely as the sum of what happens in all these spheres. Second, the destructiveness of evil suggests that there is a dynamic at work that manifests itself as denial (in perpetrators) and speechlessness and powerlessness (in victims). Finally, denial and speechlessness have self-perpetuating tendencies that make victims vulnerable to repeating the evil themselves (cf. Card, 2002, p. 214).
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I describe what I mean when I use the term ‘dynamic’ by exploring acts of evil and their consequences from different angles, mainly psychological and philosophical. I draw on literature on splitting, denial, and shame to gain a better understanding of the denial of perpetrators and the speechlessness of the victims and witnesses of acts of evil. I also compare acts of evil and acts of forgiveness with respect to their underlying existential patterns. My hypothesis will be that such patterns exist and that these patterns oppose one another.
I begin descriptively, by trying to depict as unbiased as possible how evil appears—how it feels, what it does to people, and how it affects their lives. This chapter is limited to excessive forms of evil and their consequences, because they typically exemplify what I consider to be a relatively neglected aspect of evil—its nontransparency, the speechlessness to which it leads and is so characteristic for the atmosphere in which evil spreads out, almost like an infectious disease. In the course of this description, we will discover two points. First, we will recognize that, after a while, reporting on evil touches the dynamic of evil itself in the sense that it becomes more and more difficult to just say what evil ‘is’ and that it is tempting to evade this ‘area of speechlessness’ by addressing more concrete issues, or by taking an overly neutral and objective stance, or by letting one’s attention be diverted to superficial issues.
The other point is that this ‘speechlessness’ is not only negative but also revealing, in the sense that it brings us to the dynamical core of evil or, at least, close to it. The guiding idea of this chapter is that something exists in the nature of evil itself that resists being spoken about and thought about. It is precisely this resistance that can be analyzed in terms of a dynamic operating in acts of evil and their aftermath. The nontransparency of evil is, then, not just a (static) feature of evil. Nontransparency does not point primarily to our difficulty in describing evil acts and evildoers’ motives. Instead, it is a dynamical category: something occurs during the process of experiencing and telling and analyzing that manifests itself in malfunction of one’s very capacity to experience, in inability to verbalize, and in the ineffectiveness of the systems with which we categorize our moral world. In other words, it is by concentrating on the nontransparency of evil that we are in a better position to detect the dynamical pattern in the effects and transmission of evil.