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In the Presence of Suffering: Toward a New Understanding of Evil

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In the Presence of Suffering: Toward a New Understanding of Evil DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 6-2018 In the presence of suffering: toward a new understanding of evil Kristina Lebedeva DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Lebedeva, Kristina, "In the presence of suffering: toward a new understanding of evil" (2018). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 246. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/246 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. In the Presence of Suffering: Toward a New Understanding of Evil A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy June, 2018 BY Kristina Lebedeva Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois 1 Table of Contents Dedication……………………………………………………………………3 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………4 Introduction: A Girl Remembers………………………………………………6 Chapter One: The Passions of Time: Temporality, Affect, and Evil in Spinoza…..31 Chapter Two: The Trajectory of Evil: From Privation to Superfluity…………...77 Chapter Three: The Morality of Resentments & Truth-Haunted Affectivity…………………………………………………..........................134 Chapter Four: Levinas After Ophir: Alterity Reconsidered…………………...192 Conclusion: The Lamb Becoming a Lion; or, Hear me Roar…………………..260 Bibliography………………………………………………………………..268 2 Abstract: The present dissertation addresses the question of evil and suffering as intrinsically intertwined, linked by the notion of affective temporality, as distinct from ‘clock time.’ Following Adi Ophir, I define evil as superfluity, as what ought not to be, thus divorcing it from any idea of necessity, and its social production that must be reduced or disrupted. The catastrophes that are still happening take precedence over past ones, since the former are still open to reduction, intervention, and alleviation. Here time becomes a key notion that alerts us to the possibilities of responding morally to present disasters. Time reappears again at the heart of suffering, understood as “the duration of the encounter with the unbearable.” I argue that affective time activates and conceptually revitalizes our moral agency, since it is phenomenologically described as open to interruption. Thus, we have the choice to either let the agonizing duration of another’s suffering go on uninterrupted or fragment this temporality, thereby offering the suffer a relief and a glimpse of a more ‘habitable’ temporality, the temporality of going about your business in the world and forgetting the ticking of the clock. Thus, we are capable of altering the suffering other’s sense of time. In my discussion of Spinoza, Ophir, Amery, and Levinas, I situate suffering as the very voice and language of superfluous evil and argue that understanding affective temporality in its relation to evil opens up new possibilities of its concrete, situated alleviation. If evil qua suffering is a language that can be studied and understood, our moral indifference becomes increasingly less justifiable. Ultimately, I submit that failing to exercise our agency in the face of the concrete suffering of others means allowing their torment to continue uninterrupted, thus forming the juxtaposition of moral action and complicity. 3 The measure of love is love without measure. —Saint Augustine if I do not love you I shall not love —Samuel Beckett For my mother, Ludmila, who is the true heroic presence behind all my dreams, all my accomplishments, and all my aspirations. She is the warm, tender radiance illuminating my forever disabled body and recalcitrant spirit, transforming my socially expected humility of a cripple into the courage of a tiny warrior, whose claws are as sharp as God’s. I would not welcome the person I would have become without her in my life. For my significant other and all my intellectually vibrant friends and colleagues who stood beside me during my hour of greatest need and who continue making this world a more hospitable place for me. 4 Acknowledgements I want to thank Dr. Steeves, Dr. Thompson, Dr. Birmingham, and Dr. Perkins, who is sadly no longer at DePaul University, as well as other faculty members, for their continued support and unwavering faith in the life of my mind, in my passion for understanding, and in the force of my ideas. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dr. Kevin Thompson. I am equally grateful to my ever-supportive family, my partner, and all my friends for their priceless gift of innumerable philosophical discussions, suggestions, and insights, as well as their intellectual and ethical generosity. There have been times when I lost confidence in the value of my work completely and I would not have regained it if my friends and colleagues had not believed in me. Lastly, the content of this work is greatly influenced by the life and death of my late fiancé Aaron Huth. It is no exaggeration to say that my dissertation was created out of his lucid blue eyes and of his delicate ashes. 5 I’m a hero, you see. It’s easy to be a hero. If you don’t have hands or feet, you’re either a hero or you’re dead. —Ruben Gallego I wanted you to see what real courage is…. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. — Harper Lee Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep. —Frantz Fanon We do not understand, we are hungry and we are hungry. —Clarice Lispector 6 Introduction A Girl Remembers What guides moral knowledge (or practical reason, phronesis) is the interest in superfluous evils that befall particular and concrete others or threaten them. —Adi Ophir If there is something dangerous about me, there is also something pure. — Clarice Lispector While I shall speak of evil and severe physical disability in a moment, let us start elsewhere. In her early student paper, Simone Weil wrote on Jacob Grimm’s tale “The Six Swans.” The tale tells the story of six brothers transformed into swans by their malicious stepmother. To help them return to human form, their sister spent six years sewing six shirts of white anemones.1 She was to keep completely silent until she was done with her task. This is how Weil commented on the story: “acting is never difficult…. we always do too much and waste ourselves in disorderly actions…. It is almost impossible to sew anemones together and turn them into a shirt, and the difficulty is such that it prevents any additional action that would alter the purity of that six-year silence.” Thus, a strange, arduous, nearly impossible task, which I would liken to the tremendous difficulty of sustaining an ethical orientation throughout one’s lifetime, an 1 According to the original tale, the shirts are to be made out of stinging nettles, making the process of sewing incredibly painful. To transpose this story onto this inquiry, it is clear that while experiencing a moral desire is more or less effortless, the labor required to sustain moral comportment toward others and the endeavors to alleviate suffering as it surges has a painful intensity to it. Your revolt in the face of injustice is more powerful than even the bleeding fingers. 7 orientation toward singular others in distress in all of their maddeningly messy particularity.2 I hope that the present inquiry will minimize the aura of near-impossibility surrounding moral endeavors, presenting the task of morality in the most practical, concrete terms, while preserving the pure, almost ascetic core of these endeavors and an uncannily steadfast, seemingly groundless commitment to the well-being of others that a moral subject3 cultivates. The slightly surreal nature of Weil’s retelling of the story speaks to the idea that while exemplary actions do take place on a somewhat regular basis, morality’s heart is strange, sublimely stubborn, shot through and through with radiant lucidity, and pulsating at the center of every disaster, if only as a possibility. My inquiry situates morality between the practical means of alleviating an other’s suffering and shirts of white anemones. This work is written with the sole purpose of reducing concrete evils in the world, with unexpected theoretical twists and turns resulting in the process of investigation, culminating in the findings that I, the author, admit not to have even anticipated. It is not concerned with understanding evil for its own sake, but understanding it only with a view 2 Aristotle encapsulates the extreme difficulty of creating principles out of particular situations when he states, “it is always necessary for those who are acting to look at the circumstances surrounding the occasion themselves, just as is the case also with the medical art or the art of steering a ship.”2 We cannot predict what we’ll be confronted with next, just like it is futile to try and predict or systematize the thrashing of the sea waves in a storm. Which is to say that the correct course of action arises from out of a particular situation itself, not from out of any principle floating above reality. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr. Joe Sachs (Newbury, MA: Focus, 2002), 1104a. 3 It is important to note that while I occasionally parts ways with Ophir, utilizing his insights and concepts in a somewhat different way, I believe at least part of this divergence is due to the fact that Ophir seems to be essentially a humanitarian interventionist, which means that his moral subject is often the government or other organizations capable of intervention.
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