On the necessity of Evil and Hell There is no longer any irrevocable damnation today. There is no longer any hell. We may concede that we are still within the mongrel concept of Purgatory, but virtually everything falls within the scope of redemption. It is clearly from such an evangelism that all the manifest, promotional signs of well-being and fulfilment derive that are offered us by a paradisaical society subject to the Eleventh Commandment ('Be happy and give all the signs of contentment!') - the one that cancels out all others. But we can also read this demand for salvation and universal atonement in the way that not only all current violence and injustices, but also, retrospectively, all the crimes and contradictory events of the past are now coming in for condemnation. The French Revolution is put in the dock and slavery is condemned, along with original sin and battered wives, the ozone layer and sexual harassment. In short, the pre-trial investigation for the Last Judgement is well under way. We are condemning, then pardoning and whitewashing, our entire history, exterminating the Evil from even the tiniest crevices in order to present the image of a radiant universe, ready to pass into the next world. A gigantic undertaking. One that is inhuman, superhuman, too human? As Stanislaw Lee says, 'We no doubt have too anthropomorphic a view of man.' And why feed this eternal repentance factory, this chain reaction of bad conscience? Because everything has to be saved. This is what we have come to today: everything will be redeemed, the entire past will be rehabilitated, polished to the point of transparency. As for the future, there's even better in store, and even worse: everything will be genetically modified to achieve biological perfection and the democratic perfection of the species. Salvation, which was defined by the equivalence of merit and grace, will, once the abscess of evil and hell has been drained, be defined by the equivalence between genes and performance. Actually, once happiness becomes purely and simply the general equivalent of salvation, there is no further reason for heaven. No heaven without hell, no light without darkness. No one can be saved if no one is damned (by definition, but we also know this intuitively: where would the elect find pleasure, except in the contemplation of God, were it not for the spectacle of the damned and their torment?). And once everyone is virtually saved, no one is. Salvation no longer has any meaning. This is the fate in store for our democratic enterprise: it is vitiated from the outset by the neglect of necessary discrimination, by the omission of evil. We therefore need an irrevocable presence of Evil, an Evil with no possible redemption, a definitive discrimination, a perpetual duality of Heaven and Hell, and even in a way a predestination to Evil, for no destiny can be without some predestination. There is nothing immoral in this. By the rules of the game there is nothing immoral in some losing and others winning, nor even in everyone losing. What would be immoral would be for everyone to win. Now, this is the contemporary ideal of our democracy: that everyone be saved. And this is possible only at the cost of a perpetual upping of the stakes, of endless inflation and speculation, since ultimately happiness is not so much an ideal relationship to the world as a rivalry with, and a victorious relation to, others. And this is good: it means that the hegemony of Good, of the individual state of grace, will always be thwarted by some challenge or passion, and that any kind of happiness, any kind of ecstatic state, can be sacrificed to something more vital, which may be of the order of the will, as Schopenhauer has it, or of power, or of the will to power in Nietzsche's conception, but something which, in any event, is of the order of Evil, of which there is no definition, but which may be summed up as follows: that which, against any happy intended purpose [destination heureuse}, is predestined to come to pass. Beneath its euphoric exaltation, this imperative of optimum performance, of ideal achievement, certainly bears evil and misfortune within it, then, in the form of a profound disavowal of such fine prospects, in the form of a secret, anticipated disillusion ment. Perhaps even this is again just a collective form of sacrifice - a human sacrifice, but a disembodied one, distilled into homeopathic doses. Wherever humans are condemned to total freedom or to ideal fulfilment, this subversion seeps in - this automatic abreaction to their own good and their own happiness. When they are ordered to get the maximum efficiency and pleasure out of themselves, they remain out of sorts and live a split existence. In this strange world, where everything is potentially available (the body, sex, space, money, pleasure) to be taken or rejected en bloc, everything is there; nothing has disappeared physically, but everything has disappeared metaphysically. 'As if by magic or enchantment', you might say. Only the fact is, it is more by disenchantment. Individuals, such as they are, are becoming exactly what they are. With no transcendence and no image, they pursue their lives like a function that is useless in respect of another world, irrelevant even in their own eyes. And they do what they do all the better for the fact that there is no other possibility. No instance, no essence, no personal substance worthy of singular expression. They have sacrificed their lives to their functional existences. They coincide with the exact numerical calculation of their lives and their performances. An existence fulfilled, then, but one at the same time denied, thwarted, disavowed. The culmination of a whole negative counter-transference. This imperative of optimum performance at the same time comes into internal contradiction with the democratic moral law which ordains that everyone be perpetually re-set to equality and everything re-set to zero, on the pretext of democracy and an equal sharing of opportunity and advantage. Given the prospect of salvation for all and universal redemption, no one has the right to distinguish himself, no one has the right to captivate [siduire}. For justice to be done, all privilege must disappear; it is for all to rid themselves voluntarily of any specific qualities, to become once again an elementary particle2 - collective happiness, based on levelling down and repentance, leading to the coming of the lowest common denominator and basic banalities. This is like a reverse potlatch, with everyone outdoing each other in minimalism and victimhood, while fiercely cultivating their tiniest differences and cobbling together their multiple identities. Repentance and recrimination are all part of the same movement: recrimination means going back over the crime to correct its course and effects. This is what we are doing in going back over the whole of our history, over the criminal history of the human race, to do penance here and now as we await the Last Judgement. For God is dead, but his judgement remains. Which explains the immense syndrome of resipiscence and (historical) rewriting (with the future genetic and biological rewriting of the species still to come) that has seized the twentieth century's end; with an eye, as ever, to deserving salvation and - with the prospect of the final accounting before us - to presenting the image of an ideal victim. Naturally, we are not speaking of a real trial or of genuine repentance. It is a matter of fully enjoying the spectacle of one's own misfortune: 'Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order' (Walter Benjamin).3 This is but the latest episode in a heart-rending process of revisionism - running down not just the history of the twentieth century, but all the violent events of past centuries, to subject them to the new jurisdiction of human rights and crimes against humanity (just as every action today is subjected to the jurisdiction of sexual, moral or political harassment). As part of the same trend by which all works of art (including the human genome) are listed as world heritage sites, everything is put on the list of crimes against humanity. The latest episode, then, of this revisionist madness has been the proposal to condemn slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. An absurd proposal to rectify the past in terms of our Western humanitarian consciousness or, in other words, in terms of our own criteria, in the purest traditions of colonialism. This imperialism of repentance really is the limit! The idea is, in fact, to enable the 'peoples concerned' to put this tragedy behind them thanks to this official condemnation and, once their rights have been restored and they have been recognized and celebrated as victims, to complete their work of mourning and draw a line under this page of their history in order to become full participants in the course of modernity. It might be seen, then, as a kind of successful psychoanalysis. Perhaps the Africans will even be able to translate this moral acknowledgement into damage claims, using the same monstrous measure of equivalence from which the survivors of the Shoah have been able to benefit. So we shall go on compensating, atoning and rehabilitating ad infinitum, and we shall merely have added to raw exploitation the hypocritical absolution of mourning; we shall merely, by compassion, have transformed evil into misfortune. From the standpoint of our recycled humanism, the whole of history is pure crime - and, indeed, without all these crimes there quite simply would be no history: 'If we eliminated the evil in man,' wrote Montaigne, 'we would destroy the fundamental conditions of life.' But, on this basis, Cain killing Abel is already a crime against humanity - and almost a genocide (there were only two of them!), and isn't original sin already a crime against humanity? All this is absurd, all this humanitarian, retrospective fakery is absurd. And it all stems from the confusion between evil and misfortune. Evil is the world as it is and as it has been, and one may look upon this with lucidity. Misfortune is the world as it never should have been - but in the name of what? - in the name of what should be, in the name of God or a transcendent ideal, of a Good it would be difficult indeed to define. We may take a criminal view of crime - that is the tragic view - or we may take a recriminatory view - and that is the humanitarian view, the pathos-laden, sentimental view, the view which constantly calls for reparation. We have here all the ressentiment dredged up from the depths of a genealogy of morals, and requiring in us reparation for our own lives. This retrospective compassion, this conversion of evil into misfortune is the twentieth century's most flourishing industry. First as a mental blackmailing operation, to which we all fall victim, even in our actions, from which we can now hope only for the lesser evil (keep a low profile, do everything in such a way as anyone else could have done it - decriminalize your existence!). Then as a profitable operation with gigantic yields, since misfortune (in all its forms: from suffering to insecurity, oppression to depression) represents a symbolic capital, the exploitation of which - even more than the exploitation of happiness - is endlessly profitable from the economic standpoint. It's a gold-mine, as they say, and there is an inexhaustible source of ore, because the seam lies within each of us. Misfortune commands the highest prices, whereas evil cannot be traded. It is impossible to exchange. To transcribe evil into misfortune and then to transcribe misfortune into commercial, or spectacular, value - most often with the collusion or assent of the victim himself. But the victim's collusion with his own misfortune is part of the ironic essence of Evil. It is what brings it about that no one wants his own good, and nothing is for the best in the best of all worlds
this demand for salvation and universal atonement in the way that not only all current violence and injustices, but also, retrospectively, all the crimes and contradictory events of the past are now coming in for condemnation. Revolution and slavery is condemned wives the ozone and sexual harassment the pre-trial investigation for the Last Judgement is well under way. We are condemning, then pardoning and whitewashing, our entire history, exterminating the Evil from even the tiniest crevices in order to present the image of a radiant universe why feed this eternal repentance factory of bad conscience? everything has to be saved. This is what we have come to today: everything will be redeemed, the entire past will be rehabilitated, polished to the point of transparency even this is again just a collective form of sacrifice a human sacrifice, but a disembodied one, distilled into homeopathic doses Wherever humans are condemned to total freedom or to ideal fulfilmen , this subversion seeps in They have sacrificed their lives to their functional existences the exact calculation of lives An existence fulfilled but one at the same time denied, thwarted, disavowed }. For justice to be done, all privilege must disappear; it is for all to rid themselves voluntarily of any specific qualities based on levelling down and repentance, leading to the coming of the lowest common denominator and basic banalities everyone outdoing each other in minimalism and victimhoo Repentance and recrimination are all part of the same movement This is what we are doing in going back over the whole of our history, over the criminal history of the human race, to do penance here and now as we await the Last Judgement. God is dead, but his judgement remains It is a matter of fully enjoying the spectacle of one's own misfortune everything is put on the list of crimes against humanity An absurd proposal to rectify the past in terms of our Western humanitarian consciousness in terms of our own criteria, in the purest traditions of colonialism. This imperialism of repentance really is the limit! once their rights have been restored and they have been recognized and celebrated as victims, to complete their work of mourning and draw a line under this page of their history in order to become full participants in the course of modernity Perhaps the Africans will even be able to translate this moral acknowledgement into damage claims So we shall go on compensating, atoning and rehabilitating ad infinitum, and we shall merely have added to raw exploitation the hypocritical absolution of mourning; we shall merely, by compassion, have transformed evil into misfortune. recycled humanism, the whole of history is pure crime 'If we eliminated the evil in man, 'we would destroy the fundamental conditions of life All this is absurd, all this humanitarian, retrospective fakery is absurd Misfortune is the world the name of what should be, a recriminatory view - and that is the humanitarian view, the pathos-laden, sentimental view, the view which constantly calls for reparation We have here all the ressentiment dredged up from the depths of a genealogy of morals, and requiring in us reparation for our own lives. This retrospective compassion, this conversion of evil into misfortune is the twentieth century's most flourishing industry a mental blackmailing operation, to which we all fall victim Then as a profitable operation with gigantic yields, since misfortune represents a symbolic capital, the exploitation of which is endlessly profitable from the economic standpoint To transcribe evil into misfortune and then to transcribe misfortune into commercial, or spectacular, value - most often with the collusion or assent of the victim himself. But the victim's collusion with his own misfortune is part of the ironic essence of Evil. It is what brings it about that no one wants his own good, and nothing is for the best in the best of all worlds