About evil: reading Adorno in Rorty style

Before the 1970s, we would call a film “heavy” when it had scenes of physical violence and/or sex. Today we have another meaning for the word. A “heavy” film is a “good film” with breathtaking and dark drama. We have had a revolution in the way we describe films. We have had a revolution in the images and vocabulary of the films themselves.The image of Evil in films has also changed. The Nazi German, bloodthirsty Indian, sleazy Mexican, cold-blooded Soviet officer, treacherous Japanese are all part of the fantasy created by the North American film industry. Today, however, the figure of Evil is much more sophisticated. In Saving Private Ryan Evil is “the war” and not the Germans or Nazism. In Dances with Wolves Evil is the “cruelty against nature and the unusual”, but not the Indian or paleface. In Philadelphia Evil is not AIDS or the owner of the company who fires the sick employee, but rather a new kind of lack of respect for civil rights. In The Insider Evil is not the tobacco industry but rather the lack of trust and companionship between colleagues and in the home.

Evil in films has become more abstract and, for this very reason, more insidious and suffocating. Evil has become much more Evil. Once it was unrecognizable, now it may be recognized any and everywhere.

In the academic milieu, the contemporary text on Evil that has most survived is “Post-Auschwitz Education”, by Theodor Adorno. Adorno, a colleague of Max Horkheimer, absorbed from his friend the style that is so essential for the text, enduring long after its outdated Marxism: the Metaphysics of Schopenhauer’s Evil.

Hence, some people say that the reason for the success of Adorno’s writing lies in “fact itself”, that is, in the concentration camp: the project that included Auschwitz did not involve punishment, struggle or war, but extermination, premeditated genocide, in conjunction with dubious scientific experiments on human guinea pigs, remorselessly executed. Any text, then, that was to assimilate the grandeur and endurance of the Evil of Auschwitz would also possess grandeur and endurance. This argument is no less strong when justifying the success of Adorno’s text. Adorno hit the mark when he did not regard Auschwitz as a mere but rather abstract historical episode, and thus understood Evil as it appears in today’s films: insidious, with no return, suffocating, faceless... without redemption — almost without redemption!

But Adorno’s success was accompanied by a number of problems for which he was not prepared. Having once seen metaphysical Evil, he created a sketchy hope for the end of Evil in just as metaphysical a framework. Evil, even when it touches everything, might not have touched man’s soul. Almost like Rousseau, Adorno wagered that in the human heart there exists a metaphysical recording that cannot be corrupted, and, at the right moment, would warn its host: “no!” “don’t do it”, “don’t agree to it” — “no!”.

Philosophers who have one foot more in the 21st than 20th century, that is, philosophers in the same vein as Michel Foucault or Richard Rorty, do not believe in the awakening of this “voice of conscience” in which Adorno believed. Nevertheless, if Foucault were alive today, perhaps he would not attribute so much importance to “Dances with Wolves”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “The Insider” or even “Philadelphia”. If he were to encounter intellectuals praising these films, perhaps he would only think that they were lukewarm attempts by a sentimental philosopher to, like Adorno, make the human heart say “no!” to Evil. Or even worse: perhaps he would see this as the frosting on a cake whose ingredients would once again be pure cheap patriotism of forsaken North Americans. Yet a Rortian cannot think like this: he will surely see that such films arouse nothing at all but are accompanying a major semantic revolution — they are “heavy” films. And they are exactly like that to the extent that they can re-describe the world and, therefore, induce behaviors that can say “no!” to Evil, even when it is faceless and there is nothing to arouse in man.

Paulo Ghiraldelli Jr. is philosopher and editor of Contemporary Pragmatism together with John Shook.