Interpreting Radical Evil

 

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Friends,

 

 

I am extremely honored by your presence today, the interest that you have taken in my work, the warm friendship and solidarity that you, the Kristeva Circle, have surrounded me with for many years. I thank you all, all of you, from the bottom of my heart, and in particular the organizers Carin Franzén, Cecilia Sjöholm and Cecilia Annell as well as, of course, the University of Södertörn in Stockholm and the French Institute that have brought us all together here today, supported by The Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, and The Swedish Research Council.

         I would not be able to go much further in this encounter if I did not mention something that you have already noticed. My English is far from being perfect, and I fear, very far from your high standards. All of my work that you’ve so graciously read and commented on was conceived of and written in French. The French language is my second language, which I learned in Preschool, then continued studying in classes at the Alliance Française and finally at University; but since 1966 it has been the first and only language that I try to think in, express myself in and live in.

         Learning English crosses paths with a trauma. I’m letting myself to confess this to you today perhaps for the first time in public. In High School, I wanted to sign up for English classes, which were reserved for the good students from Middle School. My transcripts and my academic performance gave me hope of being accepted. How distressing it was when I was refused due to my parents not being apart of the red nomenclature, that is, they were not members of the Communist Party. Was it this refusal that barred me from seriously taking-up English? My attempts to learn English have remained very mediocre, despite my effort to remedy the situation by taking private lessons, etc.

         If I am confessing this all to you it is not because I refuse to speak in English. I am conscious of the fact that globalization needs an Esperanto, and that for different reasons English lends itself to this function. I simply wanted to ask you to keep this situation in mind, and to remind you that my foreignness in “Globish English” (Global-English) is also an invitation that I address to you to hear the ardent interest I have in the singularity of national languages, the necessity to give them a place, not only within our borders, or on the analyst’s couch, but also in international forums, within the realm of possibility. Europe, as you know, speaks 23 languages, if not more, which clearly makes it more fragile, but also gives it a richness that is summed up in the fact that identity for us cannot be – must not be reduced to a cult, but must always remain polyphonic and in question.

         It’s in this spirit that I invite you to lead our debates and, without further ado, I propose to you to take on a question that recent events impose on us, in order to show that throughout the interdisciplinarity of my research I am trying to be present in the global debates among citizens, which call for the contribution of intellectuals.

 

War is in France, but who are the French at war with? Faced with the totalitarian ambitions of bloodthirsty jihadists, a we is bringing together les enfants de la Patrie – the “children of the Fatherland” around the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. An upright we, on their feet [debout [1] ], taking a stand against a new version of nihilism whose brutality and scope are unprecedented in France. Radical evil and the death drive, fueled by the technical feats of hyper-connectivity, defy the Enlightenment tradition that under-estimated them while endeavoring, for more than two centuries, to break with the religious tradition in order to found the values of a universal morality.

 

What is “radical evil”? Emmanuel Kant had used this expression to name the catastrophe when certain humans consider other humans to be superfluous and coldly exterminate them. Hannah Arendt denounced this absolute evil in the Holocaust.

 

Why, in so-called “at risk” [fragile] adolescents, does the “death drive” replace the pre-religious anthropological need to believe? Today, the adolescents in our communities—most of them come from Muslim families while the others come from Christian, Jewish or non religious families— prove to be the weak link where, in the absence of a social pact, the human bond falls apart (Hobbes’ and Spinoza’s conatus) and the reliance between speaking beings explodes in a monstrous unleashing of the death drive.

 

How and Why

 

I won’t be able to get into the geopolitical and theological causes of this phenomenon: the responsibility of post-colonialism, the failures of integration and education, the weakness of “our values” that manage globalization by way of petro-dollars in turn based on surgical strikes, the shrinking of the political in the service of an economy by more or less soft or hard jurisdiction…

 

Leaders in the Muslim community are now calling for firm sanctions on those who preach “holy war”, but also to abandon the supposedly “quietist” discourses that settle, it seems, to humbly draw up lists of our “impurities” and, this being done, implicitly condemn all “infidels” or “non-believers”, wherever they are in the world, to the mercy of the “pure”. Some have the courage to interrogate Islam’s absolute legislative role (code of regulative procedures focused on how we are to organize ourselves) and invite other members of their religious community to question their constraining rituals, to historicize and contextualize them: Why? When? With whom? Would it be because Allah recalls, more than the God of the Bible and of the Gospels, the “unmoved First Mover” that Aristotle placed at the edge of the Universe and thus has no paternal relation to the faithful? We might say that Islam is missing an in-depth account of the “killing of the father” whose aftermath transformed, in the history of humanity, the “primitive horde” into a “social pact”. This elucidation of the parricide underlying regulations, the murder at the heart of Law, which occurred in Judaism and Christianity, opened the way to the infinite retrospective return of the hainamoration [2] constitutive of the anthropological bond; sparing itself the definitive reference to an inaccessible Beyond, however, and without sanctifying any acts of war, this elucidation did not prevent crusades, Religious wars and pogroms. However mechanical and unapproachable the Quranic Absolute may appear, it must be recognized that it did not stop a great “rationalist” school of philosophers and scientists to develop within Islam, as well as a powerful mystical current in poetry, that influenced European culture…

 

These interpretive movements, less in the minority now than in the past, are vigorously taken up again today within Islam, under the shock of the killings at Charlie Hebdo and at the Hyper Cacher [3] , and even more powerfully still, confronted with the suicide attacks of November 13. They don’t necessarily announce the coming of Enlightenment Islam. Certainly, Diderot was a canon before becoming a deist and then definitively atheist, but philosophical debate had already infiltrated Catholic theology since Saint Augustine, illuminated the 12^th century and continued up through the quarrels of the Encyclopedists. The crises endemic to the current process of globalization, and the impotence of Europe within it, do not facilitate the process of reevaluating values. But these crises make necessary a new and specific redefinition, to reinvent without following any ready-made model, even that of the Enlightenment. The procedural thinking of entrepreneurial modernity, the how in the place of the why, the subjection to technical calculations, the withdrawal of interconnected individuals, combined with the death of self and virtual exaltation, are not in contradiction with ritual behaviors from another age: our modern barbarities are found in the ancient’s and vice versa – their logics are compatible.

 

On the contrary, if the secularization that “broke the thread of religious tradition” (according to Tocqueville and Arendt) is an irreversible reality, and if it remains a long-term combat, the assault of Islamic gangster-fundamentalism obliges us to see our wounds and our failures without indulgence, in the same way as our potentialities, their endurance and their future. For too long secular humanism was content to target the abuses of oppressive religions, and this vigilance is more relevant than ever. But a new urgency imposes itself: the seduction that religions exert on people and on human communities, as well as their role consoling, educating, regulating and manipulating anxieties and destructiveness still remains to be analyzed. More specifically than philosophy, it is Freudian psychoanalysis, with its singular experience in the immediate clinical setting, that – for only the past 150 years – has taken on the religious tradition with this ambition. With difficulty, through advances and deviations, idolized and despised, psychoanalysis has been able to return once more to investigate the “need to believe” and the “desire to know”, in order to probe the new sicknesses of the soul and the new harbingers of nihilism.

 

I hear the terror of the passer-by who leaves flowers at the Bataclan and asks into the microphone: “How can one be a jihadist? What are the states of their souls? Can we do anything about it?” These aspects of the state of war are not secondary. They are part of the preventive component of the state of war: before punitive, security or military measures, it is not enough to find out how the jihadists proceed when recruiting those who will execute their plans. It is important to treat the candidates of jihad on the road to radicalization, before they join the camps of Daesh, in order to return as kamikazes or, potentially, as more or less sincere repenters, for a possible deradicalization.

  

For two decades now, my experience as a psychoanalyst has let me encounter the discontent of adolescents. Since 2005, on the occasion of the European Forum, I drew attention to the “ideality disorder” [4] specific to all that belongs to this age group but that continues as an “adolescent structure” in adults, and in particular in multi-cultural and secularized societies. For the past three years, at the invitation of Professor Marie-Rose Moro, director of the Maison de l’Adolescent (Maison de Solenn) at the Chochin Hospital, I’ve continued reflecting on these problems in this clinical context. The seminar on the “Need to Believe” is aimed from now on at different personnel in the care sector (psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, nurses, therapists of all kinds, educators, social workers, etc.) that deal with adolescent discontent.

 

The Need to Believe

 

Two psychical [5] experiences confront the clinician with this universal anthropological element, the pre-religious need to believe.

 

The first returns us to what Freud, responding to the solicitation of Romain Rolland, describes, not without reticence, as the “oceanic feeling” with the maternal container or envelope (Civilization and its Discontents). The second concerns the “investment” or the “primary identification” with the “father of individual prehistory” [6] : the beginning of the Ego-Ideal, anterior to the Oedipal father that separates and judges, would have the “qualities of both parents” (The Ego and the Id).

 

The belief that is at stake is not a presupposition but is, strictly speaking, an unshakable certitude: the sensorial plenitude and the ultimate truth that the subject experiences as an exorbitant survival, indistinctly sensorial and mental, properly speaking ek-static (in the “oceanic feeling”) and the going-beyond the self in the “transcendence” of this first third-party that is the father of the individual pre-history (“unification” with the loving father).

 

Once the need to believe is satisfied and offers the optimal conditions for the development of language, it appears as the foundation on which another capacity, corrosive and liberating, will be able to develop: the desire to know.

 

The Adolescent is a Believer

 

The insatiable curiosity of “His Majesty the Baby” [7] [l’enfant roi], dormant in the “infantile” of each of us (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905) makes him a “researcher in a laboratory” who, with all his senses awakened, wants to discover “where babies come from”. On the other hand, the arrival of puberty in the adolescent involves a psychical reorganization underpinned by the search for an ideal: to go beyond parents, society, the world, to go beyond oneself, to unify with an ideal alterity, to open time in a moment, eternity in the present. The adolescent is a “believer” that oversees the “researcher in the laboratory” and sometimes prevents it from being. He is strongly convinced that the absolute satisfaction of his desires exists, that the ideal love-object is within his reach; paradise is a creation of adolescents in love: Adam and Eve, Dante and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliette…To believe, in the sense of faith, involves a passion for the object-relation: faith wants it all, it is potentially fundamentalist, as is the adolescent. We are all adolescents when we are passionate about the absolute or when we are fervent lovers. Freud didn’t sufficiently deal with adolescents because he himself was the greatest non-believer, the most irreligious of humans that has ever existed.

 

However, this belief that the ideal world exists is continually threatened, indeed shot down, since our drives and desires are ambivalent, sado-masochistic, and reality imposes frustrations and constraints. The adolescent, who believes in the relation to the ideal object, cruelly experiences the impossibility of it. So, passion’s failure in search of its object turns into punishment, and self-punishment, with the procession of suffering that the impassioned adolescent is familiar with: disappointment-depression-suicide; the destructive growth of the self-with-the-other: petty crimes like vandalism; drug addiction that suppresses consciousness, but realizes the belief in the absolute by the orgasmic regression into a hallucinatory jouissance; anorexic adolescents that attack the maternal lineage and reveal the young girl’s battle against femininity in favor of an over-investment in the purity-and-hardness of the body, in the phantasm of spirituality (it, too, absolute), where the body disappears entirely in a beyond with heavy paternal connotations.

 

Belief and Nihilism: The Sicknesses of the Soul

 

Structured by idealization, adolescence is an ideality disorder: either ideality is lacking or the ideality at the adolescent’s disposal is not adapted to the pubescent drive and to its need to share in an absolutely satisfying object. Necessarily demanding and haunted by the impossible, the adolescent belief inexorably rubs shoulders with adolescent nihilism: Dostoyevsky’s genius was being the first to probe these possessed nihilists. Since paradise exists (for the unconscious), but “he” or “she” disappoints me (in reality) I can only be angry at “them” and avenge myself: delinquency follows. Or else: since it exists (in the unconscious), but “he” or “she” disappoints me or is missing from me, I can only be upset with myself and take it out on my self which identifies with them: mutilation and self-destructive attitudes follow.

 

Unbinding [déliason]

 

Endemic to and underlying every adolescence, ideality disorder risks leading to profound psychical disorganization, if the context, traumatic, personal or socio-historical, lends itself to this. The greed for absolute satisfaction resolves itself by destroying everything that is not this satisfaction, abolishing the border between self and other, inside and outside, good and evil. No link to any “object” subsists for these “subjects” that are not subjects, prey to what André Green calls déliaison, unbinding (André Green, La déliaison, 1971-1992), with its two aspects: de-subjectivation and de-objectilization. Only the death drive triumphs, the malignancy of evil.

 

Whether due to denial or ignorance, our secular civilization no longer has rites of initiation for adolescents. Trials and jousts, fasts and mortifications rendered in story and given symbolic value – these cultural and cult practices, known since prehistory and still present in organized religion, validated the ideality disorder in adolescents and organized links to communal reality. Literature, in particular the novel as it has appeared since the Renaissance, knew how to narrate the adventures of initiation of adolescent heroes: the European novel is an adolescent novel. The absence of these rites leaves a symbolic void, and today commodity-literature and spectacle are far from being able to satisfy the anxieties of the militant nihilist that is the internet-using adolescent who prefers video games to books.

 

During the 19^th and 20^th centuries, revolutionary ideological enthusiasm that “made the past a blank slate”, had taken the baton from faith: “Revolution” absorbed the need to transcend oneself, and the ideal time of the promise was opened with the hope that the “new man”, women included, would be able to enjoy complete satisfaction. Until totalitarianism put an end to this mechanistic utopia, this messianic secularism, which had expelled the death drive into the “class enemy”, and repressed the freedom to believe and to know.

 

Beneath the Clash of Religions

 

Taken off-guard by the malaise of adolescents, secular morality seems incapable of satisfying their ideality disorder. What is to be done when faced with this intense return of the need to believe and of the religious that is now being observed everywhere, all over the world? The resurgence of young politically engaged Catholics against marriage equality surprised many. Most often, these are “spiritual bricolages” that young people make for themselves, by gleaning the vague spiritual notions they find here and there on the internet, or rather they adhere to bastardized forms of this or that religion (sects), when they’re not signing up for fundamentalist groups (that encourage an explosion of destructiveness in the name of an ideal).

 

Still more unsolvable: is it possible to stop the déliason, the unbinding that sets loose the death drive, freewheeling in the adolescent gangster-fundamentalism in our communities? This ready-to-be-radicalized delinquency, most often in prison (in the past, the “radicalizable” youth preferred the immediate jouissance of easy money and “acting out”), shows that henceforth the religious treatment of revolt finds itself discredited. It is not sufficient to insure the paradisiac aspirations of the paradoxical believer, this nihilist believer, necessarily nihilist because pathetically idealist, the disintegrated adolescent, dissocialized in the ruthless globalized migration imposed by ultra-liberalism, itself ruthless, when it commoditizes and levels out every “value” as well as the capacity to problematize images and publicity. There also exist “false” personalities, “split”, “as if”: in adolescents (or young adults) that appear to be well-socialized and who are capable of technically more or less positive performances (conformity to the “how”), unapproachable affective crises (subtracted from the “why” of language and thought) manifest themselves brusquely in destructive behaviors to the surprise of those close to the adolescent, never having suspected a thing… Beneath the “clash of religions”, the nihilist unbinding is more serious than interreligious conflicts because it affects the sources of civilization more deeply, highlighting the destruction of the pre-religious need to believe constitutive of psychical life with and for others.

 

We have to make a distinction. Yes, there is, on the one hand, an evil that results from the clash of values, themselves resulting from divergent or concurrent libidinal interests, and that underlie our concepts of good and evil elaborated in diverse moral codes, themselves historically formed in various cultural arenas. Religious Man and moral Man are constituted by these codes: more or less guilty and revolted, men live them, worry about them and hope to elucidate them in order to eventually understand one another instead of killing one another.

 

Beside this evil, there is another, an extreme evil that destroys the meaning of the very distinction between good and evil, and from this fact, destroys the possibility to accede to the meaning of one’s self and to the existence of others. These borderline states are not confined to hospitals nor to the couch, but unfold in sociopolitical catastrophes: such was the abjection of the extermination of the Holocaust, a horror that defies reason. New forms of extreme evil are spreading today in the globalized world, in stride with ideality disorder. Are they “without a why”?

 

Literature and the mystical would accept this to be the case. Psychoanalytic experience does not share this perspective, nor does it stop at a “comprehensive moralism”. In the intimacy of transference-counter-transference, it seeks to refine the interpretation of this potential malignance of the psychical apparatus that reveals itself in ideality disorder. Psychoanalysis has the cruel advantage of revealing and interpreting this potential malignance of our psyches that explodes in some socio-historical conditions.

 

 

 

The Shrink Reinvented

 

Souad was hospitalized for serious anorexia: cold mortified passion, fits of bulimia and draining spells of vomiting. Unbinding was underway. This slow suicide addressed to her family and to the world had abolished time before metamorphosing into radicalization. Ripped jeans and an oversized pullover had disappeared underneath a burqa. Souad walled herself up in silence and didn’t get off the internet where, with her unknown accomplices, she exchanged furious emails against her family of “apostates, worse than unbelievers”, and prepared her voyage “over there”, in order to become the mistress of polygamous combatants, the mother of prolific martyrs or a kamikaze herself.

 

A girl of few words, Souad was distrustful and reticent about psychotherapy like many other teenagers, but nevertheless was taken by surprise in an “analytic multicultural psychotherapeutic” consultation with a dozen other men and women from different backgrounds and with different skills, who neither interrogated, diagnosed or judged one another. They refined the empathetic diversity of their team: they involved her in plural and disseminated identifications, as though in a blended family, a reparative community. Maximal proximity with frustrated, humiliated, and mortified affects, sensations and excitations. Putting breakdown [effondrement] [8] into words to treat this person clinging to barbarity in order to not fall to pieces but to enjoy to death. The young girl who described herself as a “scientific mind”, strong in math, physics and chemistry, but “crappy in French and philosophy”, began to find pleasure in telling stories, playing with the group, and laughing with others and at herself.

 

Reconnected to the French language, taming through language the drives and sensations of suffering, finding the words to make them exist, to unmake and remake, to share them: language, literature, poetry, theater filled the lack of meaning and undid the nihilism. Roland Barthes, whose 100^th birthday anniversary we commemorated last year, did he not write that, if you find meaning in the plentitude of a language, “the divine void is no longer threatening”? Souad is not there yet. She has just put her jeans back on. It will be a long journey. But how many young girls will not have the opportunity, like Souad, to be recognized, heard and supported?

 

Treating “radicalizable” adolescents is part of this viral war that is spreading all over the world, and whose attacks woven by Islamic terrorism and our aerial bombardments are only the militarized version. Viral war, because it operates, invisible and invasive, with formations as ancient and resistant (if not more so), as inherent and destructive of humanity as a virus is to our cells: viral war operates with the death drive and radical evil, which cohabitate with our living organisms and our psychical identities, and which, in certain circumstances, destroy their hosts and spread malignance across the world.

 

An Historical Challenge

 

We will discover then that, following familial disintegrations and social breakdowns, certain people, in particular adolescents, slumber in borderline states that make them easy prey, delivered over to the propaganda of “holy war” that eroticize their destructivity (beheadings, human bombs, undifferentiated killings), attract them to camps of mistreatment, sexual abuse, and servitude, and intoxicate them with the phantasm of a paradise guaranteed for eternity and offering salvation: beyond time and beyond the world.

 

Accompanying adolescents prey to radicalization or who are already radicalized places the analyst at the untenable intersection where this desubjectivization-de-objectivization operates and threatens, when the human being becomes incapable of investing psychically and of forming bonds, deprived of “self” and drained of the sense of the other, wanders aimless in the absence of “world”, in a non-world, without “good” or “evil” or “value” of any kind. At the limits of the human, a restructuring of the person can begin: such is our wager – psychoanalysis’ wager insofar as it is attuned to the death drive.

 

The French Republic finds before itself a historical challenge: is it capable of taking on this crisis that the lid of religion can no longer hold, and which touches the foundation of the bonds between humans? Is it capable of detecting and preventing radicalization? The anguish that freezes countries in times of carnage, upon the foundation of this economic and social crisis, expresses our uncertainty before such colossal stakes. Are we capable of mobilizing all the means necessary, police forces as well as economic ones—without of course forgetting those that gives us knowledge of the soul—alongside a suitable education program and the generosity required to lend an ear to those we’re treating for this poignant ideality disorder that descends upon us with all the atrocities of the radicalized? Interpreted in this way, the barbarity of jihadists prey to the malignance of evil, concerns “our” fundamental “values”, our humanistic secularized culture and our model of civilization where rationality is not without recourse in the face of radical evil under the cover of divine revelation.

 

The war against radical evil demands that we take seriously Nietzsche’s project: “Put a question mark in the most serious place.” [9] By this we understand, in the place occupied by God, ideals, and their absence. In order to make these most serious places known, to transmit them to the young generations, and reevaluate them, problematize them, rethink them without end, reinvent them, to interpret the horror and fight concretely against it by all means, to not back down before evil, not even before radical evil, but to patiently pursue the search – certainly not for some secure utopic equilibrium – but for the fragile point that Pascal defines as a “perpetual movement”: “Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing in the good without being annoyed by its contrary would have found the point. It is perpetual motion.” [10] Yes, perhaps the vision we’re missing today is precisely this “point”, this “perpetual motion”, towards the “secret of rejoicing in the good without being annoyed by evil.” A certain demanding interior experience that the barbarians have deserted…

 

It is not enough to bomb Daesh, to lock up jihadists, or to promise, indeed to find work for the young and unemployed in our neighborhoods. It is urgent to organize, with parents, beginning at the youngest age, an attentive follow-up of weaknesses in the eventual prey of God-crazy people, who keep a low profile, often unnoticed, in the social margins or in latent pathologies. It is more urgent still to forge and to share new civic ideals attractive to young people seen and experienced as a resource, and no longer as a danger. Qualities like generosity, creativity and engagement would be able to flourish in occupations for social, educational, cultural and humanitarian vocations: NGOs, cooperation institutions, mutual aid, etc.; reconstructing Africa is among these projects that could impassion young Europeans; but also the education of young girls; the development of sustainable energy… Who can awaken, guide, and see-through these desires through to their conclusion?

 

Let’s make education a priority, coupled with consistent valorization, of a “teaching and educational corps”; this platform would vow to give a personalized approach to psycho-sexual discontent, the need to believe and the adolescent desire to know. Educators, teachers, professors, life aids, psychologists, as well as human resource managers, entrepreneurs…would be able to create a true passage beyond the growing abyss and the looming state of war. It is this, the global priority of our globalization-hyper-connectedness. This is our only way—through the cultural diversity that has become sharable— to protect humanity itself.

 

Julia Kristeva

Stockholm, Sweden, 2016

The Kristeva Circle