On Evil

Reading Terry Eagleton either makes me feel incredibly clever ( “Literary Theory”, ”After Theory”) or incredibly stupid (“The Ideology Of The Aesthetic”, “Walter Benjamin, or Towards A Revolutionary Criticism”) His latest offerings have been slightly easier on the ego and “On Evil” is (for the most part) no exception. It's a whistle stop tour through Theology & Theodicy via, amongst others, Marx, Freud, Schopenhauer and Lacan. His argument ricochets through readings of “Macbeth”, “Brighton Rock”, “Pincher Martin” and “The Third Policeman” to arrive at a strangely unsatisfying conclusion.

Evil is something more than just wickedness after a workout.
Evil is purposeless, pointless, a non-rational “condition of being”. It’s aim is, accordingly anti-life, the void, nothingness. It’s like a passionless over-reaching Death-Drive. So while wickedness certainly abounds, Evil is, thankfully, very rare and “something we should not lose much sleep about”.

Unusually, this is one of Terry Eagleton’s conclusions that I could easily have arrived at independently although, obviously, not with the same rigour. Paradoxically this rigour may well be the problem - I’m not particularly patient. His meandering toward a final conclusion is never less than entertaining but I’m not entirely convinced it needed so many detours and 160 pages to get there.