Abstract
It does not seem as if Augustine's conception of evil as the privation or absence of goodness is adequate to account for the horrors of the 20th century. Whether this is true depends on how we interpret “privation.” Drawing on Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, I argue that the privation of goodness may be seen not merely as the absence of goodness, but as the active destruction of goodness, its intentional deprivation. This, it turns out, is enough to make sense of Hannah Arendt's otherwise confusing concept of the banality of evil. Making sense of her concept does not, however, make it right.
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