La banalité du mal: nécessité, contingence et pouvoir des mots

Abstract

This text proposes an examination of what constitutes our humanity based on a study of the theme of “the banality of evil”. This expression is often used nowadays with a fairly broad meaning in which “banal” means “common”, “widespread”. In this sense, evil is considered as a dimension of humanity, it is a necessity to which we are submitted. Violence, the death drive, destructiveness and dominance are components of the human being. Psychoanalysts postulate the universality of the Oedipus complex after the observation of the presence of its constituent elements – incestuous and parricidal fantasies – both in the tradition of Greek antiquity and in the dreams of modern men or through the words of young children. Through reference to the work of François Marty, we will show how this author's reflections on the family crime of Pierre Rivière has provided knowledge about becoming human during adolescence, a period of development that seems crucial for the regulation of instinctuality. In his texts on fratricide, Marty also offers us an approach to what constitutes the founding of humanity at its origins. But the expression “banality of evil” also has its origin in the subtitle that H. Arendt (1963) gives to her report on the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem. By “banality”, she means mediocrity, the absence of originality, the difficulty of having a personal thought, of manifesting oneself as a subject through a singular speaking. Banality appears here as a contingency, a characteristic which, although capable of affecting crowds–for example the millions of members of the Nazi Party–does not, however, constitute the basis of human nature but rather defines the absence of humanity. Here, the banality of evil concerns an individual who has abdicated his subjectivity, who is not able to recognize their own humanity in the face of others or to integrate a representation of death as a limit given to each of us. Whether the banality of evil is interpreted in one way or the other, it mobilizes the issues of psychopathology and psychotherapy: for the practitioner, it is important to identify the individual and family failures which have prevented the containment of sexual and murderous impulses and then to resume the unfinished Kulturarbeit and to revive the process of subjectivation. As François Marty suggests in his numerous publications, the establishment of a capacity to deal with excitement, the development of reflexivity through the work of latency, the transformation of violence into creativity during adolescence thus support the processes of subjectivation, among which we will also insist on the transfer of authority. Psychopathologists and psychotherapists, insofar as words matter for them, contribute to a better knowledge of what constitutes our humanity and they object to the banality of evil.