Moral Monsters Research Articles

Moral Monsters, Significance, and Meaning in Life

Moral Monsters, Significance, and Meaning in Life

A word from . . . Wendell Griffen: What will expositors do about this Jesus?

Relief from the vast debt due to racial injustice associated with slavery requires prophetic intervention and interactions concerning reparations such as Jesus took with Zacchaeus. Those interventions and interactions require that prophetic people reject “rich ruler” religon, and not view the beneficiaries of the racial injustices associated with slavery as moral monsters incapable of repentance. The issue is whether followers of Jesus trust God to do through us concerning reparations for racial injustice what God did through Jesus with Zacchaeus.

Replies to Timmerman and Gorman

In my reply to the thoughtful comments of Timmerman and Gorman, I take up, and further explore, some main questions, including: Can a horribly immoral person (a moral monster) lead a meaningful life? Similarly, can a significantly deluded person lead a meaningful life? What role do judgments of meaningfulness play in our normative framework? How can we understand the debate between those who would embrace the possibility of immortality and those who would reject it? What is the role of narrativity in evaluating meaning in human lives, and how would this concept apply to immortal lives? If death can be a bad thing for the deceased, should we fear death (the status of being dead)?

Fleeing from War or Pandemic, and Returning Home

Today, the word ‘flee’ connotes a moral weakness for many, perhaps even cowardice for some. However, that is not entirely accurate. Fleeing may be a morally decent response to a dangerous situation. As the American philosopher Todd May wrote in his insightful book A Decent Life: Morality for the Rest of Us (2019): “Most of us seek to live a morally decent life. We are not moral monsters, but neither do we strive to be moral saints. [There are] avenues of moral improvement that do not require us … to sacrifice our deepest commitments and projects ….[Why? That which] … makes life meaningful gives me permission to limit my aid to others.”

Le langage des murs qui enferment dans L'Étranger de Camus et Hiroshima mon amour de Duras

Meursault de L’Étranger et « Elle » d’Hiroshima mon amour sont des personnages tragiques qui, comme poussés par un fatum antique, ont commis un crime, crime de sang ou crime d’amour, pour lequel ils doivent payer. Tandis que le premier est accusé d’insensibilité et condamné à mort parce que la justice voit en lui un « monstre moral », le deuxième est accusé de « collaboration horizontale » et puni par la « justice populaire ». Dès lors, enfermés, dans une cellule pour le premier, alternativement dans une chambre et une cave pour le second, ces deux êtres cherchent les visages et voix d’amours passées. La quête de ces visages et voix d’un monde révolu qui font souffrir les protagonistes par leur disparition va laisser la place chez les deux personnages à un état d’apaisement allant permettre, au héros comme à l’héroïne, de se réconcilier avec leur passé. Tandis que Meursault, qui a changé en prison, va redécouvrir sa mère et finalement comprendre la volonté de celle-ci de reprendre goût à la vie à l’asile de vieillards, « Elle », guérie par le Japonais, va retrouver un équilibre sentimental.

THE SQUARE ROOT OF NEGATIVE ONE IS IMAGINARY

I focus on specific practices in twentieth- and twenty-first-century mathematics of articulating, barring, taming, and operating with what mathematicians widely call mathematical monsters. I describe how over centuries the quotidian procedures of the epitome of rational practice – mathematics – have produced beings outside the extant purified categories understood by theorems and proofs, despite, and sometimes as a consequence of, ever greater precision and rigor. However, mathematical monsters stand in a different relation to their makers than socio-economic and moral monsters who are barred from the world. Indeed, we will see how mathematicians have made plural and productive accommodation with their monsters. Although some mathematicians have been persuaded by logicians to bar monsters from the temple of mathematics by simply forbidding the operations that engender beings against nature, most mathematicians have accommodated or simply cohabited with their monsters by extending axioms, definitions, theorems, and methods of proving theorems as a part of quotidianized practice.

Frankenstein in the History of Happiness: From Ancient Ethics to Richard Wright

ABSTRACT In the classical and neo-classical philosophical tradition, virtue is necessary, or even sufficient, for happiness; it partially or fully constitutes happiness. Virtue comes first; happiness attends it. In Frankenstein, however, Shelley’s creature thinks of happiness as a social and material entitlement, and, turning classical philosophy on its head, a prerequisite to virtue. ‘I was benevolent and good,’ the creature says to his creator, ‘misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.’ Happiness, to the creature’s mind, is not available to the lone, superior individual as an assertion of his own rational independence; it is, rather, dependent on circumstance and our needs as fundamentally social creatures. Shelley’s moral and psychological inquiry into virtue and happiness emerges from political-philosophical responses to the French Revolution, chiefly those by her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The ethical question explored in Frankenstein continue to animate nineteenth-century realist and naturalist novels. Developing the case for Shelley’s direct influence on African-American literary naturalism of the first half of the twentieth century, I conclude with a consideration of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, which examines the genesis of and responsibility for another moral monster, Bigger Thomas.

Dante's Cannibal Count: Unnatural Hunger and its Reckoning

Dante’s Cannibal Count: Unnatural Hunger and its Reckoning PATRICIA VÁZQUEZ In 2001 the bones of an allegedly cannibalistic Count were removed from a tomb in Pisa to let science determine whether or not Count Ugolino had eaten his children as his last meal, as recounted by Dante in Canto 33 of the Inferno. Dante invites us to peer at the wicked soul of Count Ugolino as an eccentric doctor might beckon us to gawk at a glass jar filled with his strangest medical oddity. Except what is extraordinarily grotesque about Ugolino isn’t for the eye to see, it’s a deformity of the soul, he’s a moral monster. And yet, he wasn’t a serial killer, and violent murderers on a scale of evil are not relegated to the bottom of hell, as one might assume. In Dante’s architectonic vision of hell, that prize goes to the treacherous, and the traitor par excellence is Count Ugolino. We tend to forget this as we listen with both fascination and horror to Ugolino’s entreaties. We consequently, and quite predictably, abandon reason and impartiality by rising up to defend him on the grounds that hunger would drive anyone mad. We often assume Dante errs or dismiss his reasons for assigning Ugolino to the ninth and lowest circle of hell. Perhaps to put these rumors to rest the descendants of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca graciously gave paleontologist Francesco Mallegni permission to carry out DNA tests on the five skeletons that were buried in a crypt under the family chapel. If the forensic analysis is to be believed, Dante was mistaken. “Even if Ugolino had wanted to eat the flesh of his offspring,” Mallegni explained, “he couldn’t have because he didn’t have any teeth”1 (fig.1). arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 68 dante’s cannibal count Although Mallegni is 98 per cent certain the genetic tests match Ugolino’s living relatives,2 that did not stop archivist Paola Benigni from coming forward in 2008 to challenge the findings, claiming the documents used to locate the bones were fascist forgeries.3 But the professor of paleontology’s tests are compelling. Consider how the mitochondrial DNA (passed down from mother to son) proves the kinship ties between those imprisoned in the Tower. You have an aging grandfather, his two sons, and the clincher, his two grandchildren were “cousins by unrelated mothers and the tests bore that out as well.”4 In clearing the Count of his alleged cannibalism, however , Mallegni’s tests have consigned the Count’s crimes to the realm of fiction. What’s problematic about Mallegni dismissFigure 1. “Ugolino della Gherardesca [Forensic facial reconstruction. By permission of Francesco Mallegni] | Che Faccia Avevano I Vip Del Passato —Foto.” Il Tirreno. February 03, 2015. Slide 6 of 17. Accessed January 29, 2019. http://iltirreno.gelocal.it/empoli/foto-e-video/2015/02/03/fotogalleria /che-faccia-avevano-i-vip-del-passato-1.10793432#6. Patricia Vazquez 69 ing Canto 33 as “a beautiful dramatic verse about a political enemy” is that it implies subterfuge on Dante’s part.5 As if his disposition towards Ugolino had been colored by his enmity towards the Count, resulting in a portrait that evokes both fear and loathing. “Clearly a scientist and a poet see the world differently,” Mallegni explains in an interview, “but it makes for fascinating work to compare the two.”6 What Mallegni concludes after comparing the science with the poetry is that Dante “only insinuates that Ugolino ate his offspring” and that the target of the poet’s ire was not in fact the Count but his captors, “I prefer to think of the verses as a magnificent orchestration intended to whip up hatred of the Pisans for killing Ugolino and trying to wipe out his family , too.”7 By framing the Count as victim, the imputations against him are minimized or forgotten, which should hardly come as a surprise when you stop to think of it; the Count has seduced others as well. Figure 2. “Torre Dei Gualandi: The ‘Other’ Tower of Pisa You Shouldn’t Miss.” ITALY Magazine. June 15, 2016. Accessed January 29, 2019...

Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity ed. by Iris Idelson-Shein and Christian Wiese

Reviewed by: Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity ed. by Iris Idelson-Shein and Christian Wiese David B. Levy (bio) Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity Edited by Iris Idelson-Shein and Christian Wiese. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. xiv + 269 pp. The past two decades have witnessed a surge of interest in monsters and the monstrous, but none from the perspective of Jewish studies except for some of the work of David Ruderman, who in a number of pioneering articles in the 1970s and 1980s analyzed early modern Jewish representations of conjoined twins, unicorns, and child prodigies, shedding light on the relationship of monsters and omens, teratology, and anthropology, science, religion, and magic. In addition, Jay Geller's Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (2018) investigates the productive relationship between the animalization of Jews in Christian works, up to the depiction of animals in works by Kafka and Freud. Thus this timely, well-written, erudite, well-researched book imports the increasing interest in monstrosity into the field of Jewish studies. The book gathers the scholarship of fourteen distinguished international academics, shows how, as Joshua Trachtenberg did, the mechanism by which Jews as the feared "outsider and other" have been demonized negatively into monsters by medieval Christians. Robert Chazan, Miri Rubin, and Sara Lipton have shown it was during the Middle Ages that the Jewish otherness coupled with Christian theology led to accusations of host desecrations, well poisonings, and ritual murder. Its scope is from the medieval times to the modernity from the interdisciplinary methodologies of the perspectives of history, literature, anthropology, folklore, and history of science, art history, and religion, across geographical boundaries. Yet the book goes beyond Trachtenberg's seminal studies and is not susceptible to what Baron calls [End Page 303] "the lachrymose conception of Jewish history"; that is, the history of persecution in the diaspora, by demonstrating how Jews have sometimes subversively polemically flipped the image of monstrosity, a kind of Freudian sublimation and projection, onto their enemies—be they Christian Jew haters or secular Nazis as internally ethically bankrupt. For example, Kabalek's chapter 7 in part analyzes the representations of Simon Wiesenthal's representations of Nazis as monsters. The book is in two parts. The first explores the predominance of images of monsters in Jewish Christian interreligious and intercultural encounter. In chapter 1 Krummel and Mittman examine Beowulf alongside the Old English Exodus, demonstrating how pursuing monsters sheds light on cultural intersections. In chapter 2 Strickland exposes images of medieval monstrous Jews in the painter Hieronymous Bosch, who uses Jewish racial stereotypes of physical features such as long noses, beards, and dark skin to represent Jews as well as Jews' associations with toads, owls, asses, pigs, and scorpions. In chapter 3 Epstein considers the Duke of Sussex Pentateuch from the fourteenth century in southern Germany, whereby four monstrous figures are depicted representing different types of gentiles juxtaposed with four images of anti-Jewish tropes of Jews. In chapter 4 Guesnet examines matted hair assumed to be the work of demons called Plica Polomica [Polish plait] or Judenzopf [Jewish braid] as a marker of contamination and transgression. In chapter 5 Jacobs offers a close reading of Oskar Panizza's The Operated Goy (1922) and Salomo Friedlaender's The Operated Jew (1893) to reveal how science can create monstrosity. In chapter 6 Gelbin looks at Weimar cinematic expressionism. Her examples are Paul Wegener's Der Golem (1920), Friedrich Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and Richard Oswald's Anders als die Anderen (1919) to reveal anti-Jewish stereotypes and iconographies of horror. In chapter 6, drawing creatively on Lyotard and other postmodern philosophers, Kabalek analyses Holocaust testimonies that represent the Nazi persecutors and their collaborators as moral monsters, and also addresses the image of the Muselmänner as an image of degraded monstrosity created by the Nazis who worked the Muselmänner to death. [End Page 304] Part 2 looks at "the Jewish monsters" within the European Jewish communities' self-perception and intracommunal meanings of monstrosity. In chapter 8 Shyovitz considers the monstrous inhabitants on the realm of Tevel from the seventh- to eighth-century cosmological...

Food for Thoughts: Thinking through Cannibals and Plagiarists

This article weirdly pairs the cannibal and the plagiarist as moral monsters – figures outside of conventional societal and legal categories – to argue that monstrous logic can offer potential correctives to common laws that otherwise demonize transgressive figures. An introduction to Mark Fisher's analysis of the “weird” will complement the tracing of the figure of Richard Parker throughout three literary texts and one historical text: Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Mat Johnson's Pym, and A.W. Brian Simpson's Cannibalism and the Common Law. Demonstrating the familiar and repeated tropes associated with nautical survival cannibalism, or “the custom of the sea,” this article claims the economic and political motivations that often underlie travel narratives relegate any monstrous and humanist concerns to a secondary, lesser importance. The conclusion suggests that thinking through monstrous categories may offer alternative solutions to contemporary problems of conspicuous consumption, resource ownership and exhaustion, and environmental crisis.

What Makes the Good Life Good? An Investigation into the Nature of Happiness

My research focuses on the nature of happiness as presented by contemporary philosopher Fred Feldman in his recent work, What is This Thing Called Happiness?(2010). Feldman offers an innovative theory of happiness that suggests happiness is contingent on a subject’s capacity to acquire more pleasure than displeasure in his or her surroundings. Feldman’s model is a valuable contribution to the study of happiness because it calls attention to the power a subject has in determining her own happiness. Like many of his predecessors including Aristotle, Feldman describes the happy life as the Good Life. However, where Aristotle measures the Good Life in terms of virtue, Feldman uses welfare as his metric. A problem with Feldman’s approach is that he rejects Aristotle’s arguments for why happiness is the Good without providing a suitable alternative. In this paper, I address the limitations of Feldman’s model by examining the implications of this omission. I will argue that Feldman lacks a conclusive argument for why the Good Life consists of welfare. Most significantly, Feldman’s account is problematic because it leads to the unusual conclusion that many of us are not in fact pursuing the Good Life for fear of becoming moral monsters. By reintroducing virtue into our description of happiness, and arguments for why happiness is our greatest good, I think that we can rescue contemporary theories of happiness from the repugnant moral conclusions that I have suggested are present in Feldman’s work.

The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking

The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking

"Cómo Ocultar la Verdad Sin Mentir": Cercas's El Impostor and the Doctrine of Equivocation

"Cómo Ocultar la Verdad Sin Mentir"1:Cercas's El Impostor and the Doctrine of Equivocation Hilaire Kallendorf Javier Cercas's 2014 non-fiction novel El impostor, regarding the massive fraud of alleged Spanish Holocaust survivor Enric Marco – who, it turns out, was a voluntary guest worker in Germany, not a leftist persecuted for his political leanings, as he claimed – raises important philosophical questions about the nature of truth and its vulnerability to manipulation by a cynical charlatan. This case of imposture, widely publicized in Spain, has become a national litmus test for gullibility and an occasion for soul-searching as Spaniards ask why they were taken in by him – essentially, why they wanted to believe his fabricated stories of life in a German concentration camp were true. The purpose of this essay is, first, to explore the novel's own comments about truth and lies (which, as we shall see, are explicitly posed within the context of Spanish Catholic penitential discourse) before turning to a curious text from the Renaissance titled A Treatise of Equivocation. If his case were slightly different, this text might have provided the Protean Enric Marco with his best shot at a defense of his actions within the realm of moral philosophy. As it stands, el caso Marco still opens up for our analysis significant issues of secrecy, sovereignty and absolutism as discussed by political philosopher Alberto Moreiras and French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. The essay will conclude with an assessment of whether, according to internal criteria laid out for the Renaissance doctrine of equivocation, Marco's actions would have been justifiable to early modern casuists or not. ________ Some of the most appealing features of Javier Cercas's El impostor are the novel's multiple layers of metadiscourse. The narrative voice frequently compares himself to Enric Marco and thereby develops a capacity for empathy with this so-called [End Page 109] moral monster. He also engages in periodic detours or tangents away from the main thread of the story line where he meditates upon questions such as "¿es moralmente lícito mentir?" (Cercas 184). In response to this question, he offers an erudite survey of thinkers ranging from Plato, to Voltaire, to Kant, to Montaigne, a group which he divides into two categories: relativists and absolutists (Cercas 184). He quickly arrives at the rather startling conclusion that most of the thinkers out there are relativists when it comes to lying. In The Republic Plato spoke of the noble lie (Cercas 184), while Voltaire concluded that lying is a vice only when its effects are evil (Cercas 184). As the novelist summarizes the spectrum of these "relativistic" positions, Razonan que la mentira no siempre es mala y a veces es necesaria, o que la bondad o la maldad de una mentira dependen de la bondad o la maldad de las consecuencias que provoca: si el resultado de la mentira es bueno, la mentira es buena; si el resultado es malo, la mentira es mala. (Cercas 184) In contrast, he argues, the absolutists see a lie as evil and culpable in and of itself, regardless of its potentially beneficial effects: Por el contrario, los absolutistas argumentan que la mentira es en sí misma mala, con independencia de sus resultados, porque constituye una falta de respeto al otro, y, en el fondo, una forma de violencia, o un crimen. (Cercas 184) He ultimately concludes that the only true absolutist in the realm of truth-telling was Immanuel Kant, who claimed that the prohibition against lying admits of no exceptions (Cercas 185). He notes that in this area of his dogmatism, Kant had few followers. Javier Cercas – or, more accurately, the narrative voice in his non-fiction novel – goes on to apply these tidbits from the history of moral philosophy to the specific case of Enric Marco. Latching onto Plato's concept of the noble lie, he applies it to Marco's imposture, playing devil's advocate just long enough to explore what his self-defense might look like against the charges brought against him of massive fraud and imposture: Los defensores de Marco … sostienen que las mentiras de Marco eran mentiras nobles, por decirlo como Plat...

Et le monstre rêva qu’il était un homme

Disability always evokes an image of monstrosity. The author proposes to study how representations of the monstrous and of disability have evolved. The monstrous, in the modern era, is situated in a relationship of reciprocity that founds another way to conceive of alterity. A monstrous person is a mirror in which contemporary man might be able to recognize a fellow creature. The author makes the hypothesis that the monstrous does not preclude subjectivity. This hypothesis is backed up with several examples, from literature (Kenzaburô Oe, Richard III), mythology (the Minotaur) and clinical cases (a four-year-old child suffering from a genetic disease causing facial deformation). The definition of the monster is to be without fellow creatures and without descendants. In terms of disability, this corresponds to three unconscious collective representations: faulty filiation, dangerous transmission and forbidden procreation. Monstrosity raises the question of interiority and appearance: is the physical monster a moral monster? Can the monster become conscious of his monstrosity? And if so, through what psychic processes, in relation with the gaze of the other?

Justifying a duty to suicide

Summary Asserting that there are mandatory suicides is a controversial claim to make, to say the least. The idea that some people have an obligation to end their own lives creates a visceral reaction in its apparent attack on the central moral tenets of respecting life and people for the intrinsically valuable entities they are. Moreover, there is a well-justified fear that some despicable groups might take advantage of such a position in their attempts to eliminate what they consider to be undesirable populations in their community. Given the conventional view that these populations are generally the most vulnerable, believing that there is a mandatory duty for vulnerable, persecuted populations to suicide would plausibly make the person holding such a position a moral monster to be roundly condemned. The issue of obligatory death, however, deserves far more serious consideration than generally given because it is not a simple view with obvious conclusions. The very arguments used against duties to die or suicide can be shown to support such obligations in certain increasingly common situations. In this article, I will develop the philosophical justifications for mandatory suicide based on Gillian Bennett's suicide letter. The letter shows the practical reasoning that many reasonable people facing end of life decisions use to justify, and more importantly, explain to others why they are going to take their own lives on their own terms. Bennett's message serves not only as a foundation to developing critical arguments but as a grounding of the emotional, reasonable humanity involved in these tragic situations. In what follows, seven arguments for suicide duties will be considered. Some, such as the Rights’ Argument, will be found deficient based on the existential implausibility of the rights existing, as Jeremy Bentham pointed out approximately 200 years ago. Others, such as the Consequentialist Argument, are far more plausible in that they appeal to our intellectual desire to use the most objective, rational approach to solving ethical quandaries that literally involved life and death decisions. The problem, however, is that consequentialism denies the very foundation of morality in that it treats intrinsically valuable entities, i.e., persons, as mere objects. What might be surprising to many is that the most convincing arguments suicide duty are built upon moral foundation that most people think are the most hostile to any such obligation. However, care ethics, narrative ethics, and even Kantianism can justify a duty to die if certain conditions obtain. In fact, these theories show far more humanity to those who are facing the existential decision to remain alive or to end their lives. The Kantian Argument, for instance, can justify a suicide only in those instances in which the person faces the moral dilemma of sacrificing her physical life as the only way to preserve her human dignity, or continuing to physically live even though her dignity has been destroyed by an unethical choice she made or implemented. Of course, the latter is an irrational action to take. The Care Ethics and Narrative Arguments are based far more on subjective grounds, including personal relationships that create attendant obligations or existential choices the person makes to be a particular type of person with a particular history. Finally, it should not be thought that any one of the suicide duty arguments cover every situation or must be used on their own. In the final section, a compromise argument is developed that uses elements of all the plausible justifications for an obligation to die. The power of this argument makes it far more difficult for anyone to claim that there are not real instances in which a person has a duty to take his own life.

Complicity: That Moral Monster, Troubling Matters

In the criminal law of many jurisdictions complicity, though not itself a substantive crime but a way of committing a crime, is a doctrine that determines when one person is legally liable for a criminal offense that was committed by another person, typically by being an accomplice. That doctrine has a number of troubling moral implications with respect to responsibility, particularly when complicity is employed as a devise to capture one agent as morally accountable for the actions of another agent and/or the consequences of those actions. I focus on the issue of responsibility for consequences and actus reus and mens rea difficulties with complicity as a moral concept in the light of two cases in which complicity is the basis for ascriptions of moral and criminal responsibility to someone who was not the primary wrongdoer. The book on the topic by Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin provokes my discussion.

Exclusion and Control in the Carceral State

Theorists of punishment typically construe the criminal justice system as the means to achieve retribution or to deter or otherwise prevent crime. But a close look at the way the American penal system actually operates makes clear the poor fit between these more conventional explanations and the realities of American penal practice. Taking actual practice as its starting point, this essay argues instead that the animating mission of the American carceral project is the exclusion and control of those people officially labeled as criminals. It maps the contours of exclusion and control, exploring how this institution operates, the ideological discourse that justifies it, and the resulting normative framework that has successfully made a set of practices that might otherwise seem both inhumane and self-defeating appear instead perennially necessary and appropriate. Appreciating the “cognitive conventions” by which current penal practices are rendered at once logical and legitimate proves to shed light on a number of mystifying features of the Americanpenal landscape, including why LWOP and supermax have proliferated so widely; why sentences are so often grossly disproportionate to the offense; why, given the multiple complex causes of crime, the state persists in responding to criminal conduct by locking up the actors; why prison conditions are so harsh; why recidivism is so high; why extremely long sentences are so frequently imposed even for relatively non-serious crimes; and even why the people we incarcerate are disproportionately African-American. Without claiming to provide comprehensive answers to these vexing questions, this essay offers a framework that helps to explain these striking aspects of the American carceral system. This framework takes as its starting point the practical demands incarceration imposes on the state itself: the exclusion and control of the people sentenced to prison. But as will be shown, in the American context, efforts to make sense of this way of responding to antisocial behavior quickly lead beyond practicalities to a moral economy on which the incarcerated lose not only their liberty but also their full moral status as fellow human beings and fellow citizens. What happens to them is thus no longer a matter for public concern. And as a consequence of this collective indifference, penal practices that may otherwise seem counterproductive, unnecessarily harsh, and even cruel become comprehensible and even inevitable. Part II of this essay sketches the structure of the American carceral system, exposing both its dependence on the logic of exclusion and control and the moral economy that drives it. Part III explores the self-defeating nature of current carceral practices—the way the combination of prison conditions and postcarceral burdens ensures that many people who have done time will return to society more prone to criminal activity than previously. Part IV considers the question of how such an evidently self-defeating system has been able to sustain itself, and locates the answer in the radically individualist ideology, pervasive in the criminal context, that construes all criminal conduct as exclusively the product of the offender’s free will. Part V illustrates the way this individualist discourse constructs criminal offenders as not just unrepentant evildoers but also sub-human—a process referred to as “making monsters”—and examines the work this normative reframing does both to vindicate the penal strategy of exclusion and control and to justify the arguably inhumane treatment of prisoners. Part VI explores the way that perceiving criminal offenders as moral monsters makes it difficult to distinguish the relatively few individuals who are genuinely congenitally violent and dangerous from the vast majority who are not; through this ideological (re)construction,allpeople who persist in committing crimes, even nonviolent offenders, can come to seem appropriate targets for extended and even permanent exclusion. Part VII considers the racial implications of exclusion and control, in particular the way the cultural construction of African Americans as “incorrigible” may explain why members of this group are overrepresented as targets of the American carceral system. Part VIII shifts the focus to the prison itself, where the self-defeating logic of exclusion and control has reappeared behind bars in the form of the supermax prison. Finally, the Conclusion considers how the destructive and self-defeating dynamic of exclusion and control may be disrupted. It argues that a political strategy emphasizing the financial costs of incarceration is bound to fail unless it also generates an ideological reorientation towards recognizing the people the state incarcerates as fellow human beings and fellow citizens, entitled to respect and consideration as such.

Listening to the World: Prophetic Anger and Sapiential Compassion

Listening to the World:Prophetic Anger and Sapiential Compassion Felix Wilfred Pope Benedict XVI has insisted all along how the absence of reference to God has caused dehumanization in our world. Unfortunately, what does not seem to occur to him and those who think along these lines is how the absence of concern and engagement with the issue of suffering—poverty, oppression, racism, and sexism—causes dehumanization. Suffering epitomizes the condition of our contemporary world. This is the meeting point of any meaningful common discourse of religious traditions, independent of the God question. For those believing in God, the very God question is itself bound up with the question of suffering. As Gustavo Gutierrez has rightly pointed out, the real question today is how to speak about God in a world of suffering, and indeed suffering of the innocent.1 a world not angry enough What defines us as individuals and groups is the way we respond to suffering. This is a crucial question. For, as Hannah Arendt has drawn to our attention, there is something like a banality of evil.2 Its everyday genesis and manifestations are not anything sensational, as they are mostly committed by ordinary men and women who go about their daily lives and are by no means moral monsters. The first sentiment in responding to suffering should be a sense of horror, trembling, and indignation at the injustice inflicted on the victims, and that is very important. We note that the environment we live in is so politicized that human beings are less and less shocked by the horror of evil. Suffering has become a matter of statistics, codification, media commercialization, and photography.3 What strikes us is the fact that anger characterized men and women of great leadership, because they were upset with the existing situation and they imagined a different order of things. Moses was such a man in the biblical tradition. In modern times, such was the case for example with B. R. Ambedkar, the foremost leader of the Dalits (“Untouchables”) of India, and Martin Luther King Jr. of the civil rights movement in the United States, both of whom were great, angry leaders. We could [End Page 63] characterize this as “holy anger.” It aims not at destroying the enemies or punishing them but at redeeming a society from the consequences of suffering. prophetic anger: some salient features When we speak of prophetic anger, the question that could be raised is: Whose anger? It is first and foremost the anger of the victims. For it is they who know the pain evil inflicts in the form of grinding poverty, violence, and humiliation. Along with the victims, we have those in solidarity with them who express rage at the situations of gross injustice. Anger is of different kinds. Anger can and does often accompany the spirit of vindication and revenge.4 This anger is aimed at others as enemies, and as threats to oneself. But prophetic anger has a direct reference to justice. The anger of the victims has something visceral about it. The whole being of the victim reacts to the injustice and oppression suffered—be it women; discriminated-against ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities; or any victim of human rights violations. There is then ample room to speak about “black rage,” “Dalit rage,” and “gender rage,” which express the anguish of the victims pushed to the wall through long-standing oppression and yet having the strength to imagine something different. Prophetic anger is a healing anger. It opens the wounds of society and has ultimately the goal of healing them. Prophetic anger is the result of being gripped by an encounter and experience of something wonderful and exceedingly beautiful beyond the present distortion of reality. This is something different from a mere human passion. Like symbols that help us convey what words and speech are incapable of, so anger is a medium to bridge the gulf that divides the lofty realities and the misery of the prevailing situation. The encounter and experience that is in the prophets also finds expression in prophetic anger as it is directed at the cause behind the suffering of the innocent. Prophetic anger is directed...

“Smoke like incense”: sacrifice, Shakespeare and the Shoah

Richard Marientras' book Le Proche et Le Lontain was misrepresented as a work of structuralist anthropology when its English translation was published in 1985 as New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World. In fact, it belonged to the post-structuralist deconstruction of the binarism of civilization and barbarism, and explored how “wildness can erupt at the heart of the civilized”. Its theme, that with moral monsters like Iago we see how “the near is more dangerous than the far”, has to be read in light of its disclaimer of objectivity and insistence that Shakespeare is our contemporary. Then its author's likening of his book to the witness heap of stones on a Jewish grave renders The Near and the Far a work of mourning for the “smoke like incense” arising from the Holocaust, and a deep meditation on Shakespeare and the Shoah. With the hindsight of Nazi Carl Schmitt's dictum that “sovereign is who decides on the exception”, Marienstras' scholarship on sacrifice and forest law becomes a traumatized response to the camps, and the book now emerges as being about the banality of evil in the criminal state, as personified by an Eichmann or Macbeth.

Jefferson’s Spaces

Jefferson’s Spaces Peter S. Onuf (bio) and Annette Gordon-Reed (bio) “A Rich Spot of Earth”: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello. Peter Hatch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. 263 pp. Jefferson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Kevin J. Hayes. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. 210 pp. Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello. Cynthia A. Kierner. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 360 pp. Thomas Jefferson presents daunting obstacles to biographers. Historian Merrill Peterson famously called Jefferson “impenetrable,” echoing the complaints of visitors to Monticello who were denied access to the great man’s private suite, or “sanctum sanctorum” (Thomas Jefferson viii). Jefferson customarily diverted his guests’ attention away from himself, inviting them to enjoy the magnificent views, imagine what Monticello might look like if construction were ever completed, and contemplate the statues, paintings, prints, maps, Indian artifacts, and other conversation pieces that filled the house to overflowing. Granddaughter Ellen Randolph called life at her childhood home a “feast of reason,” but there were limits to the feast. Jefferson usually declined to participate in contentious and divisive arguments about politics or other topics that might lead him to express controversial opinions or principles; his manner undoubtedly discouraging [End Page 755] others from doing so. Nor did he bare his soul, even to family members or close friends. “To a disposition ardent, affectionate and communicative,” reported Margaret Bayard Smith, who adored him, “he joins manners timid, even to bashfulness and reserved even to coldness” (Hayes, Jefferson 60). Jefferson’s perceived chilliness was “unfavorable to that free interchange of thoughts and feelings which constitute the greatest charm of social life” (Hunt 386). Surely the “greatest charm” of a modern biography is the secrets it betrays, and modern subjects seem all too eager to tell all. But Jefferson had a gift for turning the conversation away from himself, Smith concluded, “so as to draw forth the powers and talents of each guest” (Bayard Smith). Jefferson has a similar gift with modern biographers, often turning efforts to penetrate their subject’s defenses into righteous self-posturing. The temptation to knock Jefferson off his pedestal and so reveal the hypocrisy of a slaveholder who wrote the script for our democratic creed has been nearly irresistible. The “real” Jefferson must have been a moral monster: his penchant for privacy a mere device to hide a flawed “character” that cannot bear scrutiny. Instead of being his claim to eternal esteem, the eloquent language of the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—constitutes an everlasting indictment of him. The books under review here suggest that the time is ripe for a less moralistic—and self-congratulatory—approach to Jefferson’s life. Such an approach cannot evade the harsh realities of chattel slavery and white supremacy: no truthful portrait of the master of Monticello can ever successfully extricate him from the slave society that sustained his wealth and influence and made his career as a revolutionary patriot and republican statesman possible. Indeed taking Jefferson seriously on his own terms requires acknowledging the ways in which all aspects of his life made him who he was, and shaped how he presented himself to others, including his family, the people he enslaved, and visitors to his mountain. Jefferson’s family and the enslaved knew all about life in a slave society, of course, understanding that the master had to develop a persona that allowed him to play his designated role. And the visitors to Monticello whose testimony is included in Kevin J. Hayes’s engaging Jefferson in His Own Time were of course well aware that Jefferson exploited large numbers of his fellow human beings.1 They might have wondered whether (and how) the author of Notes on the State of Virginia, with its trenchant denunciations [End Page 756] of slavery, could sustain his faith in the imminence—or at least inevitability—of emancipation, and the topic was occasionally broached in parlor or dining room conversations. But they could have no doubts that, in the meantime, Jefferson lived easily with slavery, or that slave labor was...