On Representations of Evil
Donald Moss
The Setting: The logic of self-defense is easily transformed into the logic of elimination: it starts with getting rid of the enemy now and ends with getting rid of the enemy forever. The logic of self-defense is situational, particular, local, and limited: an action, a breach, a response, a repair. In contrast, the logic of elimination is categorical: permanent, transhistorical, and limitless. Today’s action gives expression to the irreducibly malignant character of a taxonomical category, a type. The enemy is therefore not properly defined by a specific actor or action but instead by this category, this type. Coherent self-defense, then, entails the elimination of the category. The enemy is a pathogen; the body has been infected; self-defense is medical. Permanent cure is the only satisfactory aim.
*
Prelude: We have no absolute right to have been created. No living thing on the planet has such a right. But once created, we, all of us living things, do have a right to continue being here, a right to exist, and to die, as will happen, whenever it happens.
Creation, its powers, and determinants beyond us, is absolute. Life, and all that follows, are contingent, prey to circumstance, to flaw, to violence, to illness, to accident.
We humans know that we are here contingently. Our time is brief, our capacities slight, our possibilities limited. We know this and yet we, all of us, imagine otherwise, imagine ourselves limitless, omnipotent, capable of anything—as absolute as creation.
There is, then, a sadness to being alive, a realization that we can never have what we can always imagine. We are smaller than we would want to be. We live within the frame of that smallness. And yet, we are always tempted to shatter that frame, to achieve the absolute, to become without limit.
Evil offers that temptation. It seduces us into pursuing a status equal to creation’s. But since we cannot create, our only path toward the absolute is through destructiveness. Via destruction, we can mobilize to correct creation’s errors, to rid the world of creation’s mistakes, and to return our lands to what they always ought to have been.
Once seduced, we march toward absolute dominion over our selected target: creation’s mistake. If we can achieve this, we can match the power of creation with an equal power of our own. To cleanse, shape, and purify—this is evil’s work. Restoring the proper order of things, evil claims the right and even the duty to regulate, control, reduce, enslave, and destroy without limit. With this project, it declares war on creation’s singular status as absolute.
Listen to evil’s voice: “We aspire not to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must once again become a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into law.”[1]
As in stories of creation, evil names and classifies its target objects into fixed taxonomical categories: “The country of a foreign race” means Jews, women, gays, Blacks, Africans, the poor. These target objects become available for limitless use—limitless labor, of limitless kind. This is the realization of evil’s fundamental mandate to match creation’s power, as voiced most directly in Genesis: “have dominion . . . over these living things that moveth upon the earth.”
This aim—first dominion and then, if necessary, elimination—defines the logic of evil, which I call here the logic of extermination. Evil configures its object as existing only to be dominated and, when necessary, exterminated. The object has no meaningful voice; its experience is of no concern. Its pain does not matter. This indifference to the object distinguishes the logic of extermination from the logic of sadism.
Sadism, crucially, does not aim at its object’s elimination. Instead, for sadism, the preservation of the object is crucial. The object’s experience matters; its pain matters; its excitement matters. Sadism must preserve its object to find satisfaction in its object’s continued suffering.
While the logic of sadism preserves its object, the logic of evil eliminates it.
In trying to think directly about evil, this may be as far as we can go—mapping its aspiration to the absolute and distinguishing it from sadism.
“Evil configures its object as existing only to be dominated and, when necessary, exterminated.”
We can locate evil by way of its yearning for the absolute. Enactments of evil express that yearning. While we can catalog examples of this enacted yearning and can even describe their particulars, these descriptions do not derive from direct knowledge; they do not come from the inside. We encounter evil and its representations either as victims or as witnesses.
Speaking now in the first-person singular: I aim to do two things simultaneously. First, I want to convey a point of view that I can comfortably own. And second, I want to invite you to hear me in your own first-person. Of course, “we”—the first-person plural—are in it together as we all contend with evil. But we also confront evil individually and alone. We are simultaneously alone and together in this experience. We face two intertwined questions: what demands does evil make on us, and what demands does it make on me? I intend to address both questions at once.
Primo Levi, writing of his time in the concentration camp, cautions us regarding our capacity to think about evil and its representations. He writes: “This very book is drenched in memory, what’s more a distant memory. Thus, it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself.” Even when speaking directly and from experience, Levi knows that no report is entirely reliable.
What we have heard, what we have seen, what we have experienced: memory can give us only a representation of experience, not a repetition. All representations of evil, even first-person accounts, are “suspect and must be protected against themselves.” Evil traumatizes. Even its representations present us with “more than mind can endure”, the basic condition of trauma. We do our best to create narratives around evil, hoping, I think, to create order. However, since all order has been undermined, the order we create can only stand next to, but cannot undo, the undermining effect of evil.
So, whatever we say will be insufficient. Who can hear it, anyway? We must downgrade our hopes, no longer imagining an immediate listener, effect, or consequence. We can only speak our failure into a future. We can imagine being heard, but not being heard now, not with any effect. We can only be heard later, after whatever we say would have counted. We speak into a time when the evil before us is over. We speak so that someday we will be able to claim our place as witnesses. We speak for ourselves, then, and as such our language will always fall short of what we might have wished it to do. No voice, hobbled by the limitations of language, can credibly claim to be free from suspicion.
*
I begin with Freud:
“At first, the human organism is incapable of bringing about the specific action. It takes place by extraneous help, when the attention of an experienced person is drawn to the child’s state by discharge . . . In this way this path of discharge acquires a secondary function of the highest importance, that of communication, and the initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives.”
“The initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives.” The cry we hear from a baby, then, is a cry of helplessness and a demand for help. The cry penetrates us, provoking and exposing this primal source—the site where we, as moral creatures, begin. The demand is clear: demonstrate, show, bring comfort to the crying infant. Goodness begins there. And so does its contrary.
The baby here is Freud’s figure of creation. To turn toward it, to turn toward care, and you are turning yourself toward goodness—toward the elimination of the cry, yes, but even more fundamentally, toward the elimination of the other’s pain. To turn away from the cry, away from the baby, and away from goodness, might also be to aim for quiet. Here, though, the cry changes its meaning. No longer an appeal for help, it becomes mere noise. You no longer aim to eliminate the other’s pain; you now aim to eliminate the other. It is you now who are crying—“Stop this painful noise,” your cry insists, “stop this invasive sound.” Once the cry has turned to noise, once it impacts you as though it were violent, and once the noise, in effect, makes you cry, you are in the grip of the logic of extermination. Once your aim is to protect yourself, there is no reasonable limit to how you might achieve it. Your right to self-protection, to eliminate painful noise, is absolute.
The work of evil, its aspiration to the absolute, is always oriented toward the elimination of pain—the permanent elimination of pain, the final solution.
“Once the cry has turned to noise, once it impacts you as though it were violent, and once the noise, in effect, makes you cry, you are in the grip of the logic of extermination.”
*
We recently visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to the more than four thousand four hundred known victims of lynching in the United States. By visiting the memorial, I felt like I was meeting a demand: You, a white American man, must see this. You must see what has been done in your name, in the name of white men. I thought that by doing so, I would somehow partake in a “moral motive” and be better for it. There are cries here that I must hear. I am linked by race to the perpetrators, by feeling to the lynched, and by position to the witnesses. I will be surrounded by cries, from inside and out.
As you enter the memorial, you encounter Toni Morrison: “And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck, put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than those eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”
Morrison gets it exactly right. The heart is the prize. The heart—the signifier of life, of creation—is racism’s target here, and evil’s target everywhere. Claim the heart, and you claim equal status with creation itself.
You walk down a sloping circular walkway. Eight hundred and five six-foot steel monoliths hang from above, each one representing a county and inscribed with the names of the people lynched in that county, some of the lynched designated as “unknown”. “As you walk through the installation, the ground begins to slope and the monoliths to rise until you are standing underneath scores of them.” What do you do with these hanging monoliths, these places, these names, these “unknowns”? What demands do they make on you?
“The ego is a precipitate of abandoned object relations,” writes Freud. The phrase “abandoned object relations” haunts us. These lynched people—what kinds of objects have they been, and what relations have we had with them? We have known them, known of them, since we were children. We have lived with them and their kin, heard their stories, seen their photos, seen their hanging bodies. They are more present to us than great aunts and uncles, or Russian ancestors whose photos we might find in our parents’ albums. Those ancestors lie forlorn and far away. We imagine them, connect with them dutifully, even if they have been murdered, their villages obliterated, their graveyards torn apart. They are distant relations. But these lynched people are here; they have always been here, where we have lived, where we still live. These lynched people reside in our bones. As Freud says, just as we have abandoned these objects, we have concurrently taken them in. They have become part of us. Their killers, whom we have tried to abandon, have also become part of us—the killers we have seen in the postcards, excited and laughing with their grim and cocky faces, trophy hunters celebrating a job well done. This whole cluster of objects—all the dead and all the killers—rises up in us as we walk down the sloping circular walkway. We cannot grieve, we cannot mourn; these figures are neither dead nor alive. “Don’t you see I’m burning?” says the no-longer-dead son to the dreaming father in Freud’s iconic image. And with the dream, the father has prolonged his son’s life for a few more minutes.
And here, at the memorial, we hear voices similar to the ones that the father heard: “Don’t you see us? Don’t you see us burning?” And for the moment, we do see them, and in that moment, all of it—all of them—are alive. And so are we, much more alive now than we were an hour ago. They rise out of our ego. For the moment, they are no longer “precipitates”; they have become companions, present with us. And when we leave, all of these objects return to where they were—back to our bones, to ourselves, to, as Freud so drily put it, our egos.
It has not been a “moral motive” at work as we contended with those hanging monoliths. There was nothing either good or bad about this experience. Nothing had been done. No real cry from real people had been heard. Afterwards, the motive seems to have been something more selfish than moral—maybe a response to a cry of my own, a simple demand: See and hear what’s in front of you. Name what you see. Tell whom you can.
What we are left with is to await the next time—the next lynching, the next moment when we encounter the representation of evil. There will be a next time; of this, we can be sure.
I write this from a house in the woods—a hill, a pond, and a forest out my window. And suddenly, as I write, the trees, the hill, and the water become like the monoliths, hanging in front of me as an ongoing memorial to all that we have done, to all that we are doing, to all that we will continue to do.
*
At its foundation, evil offers us logic instead of passion, reason instead of sadism, aggression instead of hatred. Its appeal is to self-preservation and necessity, to what must be done. It offers work, not pleasure. Its excitements, as Adolf Eichmann says, appeal only to the “clowns” amongst us. Here is one of the judges at Eichmann’s trial: “Dr. Servatius, I assume you made a slip of the tongue when you said that killing by gas was a medical matter.” Servatius replies: “It was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is a medical matter.”
What category of destructiveness is this, one that transgresses all limits, for which nothing is forbidden, nothing is regulated—a category that represents itself as absolute, placing itself beyond law, beyond language, beyond any naming, and thus presenting itself to us as the unthinkable?
The first thing we do, and what immediately places our thought under suspicion, is to search for a category—as I have done here. Then we insert the story into a pre-existing framework—in this case, “evil”—as though we have encountered it before, when, in all likelihood, we have not. The category tames the story, turning its unbearable particularity into a bearable likeness, rendering it as a simile—this is like that. The procedure resembles what diagnosis can do in medicine, blunting incurable suffering by giving it a name. But we must remember, as Daniel Foliard puts it in the Violence of Colonial Photography, that “no category can do justice to the pain and force imposed on subjected bodies.”
As a boy, I often went to the movies alone. Week after week, I watched newsreels of the Holocaust, especially images of the liberation of the camps. The intention of these newsreels was clear—to teach us all a lesson. The Nazis were monsters, and we Jews were their victims. The problem for me, though, as I saw all those Jewish bodies and nearly starved Jewish inmates, I was not only educated about the Nazi’s monstrosities but also excited by the presentation of their limitless power. Though I could never give voice to that excitement, I have never forgotten it. Those experiences with the newsreels have recently erupted yet again.
“We must remember, however, that the logic of elimination allies itself with the logic of medicine, the logic of cure.”
We have encountered this category before—different killers, different camps, different victims, different witnesses. In the United States, for example, we all watched as George Floyd was slowly murdered by a policeman, with witnesses compelled to stand back and stay still as Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe and called out for his mother. The story was the same: different killer, different victims, different history, different camp, different country, yet the same setup, the same message, the same limitlessness, the same absolute right, the calm killing within a purifying frenzy, correcting the errors of creation—the logic of extermination. And at first, presented with this—lynching and George Floyd then, Israel and Gaza now—the people on the street and all of us who see the videos and read the reports are only able to observe the logic of extermination in action. We must remember, however, that the logic of elimination allies itself with the logic of medicine, the logic of cure. Different medical interventions may share the same curative aim. We can clearly see that the medical rationale leading to the murder of George Floyd employs a different technique than those represented in the newsreels or Gaza videos. These technical differences are as apparent as the underlying eliminative logic that binds them.
*
My patient is the son of Holocaust survivors. About a year ago, he was told a particularly horrific story from the Holocaust: a Nazi guard, on a cold winter day, incinerated a Jewish baby to warm his hands. The man who told him this story was a boy then, a witness standing next to the guard. “Think about this,” he told my patient, “the next time you decide to go out with a non-Jewish woman.” So, my patient asked me to “think about this” with him. I found the story nearly unbearable. This story, I think, represents the logic of sadism. The witness must survive in order to suffer; first, the witness at the camp, then my patient, and now me. The story loses its force without our suffering. Our suffering gives the story its meaning.
Rather than directly confronting the image of the burning baby, I thought about my unpaid debts to my murdered ancestors, as if settling these debts might somehow quiet the baby’s scream. This seemed like an impossible yet manageable predicament, somehow quantifiable, unlike the permanent immobilization I felt when I imagined the guard and the baby. My patient, though, did not seem very moved by the story. For him, it was just another in a long line of sadistic stories he had heard from his father.
After October 7, things changed for both my patient and me. I was immediately overwhelmed, barely able to think, and certain that thinking didn’t matter. I felt caged in, banging against limits, where action seemed impossible and inaction unacceptable. Listening to quotidian clinical material made me a derelict citizen, while not listening made me a derelict analyst. That Tuesday, a patient said to me: “I can’t tell what the fuck is going on.” “Me too,” I say, helplessly, and she smiled at my best intervention of the day.
My patient came to his October 9 session ferocious and enraged. He was now encountering a representation of evil, no longer just a representation of sadism, as with the story of the incinerated baby. Everything had changed. His voice was raised, his chair closer than usual.
“Two thousand now,” he said, “and the world watches. They’re killing us again.”
“Us,” he said, staring at me. “Us.”
“How many will it take this time: Twenty thousand? Two hundred thousand?”
“They should be wiped off the face of the earth.”
“What kind of world is this?”
“A father tells a reporter he is happy that his eight-year-old daughter has been killed. That way she will not have been raped and tortured.”
“Thank God my parents did not have to see this.”
“Destroy Gaza. Eliminate it. Eliminate them all.”
His words feel invasive. We are in a small room together, and he has taken over the space. I know I can think, but my thoughts are too fragile for this. I need to protect them, hide them, get them ready, nourish them, give them strength. Now is too early. Evasion is the best I can do. I want to say something, so I say: “Revenge makes us all crazy.” My patient seems to take this in. I felt a little better; he listened to me. “Don’t go crazy,” is what I meant. And don’t make me crazy.
I felt inadequate, lacking in authority, and unworthy of being heard, as though I should leave it to them to do as they will. This horrifies me. They cannot be left to do as they will; they are crazed and could be monstrous. And yet here, in the session, I can’t quite pull myself together. His demand is clear: I must decide between being a psychoanalyst or being a Jew—a Zionist Jew. Representations of evil ask for fundamental, essentialist identifications.
Since evil aims to annihilate, representations of evil ask us to choose: align with those facing annihilation or with those trying to annihilate them. There is no third option. You are not to be seen as an individual but as a member of a group. The representations make it clear: first and foremost, you must identify with your tribe; second, your thoughts are rendered irrelevant.
And now the Israelis are “obliterating Hamas,” and have been doing so for almost a year. They seem to be enacting what my patient reflexively wanted when we met that Tuesday after the massacres. The logic of extermination is winning the day, winning the year. Jews have long been victims of this logic; today, Israelis are also its perpetrators. I recently received an email from Israel: “A wise rabbi said to his followers, it could have been worse than the holocaust, we could have been the murderers. Now we are. The inhumanity, the stupidity, the indifference. Evil always wins in the end, it seems."
I think about violence—its seduction, its promise to eliminate pain, to clean things up, to restore. I know, however, that it won’t do that. My knowledge feels both potent and lame, my thoughts both weak and strong, my voice commanding yet dismissible. Thought is being punished, people are being cancelled and fired. Slaughter reigns.
“As psychoanalysts, if we are to engage with these representations of evil, we will be obliged to identify with all of their main figures.”
Hold it all, I tell myself—violence and non-violence, thought and fury, interpretation and merger, fragility and strength. Some parts now, some later. I am ready. I will be ready. I will never be ready.
This is what it’s like to be inundated with representations of evil: they impose an enormous demand. You must locate yourself amid the flood. Yet, you feel overwhelmed and desperate to alleviate the deluge, to correct your condition. You can’t think. You try not to drown in images. You try to do something more than just imagine. You work. You try to think. You aim to rediscover yourself, though you can never return to who you once were. You have been changed forever.
As psychoanalysts, if we are to engage with these representations of evil, we will be obliged to identify with all of their main figures. We need to endure, even if only momentarily, the monstrosity that connects us to the Nazi, the scream that connects us to the baby, the helpless rage that binds us to the witness, and the collective horror that attaches us to the camp. Similarly, we must find a way to identify with Hamas and their Israeli hostages, the IDF, the thousands and thousands murdered in Gaza, the dying patients. Only by enduring these identifications might we begin to think psychoanalytically of what we are contending with when we contend with representations of evil.
As Freud writes, we all “hate, abhor, and wish to destroy” the sources of our pain. This primal pull draws all of us toward the logic of elimination—not only the wish to rid ourselves of pain but to be rid of its sources and origins. For Freud, our first impulse toward the external world partakes in the logic of elimination: find the responsible object and get rid of it, permanently.
The seductive pull of evil rests on this universal impulse. We have the limited right to eliminate our own sources of pain, according to the logic of extermination. This initial impulse makes us susceptible to its expansion—the claim that we have the absolute right to eliminate the world’s sources of pain.
Evil positions itself on the side of right and necessity. Pain is the enemy, regardless of its form. This constitutes the absolute logic of evil: the right to claim dominion, to name, locate, and eliminate the source of the world’s pain. In this case, Israelis here and Palestinians there; in other cases, it is other sources. The list is endless. No category is immune.
What happens to us—all of us—when we hear these stories: first of the burning of the baby; then, the massacre in southern Israel; and now, the retaliatory massacres taking place under Israeli direction? All of these are informed by the logic of extermination, echoing the words: “Violate any norm on the way to victory.” What happens to us, in fact, when we hear any story about perpetrators on the move, absolute in their mission to rid the world of creation’s mistakes and to eliminate, once and for all, the sources of pain?
Of course, we can all hear the baby’s cries when we hear my patient’s story, read about the massacres of October 7, or learn of premature infants dying in non-functional incubators in Gaza. The cries grow louder—they become desperate and more confusing—when they are immediate. They are no longer muted by time or mediated by parents and ancestors. These cries have the power to penetrate us, to provoke and expose the primal source of all moral motives. We cannot bring comfort; we cannot find quiet. We hear them, yet no matter what we do, it seems the cries will continue indefinitely, interminably. What, then, can we demonstrate? What can we show? We are demanded to act while knowing that our action will fail.
The story of the burning of the baby, the stories from October 7, the stories from before, and those from the three hundred days that followed are all intended as permanent memorials, to be passed on to every subsequent generation indefinitely. Each story, each image meant to portray evil serves as a lasting memorial to evil. This is what we did; this is what was done to us. This commemorates our power. This commemorates their murderousness and our survival. Large architectural memorials provide material weight and presence to these stories. No matter how evil is represented—the spoken word, the written word, the visual image, the sound, the cry—the representation is meant as a permanent contribution to the record: a memorialization. This is what humans can do; this is what humans have done.
Representations of evil convey a singular, memorial message: the past is neither past nor dead; the past is present. This awareness—that the past lives fully in the “here and now”—stands as the grounding principle for all clinical psychoanalytic work. Our patients’ stories each memorialize a past that has been too much to bear and, as such, continues to infiltrate the present. Every clinical story is a story of helplessness, of cries that were insufficiently heard. Some clinical stories include confrontations with the logic of extermination, either visited from the outside, or from within. From without, this logic is often enacted by those who are supposed to be caretakers, who may claim unlimited rights over their lives and to how they can be used. In such cases, voices and cries are reduced to mere noise and are deemed insignificant.
From within, the identical logic can easily erupt. Consider this example:
“I treat my own cry without mercy. My only right is to be silent and invisible, to disturb nothing. I am here contingently. I have never been welcomed. I have no place. Go back to where you came from. I came from nothing. Go back to nothing.”
This is a logic not so much of extermination, but of restoration. His elimination restores order; his presence disturbs it.
In clinical work, we psychoanalysts develop a receptivity to representations of evil. Our task is to withstand these stories, to locate ourselves in each of their elements, to identify with each character, and to endure what we hear. By doing so, we make it more possible for our patients to bear their own narratives. There is a beauty in this work—a pushing back against any claim to the absolute and an insistence on the integrity of the small and the fragile. We insist on the dignity of the cry.
[1] Césaire attributes it to Hitler in Discourse on Colonialism but it comes from the French philosopher Ernest Renan.