Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations

No one will deny that we live in a world where evil exists. But how are we to come to grips with human atrocity and its diabolical intensity? Martin Beck Matuštík considers evil to be even more radically evil than previously thought and to have become all too familiar in everyday life. While we can name various moral wrongs and specific cruelties, Matuštík maintains that radical evil understood as a religious phenomenon requires a religious response where the language of hope, forgiveness, redemption, and love can take us beyond unspeakable harm and irreparable violence. Drawing upon the work of Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, this work is written as a series of meditations. Matuštík presents a bold new way of dealing with one of humanity's most intractable problems.

"This book deserves a large and thoughtful readership.... the insights are worth the effort." --Robert L. Perkins, Stetson University, Int J Philos Religion, May 13, 2009 (online) Indiana University Press

"In a world filled with war, torture, and cruelty, where millions of people die of diseases related to malnutrition or inadequate health care each year, Martin Beck Matuštík's book is an important and innovative inquiry into an age-old problem." --Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Indiana University Press

Opens a way for hope, forgiveness, redemption, and love to spring from evil

Martin Beck Matuštík is Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Religion at Arizona State University. He is author of Jürgen Habermas: Philosophical-Political Profile and Specters of Liberation. He has edited (with Merold Westphal) Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (IUP, 1995).

Acknowledgments

Part 1. Impossible Hope

1. Job at Auschwitz

2. Redemptive Critical Theory

3. Between Hope and Terror

Part 2. The Negatively Saturated Phenomenon

4. Job Questions Kant

5. Redemption in an Antiredemptory Age

6. Radical Evil as a Saturated Phenomenon

Part 3. The Uncanny

7. The Unforgivable

8. Tragic Beauty

9. The Unspeakable

10. Without a Why

Epilogue: Job Questions the Grand Inquisitor

Notes

Works Cited

Index