Regarding evil

Abstract

The transnational summit, Regarding Evil, was called to assembly with the simultaneous sounding of the trumps in six sites around the world, projected simulcast. In collaboration with the six individuals who were issued the instruments, each announced their particular state of emergency and converged at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a seventh blast. Scotsman Kenneth Smith assumed the role of 7th piper. Artists and scholars of international reputation had been invited to present visual and discursive material confronting the elusive and immeasurable subject of Evil, its transpolitical behaviors, charismatic aesthetic, and viral disbursement in the vast enterprise of simulation, symbolic power, and catastrophe. Panel discussion and audience participation provided a public forum to expand this dialogue. Engaging in the discourse of ethics as a codal system by which we can only hope to define a subjective good, continues to undermine the intelligence of Evil and fuels the perpetual orbit around exotic 'otherness' as an opaque foreigner situated in an archaic Other World of saboteurs. Questions that I have raised concerning the usefulness of colloquia and the discourse of Moral Law included "How then can we speak to/of evil while choosing to sidestep the subject using rhetorical strategies at the risk of sacrificing symbolic power?" "Must we rely on the performative death act to regain this symbolic power?" Including ourselves within the equation of Evil is necessary for a richer appraisal of our condition, which may, in some cases, require the invocation of such an unwanted guest directly into our universe.