The New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today

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Notes

1 The New Demons, 119.

2 “[T]he hermeneutic key incessantly put forward by twentieth-century philosophy is the clear distinction between the omnipotent action of the evil actor and the totally passive inaction of a subject who is deprived of any capacity to react; as if the eternal Dostoevskian scene of the violation of children – the quintessential innocent victim – were to be endlessly repeated. After all, if we take a close look, the darkest, most terrible power relations in our history have been modeled according to this schema: evil demons on one side and absolute victims on the other”, ibid.

3 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons: A Novel in Three Parts, trans. and annotated by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. New York: Random House, Vintage Classics, 1995, 43. Quoted in The New Demons, 15.

4 The New Demons, 185.

5 “Instead of interpreting evil as a cypher of the pain human beings feel as a consequence of their finite nature, [Nietzsche] critiques the evil that the vital energy has to be subjected to in order to become docile, so as to be saved by the same power that wounded it”, ibid., 216.

6 See especially chapter 5 for Arendt (189ff.), and chapter 7 for Foucault (237ff.).

7 See, for example, Simona Forti, “The Biopolitics of Souls: Racism, Nazism, and Plato”. Political Theory 34, 1 (2006): 9–32; Hannah Arendt tra filosofia e politica. Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2006.

8 “Even though the samizdats differed between each other, with very distant ideological and theoretical backgrounds, many of them were directly inspired by Foucault’s latest works to emphasize the importance of subjective strategies for changing the course of things, and more generally to emphasize the impact of the ethical dimension in political life”, The New Demons, 269.

9 The New Demons, 284–85.

10 See Blanka Císařovská and Vilém Prečan, eds., Charta 77. Dokumenty 1977–1989, vol. 3 (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2007), 36.