Session 4: Apprehension and Appreciation of Evil and Sorrow

Session 4: Apprehension and Appreciation of Evil and Sorrow
Chair: Karil Kucera

Holy Families; The Rise of the Religious Right in Australia
John Nijjem
The Philosophy Department, University of Sydney, Australia

No abstract is presently available

Beauty in Mourning? (Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed)
Mena Mitrano
University of Maryland in Europe

One of the distinguishing traits of twentieth-century creativity is its acute consciousness of ideological and historical evil. In Europe especially, as philosopher Remo Bodei writes, modern art has been in mourning for the dead and for whatever, in everyone’s life, is mutilated, humiliated, and offended. There has been a prohibition on the enjoyment of beauty, out of decency, before the sorrow of others. I would like to explore some of the consequences of Bodei’s argument on literary criticism.
If modernity perceived beauty as a cosmetic cover that tries to hide the horrors of the world, how has the post-World War II creativity dealt with the split between inside and outside, substance and cover, encouraged by that accessorial view of beauty? What role has beauty’s consciousness of evil played in the development of literary studies? It is a common assumption that literary criticism, especially in its contemporary form of theory, has imposed a prohibition on the enjoyment of beauty (I am thinking of Elaine Scarry’s work), focusing instead on the notions of textual undecidability and indeterminacy. Is this the case? Is contemporary criticism’s interest in the immanent social meaning of texts a rejection of beauty? To what extent does this rejection stem from the modernist split between irrelevant ornament and the harsh historical realities of discrimination and violence? Is literary criticism today an aesthetic practice? Of what kind?
To begin to raise these questions I will focus on a visual work that marked a turning point in post-World War II aesthetic views. This is Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955). At the first Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, in 1958, officials removed Bed from public view and hung it in an office instead. They judged it unfit for public display. One of the reasons was that it conjured a scene of violence (some spoke of murder). Bed was made of a quilt, a pillow and sheets. The artist applied oil paint and other materials, such as toothpaste and nail varnish, on the cloth of the pillow and the sheets. It is interesting that those viewers who associated Bed to a scene of violence did so because of Rauschenberg’s use of the stain technique, combined with the fact that the cover and sheets suggest an absent human body. By treating the sheets as a vestimentary metaphor—the cloth of the body—the artist was suggesting that the canvas, too, is an accessory of the body. Accordingly, he left on the canvas the traces of a bodily presence.
The scandalous fact about Bed was that, despite the modernist awareness of the subjection of beauty by evil, the artist still persisted in a bond, whose exclusive character was testified by the essential, poor materials used. I find it interesting that Rauschenberg’s use of the canvas in Bed is highly evocative of the materiality of fabric. In this regard, it parallels literary criticism’s turn toward the etymological meaning of the text as a fabric or texture, and thus its imaginative contiguity with the human body. Rauschenberg resumes in a highly original manner the modernist dilemma of a beauty as a cosmetic cover. He questions it. It would be productive to speculate on how his questions transfer to critical discourse at a time when there seems to be a revived interest in beauty.

The Problem of Evil After the Death of God
Alan Watt
Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

“The problem of evil” is usually thought of as a problem exclusively for believers in an omnipotent, benevolent God (theists), but in this paper I argue that the essence of the problem is of universal scope, surviving the “death of God” to be a critical challenge for atheists and agnostics, too.
The first part of the paper explains how the problem can be reformulated in non-theistic terms. My main argument is that the traditional, logical problem is superstructural, building on a more basic, existential problem of affirmation in the face of senseless suffering (evil).
In the second part of the paper I outline a typology of responses to this “basic” problem, arguing that there are three major groupings. The first I label “metaphysical” (most of Christian theodicy would come under this heading) – its essential characteristic is to find “sense” in senseless suffering or in other words to justify evil as part of a larger, rational purpose. The second I label “ethical” – its essential characteristic is to combat (ideally to eliminate) evil in the name of the good. The third I label “Sisyphean” – its essential characteristic is to accept evil without seeking to justify it, and affirm in spite of it.
In the final part of the paper I discuss the status of the three responses. I suggest that the loss of faith in God and foundationalist metaphysics has radically undermined the metaphysical way of dealing with the problem, and that the ethical way has now largely displaced it. Nevertheless, the ethical way has serious flaws and the Sisyphean way has important attractions (here my argument relies considerably on Camus and Nietzsche). I conclude that, after the death of God, the problem of evil will remain the site of a contest between ethical and Sisyphean responses.