Session 8(b): Repairing Wickedness

Concurrent Session 8b: Repairing Wickedness
Chair: Luc Small

A Couple of Problems: The Evil of Queer Desires within Heteronormative Cultures
Margaret Breen
Department of English, University of Connecticut, Groton, CT, USA

This paper considers two novels, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies, within the context of art’s expressive and transformative relation to lesbians who as children experience sexual abuse. Both works may be understood as Bildungsromanen that, on the levels of story and narrative construction, explore how art allows the lesbians, beginning in their childhood, to claim a validating sense of identity for themselves. By focusing on the cultural contexts that the two young protagonists occupy, the novels themselves reveal their necessarily politically resonant role as works of art. They expose and critique the hegemonic power of heteronormativity, which at best remains benignly indifferent and at worst violently opposed to the girls’ lesbianism. In so doing, they dispel cultural narratives of lesbianism that, so often haunted by the spectre of homophobia, read lesbian sexuality as a traumatic extension of sexual violence.

For thousands of years humanity has devised mechanisms to address undesirable behaviour and deviant acts.  These mechanisms utilize different approaches that are determined by individual cultures.  Despite the differences between cultures, the argument can be made that traditional mechanisms of justice share a common thread, especially when compared to mechanisms within the modern system of justice.
In traditional systems of justice there is a focus on achieving peace by repairing relations between the conflicting parties and re-establishing harmony in the community.  In contrast, the modern system focuses on punishment of the wrongdoer by prison sentencing or monetary reparations, and there is less emphasis put on repairing the relationship between the parties or rehabilitating the affected community.
This system separates the act of wrongdoing from the personal relations between the parties involved by imposing punishment payable to the state or government (as with prison sentencing).  This paper will argue this division has, over time, changed the mindset of the individual in modern society; and as a result, has depersonalized acts of evil, or crimes. For the purposes of this paper, the process by which this transition occurs is defined as the externalization of justice.

Download Conference Paper –

Like Leibniz, Ricoeur consecrates to the reflection on evil a significant part of his philosophical work. Like Ricoeur, Leibniz is induced by the reflection on evil “to think more, that is to think differently” some of the great ontological questions of his time. Nevertheless, in spite of this certain parallelism of paths and interests, Leibniz is not a Ricoeur’s favoured interlocutor. The aim of the pages Ricoeur consecrates to him is to denounce the defeat of the leibnizian project, and with it the defeat of all theodicies. The basis of Ricoeur’s analysis, and the identification of where, in his opinion, the originality and the limitations of Leibniz’s contribution to the reflection on evil lays, allow us to confront two significantly different conceptions of human reason and of its scope. Moreover, these two distinct conceptions entail a significantly different conception of evil, understood simultaneously as scandal and defiance to philosophy.
The aim of this communication is to analyse the presuppositions of Ricoeur’s lecture on Leibniz’s Theodicy, not only from the point of view of its historical correctness but also from the point of view of the meaning these two authors attach to the problem of evil, and of the way they understand the capacity of human reason to find an answer to it.