When an author throws her book out into the public, she loses exclusive control over its meaning. It is always interesting, if sometimes disorienting, to come across new and unexpected interpretations of one’s work. Indeed, I was disorienting reading Professor Monroe’s review of my work, particularly because she attributes to me a task I did not intend to pursue, and then faults me for not achieving it.

Let me clarify what my task was not. I did not set out to write a chapter in normative philosophy, to instruct people on how to act in pursuit of virtue and the good. Even less did I intend to provide empirical data on the kind of people who are likely to engage in evil actions.

Rather, the book is an intervention into debates in critical philosophy. On one hand, I criticize traditional approaches to the problem of evil, approaches that see it as—from Kant on—an extraordinary act of transgression. On the other hand, I intended to challenge some strands within post-foundationalism (I deliberately use this term instead of what I believe to be a trite, superficial, and outdated category such as “postmodern”) that suggest that talking about evil only made sense in the world of theology and metaphysics, which they want to transcend. Although I share the premises of critical and deconstructive thought, I also believe that evil still presents itself to us as something that forces us to some form of judgment, even when we think we have left it behind.

How are we to think of evil today? In order to answer this question, I undertake a genealogical reconstruction—which sharply differs from a historicist approach striving for a contextual rationalization. I work through several philosophical stances on evil to show how, despite their ostensible differences, they all fit into what I call the “Dostoevsky paradigm.” From Schelling to Heidegger, from certain readings of Nietzsche and Freud to Lacan, a view always emerges of evil as simply a transgression of the law for the sake of destruction. The political translation of this frame entails a radically dualistic landscape where the perpetrators are driven by a will to power and the victims are completely passive and powerless. Drawing on work on biopolitics, whose invention Professor Monroe generously but unfairly attributes to me, and specifically the work of Foucault, I put the hegemony of this paradigm into question. If we assume that evil is not a substance, an essence, but still is a set of actions (of which genocide constitutes the most striking example), how are we to confront it in judgment? Do we confront it simply as the product of a will to death, repeating the age-old binary life/good, death/evil? Or is it possible that the will to life itself can paradoxically become the bearer of evil?

Both these somewhat Foucauldian questions and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the banality of evil, I argue, point us beyond the Dostoevsky paradigm. But in those reflections, Arendt fails to render explicit the connection between Eichmann’s mindless rule-following and the emergence of an obedient subjectivity in relation to power. I bring Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s critique of pastoral power, as well as Primo Levi’s reflections on the “gray zone,” to bear on this gap. The genealogy of this subjectivity discloses, I suggest, an alternative and complementary paradigm, which we might call of “mediocre” demons, who do not pursue a will to destruction, but a will to life bringing them to thoughtlessly comply with hegemonic norms.

This reconstruction of my argument, though rough itself, bears little resemblance to the one put forth by Professor Monroe. Indeed, I hardly recognized myself in her words, hence my disorientation. It seems to me that Monroe simply wanted me to write a different book: either one on neo-Aristotelian ethics, or one on social psychology. Unfortunately, that is not where my interests, my competences, or my passion lie.