Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil

Description

Feminist voices respond to evil and acts of terrorism that trouble modern society

Any glance at the contemporary history of the world shows that the problem of evil is a central concern for people everywhere. In the last few years, terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, and ethnic and religious wars have only emphasized humanity's seemingly insatiable capacity for violence. In Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, Robin May Schott brings an international group of contemporary feminist philosophers into debates on evil and terrorism. The invaluable essays collected here consider gender-specific evils such as the Salem witch trials, women's suffering during the Holocaust, mass rape in Bosnia, and repression under the Taliban, as well as more generalized acts of violence such as the 9/11 bombings, the Madrid train station bombings, and violence against political prisoners. Readers of this sobering volume will find resources for understanding the vulnerability of human existence and what is at stake in the problem of evil.

Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Evil, Terrorism, and Gender Robin May Schott
Part 1. Feminist Perspectives on Evil: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
2. The Devil's Insatiable Sex: A Genealogy of Evil Incarnate Margaret Denike
3. Irigaray's To Be Two: The Problem of Evil and the Plasticity of Incarnation Ada S. Jaarsma
4. Genocide and Social Death Claudia Card
5. Holes of Oblivion: The Banality of Radical Evil Peg Birmingham
6. Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust Jennifer L. Geddes
7. February 22, 2001: Toward a Politics of the Vulnerable Body Debra Bergoffen
8. Obscene Undersides: Woman and Evil between the Taliban and the United States Mary Anne Franks
9. Cruelty, Horror, and the Will to Redemption Lynne S. Arnault
Part 2. Forum on September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives on Terrorism
10. Terrorism, Evil, and Everyday Depravity Bat-Ami Bar On
11. Responding to 9/11: Military Mode or Civil Law? Claudia Card
12. Naming Terrorism as Evil Alison M. Jaggar
13. The Vertigo of Secularization: Narratives of Evil María Pía Lara
14. Willing the Freedom of Others after 9/11: A Sartrean Approach to Globalization and Children's Rights Constance L. Mui and Julien S. Murphy
15. Terrorism and Democracy: Between Violence and Justice María Isabel Peña Aguado
16. Those Who "Witness the Evil": Peacekeeping as Trauma Sherene H. Razack
17. The Evils of the September Attacks Sara Ruddick
18. Feminist Reactions to the Contemporary Security Regime Iris Marion Young
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Feminist Theory
• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• List of terrorist incidents
• Philosophy
• Gender
• Terrorism
• Feminism
• Continental

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253027740
• Langue: English

Extrait

Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil
A Hypatia Book
EDITED BY ROBIN MAY SCHOTT
Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404–3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders   800–842–6796 Fax orders            812–855–7931 Orders by e-mail    [e-mail]
© 2007 by Indiana University Press and Hypatia, Inc.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Feminist philosophy and the problem of evil / edited by Robin May Schott.       p.   cm. — (Hypatia books)    Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 978–0-253–34858–6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0-253–21901–5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Good and evil. 2. Feminist theory. I. Schott, Robin May.    BJ1401.F39 2007    170—dc22
2006029516
1 2 3 4 5   12 11 10 09 08 07
To my parents
In memory of Iris Marion Young ( January 2, 1949–August 1, 2006 )
 
Iris Marion Young, a contributor to this volume, died at the height of her philosophical powers on 1 August 2006. Young received her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1974. She was trained in continental European philosophy, and much of her early work on theorizing female body experience used a phenomenological method. Young wrote boldly about topics hitherto ignored in academic philosophy: women’s motility and sexual objectification in the society of the 1970s, the experience of pregnancy, breasted experience, and women’s relation to clothes. “Throwing Like a Girl” became a much-loved classic in this genre.
Young finally gained the attention of mainstream political philosophers in 1990 with the publication of her landmark book Justice and the Politics of Difference . This book criticized most philosophical theories of justice for being overly preoccupied with distributive justice and insufficiently concerned with domination and oppression. Young defined these concepts to reveal aspects of justice that are excluded by the distributive model. They included: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence.
Young’s second major book, Inclusion and Democracy , explores how the ideals of deliberative democracy can be approached not in some ideal world but in our actually existing world of systematic differences, inequality, and segregation. She calls her work “democratic theory for unjust conditions.” In her work on democracy, Young is still concerned ultimately with justice. For her, the value of democracy is not intrinsic but rather instrumental to remedy injustice. At the time of her death, Young was working on a book exploring the responsibility of citizens in affluent countries for abuses such as sweatshops.
Young’s work bridged divides between analytic and European philosophy and between high-level theory and grassroots activism. In addition to her philosophical contributions, Iris was a committed political activist, an inspiring teacher, a loving partner and mother, and a loyal friend.
 
Alison M. Jaggar and Robin May Schott
Contents
 

Acknowledgments
  1. Evil, Terrorism, and Gender
Robin May Schott
PART ONE: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON EVIL: HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES
  2. The Devil’s Insatiable Sex: A Genealogy of Evil Incarnate
Margaret Denike
  3. Irigaray’s To Be Two: The Problem of Evil and the Plasticity of Incarnation
Ada S. Jaarsma
  4. Genocide and Social Death
Claudia Card
  5. Holes of Oblivion: The Banality of Radical Evil
Peg Birmingham
  6. Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust
Jennifer L. Geddes
  7. February 22, 2001: Toward a Politics of the Vulnerable Body
Debra Bergoffen
  8. Obscene Undersides: Woman and Evil between the Taliban and the United States
Mary Anne Franks
  9. Cruelty, Horror, and the Will to Redemption
Lynne S. Arnault
PART TWO: FORUM ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM
10. Terrorism, Evil, and Everyday Depravity
Bat-Ami Bar On
11. Responding to 9/11 : Military Mode or Civil Law?
Claudia Card
12. Naming Terrorism as Evil
Alison M. Jaggar
13. The Vertigo of Secularization: Narratives of Evil
María Pía Lara
14. Willing the Freedom of Others after 9/11: A Sartrean Approach to Globalization and Children’s Rights
Constance L. Mui and Julien S. Murphy
15. Terrorism and Democracy: Between Violence and Justice
María Isabel Veña Aguado
16. Those Who “Witness the Evil”: Peacekeeping as Trauma
Sherene H. Razack
17. The Evils of the September Attacks
Sara Ruddick
18. Feminist Reactions to the Contemporary Security Regime
Iris Marion Young
 
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
 
It takes a very long time to make a book, and what happens during that time can be decisive for the character of that book. This is particularly the case for this book, which was planned as a Hypatia Special Issue on Feminism and the Problem of Evil well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Those of us working on the issue quite naturally expanded its scope and character following these events.
I would like to thank Nancy Tuana and Laurie Shrage, who were co-editors of Hypatia when I worked on the Special Issue. From its inception both of them were enthusiastic about having an issue devoted to feminist philosophical analyses of the problem of evil. Laurie Shrage in particular urged me to expand the Special Issue to include a forum on terrorism after the attacks on 9/11. The articles in part two of this book develop this forum and have been (with one exception) substantially revised and expanded for this edition. I would like to thank Hilde Lindemann, current editor of Hypatia , for her unfailingly positive spirit of cooperation, which has smoothed the transformation of the Special Issue into a Hypatia book.
Claudia Card, whom I met originally in 1995 at an IAPh meeting in Vienna on the theme of war, is largely responsible for calling my attention to the problem of evil in relation to war rape. I would also like to thank Sara Ruddick for her longstanding work on gender and war and for her ongoing support of my own work in this area. And I thank Debra Bergoffen both for her work with the theme of vulnerability and for her personal courage in facing it. I am grateful to all of the contributors of this volume, leading figures in the field, many of whom have worked for years with the issues they discuss here. Their work does indeed illustrate why feminist interventions are crucial for addressing some of the central ethical and political problems of our time.
Dee Mortensen, editor at Indiana University Press, has been an outstanding editor in every sense. Not only has she provided constant encouragement and support in dealing with the publication process, but she gave me invaluable feedback for my own contribution to this book. I would like to thank Elizabeth Yoder, copy editor of the manuscript. Though many authors cringe at the thought of a copy editor changing their words, Elizabeth’s work has elicited only praise and enthusiasm from the contributors.
I would like to thank Alison Jaggar for her contribution to the memorial reflections for Iris Marion Young. The recent death of Iris Young is a brutal reminder that we must thank not only the living, but those who have died after having worked so hard to create the conditions under which philosophy, and feminist philosophy, can flourish.
Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil
1 Evil, Terrorism, and Gender
Robin May Schott
Why Discuss Evil Now?
If anyone should think that evil is a problem of the past and not of the present, a glance at the history of the twentieth century proves otherwise. In that century, the atrocities of war escalated dramatically; between 1900 and 1990, there were over four times as many war deaths as in the preceding four hundred years. In 1990 battlefields included Afghanistan, Angola, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Mozambique, Peru, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Tibet (Vickers 1993, 2). To these one must add the battles of the Gulf War and the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. And if Americans thought that events that give rise to reflections on evil matter to other peoples but not to them, then they came