A Note on Evil

In L'esprit du mal, psychoanalyst Nathalie Zaltzman argues that man's self representations “include … the representations of evil and of man's relation to it” (39). Evil, Zaltzman continues, “has constituted an index of the process of humanization” (43). She then recalls that in the West, the founding myth of the birth of man is original sin—the Fall of Adam and Eve under the influence of Satan (44). In other words, humanness and evil appear in the world synchronically. What is also clear is that the process of humanization is an attempt at excluding evil from the definition of the human.

This process arguably culminates with the idealization of humanity in the aftermath of the Second World War, Nazism and the Holocaust, via the introduction of the concept of “crimes against humanity” into the realm of international law. “Crimes against humanity” include any of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

1. · murder;

2. · extermination;

3. · enslavement;

4. · deportation or forcible transfer of population;

5. · imprisonment;

6. · torture;

7. · rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;

8. · persecution against an identifiable group on political, racial, national,

9. ethnic, cultural, religious or gender grounds;

10. · enforced disappearance of persons;

11. · the crime of apartheid;

12. · other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury.

Zaltzman argues that this legal definition can be considered progress in the process of humanization or civilization/Kulturarbeit; man will have climbed higher on the ladder of his own humanization once he has established that there are transgressions, or crimes, that are external to the realm of humanity—“inhumane acts”—and once he has inscribed them within the body of law.