Inspired here by the powerful and unsettling work of Primo Levi, I would say that before we reach a stage of domination polarized between victims and perpetrators, there is a “gray area” of strategies of power, domination, co-option and resistance. This calls on us to address many challenging ethical and moral complexities that defy absolutist positions.

For example, Foucault’s now widely cited reflections of biopolitics (the politics of life), and its ever possible slippage into thanatopolitics (a politics of death), reveal that the evil of domination comes not only from a will to destruction and death, as the classics imply, but also from a will to maximize life.

To understand this, consider that killing often takes place so that certain ways of life can thrive, not just out of some nihilistic urge. It was, in this sense, quite enlightening for me to read some key Nazi texts — texts of so-called “philosophical anthropology” — and to note how, despite how comforting it is to think of the perpetrators of genocide as absolute nihilists, such actors often think of themselves as maximizing some conception of life. They see themselves as the “true humanists” who fight against a “culture of death” (the Jewish one, in this case) in the name of “the value of life.”

All of this further puts into question the Dostoyevsky paradigm. Now, the characters are more than two (malevolent demons on one side and absolute victims on the other) precisely because the plot of political evil does not center only on death and the will to power, but also on the unquestioned priority of “life,” and the dangerous ways it can be pursued and conceived of. Out of the shadow emerge mediocre demons, and their desire for normality and positivity.

B.E.: Your mention of “mediocrity” and evil inevitably recalls the work of Hannah Arendt. How does all this relate to her now infamous dictum on the banality of evil?

SF: My debt to Hannah Arendt here is obvious. She was the first to grasp the complexity of a system of evil, to understand that it does not live only of evil intentions. With “Eichmann in Jerusalem” she no longer speaks of radical evil, but of the banality of evil, that matter of fact way that the officer Eichmann and other Nazis pursued the day-to-day operations of genocide. Thanks to this theoretical shift, Arendt makes available for us a constellation of concepts, even though she did not have the time to arrange into a fully developed philosophical reflection. My goal is to pick up where she left off, while addressing the limitations of her important and empirically grounded work. Talk of “banality,” in my opinion, runs the risk of turning merely into a linguistic provocation. If we talk about normality instead, a whole new field of insights comes to the fore, including that of compliance with a norm.