GOOD AND EVIL

New intervention by Giorgio Agamben

Before I paste here my translation of the recent intervention by Giorgio Agamben (original Italian here),

I would like to quote one very well-known and well-loved Soviet poet-songwriter from 1970’s, Alexander Galich. The quote is from his famous song “Don’t be afraid, folks”.

“Don’t be afraid of poverty, folks, don’t be afraid of prison,

Don’t be afraid of plague or famine,

But be afraid, folks, of that one guy,

who will tell you “I know what you all should do”.

“For the sake of common Good”.

GIORGIO AGAMBEN — GOOD AND EVIL

January 21, 2025

“The ancient doctrine that Evil is the absence of Good and therefore in itself does not exist should be corrected and supplemented in the sense that it is not so much the absence as the perversion of the Good (with the codicil, formulated by Ivan Illich, corruptio optimi pexima, “there is nothing more evil than a corrupted Good”). The ontological link with the Good in this way remains, but the question remains how and in what sense Good can pervert and corrupt itself. If Evil is perverted Good, if we still recognize in Evil a marred and distorted figure of the Good, how can we combat it when we face it today in all spheres of human living?
A corruption of the Good was familiar to classical thought in the political doctrine that each of the three righteous forms of government — monarchy, aristocracy and democracy (the government of the one, the government the few and the government of the many) — fatally degenerated into tyranny, oligarchy and oclocracy (mob rule). Aristotle (who regards democracy itself as a corruption of the government of the many) uses the term parekbasis, deviation (from parabaino, to move to the side, parà). If we now ask where they have deviated to, we find that they have, as it were, deviated to themselves. The corrupt forms of the constitution resemble, indeed, the healthy ones, but the Good that was present in the healthy ones (the common interest, koinon) has now turned to the Self and the Particular (idion). Evil is, that is, a certain use of the Good, and the possibility of this perverse use is inscribed in the Good itself, which in this way comes out of itself, moves as it were alongside itself.