More on evil

Martin Amis, who I don't have much respect for or interest in as a writer, wrote a book called 'Time's arrow' in which the soul of a Nazi officer of some sort ends up having to relive the life it has just lived backwards after the moment of death - not remembering or recognizing the life its lived and not really understanding what it is seeing. Killing appears to be giving life - an experience which the soul finds thrilling. Relationships begin with recriminations, and sometimes violence, then they get sweeter and closer, and then the people involved finish by drifting apart and slowly forgetting one another. I only think of this because it is the way blogs are set up - what comes last is the first thing visible. As you scroll down and read them, the authors move from experiencing something to anticipating it - moving steadily from knowledge to ignorance as the writers unlearn the things they've learned, forget their conclusions, etc. There ought to be a better way to set them up.
Anyway, one of your last posts you asked about Evil as the opposite of bourgeois... I would guard against saying 'Bataille and Blanchot and co.', partly because Blanchot isn't really the best example of that tendency (which I hope to have an entry about very soon), partly because I was thinking about older and more straightforward, or literary rather than theoretical writers like Baudelaire (who Bataille has an early chapter on in 'Literature and Evil'), and partly because, especially in a forum like this, I have such an unhealthy tendency to take the ideas of better men and make something else out of them. I feel better when we're talking about stuff we've both read where I know I won't leave you with a mistaken idea of the writer in question. Anyway, in response to the question of what Evil is here - dictionary definition, what is generally understood by 'Evil', etc. (and it is funny you mentioned the possibility of Evil as a metaphysical category that people haven't properly understood - either in this post or the next I think I'll touch on Sade as a sort of Evil Socrates, looking for the ideal form of Evil, knowing that individual manifestations of evil, being finite can never give genuine satisfaction, and are necessarily found lacking). Contrary to what you said I was talking about how Evil is generally understood - at least by those who claim to take the side of Evil (when you claim to reject evil, you are no doubt thinking in terms of Nazis, serial killers, rapists and the like - for most people this is unattractive, genuine evil, as opposed to the fun, attractive pretend evil of conmen, rogues, bank robbers and scoundrels you can identify with in the movies). I mentioned the idea that intensity in life was, if not exactly opposed to longevity, at least necessarily linked to an idea of danger (how this would explain the joy of creation, success in major projects, the rush of good music, etc., I don't know - it keeps me from finding the idea entirely convincing). Those who do things like extreme sports (If I understand the concept properly), partake in a totally non-political form of embracing danger, and this has little or nothing to do with Evil, which I imagine is always a somewhat political concept. The punk kids who write things like 'Anarchy' or 'Satan' on public walls, assuming they still do that, are doing something different - and note that 'Satan' and 'anarchy' are slogans that can be associated as can often appeal to the same demographic in the same way. The sort of punk-ish adolescent-angst types often fall into a sort of uniform anti-conformity, that's very different from genuine, independent non-conformity (and the reactionaries are often inspired in a similar way to react against anti-conformist uniformity by irritating the leftists any way possible and asserting their own imaginary higher individualism)... which is a large digression to say that whatever safe collections most of these punk kids might fall into, they generally are inspired by a genuine desire for subversion, understood as a challenge to the safe, stability posited by the society they are making little symbolic gestures against. A society with an essentially bourgeois value system (which is not a particularly martial value system) pushes people along the surest path to a secure job, with a minimum of shock or uncertainty - keep in mind that guilt and reprimand are attached to failing to live up to the responsibilities attached to keeping this social system going. Neglecting work for the sake of parties and amusement, or simply failing to be successful within the system gets you treated not as Good, but the opposite - an attitude which is often internalized - in order to enjoy yourself and not suffer too much from your guilt, you have to embrace the role of 'Evil' (which is a less banal and more romantic term than simply 'faulty', 'defective', 'talentless' or 'lazy'). The safest path is the least intense, and the teenage rebel, should he write 'hail Satan!' on the wall or wear some silly death metal t-shirt with graffic pictures of demonic violence on it (its the heavy metal types rather than the punks have the most exagerated, un-ironic expressions of teen angst), the demons on their t-shirts identify themselves as attracted to, interested in, and basically siding with 'Evil', which is being put in opposition with 'Good' defined as a bourgeois concern with safety and stability - keeping death, hunger and disease at bay with insufficient concern for danger, excitement and intensity within the long and comfortable life on offer - there are just some rare unsettled few who take a conflation of evil and intensity to an unhealthy extreme where some sort of real human suffering or genuinely destructive act becomes attractive - though most people, and not just rebellious teens do like to have some sort of occasional contact with real risk of some sort - though it's teens who are most likely to take this too far and play with a less controlled risk, possibly doing real damage to themselves or someone else. The fifties, and especially fifties-style sitcom and advertising images are of continuing fascination in American culture - it's constantly parodied, 'exposed' and dismantled, precisely because it is seen as a social projection of 'Good', which is found wanting. By introducing disfunction into it, people, mostly bad would-be artists, often miss there intention - the ideal itself remains unscathed, and society can be seen as left condemned for not having really lived up to that ideal. When what is normally repressed from that image is introduced, when blacks or gays or whatever else is brought in and that fifties nuclear family image fails to cope with it - showing itself bigoted and small-minded, once again it isn't condemned for the order and stability promised, instead the order is shown to have been founded on disorder, the violence excluded from the image is not really dispelled, but just hidden away in ghettoes and foreign sweatshops. The safety and security on offer will only be Good when they have been made available to everyone. Nietzsche says something very similar when he talks about 'the last man', when he claims that society's aim is to make the individual non-threatening and what creates danger is defined as Evil - his mistrust of 'altruism' and 'selflessness' comes from precisely this. People generally don't define Good and Evil, they think of the words in terms of images and associations. You may say the image of Good will a person who will do anything to help others, even at his own expense and that Evil is doing anything to hurt others, and I wouldn't disagree... when I talk about Blanchot's Lautreamont I'll actual come closer to that sort of definition in dealing with someone who sides with Evil - but generally when someone gets the urge to say 'hail Satan' or 'up with Evil' or anything of the like, the motivation is a provocation of the bland, safe and orderly and a yearning for the dangerous and disordely. When people watch painfully gory movies or get fascinated with books about serial killers, it is because the nearness of death and all that society banishes provides a necessary testing of the limits of our own mortality. The most cutting thing Hannah Arendt could say about the Nazis was that their evil was banal - which totally robs it of the thrill and excitement Evil is supposed to have.