If, asks Simona Forti, we assume the premises of critical and deconstructive thought, but also believe that the idea of evil is basic to human understanding, “what direction are we to take?” (2). First thing is to deconstruct the Dostoevsky paradigm of evil, as she calls it. The paradigm is best reflected in Dostoevsky's Demons, particularly the character of Stavrogin, who denies Kant's concept of radical evil, for he transgresses for the pleasure of transgression, for the sake of evil. He would destroy for no reason but the pleasure of destruction. In this regard, he has a thoroughly evil will, something humans do not possess according to Kant. More recently, says Forti, Freud's Todestrieb, the death drive, has become the secular name for the desire for nothingness and destruction for its own sake.

Auschwitz is an expression of the will to nothingness. Unlike God, humans cannot create ab nihilo, but they can create nothingness, or rather act as if they could, and in this way become like gods. The horrors of the twentieth century stem from the Todestrieb, coupled with totalitarianism and technology. This is the view that Forti would overcome, for it is based on a dualism that cannot tolerate our own duality, and so would demonize the other.

“Beginning with Levinas, continuing with Arendt and Foucault, the path that continental philosophy took after World War II progressively disrupted the assumptions of the Dostoevsky paradigm” (140). Forti traces this disruption through this trio, along with a few others, including Nietzsche (always before his time), Heidegger, and Lacan. The path is not for the fainthearted. She can spend pages expounding a single point, but her destination is clear: not a nondualistic view of good and evil, but a view of evil that can live with this dualism; that is, with the Stavrogin in each of us.

Her view, and its problems, are best captured by her fondness for former Czech dissidents as models of a more fruitful way of thinking about evil: “For these authors [Patočka and Havel] the only possibility for blocking the propagation of the normality of evil is through the special relationship that the self entertains with itself, with its own life and death, and by making itself a witness before others of its own truth” (272). This special relationship she relates back to Arendt's late conception of the Socratic two-in-one, the person on friendly enough terms with him- or herself that he or she can resist being absorbed in existing circumstances. This person does so by engaging in an internal conversation. Only dialogue, among friends, or within selves who are complex enough to talk with themselves, enables us to question the existent.

What Forti adds, and it is as present in Jan Patočka as it is in Foucault, is that it is the love of life, mere life, life at any price, that is the real source of evil, for it strips us of any ability to resist. Hobbes was right all along, only he underestimated human cowardice. Not just fear of a violent death, but fear of death and discomfort, makes obedient subjects of us all. It is only by living with an awareness of death, only by taking death into life, as Socrates did, that we recognize limits we will not cross. Only with death in mind can we speak freely, and live in truth. The “final message resounds unequivocally: the undisputed, grand old lady of the century was not death but life, which monopolizes and captures both individuals and collectivities” (277).

And yet it is precisely in her fondness for the Czech dissidents that we see where Forti goes wrong. “It was almost,” she says, “as if thought had succeeded in giving life to a movement that was able to produce political change” (272). The Czech dissident movement was generated by real existing circumstances, the reality on the ground of a soft totalitarianism that humiliated thoughtful people daily. Like many political philosophers, Forti often writes as if thought has a power of its own, independent of lived experience.

It is in the context of East European Communism that living in truth, Foucault's parrhesia, makes sense as a life practice. “In the post-totalitarian world, evil no longer produces the mass of corpses of those who are considered ‘in excess,’ because each individual has found his or her own comfortable position in the systematic demoralization” (292–93).

True enough, and Forti's book is about a certain type of evil within which even its victims can be comfortable, if they choose. Trouble is, Forti is writing about evil in the twentieth century, and her attempt to create mundane demons, as she calls them, requires a mundane evil. One sees the price in her misinterpretation of Primo Levi's last book, The Drowned and the Saved (Vintage Books, 1989). Those who tormented Levi, who would have killed him in a minute if it were convenient, acted out of the same motives that we find in any power relationship. “This is Levi's realistic, bitter warning” (307). But that is hardly the conclusion of Levi's late, troubling book. In the end the Holocaust is incomprehensible, the Germans inexplicable. This leaves Levi with a painful void that can never be filled, the evil that passes all understanding (Levi, 174–75). This is not the Dostoevsky paradigm, but neither were the Germans practitioners of mundane evil. If the Germans are inexplicable, then the Holocaust is inexplicable, and we are left with the “excess” of evil with which we began. Forti's fellow countryman is no help here.

Yet Forti makes a considerable contribution, particularly her claim that when one makes “improving one's own life the absolute, universal law of your conduct,” then people will acquiesce to anything, any power arrangement. Like the Socratic philosopher, one must live with death constantly in mind, knowing that mere life, life on any terms, is of little worth.

The trouble with this conclusion, which seems about right, is that for most of us this requires religion, community, or both. Only if we live in the penumbra of the sacred, or are ensconced in community, does it make sense to give up one's life, or even one's comforts, for the truth. Forti sometimes forgets this, which is why she is tempted to see the Czech dissidents as products of thought, not of dissident community. And it is why, I think, of all the works of Arendt that she deals with, she never mentions “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure.” For it is there that Arendt grasps that revolution is not primarily about thought, but about being with others in a way that what one says and does matters. This idea is not alien to Forti. She makes a contribution to it. But it is not the theme of her book.