Intelligibility and Its Limits

Paradigmatic perspectives on evil suggest that the presence of evil threatens the sense or intelligibility of the world by defeating our normative expectations. In this paper, I turn to Arendt, Améry, and Levinas to explore distinctive ways in which the relationship between evil and intelligibility can be understood. I argue that while Arendt’s account of radical evil problematically assumes that perpetrators evade (moral) comprehension, Arendt’s account of banal evil treats perpetrators as (morally) intelligible, and, as a result, makes evil morally tractable. In Arendt’s view, then, evil is intelligible. This, however, is not the final word on evil and intelligibility. A much-neglected way in which evil and intelligibility are related concerns how evil destroys the suffering subject’s ability to make sense of the world. In order to bring out this feature of evil, I put into dialogue Jean Améry’s first-person reports of his experiences of torture and internment, as chronicled in At the Mind’s Limits, with Emmanuel’s Levinas’s essay “Useless Suffering.” Reading Améry through Levinas reveals how suffering condemns the subject to sense-destroying isolation without recourse to intersubjective modes of sense-making. Together, Arendt, Améry, and Levinas reveal the distinctive ways in which the relationship between evil and intelligibility can be understood, whether we are considering the perpetrators of evil, victims, or spectators.