Piercing the Shroud: Destabilizations of ‘Evil’ (At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, 124)

Our world has become inundated with images of a reality in which ‘evil’ thrives, and ‘good’ seems to be a naïve, utopian fantasy. ‘Good’ is reserved for superheroes and children’s stories, while the ‘real world’ is driven by greed, violence, and hatred. If we are so consumed with evil, then is there any point to writing about it? Perhaps the more important question is ‘why should we ever stop writing about it?’. Towards that end, this volume is intended to act as a catalyst to an ongoing destabilization of mental (philosophical) and social (political, historical) regimes of ‘evil’ in thought and practice. It is compiled with the intention of saying something new about a very old topic, as a reminder that this is an unfinished conversation which stretches back millennia and has a deeply tangible impact on the worlds within which we live today. Contributors are Peter Brian Barry, Lima Bhuiyan, Diedra L. Clay, Zachary J. Goldberg, Sophia Kanaouti, Stefanie Schnitzer Mills, Rallie Murray, Asli Tekinay and Claudio Vescia Zanini.

Rallie Murray is an anthropologist and an activist studying prisons and prisoner resistance. As a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies, her research focuses on the prison as a necessary apparatus of the capitalist world system, and comparative ethnographic research on prisoner resistance. After the initial writing of this paper, her work took her to Palestine, which she hopes will be a larger part of future projects.
Stefanie Schnitzer-Mills obtained her Magister Artium in North American Studies and Pre-Columbian Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently working as a translator and writing proposals for a doctoral dissertation.