Beyond Good and Evil, Kierkegaard, More, Christ, and Capitalism

To refer to Kierkegaard's terms, Evil is Good itself "in the mode of becoming": it "becomes" as a radical disruption of the life-circuit; the difference between Good and Evil concerns a purely formal conversion from the mode of "becoming" into the mode of "being." This is how "only the spear that smote you can heal the wound": the wound is healed when the place of Evil is filled out by a "good" content. Good qua "the mask of the Thing (i.e., of radical Evil)" (Lacan) is thus an ontologically secondary, supplementary attempt to reestablish the lost balance; its ultimate paradigm in the social sphere is the corporatist endeavor to (re)construct society as a harmonious, organic, non-antagonistic edifice.

Suffice it to recall Thomas More, the Catholic saint who resisted the pressure of Henry VIII to approve of his divorce. It is easy for us today to eulogize him as a "man for all seasons," to admire his inexorable sense of rectitude, his perseverance in his convictions although the price to be paid for it was his life. What is far more difficult to imagine is the way his stubborn perseverance must have struck the majority of his contemporaries: from a "communitarian" point of view, his rectitude was an "irrational" self-destructive gesture which was "evil" in the sense that it cut into the texture of the social body, threatening the stability of the crown and thereby of the entire social order, So, although the motivations of Thomas More was undoubtedly "good," the very formal structure of his act was "radically evil": he was an act of radical defiance which disregarded the Good of community. And was it not the same with Christ himself, whose activity was experienced by the traditional Hebrew community as destructive of the very foundations of their life? Did he not come "to divide, not to unite," to set son against father, brother against brother?

We can see not, how "substance becomes subject" by way of passing into its predicates. [...] capitalism is Evil, disruptive, it unsettles the delicate balance of the closed precapitalist economy--why, precisely? Because it presents a case of a "predicate"--a secondary, subordinated moment of the social totality (money--which, in a kind of hubris, "runs amok" and elevates itself into an End-in-itself. However, once capitalism achieves a new balance of its self-reproductive circuit and becomes its own mediating totality,i.e., once it establishes itself as a system which "posits its own presuppositions," the site of "Evil" is radically displaced: what now counts as "evil" are precisely the left-overs of the previous "Good" -- islands of resistance of precapitalism which disturb the untroubled circulation of Capital, the new form of Good.


Cited

Tarrying with the Negative, pg 97-98, Slavoj Žižek