Forti, Simona. New Demons

Philosopher Simona Forti offers a new paradigm for understanding evil and power in the world today. Tracing the concept of evil throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, she deconstructs the “Dostoevsky paradigm,” a dualistic understanding of evil as a demonic and monstrous force of death and destruction making helpless innocent victims. Instead, following the Foucauldian concept of the bio-political, Forti proposes a different genealogy of evil and power, based on the will to maximize life, to stay alive at all costs, given power in modern biopolitics. At the center of this contemporary evil – or of “mediocre demons”, as she calls it – is the positive value assigned to obedience and conformity. Furthermore, she considers the complex issue of agency in this context: “[e]vil […] is an event that makes itself into a system. [I]t is a system in the sense of a tangle of subjectivities, a network of relations, whose threads pull together into a pernicious event thanks to the perfect complementarity between (a few) wicked actors and originators, (a few) zealous, committed agents, and (many) acquiescent, not simply indifferent spectators” (179). She discusses Primo Levi’s “gray zone” as an example of the refutation of conceptions of evil as demonic. A way out of the paradigm of mediocre demons, Forti argues, is practising parrhesia (a concept she borrows from Michel Foucault), speaking the unembellished truth against power.

Forti, Simona. New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Translation of: I nuovi demoni: Ripensare oggi male e potere (Feltrinelli 2012)