Edizioni FrancoAngeli - Last issue of PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE (2/2013)

Editoriale

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

La locandina del convegno

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Gli autori di questo numero speciale

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Evil and human action. An interdisciplinary research project

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Alberto Burgio, Adriano Zamperini
The banality of evil has become a passkey concept used anywhere and by anyone. Urgent is then the need to return to a theme often trivialized by the use and abuse that has been made. This article outlines the theoretical and methodological lines of an interdisciplinary research project that, starting from Nazi Germany and the tragedy of the Holocaust, makes a re-vision of the problem of evil and questions the human action in terms of responsibility, consensus, active and passive participation in the context of collective atrocities.

Agreeing with the extermination. An analysis of the reasons behind the mass consent to Nazism’s crimes

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Alberto Burgio
In Germany e Austria Nazism was supported by a mass consent of the majority of German population, which by and large was well aware of its crimes. Among historians there is general agreement on this, but the issue of objective premises (cultural traditions, ethical codes, educational models) and subjective factors (ideological, moral, psychological, and economical factors) at the basis of this mass consent is still controversial. In order to investigate on the premises of the "totalitarian context", it seems indispensable to link historical research to other fields of knowledge (philosophy, anthropology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology), and to work towards the construction of a new methodology of analysis, a new theoretical language, and new conceptual categories.

Metaphysics and microphysics of evil: From absolute demons to mediocre demons

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Simona Forti
Two different ways of thinking political evil are contrasted and named, respectively, (i) "Dostoyevsky paradigm" and (ii) "mediocre demons paradigm". Will, omnipotence, and nothingness: although no longer framed in Dostoyevsky’s religious outlook, the correlation between these three terms has been reworked by later philosophers, who continue to think of evil as a result of perversion of will in omnipotence, and of a sovereign subject - whether collective or individual - which, by raising itself up to everything, creates nothingness. It is argued that now is the time to abandon this approach and focus on the paradigm of "mediocre demons". Following this direction, it should become clear that evil is a system, in the sense of a tangle of subjectivities, a network of relations, whose threads knit together thanks to a perfect complementarity. Thinking within the paradigm of "mediocre demons" means primarily questioning the exclusive role of the will and desire for death, and viewing instead the scenes of evil as powerfully inhabited by the will to life, as the result of the attempt to maximize life itself.

Dissonances of totalitarianism. Banality of evil or voluntary servitude?

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Enrico Donaggio
Like other concepts that have been legitimately used in order to diagnose the psychopathologies of totalitarianism, also the concept of "banality of evil" seems to be drifting in two different directions. On the one hand, this concept is often overused and has become somehow inflated. On the other hand, this discovery, disquieting and revolutionary as it was at the time when it was put forth by Hannah Arendt, has become more or less banal in its own way. Given this state of affairs, this paper takes up this issue and tries to give an answer to the following question: "What are we talking about when we talk of banality of evil?". In the same time, this paper tries to investigate on the relationship between the conceptual category of "banality of evil" and the related notion - that could be quite useful to a philosophical diagnosis of totalitarianism - of "voluntary servitude".

Diritto e male. un’approssimazione

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Massimo La Torre
Law and Evil: An approximation. The relationship between law and evil is to some extent well known, since law is often conceptualized as a command enforced by the threat of evil, i.e., by a sanction. Or because it is stated that law is a remedy to evil caused by violation of law. From the philosophical point of view, however, this relationship is rarely discussed. This paper aims at presenting the various ways in which this relationship between law and evil has been discussed and can be discussed starting from the controversy around the definition of evil. Such discussion on approaches and relations may lead us to some more general conclusions on the concept of law (but maybe also on the concept of evil itself) and on the ethical risks the practicing lawyer can incur.

Law and consent in Nazi Germany: The perpetrators’ perspective

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Costerbosa Marina Lalatta
This essay discusses the mass consent to enacted evil, in particular regarding National Socialism. It is suggested that the concept of legality played a major role in the creation of consensus from the perpetrators’ viewpoint. Legality contributed to consolidation of the regime and to its support because it reinforced bureaucracy and accelerated the Nazism’s criminal project. With the collusion of the amphibious nature of Weimar Constitution, full awareness and participation of the regime’s ruling class, zealousness of German jurists (judges such as Roland Freisler and Hans Frank, or theorists such as Carl Schmitt and Karl Larenz), the principle of legality favoured, together with other propulsive factors, the efficacy of the Führer’s power system, also regarding the consent of the civilian population.

"We who were witnesses, we who were with him, we happy few". European construction of the racist thought as linguistic dynamics of the removal from the "we".

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Giacomo Todeschini
Starting from an analysis of the lexical and political-theological formation of the Western European "we" (nos) as a collective charismatic subject, we may reconstruct the cultural and linguistic genealogy of the stereotypes that have gradually defined and pictured the various typologies of human, psychological and racial separation and inferiority. The history of these representations and of the unwitting associations among the images hidden in these rhetorics allows us to read, within the racist and discriminatory discourse, a long and layered path that slowly became part of the Western European culture, and to think and perceive the relationships among people and groups.

Auschwitz and empire: The violence of imperialism

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Paul Corner
The article examines the links suggested by certain historians between the German experience of colonial rule in Africa before the First World War, with the massacre of the Herero, and the genocide carried out by the Nazis in Central and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945. While it concedes many of the points made by these historians in relation to the importance of the German colonial experience in forming ideas of racial hierarchy, it questions the assertion of a too-direct link with the Shoah and insists on the essential role played by First World War itself in catalyzing German attitudes towards expansion within Europe and in generating a culture of violence. It concludes by arguing that Nazi attitudes towards the peoples of Eastern Europe were conditioned essentially by defensive thinking, based on fears of encirclement, thus providing a justification for mass murder which, as a consequence, was not perceived as such by many ordinary Germans.

Denying the other: The forms of dehumanization

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Chiara Volpato
Dehumanization is one of the main strategies to delegitimize the other, to exclude him/her from the circle of those who are considered human, justifying measures of extreme cruelty. There are animalistic and mechanistic forms of dehumanization, which it may also take the form of demonization, biologization, objectification, and invisibility. After a brief review of the psycho-social studies on dehumanization, the present work focuses on the dehumanization of Jews in the Fascist propaganda through the analysis of images that appeared in La Difesa della Razza ("The Defense of the Race"), an Italian magazine published from August 1938 to June 1943 with the aim to convey racist and anti-Semitic ideas to the Italian population.

Un caso esemplare di costruzione del consenso: la realizzazione dell’Aktion T4 nella Germania nazista

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Marcella H. Ravenna
In Germany during the 1930s men and women committed large-scale killings, legally but in contrast with their professional ethics. The aim of this study is to examine with an inductive approach some aspects that so far have not been addressed by social psychologists: What events anticipated the Aktion T4 program? What events defined the T4 program? What took place at its conclusion? More importantly, what were the relationship between all of them? What factors and psychosocial processes made possible the participation of a significant proportion of health care professionals to euthanasia programs of infants, children, adolescents, adults, elderly, disabled? The main results of this analysis and their implications are discussed in relation to different contextual factors and according to the methods of psychological functioning of the perpetrators in the context of recent historical, psychosocial, and clinical studies.

The banality of indifference. Ambivalence of a feeling (not always) at the service of evil

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Adriano Zamperini
Few works on the Shoah have elicited as much controversial discussion and few have attracted as much attention as Hannah Arendt’s (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem. Discussion of Hannah Arendt’s trial report on the "banality of evil" was so intense that it became a kind of icon in the discourse about collective violence and genocide. The concept of the banality of evil now constitutes a career in itself, both in the sphere of public opinion and in academic disciplines. Any attempt at studying human behavior under the rubric of this term will be fraught with the problem of indifference. Through contributions from social psychology, this paper reviews the traditional way of understanding indifference and finds new perspectives of analysis to explain the phenomenon of indifference in situations of collective atrocity.

Banality of evil and social construction of violence

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Fabio Dei
In the common sense, the notion of "banality of evil" links violent behaviour to a kind of moral absence or emptiness: the killing of morality, the "lack of thought" which Hannah Arendt saw in Eichmann, the "empty minds" of juvenile delinquents. In this paper, it is emphasized the importance of an ethnographic method which approaches violence as a meaningful practice - the product of a cultural process, like other kinds of social action. Specifically, it is raised the problem of cultural and historical constitution of "violent subjectivities" in systems of social practices, and the contributions of authors such as Hannah Arendt, Franz Fanon and Giorgio Agamben are discussed.

Consent and responsibility in Nazi Germany. An interview to Enzo Collotti

Thu, 15 May 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Alberto Burgio, Costerbosa Marina Lalatta
In this recent interview, Enzo Collotti, who is one of the major historians of Nazism, discusses some of the pivotal and still controversial issues of Nazism and of its incubation during the years of the Weimar Republic. The consent of large part of population, the presence of terror, the feeling of community, the ethical problem coupled with the issues of responsibility and law, and also anti-Semitism and anti-bolshevism that were rooted in Germany: these are only some of the themes at the center of the reflections of Collotti who restates the need of continuing to try to understand and explain what has happened in Germany and in Europe in the twelve years of National Socialist regime. In his conclusions, Collotti emphasizes the actuality of the themes at the center of the historiography of Nazi Germany.