Abstract

A discourse on evil beyond the rhetoric of clichés begins for Gabriel Marcel by defusing the logics of abstract thought of the Western tradition, which just as they want to speak of evil as of any other problem implode upon themselves, without ever reaching a sincere encounter with it. Marcel bluntly accuses these traditional paths, deconstructs them, and leaves them behind to open a new phenomenological path, one that allows him to concretely encounter evil and speak about it in an alternative way. An evil in which one stumbles daily, which surprises and destabilizes. An evil that looks at me and concerns me. Which concerns us, all of us. And others even more than myself. It is not enough for evil to become the evil over which I have triumphed. Beyond all heroism and self-eroticism of evil, beyond all centralization and entrenchment in oneself to which suffering leads, this evil of mine must become our evil, ceasing, once and for all, to be an attack on a self-centered love.