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ABSTRACT
In this article, I address J. M. Coetzee's chapter "The Problem of Evil" in Elizabeth Costello (2003); specifically, I discuss the danger of texts that attempt to represent evil letting loose that evil in the world. This insight is pushed by connecting it to the problem of sovereignty as put forth in Agamben's Homo Sacer (1998). To demonstrate the connection of evil and sovereignty, three different sets of images are analyzed that circulated in the global public sphere in 2004: frames from the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ (2004); pictures of the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners from Abu Ghraib; and beheading videos of U.S. citizens and other nationals working for the U.S.-led occupation forces in Iraq. Different explanations have been given for their circulation, but it is argued, following Agamben's notion of "homo sacer," that they are contestations over sovereignty of Iraq and more widely of the Middle East.
[Keywords: sovereignty, evil, visualization]
At the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its canon.
-Giorgio Agamben, 2005
IN THE CHAPTER "The Problem of Evil," the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) has been asked to speak at a conference in Amsterdam. She takes as her lecture's theme the problem of evil in literature, and her specific example is the book The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg by Paul West.
It was about Hitler and Hitler's would-be [July 1944] assassins in the Wehrmacht, and all was going well enough until she came to the chapters describing the execution of the plotters. Where could West have got his information? Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night and, before they forgot, before memory, to save itself, went blank, wrote down, in words that must have scorched the page, an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, stripped of their uniforms, togged out for the final event in prison cast-offs, serge trousers caked with grime, pullovers full of moth-holes, no shoes,...