Book Review
Damage Control
Power, Love and Evil: Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damaged
by Wayne Cristaudo
Rodopi, 2008
(166 pages, $52.00, paperback)
reviewed byPeter J. Leithart
Power, Love, and Evil bills itself as a contribution to “philosophy,” but Wayne Cristaudo, an Australian philosopher who teaches European Studies at the University of Hong Kong, is not interested in ivory-tower speculation. With an ear to popular culture and an eye on modern politics, he investigates love and evil in a world where psychology, popular music, novels, and politics manifest a preoccupation with damage.
Unanalyzed Damage
We cannot understand damage without grasping the power of love and evil. “What is real is generative,” Cristaudo writes in the first line of his book. Love is the most potently productive power in human life. It is the force that moves all our actions and desires. And because it is most generative, it is most real.
Evil is “love in reverse” or, in a more Dantesque phrasing, “misdirected love.” It appears when we love “phantasms” or the “demonic”: idols and ideologies and false messiahs. Anything can become phantasmic, and Cristaudo believes that in the history of the West, law, the church, the state, art, and many other institutions have at times become objects of idolatrous devotion and therefore producers of evil.
Even when love is directed toward the wrong object and becomes evil, it generates. Hitler and Castro could not have achieved what they did if they had not elicited the passionate love of their people.
In Cristaudo’s analysis, damage and evil are mutually reinforcing. Germans who loved the phantasms of Hitler and Nazism damaged others and themselves on a massive scale. On the other hand, the damage done by evil is itself evil. The catastrophic damage of the Holocaust is evil.
Cristaudo’s analysis is most powerful, though, when he examines how damage produces evil. People often turn to evil in response to the damage they suffer, in an effort to make others bear some of their pain. Cristaudo draws out the logic of damage with a moving account of the life of murderer Gary Gilmore and a sensitive reading of Josephine Hart’s novel Damage.
Gilmore and Hart’s protagonist Anna Barton are souls haunted by damage; Gilmore is the product of his family’s intergenerational brutality, and Anna of incest. Both seek retribution by wreaking damage on others. Victims of the sacrificial slaughter of others, they aim at a perverse kind of justice by bringing others to the altar.
This effort to escape damage is a phantasm, a false path of “redemption” from evil. In this way, the misdirected love that is evil generates and proliferates, creating more damage and more evil.
Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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