ABSTRACT
“Absolute evil,” “unspeakable evil,” “diabolical evil,” “extreme evil”: these are only a few of the locutions that twentieth-century culture has mobilized to name some kind of tragic excess that happened in that century at the hands of political power, particularly in the Nazi extermination camps during World War II (Arendt 1976; Bernstein 2002; Levinas 1987; Neiman 2002; Ricoeur 2007; Safranski 1997; Schürmann 2003). Auschwitz is not just the name of a place and a historical event. It rises to the status of metonymy of the intertwinement between evil and power: that overcoming of norms, values, and limits that would plunge Europe of the twentieth century, together with its juridical institutions, into the nihilistic abysses of the “will to nothing.” This is not the place to discuss of the uniqueness of the extermination genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, or to establish whether the intensity of political horror properly pertains exclusively to the twentieth century (Forti 2008). Certainly, over that lapse period of time many norms collapsed, many values were overturned, and – especially – a sense of moral boundaries was shattered.
