Radical evil: Literary visions of political origins in Sophocles, Sade, and Vargas Llosa (Greece, Marquis de Sade, France, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru)

My dissertation examines the ways in which Sophocles's Antigone (441 BC), D. A. F. de Sade's Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome (120 Days of Sodom, 1785), and Mario Vargas Llosa's La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2000) unveil the nexus between the literary and the political by imagining the inauguration of political worlds. The three fictions envision the political sphere as emerging from war but unable to entirely eliminate war in the city. The political is instantiated through a radical violence that determines who will be a member of the community and who will not. Unleashed by a primordial symbolic operation—a disarrangement of communal rituals—this violence leaves life exposed to a death that will be instrumentalized by a sovereign power to bring the polis into existence. I have chosen a political reading of the Kantian term “radical evil” to name this violence: not the simple transgression of a norm, but rather the inversion of the relation between transgression and norm is what lies at the core of the symbolic political operation that inaugurates the new order. By showing how new political orders emerge through the manipulation of symbols, the texts perform a political intervention: they expose political activity as guided by fictions.; I start with a reading of the Sophoclean tragedy as the “invention of the political” through two logics in conflict over the expulsion of a community member at the moment of the reconstruction of the city. The political results from the clash between a centrifugal force of exclusion and a centripetal force of inclusion. I then perform a political reading of Sade's text as an inquiry into the eighteenth century political concern about “the act by which a people is a people” (J. J. Rousseau). Instead of being a social contract, the Sadean polis emerges out of a division between a cohesive group that establishes its identity through the organized extermination of part of its constituency. My last reading explores Vargas Llosa's text as an extreme vision of the foundation of a political bond through the non-democratic force of a sovereign who actually performs a genocide under the guise of saving the nation.