Evil’s Political Habitats

In his 2002 State of the Union address, George W. Bush invoked an "axis of evil".What available rhetorical fields enabled the President to link together North Korea, Iran, and Iraq and then judge the result as evil?What could hold this unstable train of signification together?Within what discursive registers was such a monstrous, bizarre moral geography even comprehensible?1 "Evil" finds a hospitable environment in Bush's presidential addresses because of the speculative identity of two seemingly opposed patterns of belief prominent in contemporary America-pervasive relativism and absolutist conviction. 2 Through a retrospective on "evil" in presidential speeches, I show how this coincidence of opposites first inhabits the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, arguably the figure Bush most seeks to emulate as president.At work in the words and personae of both the fortieth and the forty-third presidents is a powerful combination of conviction and vacuity such that resolve exists simply for its own sake.In Bush's speeches this resolve culminates in a vision of himself and America as instruments of the will of God."Evil" could inhabit the 2002 State of the Union address not simply because of Bush's fluency in the language of the faith, but because of the coincidence of conviction and the broader culture of relativism in which the term "evil" floats so freely."Evil" is powerful, efficacious, because its very lack of meaning (or the excesses of meaning overdetermining it, which is the same thing) enables the term to produce a conviction-effect: no matter what "evil" means, people can be confident in Bush's conviction-he knows.3 Hearing the 2002 State of the Union address, we believed that he was convinced there was an axis of evil. 4

Abstract licence: CC BY

2 more references, whose wording the paper’s licence keeps private.

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