To Grasp the Incomprehensible – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Evil: A Review of “Talking about Evil: Psychoanalytic, Social, and Cultural Perspectives,” Edited by Rina Lazar: A review of Talking about Evil: Psychoanalytic, Social, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Rina Lazar (2017), Routledge, New York, 225 pages.

This book offers a profound interdisciplinary contribution to the study of evil. It is an effort to reflect on evil, describe its presence among us, and capture its humanity along with the horrors of its manifestations. A neglected topic both in psychoanalysis and in other cultural domains, (not for lack of familiarity, but because of its intolerableness), this present consideration of evil is exceptional.

The book originated in a series of lectures, initiated and coordinated by Dr. Rina Lazar and presented in Tel Aviv University, Israel (2015). Its thirteen chapters were written by psychoanalysts, historians, philosophers, and researchers in cultural studies, literature, and film studies. All contributors are Israeli academics or clinicians; they write from a general perspective but do not avoid the painful contact with their particular, local Israeli context.

For anyone who thinks about psychoanalysis and culture, and who feels touched by the violence of contemporary social-political reality, this volume should be indispensable reading.

In the course of these thirteen chapters, evil is considered as a reality, as something that attacks from the outside as well as constituting an internal psychological dimension. It is discussed from the perpetrator’s perspective as well as the victim’s. Psychoanalysis is the dominant point of view, but Lazar and her authors interface with other disciplines as well. Moving between the intimacy of the clinical conversation and shared social-political, philosophical discourses, the editor and contributors draw upon different types of thinking in order to instill meaning into

what is unbearable to think. While evil continues to elude our full gasp, the multiple perspectives give us a rare opportunity to meditate on its multiplicity of contexts and manifestations and the many ways of making sense of it. It is the questions posed by the authors that chart evil, even if answers are lacking. These are questions we cannot evade.

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