Stephen Fry once explained the difference between American and British humour: whereas the all-knowing big-dicked American is an endless source of perfect one-liners, the British humourist is a dickless and pathetic failure. Yet it is through their posture of failure that British comedic characters develop their identities and we come to know who they are - whereas each American comedic protagonist is indistinguishable from the other and therefore identityless.

There is a great art to a continental style of philosophy writing. When you finish reading Gabriel Piterberg or Yitzach Laor, two writers that I know who use this style, you know exactly what they are arguing - even though at no point is their argument made explicitly. There is great power to this method, too: by forcing the reader to go through the long process of thinking through the whole piece, conveyed through a kaleidescope of intersecting stories, the message gets communicated to a deeper level of consciousness than through the analytic approach.

The disappointing irony of this book, which makes some profound and important statements (about evil lying within all of us), is that in trying to be continental (in the philosophical sense: indirect and therefore profound), it has ended up being American (in the comedic sense: too arrogant to be useful). Most readers will struggle to identify Eagleton's position. One very partial way around this would be to read the last page first, but even this does not fully help us.

Perhaps this is a book to be re-read. ( )

Moments of interest; generally glib and incoherent, lacking even a proper conclusion. ( )

I'll concede to the previous author's comment on how the fascination of the introduction quickly died off from its resplendence as the pages went on. Or to be precise, the author's invocation of motley works of literature to enter into a discussion on evil ultimately confused me into understanding what was exactly the point of this book. But it should be mentioned that on its back cover, its back cover precisely inscribed with these words: "Philosophy / Literature," so please don't make the same mistake as the previous critic and buy books without knowing which genre they belong to.

But notwithstanding the equivocalness of the author's intent, the ideas on evil he broaches are sharp and insightful, many concepts which I found new to me. A notable one is his explanation of how evil has an affinity for nothingness, since a vacuity of meaning, purpose, and rationality resembles perfection, since it is independent from the laws of causality and therefore aging time. I've truncated and oversimplified his line of reasoning, but the fascination still remains.

Overall, I found this book very informative (not as humorous as people have thought to be), and after reading the novel, I've come to realize that his eliciting of several works of literature is to perhaps to show the different faces and perspectives of evil, and that its visage portrayed by Christianity is one of many viewpoints for human audience. By showcasing numerous ways to understand evil, Eagleton wants to do what Nietzsche accomplishes in many of his writing: destroying security over the little knowledge we thought we possess. ( )

The author took a truly fascinating eternal question and wandered off into the weeds. The introduction was fascinating, but as soon as the discussion turned to characters in books that I hadn't read and that I don't want to read, I gave up.

It's a shame, too. The introductory material was very real-world, and I really wanted to continue to read something in the vein of how the book began. I just wasn't prepared to wade through literary pretension to get there. ( )

Reading Terry Eagleton either makes me feel incredibly clever ( “Literary Theory”, ”After Theory”) or incredibly stupid (“The Ideology Of The Aesthetic”, “Walter Benjamin, or Towards A Revolutionary Criticism”) His latest offerings have been slightly easier on the ego and “On Evil” is (for the most part) no exception. It's a whistle stop tour through Theology & Theodicy via, amongst others, Marx, Freud, Schopenhauer and Lacan. His argument ricochets through readings of “Macbeth”, “Brighton Rock”, “Pincher Martin” and “The Third Policeman” to arrive at a strangely unsatisfying conclusion.

Evil is something more than just wickedness after a workout.
Evil is purposeless, pointless, a non-rational “condition of being”. It’s aim is, accordingly anti-life, the void, nothingness. It’s like a passionless over-reaching Death-Drive. So while wickedness certainly abounds, Evil is, thankfully, very rare and “something we should not lose much sleep about”.

Unusually, this is one of Terry Eagleton’s conclusions that I could easily have arrived at independently although, obviously, not with the same rigour. Paradoxically this rigour may well be the problem - I’m not particularly patient. His meandering toward a final conclusion is never less than entertaining but I’m not entirely convinced it needed so many detours and 160 pages to get there. ( )