The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Near the end of his introduction to the first part of Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope, Martin Beck Matuštík writes that his "book of meditations invites a response, not necessarily arguments; it is intended for edification, not for a library shelf or the accumulation of knowledge."¹ He immediately adds that the book, which he describes as "decidedly contemplative in tonality yet deeply activist in tenor," moving through dialogues with many thinkers, is a "self-transformative journey of reflecting faith, hopeful witnessing, and love." He concludes: "I wish the reader some of the astonishing self-discovery I have made in my quest, that the more one delves into hidden and at times dark recesses of the human odyssey, the more audibly and persistently the beckoning of hope calls" (23). I quote this passage because I want to respond to this generous invitation, as fully as I can: in a way signaled by the invitation itself; in a way with few arguments but instead with something closer to other meditations, other transformations, and other calls heard; in a way that takes seriously the personal, philosophical, and activist dimensions that the book seeks to interweave; and in a way that keeps in view the book's own aim of edification. I understand this aim in pluralistic terms, in terms of love's caravan taking multiple, [End Page 328] different routes (1), and, so, in terms quite different from what goes on when like-minded people (whether a country, a people, a clan or tribe, co-conspirators, a company, or even dues-paying members of a scholarly society) merely applaud each other for articulating what they all believed, and perhaps wanted to believe or at least what in common they most easily hear, from the start.

Suspense has its place, but this is not it. So, let me state one kind of conclusion at the outset. This book is timely but not trendy. Its issues are pressing but not passing. It is a tour de force journey through many rich works of a remarkably large number of philosophers—including Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Levinas, Badiou, Marion, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas. Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope is not, in the end, about any of these thinkers—it is more accurate, I think, to say that the book is through or enabled by these thinkers—but on practically every page it illuminates the work of these thinkers in new, often arresting ways. And, perhaps most important, in the face of often numbingly frequent atrocities and sometimes spreading despair, this book charts one way—surely there are others—in which it may be possible to move from useless suffering to redemptive suffering (255), one way to establish "a margin of hope even within its scarcity" (266). Indeed, the book is ultimately as much about this "margin of hope" as it is about the scarcity of hope. And it is to the extent that the book, in a distinctive voice and original way, locates this margin of hope that it realizes its goal of edification, of intellectual, moral, or spiritual improvement.

Now, if these opening remarks of mine sound too, well, meditative, here is what this means: It means that when we are done here you should march over to the Indiana University Press book Web site and buy this book. Now, I know this goes against a powerful habit of scholars who strive to write books and then wonder why more people don't buy them, all while they don't buy books by their colleagues and fellow travelers. You can break this habit, and in this case you definitely should. I hold this view, I want to stress, not because I agree with the main claims of the book or because I resonate strongly with the articulation of its project. In many respects, as I will explain, I do not. But it is precisely because of these differences that I find this book so valuable. Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope clearly...