Post-modern Narratives of Evil and 9-11: The Case of Frédéric Beigbeder
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In the wake of the Holocaust, theorists including Arendt and Lyotard outlined a post-modern perspective on evil by reconsidering human tragedies as the products of multiple forces and historical conditions that exceed human agency. More recently, post-modern thinkers such as Tzvetan Todorov and Miguel Benasayag, in their analysis of social discourse, have demonstrated how the ways in which we think and speak about evil are themselves implicated in the genesis of events that society considers evil. It remains to be seen how this philosophical perspective on evil translates into fiction. The following paper begins such an inquiry by identifying a post-modern account of evil in Frédéric Beigbeder’s best-selling Windows on the World (2003), a fictional account of the events of September 11, 2001.