Evil as a category has become tedious and politically useless in contemporary culture.

Evidence

Evil is here, however, the emptiest form of sheer Otherness (into which any type of social content can be poured at will). I have so often been taken to task for my arguments against ethics (in politics as well as in aesthetics) that it seems worth observing in passing that Otherness is a very dangerous category, one we are well off without; but fortunately, in literature and culture, it has also become a very tedious one. Ridley Scott’s Alien may still get away with it (but then, for science fiction, all of Lem’s work -in particular the recent Fiasco — can be read as an argument against the use of such a category even there); but surely Ray of Something Wild and Frank Booth of Blue Velvet don’t scare anybody any longer; nor ought we really to require our flesh to creep before reaching a sober and political decision as to the people and forces who are collectively “evil” in our contemporary world. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 633

Categorization

• XREF: Jameson’s anti-ethics position connects to his broader critique of moralizing categories as obscuring genuine political analysis. — connects to: Culture cannot fully repress death terror, driving people to localize threats in fetishized evil. — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 54
• QUESTION: Falsifiability check: is ‘evil has become tedious’ a testable periodization claim about affect, or just a taste judgment?