Traditionally, in Greek, Christian and Jewish thought, evil has been denied any positive foothold in being. It has not been seen as a real force, or quality, but as the absence of force and quality, and as the privation of being itself. It has not been regarded as glamorous, but as sterile; never as more, always as less. For many recent philosophers, however (for example, Jacob Rogozinski, Slavoj Zizek, J.-L. Nancy) this view appears inadequate in the face of what they consider to be the unprecedented evil of the twentieth century: the mass organisation of totalitarian control and terror, systematic genocide, and the enslavement of people who are deliberately worked to the point of enfeeblement and then slaughtered. Such evil, they argue, cannot be regarded as privative, because this view claims that evil arises only from the deliberate pursuit of a lesser good. Power directed towards extermination, however, suggests destruction and annihilation pursued perversely for its own sake, as an alternative end in itself. Such a motive towards the pure negation of being, as towards the cold infliction of suffering – that may not even be enjoyed by its perpetrators – suggests that the will to destroy is a positive and surd attribute of being itself and no mere inhibition of being in its plenitude.

This supposed positive evil for its own sake is often dubbed ‘radical evil’ following a term used by Immanuel Kant in his book Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. With some plausibility, Kant’s account of evil is seen as encouraging a break with the traditional privation view focused upon being in general in favour of a view focused purely upon the finite human will.