In the face of religious pluralism, the historical changes and variations within and between American religions, Bush's religiosity cannot account for the "axis of evil:' Instead, we need to know more about the variety of ways in which religious invocations can be convincing in politics. How, in other words, are these invocations at home in a community larger than a specific community of faith?
The problems that arise with trying to explain "evil" in the State of the Union address as the result of September u or religion arise from a unicity of thought. Each account, in inverse ways, formats evil as a singularity as if "evil" were a master signifier capable of stopping shifts in signification. The idea that "everything has changed" obscures its rhetmical habitat, treating as settled values and suppositions contested in the culture wars. 1<sup>6</sup> The idea that a pervasive American religiosity accounts for "evil" likewise is inattentive to the varieties of religious practice and expression. In short, operating within each idea is a failure to attend to the ways evil stimulates speech, how it opens speech up rather than closes it down.
Evil is not at all uncommon. It's all over the place. 17 Evil is a major literary theme. A quick Google search turns up more than :five million websites that contain the word evil. Many are satirical. Some involve faux mathematical equations proving that women are the root of all evil. Horror movies often explore the nature of evil, whether in the guise of say, Hannibal Lecter or Austin Powers' nemesis, Dr. Evil. In psychoanalytic terms, evil functions not as a master signifier or nodal point but as objet petit a, Jacques Lacan's term for that fantastic/ Real excess that attracts us and repels us, that we can desire but never reach, that we might flee but can never escape. <sup>18</sup>
So even as Bush may invoke evil as that ultimate threat which cannot be left unaddressed, this invocation does not unleash a repressed language of evil. That language is already there. Evil thrives in various habitats and registers. It adapts to differing practices, uses, and deployments. Journalists emphasize this multiplicity, seemingly stunned by the excesses of evil's free-floating moments even as they ponder the instability of any and all attempts to explain or signify evil. 19 This ery multiplicity :figures into invocations of evil as that which must be confronted as it comes to be embodied and summoned through extreme, unbearable images. Writing in Time magazine, Lance Morrow declares, "Even if it's elusive and even if the term is used brainlessly, evil is still there-a mystery, a black hole into which reason and sunshine vanish but nonetheless . . . there. Talk to the children with chopped of hands in Sierra Leone:'20 Armed with horrifying examples, one invokes evil as that which even the most deconstructive postmodernist cannot deny. One might say that in this way "evil" functions as a conservative logic of performative contradiction (by getting the relativist to deny that Hitler or slavery is evil, say, the absolutist thinks he has exposed a fundamental inconsistency that calls into question the place from which the relativist speaks) or a theological diagnosis of relativism's universal symptom (if one accepts that X-or denies that Y-is evil, then one has no way not to accept, ultimately, the extermination of masses of people, the obliteration of humanity, or the destruction of the world) .21
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