Banality Of Evil Research Articles

Beyond the Pale of Forgiveness: The Touchstone of Simon

What calls for thought today is radical yet ordinary thoughtlessness. But rather than become a touchstone, “the banality of evil” has been co-opted by the very thoughtlessness it would expose. Is a touchstone even possible here? Auden’s critique of Arendt’s inheritance of forgiveness points to a possibility: Jesus’ rebuke of Simon in Luke 7:36–50. Simon places himself beyond the pale of forgiveness, to which Jesus’ rebuke may recall him. How so? Will the answer that emerges introduce a touchstone that may help us become thoughtful in the face of how ordinary rootless evil has become?

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt

<i>Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil</i>, by Hannah Arendt

The Eichmann Trial (review)

Reviewed by: The Eichmann Trial Mary J. Gallant The Eichmann Trial, by Deborah E. Lipstadt. New York: Schocken Next-book, 2011. 237 pp. $24.95. Deborah E. Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Her work underscores the importance of confronting contested remembrance, as for instance in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Free Press/MacMillan,1993). Holocaust revisionism and denial come under attack as she applies the ideals of historical analysis in each of her works. Her quest for accuracy and an in-depth knowledge of her subject make an inestimable contribution to the larger orientation in Holocaust scholarship of tikkun olam, repairing the past to heal the future. In 1996, David Irving, a Holocaust denier and author, brought a libel suit against Lipstadt and Penguin Books for publishing a British edition of Denying the Holocaust in which he was mentioned. The case went on for six years. She described it in History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2005). Preparing for the Lipstadt v. Irving trial, she obtained some of the perpetrator testimony she used from the Eichmann trial (1961). Israeli authorities allowed her access to what until then had been a sealed document, the Eichmann memoir, written during his 1961 trial. From her engagement of materials in that earlier trial she determined to write the present work, The Eichmann Trial (2011), published fifty years after the 1961 trial in Israel. In The Eichmann Trial, Lipstadt is plain spoken and maintains that the trial delivered a correct verdict. It contains an Introduction, six chapters and a Conclusion in which she gives a clear picture of Adolph Eichmann, who as a Nazi career officer was completely dedicated to the goals of racial cleansing. He put his own stamp on the eradication of European Jewry during 1942–1945. Her forensics on the 1961 trial pays homage to Jews who were victims and survivors. So far from aligning with noted intellectuals at the 1961 trial, such as Hannah Arendt, who in her work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), saw Eichmann as a bumbling clerk merely carrying out the Nazi mandate, Lipstadt saw Eichmann as knowing exactly what he was doing. Eichmann was an unrepentant [End Page 192] antisemite who as a Nazi officer zealously sent millions to their deaths with intention and forethought. Marc Osiel, a student of Arendt’s, in his work Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers) takes the Eichmann trial as a brilliant success, not just in terms of a scrupulous rendering of justice, but in the way the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, presented the facts for collective memory. Hausner had worked to give survivors the right to testify at the trial, and to have the Holocaust itself provide the context for interpreting the actions of the defendant. Osiel cites Haim Gouri (Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994, translated by Michael Swirsky), who in a lead article titled “Facing the Glass Booth” (in Geoffrey Hartman’s Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory and Anti‐Semitism, London: Blackwell, 1994), noted that the Eichmann trial had allowed the Israeli nation to face contradictions in its remembrance of the Holocaust at a time when the next generation was in danger of seeing Holocaust Jews as having “allowed” themselves to be slaughtered. In 1932, in Bavaria, Eichmann (b. 1906) joined the then secret agency, the Schutzstafel (SS), and in 1934 joined the terrorist “Austrian Legion” and the SS unit at Dachau. Bored by the SS appointment at Dachau, he asked for reassignment to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and was assigned to its central office in Berlin; there he became part of the section concerned with Jewish affairs. In 1938, as Lipstadt points out (p. 69), the SD sent him to Austria. Antisemitism there had peaked after the Anschluss. Eichmann added to it, becoming a main figure in the persecution of Austrian Jews. He had boasted about his power to an SS colleague in a letter produced at...

Revering the Nazis and Blaming the Victims: Three Enigmatic Holocaust Plays

The idea of Jews revering their persecutors or blaming the victims for the Holocaust is anathema to many Jewish scholars, yet these issues are depicted in Holocaust theatre. In René Kalisky’s Jim le téméraire (Jim the Lionhearted), the premise is Jewish complicity with the Nazis, as Jim, the Jewish protagonist, hallucinates about consorting with National Socialism and identifies with its mystical origins. Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth becomes a diatribe against the idea that Jews are ‘the chosen people’, as Arthur Goldman, brought to trial in Israel as suspected notorious Nazi Adolf Karl Dorff, willingly testifies to expiate his guilty conscience as a Jew. Goldman’s message during the trial is that Jews perished like sheep during the Shoah, largely because of Jewish compliance with Nazi orders. Christopher Hampton’s George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., a fictionalized account of Israeli agents fulfilling a 30-year quest to bring Hitler to justice by extricating him from the Brazilian rain forest, culminates in a trial of Hitler. Hitler’s speech, a 25-minute tour de force that ends the play, mocks the Jews as the chosen people, equates Jews with Nazis, and then gives Hitler an ineluctable, divinely inspired rationale for genocide. This essay argues that these plays, which conflate Judaism with Nazism, represent an enigmatic subset of Holocaust drama that devalues the antisemitic roots of Nazi genocide while provocatively posing questions about the universal aspects of the banality of evil.

Beyond the banality of evil: conscience, imagination and responsibility

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to revisit philosopher Hannah Arendt's classic study of the banality of evil in light of posthumously published works bearing on moral psychology and philosophy.Design/methodology/approachLargely expository and interpretive, this conceptual paper articulates Arendt's approach to morally responsible thinking, with an emphasis on managerial decision making. Arendt's practical ethics draws, in part, on Kantian aesthetic theory, providing an original but unfinished account of “the life of the mind” and personal responsibility in community.FindingsArendt contends that humans can, and are morally obliged to, use conscience, imagination and reason to avoid evil‐doing; that self‐critical introspection, active imagination and representative judgment are essential for moral decision making, especially in times of moral crisis; and that neither profit nor pressure can justify breaching fundamental responsibilities to humanity.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper discusses, but does not critique, Arendt's oeuvre. It interprets, connects and applies ideas from disparate works relating to responsible moral psychology.Practical implicationsConfronting a “modern crisis” in values, Arendt acknowledged pressures on leaders to fulfill organizational objectives, even those effecting harm which violate deeply‐held personal ethics. Warning against temptations to divide selves into a “personal” moral self and a compartmentalized “organisational self,” she prescribed ways of thinking and judging to counteract thoughtless evil‐doing.Originality/valueThe paper connects Arendt's privative analysis of evil‐doing in Eichmann in Jerusalem with later works which delineate shared human mental capacities and processes which facilitate morally responsible leadership, independent of culture or context.

Carnal Eternity

Carnal Eternity

Totalitarian Banality of Evil in Hannah Arendt’s Thought

This paper is an exposition of Hannah Arendt’s idea of ‘Totalitarian Banality of Evil.’ Her understanding of totalitarianism based on the regimes of Nazism and Stalinism is unique in the sense that according to her assessment totalitarianism is geared towards human destruction. These regimes deprived citizens of the necessary human conditions of plurality and spontaneity to give way for their ultimate aim of ‘total domination.’ Terror, which is the essence of totalitarianism, made ‘total domination’ as a method of rule possible. As a consequence, the constituents were made like Ivan Pavlov’s dogs: perverted predictable and devoid of spontaneity. The interesting fact is that even if the consequences of the totalitarian regime were characterized by atrocities, the perpetrators considered them meaningful. Totalitarian decrees even if loaded with evilness were seen as part of translating ideology into reality. These ideologies, Racism for the Nazis and Communism among the Stalinists, were very popular that their adherents interpreted the real events according to their logic. This phenomenon, for Hannah Arendt, marked the fullness of false politics. Her political idea is an infl uence of the Greek polis , where plural opinions were treasured. Plurality, instead of being cultivated in totalitarianism, was the primary target of the att ack. Keywords - Totalitarian Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt, communism, racism, stalinism

Some thoughts on the banality of evil, inspired by a conversation with Jean-Paul Brodeur

Si la notoriété de Jean-Paul Brodeur est en grande partie due à ses recherches sur la police, il est un autre domaine, plus méconnu du grand public, qui le passionnait et le fascinait, à savoir les formes extrêmes de violence, dont le génocide et le crime contre l’humanité. Dans le cadre de cet article, je prolonge un dialogue que nous avions entamé avec Jean-Paul à propos du concept de banalité du mal, développé par Hannah Arendt. En particulier et à partir des contextes yougoslave et rwandais, je propose une extension de cette notion appliquée non pas tant ici aux fonctionnaires et bureaucrates, tels qu’ils constituaient le centre d’attention de la philosophie, alors concentrée sur l’Holocauste, mais bien plutôt des exécuteurs de terrain. Cette réflexion préliminaire révèle que la notion de banalité du mal peut être déclinée en quatre formes caractérisant la participation des exécuteurs ; soit la banalité de la similitude, de la familiarité, de l’idée et enfin de répétition.

American Poet Phyllis McGinley: A Possible Source for Hannah Arendt's “Banality of Evil”

American Poet Phyllis McGinley: A Possible Source for Hannah Arendt's “Banality of Evil”

'Without Explaining': Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, and Mr Sammler's Planet

NEAR THE BEGINNING of Saul Bellow’s novel Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970), the eponymous Mr Sammler, the novel’s protagonist, launches into an impatient tirade against Hannah Arendt and her notorious phrase the ‘banality of evil’, which Arendt had introduced in her 1963 ‘report’ on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. 1 Sammler is an elderly anglophile Polish Jew, a sprightly survivor of the Holocaust, now living in New York City among a small diaspora of family members. Tall and ‘minutely observant’, a sort of human periscope, he has nevertheless just ‘one good eye’. 2 His vision is sharp, but it isn’t perfect. His outburst against Arendt is a highly significant moment and also a representative one. Sammler speaks against his better wisdom, which counsels him to keep his mouth shut. But here as elsewhere the temptation to speak out proves irresistible. How best to understand what happens when we dare to speak and the borderline between the sheltered private self and the self that is willing to appear before others were matters of particular interest to Arendt. A few years before she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she had published her most ambitious philosophical book, The Human Condition (1958), a study of the existential character of politics, in which she explored the relationship between speech and action. It is also well known that Arendt was taught in her youth by Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who emphatically dismissed public life and any form of what he

Hannah Arendt: o mal banal e o julgar

Hannah Arendt escreveu que o “mal banal” origina-se da incapacidade do indivíduo para pensar. Porém, pode-se perguntar se o mal não pode se originar da falta de julgamento. Oou seja, o indivíduo comete atos maus porque não averigua os dados, não os avalia. Eem tal hipótese, o “mal banal” ocorre devido à ausência do “juízo reflexionante” (ou reflexivo) e da “mentalidade alargada” kantianos, resolvendo muitas das lacunas que o mal derivado do pensamento possui, como a que exige distinguir o raciocínio do pensamento.

Beyond K's Specter: Chang-rae Lee’s &lt;em&gt;A Gesture Life&lt;/em&gt;, Comfort Women Testimonies, and Asian American Transnational Aesthetics

This essay argues that Chang-rae Lee’s novel A Gesture Life exemplifies both the conceptual gains and the potential pitfalls of current Asian American literature’s transnationalism. The first section of the essay discusses the interlocking of psychoanalytic theory and political philosophy, specifically Freud’s uncanny and Arendt’s banality of evil, in Lee’s portrait of the psychology of criminal repression. The second section juxtaposes Lee’s novel against real-life comfort women’s survivor testimonies to probe broader questions of historical memory, politicized historiography, and the modes of circulation and authority in contemporary international comfort women discourse. The final section, which recontextualizes Lee’s novel within current debates in Asian and Asian American Studies, argues against a paradigm of alterity vis-à-vis the comfort women and proposes instead a transnational aesthetic premised on the human.

Hannah Arendt as a Theorist of International Criminal Law

AbstractThe guilt of Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, has long been settled. However, during the trial and for years after, Hannah Arendt questioned the legal theories upon which the Jerusalem court relied. Part 1 of this article discusses how Arendt was uncertain about the use of precedent to judge unprecedented acts. Part 2 concerns the logic of proving Eichmann's culpable mental state when he came from a culture where morality had been turned on its head. Part 3 reveals Arendt's struggle with the rationale for universal jurisdiction as well as her unconventional understanding of 'territory'. Part 4 deals with Arendt's views on group affiliation and how those views informed her definition of 'genocide'. Finally, Part 5 details Arendt's most famous writings on "the banality of evil" and how Eichmann was found guilty, not for succumbing to immoral temptation or being a depraved deviant, but instead for conscientiously observing the flawed mores of the Third Reich. While Arendt ultimately supported Eichmann's conviction, her concerns surrounding the trial raise questions that are still relevant today.

Genocide and Sexual Atrocities

International law has recently recognized that sexual atrocities can be acts of genocide. This precedent was pioneered through a landmark lawsuit in New York against Radovan Karadžic, head of the Bosnian Serbs ( Kadic v. Karadzic , 1993-2000), a case in which I played a central role. I argue that we may situate this development philosophically in relation to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . She aims to secure a better understanding of genocide than was achieved at the Nuremberg Trials (1945) and at the Eichmann trial (1961). Arendt claims that these trials were limited by formalism because they applied familiar paradigms onto these new experiences in a manner that obscured what was distinctive about them and that demanded original thinking and a new paradigm. Nuremberg obscured genocide by miscasting it as a traditional war crime, a problem that the Jerusalem court exposed but could have better clarified. Through a first-hand account, I show how we too had to secure a new paradigm by treating the facts on their own terms and coining the crime as genocidal rape. We had to wrest this paradigm from a prevailing approach that also formally applied the category of war crimes onto these experiences in a way that obscured them and interfered with justice.

Hannah Arendt and Augustine of Hippo : On the Pleasure of and Desire for Evil*

Hannah Arendt wrote two volumes on thinking and willing in The Life of the Mind, but due to her untimely death her work devoted to judgement, especially political judgement, was never completed. We do, however, have a significant amount of writings on this theme as evidenced by her lectures on Kant’s Third Critique. Judgement and thinking are critical in order to prevent what Arendt calls the “banality of evil”. Drawing on Augustine and Arendt’s work on Augustine, this paper seeks to argue that another form of serious evil has its root in what Augustine calls the libido habendi and the libido dominandi, the desire or drive to dominate and possess. It will be argued that Arendt’s solution to the problem of evil as banal can also be applied to the very human desire and pleasure to cause or inflict evil.

The Political Theory of the Clich�: Hannah Arendt Reading Adolf Eichmann

The Political Theory of the Cliché:Hannah Arendt Reading Adolf Eichmann Jakob Norberg (bio) In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt studies Adolf Eichmann through his words: she notes what he says during cross-examinations at the trial, she reviews transcripts from police interrogations, and she reads extracts from the memoirs he began to write in Argentina. The character sketch that builds on these materials famously identifies Eichmann as a "déclassé son of a solid middle-class family" (1964, 31) whose severely limited verbal repertoire and robotic delivery made him a figure of "undeniable ludicrousness" (54). But how does Arendt arrive at these judgments, or what method of reading does she rely on to draw her conclusions? Her inferences about Eichmann are informed by an understanding of class and social types in European society.1 And her observations about Eichmann's manners of speech—his blend of stock phrases, Nazi jargon, and officialese—indicate a sensitivity to degrees of verbal aptitude. But while Arendt's characterization of Eichmann as disturbingly ordinary has shaped and even defined his public image, and influenced the way that modern genocide is conceptualized, it remains difficult to identify Arendt's mode of analysis.2 Reluctant to identify herself with any school of thought or discipline, she seems to employ no particular body of interpretive techniques that would allow her to move from single observations to a global judgment of Eichmann's person. To many of the first readers and reviewers of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt's approach—or her lack of one—was part of the problem with the book. Originally reporting for the magazine the New Yorker, Arendt seemed to speak as a member of an urbane literary elite who aimed to dazzle rather than to analyze, and her report was criticized as impressionistic, perversely concerned with its own brilliance, and attuned to aesthetic rather than moral values.3 Later scholarship has [End Page 74] done much to correct this damning view of Arendt's commitments and motivations. According to numerous commentators, Arendt is able to demonstrate how Eichmann's immersion in Nazi ideology and his implementation of genocidal policies stemmed from his failure to understand himself as a responsible political agent, who in fact lent the apparatus of mass murder his active support in every act of unquestioning obedience.4 Eichmann's character is judged corrupt from the standpoint of an appreciation of human agency, according to which people are at all times obliged to assume full responsibility for their actions and words rather than abdicate autonomy with reference to their apparently minor positions in complex and overpowering organizations.5 Beyond noting how the portrait of Eichmann featured remarks on his rigidified speech, however, recent secondary literature has said almost nothing about Arendt's method. While Arendt's general statements have been positively reevaluated, then, her interest in Eichmann's clichéd speech has not been accorded much scrutiny.6 One would have to assume from this that her notes on his patterns of speech do not conform or amount to a worked-out procedure of assessment and interpretation. Judging by the literature, Eichmann in Jerusalem can be treated as a reflection on the Holocaust as an unprecedented crime, as a tract on evil, or as a critical portrait of the Israeli state, but not as an exercise in reading.7 To remedy this lacuna in the discussion of the book, we must ask a series of questions. What is involved in the recognition of clichéd speech, or what type of attention does it require? And what does the detection of frozen patterns of speech possibly allow one to say about the person who has uttered them? We must in other words focus on Arendt's consideration of Eichmann's verbal tics and near-clownish delivery of stale expressions, and trace her path to certain judgments of his character. Rather than deny or downplay this dimension of the Jerusalem report, one must understand its fundamental contribution to its overall statement. The Political Theory of the Cliché The central fact about Eichmann, the observation to which Arendt returns again and again, is that his speech consists...

The Limits of Empathy: A Mengzian Perspective

This article suggests how Mengzian ideas of the way [dao], rightness [yi] and rites [li], as related to the presupposition that human nature is moral, respond to rigid notions of "truth" and "law," which tolerate a banalization of evil. It further suggests that the Mengzian attitude is both rooted in human empathy and draws clear limits to it. This is demonstrated by responding to arguments raised by the protagonist Max Aue in Jonathan Little's book The Kindly Ones.

Wall Street's Obsession with Bonuses

The common adage – “money is the root of all evil” – is a mistranslation of a phrase from St. Paul’s first Epistle to Timothy. “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas” means “the love of money is the root of all evil”. Cupidity, or avarice, is one of the seven deadly sins – “not merely a wrongful act, but a disposition that corrupts the soul and serves as the occasion of additional sins”. This insidious mistranslation shifts the source of evil away from the subject of the sin (the lover of money) – to its object (the beloved money), thereby implicitly relieving the sinner of his responsibility. To Immanuel Kant any such attempt to shift blame is itself a form of “radical” evil – that is, a banal evil that lies at the root (radix) of all human action. Nevertheless, when viewed through the prism of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the mistranslation of Paul is unintentionally insightful. The pricking of the real estate bubble and subsequent market meltdown in 2008 looks crazy in the colloquial sense of the term. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, however, Wall Street culture exhibits a specific pathology – obsessiveness. What does market madness have to do with the evil of money? An obsessive obsesses about obtaining an object because he subjectively experiences it as the cause of his desire. Obsession is insatiable because it is deluded. The obsessive does not really desire the object, but something else he can not admit to himself – the love of others. The pursuit of the object is a fool’s errand that can spin out of control leading to a breakdown and paralysis. To Wall Street “traders”, the annual “bonus” can function as the object cause of desire. As such, although money is not the root of all evil, it can function as the cause of some very destructive behavior. In this Article, I examine the ethics of the trader culture. I do not, however, attack capitalism per se. Nor do I consider the social, political, economic or legal implications of the size of Wall Street compensation or income disparity in this country. Rather, I address the obsessional logic of the bonus.

Arendt, Eichmann y la banalidad del mal

In this text I describe the characteristics that Hannah Arendt attributes to the SS agents through the figure of Eichmann, during the German Nazi regime of the 20th century. According to this characterization, I intend to show, on the one hand, that there is not a break in Arendt’s thought on evil, i.e. from The Origins of Totalitarianism to Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, but a continuous line of thought. And, on the other hand, I try to follow the clues that Arendt gives concerning the “banality” that defines the behavior of individuals such as Eichmann. Both premises will permit me to point out what, in my understanding, the banalization of humanity implies, not only in the context of the Jewish Holocaust, but in each of the societies in which the elimination of spontaneity is a reality.

Historia de la voluntad y banalidad del mal

This article discusses the connections existing in The Life of the Mind between the theory of the banality of evil and the history of the will. It interprets Eichmann in Jerusalem as a work about bureaucratic evil, but above all as research concerning both moral and juridical responsibility. From the history of the will it highlights three different aspects that can be connected with the problem of responsibility: the ontology of contingency, the idea of individuality linked to the will and the capacity of transcendence and resistance that we see in the Duns Scotus’ theory, where liberty equals indifference. Finally, it suggests a link between the banality of evil and the ontology of good as these are present in “Some questions of moral philosophy” (1965-1966), the fight against Gnosticism and the defense of a relationship between morality and evil’s intelligibility.