A mail exchange about Hannah Arendt
Enok opened the exchange, going like this:
A new book about Hannah Arendt (in Norwegian) by Einar Øverenget is
launched these days.
Arendt wrote "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951).
Does anyone know Arendt's work and would like to tell and comment?
I find it very to the point of the theme of "evil's nature".
Hannah Arendt found her reporter's seat in the court when Adolf Eichmann
was brought to sentence (1961), and like the rest of the world she
expected to see a monster. She found a quite normal person, a family
man, a diligent and loyal bureaucrat.
That's why the individual should always protect its right and duty to
know its role and implications in things going on, and to protect its
free will to act according to its personal subjective values, not the
power's commands pushing it. Eichmann did not hate the Jews at all, he
just did what he was told to do.
Enok Kippersund
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Alan came up:
The Origins of Totalitarianism is brilliant and useful and
especially now
with the world catastrophic
Alan Sondheim
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Then Mike brought:
I met Hannah Arendt once... she was giving a talk in Toronto and I
happened
to be there ( I even got a footnote somewhere as the speech was written up
and published including a question I asked which she responded to--both the
question and the answer now long forgotten.)
Small, intense, very German and rather grandmotherly as I recall... Sort of
like Dr. Ruth complete to the accent and the focus... Saddened I thought at
the time by the world she had seen and commented on and to a large degree
lost.
It has been a long time since I read her, but as I think of it she seems to
be very much part of an interwar German discourse--reacting to Marx and
Freud but in her later years also to the (imaginary) tension between
Anglo-American "liberalism/pragmatism" and the much more ideological world
that she had left.
An interesting figure, perhaps of more current relevance than most would
warrant but also curiously dated in her belief in the shaping role of ideas
(intellectual discourse) in human events.
Mike Gurstein
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Salwa concluding:
I see Arendt at the nexus of many discourses, but also as an independent
thinker who can never be coopted by any single discourse or discipline. Her
most chilling but ever so apt analysis of the "banality of evil" is
certainly among the most useful observations about the Holocaust. What the
concentration camps did was they rendered people and their deaths anonymous;
without that anonymity, which is brought about by a highly efficient
mechanisitic, bureaucratic system that reified humans and conceived of them
as mere lifeless bodies even before death, the death of such large numbers
would never have been possible. The concentration camp was a *factory* of
death where employees worked at an assembly line and where "murder was as
impersonal as the squashing of a gnat."
More quotations:
"Suddenly it became evident ... that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow
of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods
of destruction and therapy."
"Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a
system in which men are superfluous."
"There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camp. Its horrors
can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it
stands outside of life and death."
Some topic to wake up to. Yet necessary...
Salwa Ghaly
(This exchange found its slip road the 21st and 22nd of November 2001)