The human reconceived

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-46
Author(s):  
Adriana Cavarero
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Ethical Judgment ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Radical Evil ◽  
Shared Space

The chapter shows how Socrates becomes the crucial figure that Hannah Arendt turns to, against Plato, for thinking the human as rooted in plurality and attesting to both action and thought. As a positive split image of Plato’s negativity, Socrates is singled out in the context of interrogations that cross Arendt’s entire work about radical evil and, later, about the banality of evil. Socrates works as an antidote to both: radical evil because his practice of dialogue is a political practice that calls on politics as a shared space of plural interaction; and the banality of evil because, by assuming thinking as an activity consisting in the internal questioning of oneself, Socrates discovers conscience as the source of ethical judgment.

The real banality of evil

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Regine Lamboy
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
The Real ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Adolf Eichmann ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem she was struck by the fact that his most outstanding characteristic was his utter thoughtlessness. This raised the questins of whether there might be a connection between thinking and abstaining from evil doing, which she explored in her last book The Life of the Mind. If there is indeed such a connection, there may be a class of people who might be led to abstain from evil doing if they can be persuaded to engage in thinking. This dissertation examines Arendt's success in establishing such a connection. Overall, her project does not really succeed. Her overly formal analysis of thinking wavers between a highly abstract and obscure conceptualization of thinking and a more down to earth definition. Ultimately she winds up stripping thinking of all possible content. .

scholarly journals On the Exception of Hannah Arendt

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 684-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayça Çubukçu
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
The Relationship

This article offers a close reading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It argues that in this text, Arendt consistently, even obsessively, evaluates the legal and moral challenges posed by Eichmann’s trial through the relationship between exception and rule. The article contends that the analytical lens of the exception allows us to appreciate the perplexities that Eichmann in Jerusalem presents – some fifty years after the book’s publication – from a still uncommon perspective, and enables us to attend in new ways to Arendt’s own suppositions, propositions, and contradictions in this text.

scholarly journals The Legacy of Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-86
Author(s):  
Sabah Carrim
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Adolf Eichmann

Contemporary thinkers such as Philip Zimbardo, Alexander Hinton and Elizabeth Minnich recently coined the terms Banality of Heroism, Banality of Everyday Thought, and Banality of Goodness respectively (without these concepts being the linchpins of their theses). These terms can be retraced to one thinker in particular who is constantly referred to by them: Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s Banality of Evil, a key concept in her work, was devised to discuss the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. This paper seeks to critically analyze these “banalities,” and ascertain whether they have contributed meaningfully to the existing literature on the problem of evil.

Public Things, Shared Space, and the Commons

Public Things ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Honig
Keyword(s):  
Shared Memory ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Public ◽  
Shared Space ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Lincoln Memorial ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
The Human Condition

This epilogue compares the public things model with that of two others, the commons (or undercommons) and shared space. It argues that while all three models respond to the democratic need, public things have their own specific and necessary contribution to make. The Lincoln Memorial is the sort of thing Hannah Arendt has in mind as the basis of shared memory and action in The Human Condition. The commons model identifies the losses caused by dispossession, appropriation, and accumulation, and public things may well look like one more enclosure in a very long line of them. This epilogue discusses the contributions that all three models can make to the project of preventing ever-increasing privatization and promoting justice and equality in contemporary democratic societies.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Middle Level ◽  
Biographical Sketch ◽  
Organizational Behaviour ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Level Manager ◽  
Middle Level Manager

Hannah Arendt was profoundly influenced by Martin Heidegger both intellectually and personally. Arendt’s process philosophy of organizational ethics and politics remains relevant today. In 1963, she published a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She is known for her analysis of authoritarian organizations and the emergent archetype of a middle-level manager based on Adolf Eichmann. This chapter provides a biographical sketch of Arendt and Eichmann and discusses the emergent archetype organizational and Eichmann dimensions considered by Arendt, including administrative harm, organizational requirements to obey orders, and ‘banality’ of organizational evil or at least unethical organizational behaviour. It also looks at the views of Heidegger, Eichmann, and Arendt regarding organizational becoming.

Holes of Oblivion: The Banality of Radical Evil

Hypatia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peg Birmingham
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Radical Evil ◽  
Modem Human

This essay offers a reflection on Arendt's notion of radical evil, arguing that her later understanding of the banality of evil is already at work in her earlier reflections on the nature of radical evil as banal, and furthermore, that Arendt's understanding of the “banality of radical evil” has its source in the very event that offers a possible remedy to it, namely, the event of natality. Kristeva's recent work (2001) on Arendt is important to this proposal insofar as her notion of “abjection” illuminates Arendt's claim that understanding the superfluousness of the modem human being is inseparable from grasping the emergence of radical evil. In the final part of the essay, I argue that Arendt's “politics of natality” emerges from out of these two inseparable moments of the event of natality, offering the only possible remedy to the threat of radical evil by modifying our relationship to temporality.

A Tale of Two Feminists?

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-131
Author(s):  
Yosefa Loshitzky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Red Army Faction ◽  
German Woman ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Red Army ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Rosa Luxemburg

One of the most engaging, yet controversial, public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt continues to be attacked with the same venom and ferocity that followed the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) more than fifty years ago. This article discusses why Arendt remains such a divisive figure and why her intellectual legacy is still so unsettling, particularly for Zionists. The essay examines how these issues are represented, negotiated, and problematized in Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt (Germany/ Luxembourg/France, 2012). It explores how one of the most prominent contemporary feminist filmmakers, whose work celebrates the life and activism of revolutionary women from Rosa Luxemburg to Gudrun Ensslin from the Red Army Faction, transforms the “historical Arendt” into a “cinematic Arendt.” Although not a revolutionary in the tradition of Luxemburg, the German-Jewish political thinker Arendt is an interesting choice for a left-leaning, post-Holocaust German woman director. Yet Arendt presents a paradox for feminists due to the contradictions embedded in her works and public pronouncements. The article examines these contradictions and how Arendt emerges from this film, which attempts to portray a politically engaged intellectual woman, a figure that is almost entirely absent from the film screen.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document