“For all the victims of civil obedience”

Carola Rackete, Handeln statt Hoffen (2019)

 

In a 1964 radio broadcast with Hannah Arendt, Joachim Fest asks the German philosopher about the new criminal type that seems to emerge from the Eichmann trial as well as from the Frankfurt KZ-trials, the most recent and significant of which began in December 1963. He then proceeds to address Arendt’s study, Eichmann in Jerusalem: “One of the theses of your book—it appears in the subtitle—is the thesis of the ‘banality of evil.’ It has seen innumerable misunderstandings.”[i] Responding to the interviewer, Arendt addresses the confusion that emerged from her wordings and clarifies what she meant.

“A misunderstanding is the following: one has believed that what is banal belongs to our everyday life.”[ii] This is not the case: “I can easily imagine that I talk to someone who tells me something that I have never heard before, which is not ordinary whatsoever. And I say: ‘This is extremely banal! Or I say: ‘This is minderwertig.’” “That’s what I meant,” she concludes. Interestingly, she chooses ‘minderwertig’ as a synonym, a term that might be translated as ‘inferior, common, cheap, poor, substandard,’ literally: ‘of inferior worth.’

Later on in the interview, Arendt introduces something that came to her mind in Jerusalem, not something new, but something she had learned and forgotten, like a proper lesson. Perhaps it is a step too far, to look for the ‘Jüngster Tag’ (Judgment Day) in the name of ‘Ernst Jünger’, but the situation is certainly serious (‘ernst’) in Jerusalem. The narration could as easily have come from one of Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘anecdotes from the last war.’ “During the war,” she says, “Ernst Jünger came into peasants from Pomerania or from Mecklenburg—no, it was Pomerania… (the story is in Radiations). And the peasant received directly from the camps some Russian war prisoners, who were naturally utterly starving—You know, how Russian war prisoners have been treated here! And he says to Jünger: ‘Look, you can well see that they are subhuman, just like brutes: they devour the fodder of the pigs!’”

Tweets like these have become our daily bread. One can think of the tweet series about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio. Even during the first and last presidential debate of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on September 10, 2024, Trump claimed that migrants are eating pets there: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”[iii] Contrary to unmasking the depravation of the migrants, the comment wants to hide their deprivation. The fact that deprivation might turn into depravation, is a cliché that Arendt could have listed next to Jünger’s story. The seriousness of the suffering and destitution of the homines sacri is covered up by their alleged pet murders. Moreover, killing the Dog is a hideous crime, to the extent that it threatens the entire domestic establishment whose enshrinement rests within God. Indeed, the pettiest of the crimes is the crime of being poor, a naked man, or subhuman. What cannot be admitted in an explicit manner, namely that some people are deemed subhuman, can nonetheless be alleged via detour. In some twisted sense, no fact check can disprove Trump’s assertion, since the depravation of the migrants is only a diversion in the allegation, while underhandedly the real message, which passes unchecked, is conveyed without meeting any resistance across the political spectrum, namely that deprivation means depravation, and some ‘humans’ are subhuman, minderwertig.

After narrating Jünger’s story, Arendt comments: “You see, this hi/story is characterized by an outrageous stupidity. I mean: the hi/story is basically stupid. The man cannot see that that is precisely what humans that are starved do, isn’t it? And everyone does it. But this stupidity has really something outrageous. […] Eichmann was very intelligent, but he had this stupidity…” Then, she quickly concludes her response: “And this is what I really meant with banality. There is no depth there – it is not demonic! It is only the unwillingness to imagine what is going on with the other person, isn’t it?” Translating more closely, Arendt is saying: “Unwillingness to imagine what is authentically with the other [der Unwille, sich je vorzustellen, was eigentlich mit dem anderen ist].” The shocking, terrifying aspect of the statement quickly comes across, as there is no way to contradict it by means of reasoning, but only offering a parable, ein Gleichnis, in Kafka’s terms, or, with Benjamin, an anecdote.

Perhaps this is Levinas’s response to Heidegger, the openness of dialogue within thinking, when the French philosopher questioned the role of the Other in Heidegger’s ontological finitude. In his 2015 study, The Banality of Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy intervenes in the debate again, zeroing in on Heidegger’s adherences. Arendt tries to keep the dialogue open even, or above all, where it is shut down. Later in the interview, she refers to the possible responses and responsibilities people have within a totalitarian regime. How to interact with external pressures? What are the limits of the dialogue? Is there any space for freedom given the risks? Within and without the danger, Arendt reinstates ‘the other within’ when ‘the other’ disappears in a totalitarian impersonal form. She mentions a sentence by Socrates: “It is better to be in disaccord with the entire world that with oneself, because I am one.” Arendt adds: “In fact, if I am not of one mind with myself, emerges an unbearable conflict.” She connects Kant’s imperative to this statement, then observes: “This sentence implies that I live with myself, that, as if it were, I am two-in-one… Now, to live with oneself means naturally to speak to oneself. And this speaking-with-oneself means, fundamentally, thinking… Thus, the presupposition of the sentence is: I have company with myself.” Ich habe Umgang mit mir: I go around with myself (for good or evil).

“Here I stand / Foot in hand / Talking to my wall / I’m not quite right at all,” writes David Bowie in one of his early songs, All the Madmen.[iv] Madness is represented as the most tenacious form of thinking, which does not follow laws or logic. The need to preserve the other who goes around with me, might at times of terror lead the thinker to come up against a wall, to think together. This is one of those rare, extreme cases, when an inoculative drop of psychosis might rescue the neurotically fragmented individual from the psychopathic carnage machine he is entrapped in. It seems that, like in Schopenhauer’s pendulum, which swings between suffering and boredom to find joy in the ephemeral moment between the extremes, we are suspended between neurosis and psychosis, finding contentment at that instant when, by barely grazing the pressures, thoughts find light elan and vice versa.

Anecdotes, or, in their static form, thought images, have the weak power of suspending the distinction between various levels of what one could otherwise think of as a joke. Perhaps this is precisely the immunologic psychosis that brings thought together and the strength of anecdotal thinking. And this is perhaps also the best context to imagine Arendt’s demonic, eruptive laughter, breaking off from her inner dialogue, unable to carry idiocy any stretch longer. In the same year, in a video interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt remarks: “You see, there are people that get upset at me because of one thing, and I can understand it to some extent: namely that I can still laugh at it. But I really thought that Eichmann was a dumb boy, and, let me tell you: I have read his police acts, 3600 pages, I have read them carefully, and I can’t tell you how many times I laughed; and loudly! People get upset at this reaction of mine. There is nothing I can do about it.”[v] I have a dialogue to preserve.

Eichmann, just like any other mind absorbed within the totalitarian regime, follows language and is unable to question its definitory, determining use. This is the ordinary psychopathy that preempts the detection and nourishment of the difference-within-one that constitutes language. Meanings are straightforwardly taken from the dictionary and applied like grammar rules, or, to return to the original setting, they are legally enforced. In this respect, it might not be surprising that many of Trump’s statements sound comical however appalling they are. When they cease to appear funny, we enter the totalitarian regimes they stem from.

In a 1916 letter to Herbert Belmore, the young Benjamin observed that “only in humor can language be critical.”[vi] We can think of a contained form of humor, emerging from the critical, split nature of language. Nearly a palindrome, the anecdote (in German: Anekdote) misspells death (Tod) in both directions. Unlike jokes, anecdotes claim a reality principle, that is, the extrinsic limits of the omnipotence of thought, and a certain proximity to the dead, to the extent that the dead other is the tangible limit against which nothing can be done, and no restitution or reparation suffices, so that the constellation of a character countervails fate.

By bringing together the idiosyncratic compulsion of a character (that is, the automatic repetition mechanism of the death drive) and the reality principle (the dead as impossible interlocutor), the anecdote can be read in terms of ‘insistence on the spirit’ within language, so that, even if all anecdotes are—to some extent—jokes weighed down by a dead body—they are also lightened by its spirit. Handed down through the years, the authority of the anecdotes inhabits their passage from hand to hand in the unavoidable betrayals of generations and tradition, and resides in their openness to the impossible, questioning and reflection. Following up on Derrida’s insights on the haps of the “perhaps” and the ghosts in the “Geist” (spirit) in the archives of inheritance, Rickels highlights the sinews of such endowment of thought by going radical, as he finds the “Leiche” (corpse) both in the “vielleicht” (perhaps) and in the “Gleichnisse” (parables)—and this is what characterizes the anecdotal resistance to assimilation that marks Benjamin’s writings.[vii]

Anecdotes often confront the theme of death directly, or, as in Arendt’s case, human deprivation and finitude. Their reality principle is turned around, and where jokes, according to Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, release from the inner life some form or other of aggressive pleasure, anecdotes play with the same energy coming from the outside: they are images of a realized, redeemed world. Anecdotes on the last words of authors on their deathbed reveal such alien landing most explicitly. We can think of Oscar Wilde’s famous comment: “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”[viii] The psychoanalytic id and the Heideggerian man sagt have reached the most unlikely of agreements: the dead are rejoicing, while this world is slightly readjusted beyond good and evil.

At times, it was just impossible for Arendt not to laugh at the collapsible logic of Eichmann. People, she tells us, got upset at her because of it, yet she wants to clarify one aspect: “I would probably still laugh for three minutes in front of certain death.”[ix] Perhaps that is exactly what she could not help but doing as she faced the corpse obedience of Eichmann. Trump’s amplification of deadpan hearsays by contending authenticity for them not only contradicts the authority of an anecdote, which has a claim on us precisely because it is uncertain, but also replaces the space of thinking with the authoritarianism of the “one says,” accompanied by appalling, displaced grievances, and the unforgiving spread of banalization.

Notes:

[i] Most of the quotes by Hannah Arendt stem from her 1964 interview with Joachim Fest. The audio of the interview is available on audioaz.com and the transcript can be found on hannaharendt.net. Transcript: https://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/download/114/194?inline=1. Accessed on November 2, 2024. Audio: https://audioaz.com/en/archive/archive-hannah-arendt-und-die-banalitat-des-bosen-hannah-arendt-joachim-fest-swr-1964-11-09-interview. Accessed on November 2, 2024.

[ii] Ibid. Unless stated otherwise, references are to this same interview.

[iii] The quote stems from The ABC News Presidential Debate: Harris and Trump meet in Philadelphia. Link: https://youtu.be/kRh6598RmHM. Accessed on November 2, 2024.

[iv] David Bowie, “All the Madmen,” in The Man Who Sold the World, 1970.

[v] The quote stems from her 1964 interview with Günter Gaus. The video of the interview is available on zdf.de and the transcript can be found on rbb-online.de. Video: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zur-person/hannah-arendt-zeitgeschichte-archiv-zur-person-gaus-100.html. Accessed on November 2, 2024. Transcript: https://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/download/114/194?inline=1. Accessed on November 2, 2024.

[vi] Benjamin’s letter to Herbert Belmore, end 1916 in Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910-1940 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 83, 84. “Nur im Humor kann die Sprache kritisch sein.”

[vii] For the archive, see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); for the specters/spirit, see especially Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); for the perhaps, see Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe.’ Jacques Derrida in conversation with Alexander Garcia Düttmann, ICA, 8. March 1996,” in “Responsibilities of Deconstruction,” PLI, Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 6, Summer 1997; for the readings of the Leiche in Gleichnis and in vielleicht, see Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988) and Rickels, I think I Am P. K. Dick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

[viii] Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 581.

[ix] Refer to Hannah Arendt’s 1964 interview with Günter Gaus.