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

Adolf Eichmann played a leading role in the deportation of Jews from Germany and a significant role in the logistical implementation of the Nazis' "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." After Israel's Mossad captured Eichmann in 1960 in Buenos Aires, the state of Israel tried him in Jerusalem for collaborating in the persecution of the Jewish civilian population. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962.

Hannah Arendt, a political theorist, reported on Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker. Her writing was revised and enlarged for a book published in 1964. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt draws out insights big and small as she dissects the trial and shares historical research. It is a fascinating blend of reporting, insightful meditation, and history.

The book's title captures the theme that emerged from the trial, according to Arendt. Eichmann came off as fairly average: an obedient, law-abiding, rule-following joiner, with no trace of mental illness and no real hatred for Jews. But he could not think for himself. Furthermore, he had no career plan and came to his position in the regime almost by accident; and, there, he found he had a knack for logistical planning. And when the regime's plan to expel the Jews changed into a plan to exterminate them, Eichmann accepted the change and the given rationale that doing so was the most humane option.

Arendt closes the last chapter by describing how Eichmann, after walking readily to his execution, offered a clichéd string of last words. This was wholly in character for him. "It was as though in those last moments he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil."

Arendt is reluctant to call the whole episode a show trial, but aspects seem to beg the description in Arendt's telling. Eichmann, who played an important role in the most horrific event of the century, stood in for the whole German Reich, and the execution was largely an act of vengeance.

For various reasons, including her descriptions of how some Jews helped implement Nazi policies against fellow Jews, Arendt came under heavy criticism after the book's publication. She addressed the criticism in a postscript added in a subsequent edition. She ends the postscript by stating that the trial did fulfill "the demands of justice."

Notes:

• Hannah Arendt is a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power.
• Favorite sentence: "So Eichmann's opportunities for feeling like Pontius Pilate were many, and as the months and the years went by, he lost the need to feel anything at all." 
• I suspect Arendt cleverly sought to satisfy her most vicious critic with the cliché about "the demands of justice." 

 

about selections from "Critical Essays on Michel Foucault"

This collection of essays opens with philosopher Gilles Deleuze rephrasing and re-articulating Foucault's concept of power. There is little new ground here, but the essay is a good opener. The first real bright spot in this collection is "Foucault's Oriental Subtext", in which Uta Liebman Schaub identifies Eastern influences in Foucault's work. Primarily she sees the obliteration of the self in the remedy to Western systems' ceaseless quest to isolate and peg the self, and to tie this knowable self to an identity, as described by Foucault.

The essay "Foucault's Art of Seeing" by John Rajchman opens with Foucault's startling idea that seeing--vision--"structures thought in advance". The visual representation of thought, of how people have seen their world and then accordingly made sense of it, is tied to their age, their time. So seeing yields different concepts and ways of thinking about a given subject. For example, in the classical age, people grouped plants by their character. Now scientists group them primarily by their surface traits.

Foucault took an interest in how concepts of visualization become embedded in institutional practices, and how ethical and moral judgements of things and people changed with those concepts. It is hard to imagine now that people asked different questions in the past; we tend to think we've always been "logical", that being logical is part of our nature. But being "logical" used to be a moral exercise.

Finally, Rajchman explains how, for Foucault and his philosophical-critical descendents, thinking is a dangerous act. I found this section of Rajchman's essay confusing; is it dangerous because it's always situated and political? because it's tied to moral and ethical consequences? because we, merely by thinking of things, may unknowingly reinforce or change ways of conceiving? Whatever the answer, the aim on the other side of that danger, what Foucault pursued, is a world that is not yet visible.

In "Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault's Post-Auschwitz Ethic", James W. Bernauer addresses Foucault's critics who charge the intellectual giant with advocating an amoral aestheticism. Bernauer begins his defense by recognizing Foucault's resistance to the scientifically-minded life style that presupposes we are knowable and, therefore, decipherable (and, as a consequence, subject to be judged against norms). He seemed to champion humans as sexual, primarily, and so he probed how sexuality came to be thought of as a moral experience. The modern age and its States conceive of citizens as life to be kept alive; Foucault conceived of man as desire.

That power that conceives of us as human souls in a life or death struggle categorizes us, marks our individuality, attaches us to an identity, subjectifies us, and imposes its truth on us. The sciences--the currently dominant producers and venue of true knowledge--"direct both the cognitive enterprise and the technologies for human self-relation". Foucault examined how people "became anxious about this or that," and urges us not to look so hard at what we hope to achieve, but rather what struggles we face.

Again, Foucault's ultimate goal was freedom. He knew there was no escaping knowledge-power-self relations for good, but he also thought that no "configuration" (of thought and power?) should be thought unchangeable.