'... the public realm, as the common world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time'.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
With these words Hannah Arendt issued a vibrant challenge to the 'unworldliness' she felt had pervaded the mass society of late industrial capitalism, establishing the conditions for the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Arendt's thinking on the need to maintain a shared 'world' continues to stimulate and provoke thought. In The Human Condition, she suggests that the common world we share is manifested in the spaces between us, akin to a table which both relates and separates us, gathers us together and yet prevents us falling over each other.[1] This article examines the relationship between Arendt's vigilantly anti-totalitarian concept of political worldliness and its controversial issue in her notorious and exhilarating hybrid of reportage, sociological inquiry, hermeneutic character-study, and historical narrative, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[2] A successor to the groundbreaking The Origins of Totalitarianism,[3] Eichmann in Jerusalem continues to problematize theories that ascribe the absolute motivating role of wilful evil and ideological zealotry to the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide. Arendt prefers to combine structural analysis of the processes of modernization with a differentiated hermeneutic grasp of its resultant psychological and social 'types', the rootless 'mass man', the dutiful philistine, the fanatic, the adventurous bohemian, their various modes of existence characterized by an impoverished sensibility and inability to interact with aFend wider civil society. Eschewing the externalities of conventional political science, Arendt's historicist methodology is immanently focused, anticipating the post-Foucauldian focus on discourse analysis and cultural imaginaries as potent nodes of power and its reproduction.
There is, I think, a strong worldly investment emanating from Arendt's insistence on cultural typologies. Both The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem militate against mythologizing or transcendentalizing the Holocaust as a universalizable icon of unfathomable evil, or localizing its significance as either a peculiarly German problem -- the aberration of a zealous fascist elite -- or simply a question of a barbaric, gentile anti-Semitism. Hence Arendt's caustic attitude towards the mise en scène of Adolf Eichmann's trial, the anti-diasporic and anti-gentile Zionist lesson the Israeli establishment hoped the trial would teach about the Holocaust. Indignant about any attempt to make Nazism and the Holocaust separable as objects of moralization or ideological triumphalism for the West, Arendt insists that political extremism emerges from modern ways of life, the erosion of the capacity for imagining oneself as a member of a civil society with plural modes of association, fluid identities and sub-cultural differences. Beyond any ideology or logic of history, a healthy politics will need to address its capacity to embrace plurality, its comportment towards community, and its sensitivity to difference.
In what follows I argue that Peter Novick's recent The Holocaust in American Life converses with and reprises an Arendtian commitment to representing the Holocaust in ways that respect civic pluralism rather than sectarian ends.[4] Novick evinces a wry scepticism about the paranoia, ethnocentric insularism, and sectarian complacency discursively produced by contemporary evocations and institutional memorializations of the Holocaust in the United States. Acute about the present political investments of historical discourses, Novick subtly suggests that a communal imaginary dominated by an atrocity as singular as the Holocaust will find itself in an atavistic limbo, incapable of dealing with contemporary social and perspectival differences and positively dangerous in its attitude towards geo-political relationships.
I also discuss other recent literature on Holocaust representation, principally Norman G. Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry and Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide.[5] Both texts illuminate Novick's contention that an as yet little acknowledged culture war is being fought over representations of the Holocaust, between forces for ethnocentric insularity and humanist progressivism, Zionism and Diaspora, the discursively powerful and the powerless, statist imperatives and post-colonial critique.
Arendt: The Political and the Social
A resurgence of critical interest in Arendt's ideas has unsettled the dismissive critique which charged her with an elitist nostalgia for the politics of ancient Greece, engendering a fatal split between the 'political' and the 'social' in her thinking. I take it for granted that Arendt's consistent desire to separate politics from social issues such as wealth redistribution, equal access to education, housing, desegregation of schooling, or the feminist desire to make the private realm political, and other issues that left liberal politics hold dear, is untenable, elitist, and naive.[6] However, I think it is worth trying to comprehend why, in works like The Human Condition and On Revolution, Arendt went to such pains to delimit a distinct arena of experiential possibilities and inspirational activity called the 'political', from social needs and grievances. For Arendt, genuine political activity has its own genealogy of inherited oratorical skills and performative personae; it should not be made a function of modish public opinion or ideological programs.
In The Human Condition, Arendt finds her political ideal in the ancient Greek polis, a public assembly where propertied equals can debate issues of moment. Here particular perspectives must publicize themselves as themes of universal concern by processes of persuasion and negotiation. The political specificity of the Athenian polis is its capacity for spontaneous actions, decisions, and mobilizations of various kinds. It is a lively forum that incarnates both deliberation and pragmatic compromise, and a capacity for individual excellence and distinction. In this robust sphere of interactions, the decision-making process is not bureaucratized or disciplined along party and factional lines. Arendt imagines a fluid mode of governance that is yet to be functionalized as mere administration, economy, or 'housekeeping' in Arendt's contemptuous terms.[7] Like the ancient Greek civic forum, the agora, the polis is a realm where language in its very performance can effect 'action', indeed can be reckoned a political activity in its own right. As we shall see, the relationship of the political subject to symbolic forms remains a crucial theme in Arendt's corpus, receiving maximum extrapolation in the psychological reflections of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Rhetoric and the Public Sphere
The active political language Arendt seeks is, surprisingly enough, rhetorically adept, emanating from a culture whose elites were educated and trained in the persuasive arts, and where a certain degree of formal variety and esprit in speech delivery was demanded. Reversing our usual conceptions of rhetoric as manipulative and/or clichéd language, Arendt follows Cicero in valorizing rhetoric as the basis for an acculturated political and legal praxis, a civil science and republican virtue. Rhetoric, in this non-utilitarian sense of the word, provides the necessary social skills for a heady interactive public space such as the democratic assembly, the agora or marketplace. Rhetorical training for participation in these spaces inculcates the art of vigorous argument, sociable persuasion, exercises in perspective, and a delight in controversy between equals, imbuing public spiritedness and a desire for civic participation.
Yet rhetoric balances the continuities of humanist training with a radical potential. The capacity for great rhetoric to transform likely political outcomes and generate new and dangerous mobilizations of will has been a subject of fascination in rhetorical theory and aesthetics. The ambiguous possibilities of a labile, rhetoricized public space is powerfully theatricalized in Antony's ironic speech to the Romans in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Brutus' selflessness and artless idealism engenders murderous violence, thematically related to his incapacity to meet the formal argumentative demands and persuasive skills of political rhetoric, powerfully embodied in Antony's incendiary ironies.[8]
Suffice to say here that Arendt's public-political ideal, which marginalizes motivating forces such as social inequality and party ideology, rebuking bureaucratic and technocratic modes of governance, owes much to her tenacious desire to revivify a politics driven by a mixture of rhetorical linguistic initiatives and robust republican oratorical virtues.[9] In a rhetoricized habitus the political subject is related to and separated from others in multiple and shifting ways, free from reified economic and ideological identities.
Arendt draws from a German intellectual tradition, including figures like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, which valorized the putative political purity of the Greek polis, its freedom from mundane social necessities such as labour and reproduction, its attainment of freedoms unknown in mass societies that dignify labour and a levelling productivist ethic. In the hierarchical and authoritarian society of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany, a labile participatory space open to intellectual provocations and multiple perspectives held enormous appeal and projective power for a relatively insignificant intelligentsia seeking to engender new forms of cultural capital.
In The Human Condition, Arendt's concern is with the possibility of natality in politics, or those activities which engender the 'birth' of new trajectories; of actions, linguistic or otherwise, which do more than attain limited ends. These trajectories enact a 'work' of 'world-constitution' rather than a finite labour that can only accord with the exigencies of 'necessity'. Activity or the vita activa, in Arendt's conception, is intercepted by a world of conflicting agendas and concerns, its significance and effects, once intercepted by historical process, is not in essence determined by its 'author' or 'producer', but transformed upon entry into the shared world of the public. Here Arendt inverts the theoreticism of the western philosophical tradition, suggesting the intangible, unpredictable, and yet sociably effective, even 'revelatory' possibilities of action and speech as opposed to the vita contempliva, the contemplative life.[10] The innermost possibility of action is manifested as a 'work' which can disclose political agency, revealing an as yet indeterminate 'who' rather than the 'what' of finite political ends.
In the culture of the ancient Athenian polis and the Roman republic of the first century AD, the 'who' which energetically disclosed itself was often the political orator whose formal excellence enhanced institutional genealogies of communication skills and continually renewed recognized forms of deliberation and argument.
Within an Arendtian politics, the rhetor's power of public address, stylistic felicity, personal distinction, and inventive reasoning augmented the body politic, volatile and renewing political and legal thought through the luminosity of public performances. The firmly delimited political sphere of antiquity was, then, a forum for greatness in word and (or as) deed, possessing a 'power' that continually enriched the public realm with new 'appearances' and natal human 'artifacts'. The specific meaning of each deed in a truly public-political realm, argues Arendt, can lie only in the 'performance itself and neither in its motivation or achievement'.[11] The question remained for Arendt, how is this dynamic political instance to be recreated under modern conditions?
The Revolutionary Power of Political Sociability
We move to On Revolution, and its concern to comprehend revolutionary politics in experiential or phenomenological terms. Arendt reverts back to the founding revolutionary moments of the American Republic in order to assert her version of a 'positive', participatory politics.[12] It would be a mistake, argues Arendt, to think of America's political liberalism in negative terms, as freedom of movement or freedom from unjustified restraint in the pursuit of property. In the parlance of Arendt's phenomenological essentialism, such negative freedoms are the result of processes of liberation and emancipation from oppression; they are not the 'actual content of freedom'.[13] The positive content of freedom is never simply civil rights or the amelioration of social and economic grievances, but 'participation in public affairs and admission to the public realm'.[14] Political freedom as participation does not so much consolidate as transform the animus of a collective cause. Arendt is enamoured by the American Revolution's transfiguration of its initial civic grievance, the argument for 'no taxation without representation' into a revolutionary possibility, the foundation of a new republican body politic and a declaration of inalienable human rights. The crucible of this radicalization of purpose in the leading revolutionary figures, Arendt argues, was the experience of participatory freedoms:
... the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing which proved necessary to drive this claim to its logical conclusion: independent government and the foundation of a new body politic.[15]
The constitutional stability of the American republic would then owe much to Arendt's paradigmatic theatre of pragmatic deliberation and compromise coupled with the capacity for individual distinction and linguistic initiative. American constitutional ratification arose from the relatively grass-roots level of intermediate district and state assemblies as well as municipal fora, giving plenty of scope for both local initiative and compromise in the formation of the American body politic. If, in the mass societies of modernity, unmediated political assemblies are no longer possible, Arendt suggests we emphasize the experiential possibilities of local, intermediate public organizations that exist in reciprocal co-ordination with larger representative bodies. In local assemblies it is the 'pathos of novelty' and the extraordinary experience of the power of collective purpose that produces an epiphany, an unprecedented experience of the political in its very performance.
A political measure freed from ideological specificity is free to roam in its comparative associations, and this is what Arendt does, reinventing the local, participatory power of America's constitutional assemblies in the revolutionary councils and soviets that emerged in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Germany in the wake of the First World War. While operating as spontaneously formed grass-roots spheres in which equality of participation is guaranteed, Arendt argues that factory councils and the Russian Soviets nevertheless gave rise to an elite of individuals whose political virtues were not in themselves of working-class or 'social' origins, so revivifying her favoured genealogy of skilful, civic-minded political orators.
Engendered in the communicative crucible of that 'incessant talk' which alone saves political organizations from the 'futility' of instrumentality, these political leaders disclosed active political virtues -- 'personal integrity', an enlarged capacity for 'judgment', and 'physical courage'.[16] Far from the mundane, if successful, qualities of the manager or administrator, the party-political hack, or the autocratic centralist, Arendt romanticizes the failed revolutionary as the natal 'who' disclosed by political action, a kind of self-consuming Byronic hero. Arendt's preferred political agent is not ideologically doctrinaire, but a psycho-social persona stretching from the republican rhetor to America's founding father to worker's revolutionary. Such rare political beings, as opposed to private citizens with their economic motivations, their social needs and prejudices, are born of the public realm, of the 'light which exhibits each deed enacted within its boundaries, in the very visibility to which it exposes all those who enter it'. [17]
Freedom as a Cultural Persona
I have so far suggested Arendt has established a political standard that is phenomenological and performative as opposed to ideologically binarized. It is a hallmark of Arendt's methodology that she eschews convenient categorizations of the Right or Left in favour of a heterogeneous set of themes that illuminate worldly comportment, linguistic sensibility and their political consequences. In her analysis of the Jewish 'pariah' who skilfully inhabits Enlightenment gentile salon society in order to perform cultural difference, Arendt had signalled that only performative élan and a will towards politicizing particularist distinctions could defy racism and assimilationism. In so doing she rebuked the Jewish 'parvenu' whose blend of craven denial of difference and envy of the mainstream engendered a narrow obsession with private interest and normative identification.[18]
When confronting the context of the emergence of totalitarianism, Arendt is concerned with how the natal experiential possibilities and vivaciously performative personae that are engendered by public political participation are undermined by nineteenth-century developments in America and Europe. Arendt's inquiry into the 'original intentions' of the founders of the American republic to ensure a participatory body politic, comparatively illuminated contemporary America's subjection of the political sphere to private initiative and economistic imperatives. Modern America had brought about the negative liberalism and managerialist governmentality, invaded by private 'social values', which Arendt so greatly feared. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt decried the bourgeois attempt, dating from the nineteenth century, to collapse political power into privileged 'social' networks, assuming an identity of political, economic and social power. Significantly, such a possibility gained ground in the bourgeoisie's experience of imperialist adventurism, racism, and lawless expropriation and exploitation in the nineteenth-century 'scramble for Africa'. According to Arendt the peripheral colonial ventures of the European bourgeoisie suggested the possibility of similarly anti-democratic exploits in the metropolitan centre. In this sense, Arendt suggests, 'the bourgeoisie's political philosophy was always "totalitarian", the desire for political institutions to serve as a facade for private interests, the dawn of an instrumentalist mentality'.[19]
Against a Politics of Sentiment
The subordination of politics to popular sovereignty as manifested in the idea of the 'will of the people' or 'public opinion' held similarly few attractions for Arendt, determined to inscribe both bourgeois and populist comportment as the overweening 'social' values preparatory to totatalitarianism. If the private greed of the bourgeois sensibility scorns the manifest forms of democratic politics, the French Revolution stands accused of engendering a 'boundless sentiment' which sought equally to overwhelm political articulations. In Robespierre, Arendt discovers the fatal attempt to embody the Rousseauean idea of political power as emanating from a volonté générale, or popular will. The social exigency of poverty and 'biological need' qua hunger, Arendt argues, radicalized Robespierre's mentality, now suffused with compassion for the poor, hatred towards the aristocracy and immense suspicion of the legalism of the bourgeois constitutionalists. Politics as the instrument of the 'compassionate zeal' of popular sentiment, Arendt argues, will tend to consume the distancing mechanisms of persuasion, negotiation and compromise; it will plangently overwhelm the continuity of institutions and procedural forms.
In an adventurous discussion of the dialogical Grand Inquisitor scene in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Arendt wonders whether Jesus' infinite compassion and love, with its desire to transcend the generalizations of law and judgment in the redemptive appreciation of human singularity, can ever found political institutions. In Arendt's reading, Jesus' sublime lack of 'worldliness' condemns him to inarticulateness, an unwillingness to offer demonstrative reasons in the face of the Grand Inquisitor's anguished interrogation of the political effectiveness of love. Like the completely innocent, 'natural' being of Billy Budd in Melville's eponymous tale, also discussed by Arendt, the 'selfless' being of pure sentiment or idealism is reduced to the inarticulateness of gesture, be it the loving kiss of Jesus or the ironically murderous violence of Billy Budd.
Fearful of the capacity for compassion, love and innocent selflessness to abolish those 'political' virtues born of worldly communications, political and legal proceduralism and nimble public performances, Arendt insists on an appreciation of a diversity of civic and political personae, a sensitivity to the 'pathos of distance', a refusal to simply abolish differentiating social categories and political forms.[20] Wary of the sentimental/fanatical psycho-social type born under conditions of acute social distress, Arendt maintained that politics could never hope to solve the 'social question' of poverty and biological need by itself, suggesting that the distribution of wealth and access to education were 'administrative questions'. Again, this approach, ignoring the irreducibly political nature of distributionist bureaucracies and the entirely unstable zone between social and political causes, has been subject to salutary critiques that I won't rehearse here. I have, however, attempted to reflect on why this infelicitous categorical dichotomy keeps emerging in Arendt's thought, namely as a retrospective critical antidote to the proto-totalitarian conflation of political and social power. For Arendt, the absolutism of populist politics, born with the emergence of mass movements in the French Revolution, supplants the recognition of a myriad of interests and perspectives, those 'worldly spaces between men'. It replaces a respect for institutions and their forms with an absolutist meta-physic of direct and violent action against the putatively 'unrepresentative' institutions of law and politics, the continuities of memory and the legal symbolism that they preserve.[21] In her engagingly ironic reading, Arendt suggests that Robespierre engaged in a grotesque mimesis of bourgeois totalitarian aspirations from the moment that his paranoia was able to detect only hidden hypocrisy and secret social alliances in constitutional liberalism.
Moreover, as with her allegorized suspicion of divinity (Jesus) and nature (Billy Budd) as anti-political dispositions, Arendt heaps scorn on Marx's instrumental subjection of the experiential promise of spontaneous political uprisings such as the Paris Commune of 1870 to naturalized, scientifically predictive laws of class conflict and social necessity. Marx, like Robespierre, is indicted for his disregard for the 'surface' parliamentary and juridical manifestation of bourgeois hegemony. The totalitarian animus, Arendt suggests, is to be found whenever a distancing respect is lost for the manifest 'visibility' and plurality of social conditions and the performative 'who', the public personae (juridical, executive and legislative) who form the basis for political persuasion and negotiation.[22]
The Origins of Totalitarianism
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt theorizes Nazi Germany and Stalinism as the apotheosis of a privative, instrumentalist, anti-public-political disposition. In the heterogeneous idea of the 'totalitarian' regime, Arendt found a configuration of attitudes and enabling conditions that aided these regimes to attack human relationships and political institutions in their recognizably plural or manifestly 'visible' form. Both criticized and celebrated for its willingness to 'get inside' the mentality of fascism, The Origins avoids trite moralism in its ambitious attempt to recover the strategies, propagandized fictions, and desired sensibilities that help promote the totalitarian fantasy of the 'total domination' of social and psychic life.
Arendt's keenest insight is into the kind of disoriented, or disarticulated mental topography that totalitarianism seeks to engender. She discusses Nazism's strategy of embodying the traditionally polarized political interests of nationalism and socialism within one grandiloquent rubric. In its dismantling of and replication of 'interest' groups such as lawyers' and teachers' associations, its destruction of the multi-party system, and re-creation of a pietist language of fate and eternity in terms of a class/racial logic, the totalitarian strategy of public-sphere obliteration and its perverse mimesis attempts to occupy completely the received landscape of diverse social and professional interests. Totalitarianism wishes to annihilate plural modes of interestedness and discursive interaction. The attempt to obliterate the formal manifestations of difference in terms of diverse social and political personae is read by Arendt as a war on the political recognition of argument and opinion, enabled as it is by a world of 'visible' differences.
One of the features of Nazi anti-Semitism which made it an instrument of total domination, Arendt argues, is that it was no longer to be considered an arguable, or experiential matter, but a pervasive metaphysical reality requiring counter-action on a global scale.[23] An insidious and always meta-physical evil, the 'Jew's' 'apparent' public-political manifestation as bourgeois expropriator or socialist agitator was always a ruse in Hitler's paranoid imaginary, a mere facade hiding a transnational social conspiracy for Jewish world domination. All seeming disagreement and signs of difference in public life are mystified by the Nazis, converted into natural, social and psychological sources. A vocabulary of deviance, degeneration and decadence negates the empirical visibility of political/ideological difference; a political vocabulary with its institutional vestiges of agonistic respect for other political agents, is replaced by monolithic 'social' values; now the totalitarian regime no longer feels any need to 'refute opposing arguments', preferring death to persuasion, and terror to conviction.[24]
As a means of generating a conception of power which does not rely on verifiable or arguable forms, Arendt explains Hitler's steadfast refusal to nominate the form of government his regime embodied. Only the indeterminate and unarguable 'will' of the Führer in its reciprocation with the aspirations of the German people would be allowed to underscore political power in the Third Reich. The mystical legitimacy of Hitler, moreover, was further removed from the sphere of rational argument by the gnomic repetition that he was always right, always would be right, and that the test of what he had done would only be revealed in centuries to come, again removing political decision from the 'visible' experience of his contemporaries into the realm of the visionary/prophetic.[25] Even the party-program of National Socialism itself, as an articulated and 'visible' reference point is tacitly ignored, a shift from the party-political to the metaphysical destiny of the 'movement'. What totalitarianism wishes to dispense with is 'common sense', which has its pre-condition in continuities of law, civic association, and institutional memory. To establish a reign of terror, the positive laws of constitutional government, with their ratified boundaries and established channels of communication between people, are nullified -- replaced by unarguable laws of nature and history. Organic and Manichean models of community and conflict supplant those legal and political vocabularies which preserve a field of guaranteed modes of relationship and separation in the realm of human affairs.
The outcome of this will to complete domination, in its desire to abolish all constraining distances established by positive law and plural interests, was the annihilation of the 'juridical person in man'. Removing the concentration camp from the observable penal system, converting those most innocent of normal crimes into the most profoundly guilty and maltreated, deemed entirely outside the law, encourages a recognition of arbitrariness and lawlessness as the norm, a psychic recognition of the fatal possibility that all is now possible.[27] Thus the 'radical evil' of totalitarianism in Arendt's terms, is engendered in the will to simply abolish human plurality even in psychic terms, to engender psycho-social types capable of limitless violence in as much as their thinking can no longer negotiate a common, visible world of plurality, difference and multiple interests.
It is a feature of 'mass society' Arendt argues, that its social and economic upheaval produces a certain superfluity and rootlessness, people who no longer feel bound by common interests of class, geography or civic/professional association and the continuities of purpose that they preserve. Totalitarianism avoids usual party-political appeals to locatable interests and predicates itself on the 'mass man' whose loss of a common world has disengaged their beliefs from 'everything visible', now willing to discredit 'the reality of their own experience'. Distrusting their eyes and ears, which receive an input of 'apparent' plurality, they are prey to their imaginations, which may be caught by 'anything at once universal and consistent in itself', the 'big lie' or the rhetoric of a 'two thousand year Reich'.[28]
A Typology of Totalitarianism
To do its bidding, totalitarianism will seek to co-ordinate two quite different personae, the fanatical idealist and adventurous bohemian, the youthful stormtrooper or the Nazi leader like Goebbels, both ardent followers of the Führer's capricious will and visionary propaganda. The idealist and bohemian hates the mediocre norms and duties of bourgeois society and searches for the heroic, nihilistic and exhilarating; yet totalitarianism, unable to simply extinguish prior mores all at once, also instrumentalizes the narrow-minded philistine who organizes the bureaucratic machines of domination and extermination. The philistine is capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes are well organized and have 'assumed the appearance' of routine jobs.[29] It was for the philistine, dominated by private imperatives, that a sanitized language of 'final solutions' and 'special measures' was created to dissimulate hellish violence as a routine bureaucratic task.
Eichmann In Jerusalem
So far, I have argued that Arendt's unusual, genealogical treatment of the 'political' enacts a transhistorical sphere of experience, activity, skill and desire, ideally resistant to permeation by 'social' values and affects that are either mundane in their instrumentalism or boundless in their sentiment. Arendt therefore invests less in the ideologies of the Right or Left, predicated as they are on 'social questions', than in the institutional and dispositional possibilities for spontaneous or novel political collectivities. For Arendt, these conditions found in numerous historical moments, are a flexible mixture of constitutional conservatism and novel imagination, negotiating and persuasive capacities coupled with a will towards distinction and achievement within a worldly plurality. The problem of totalitarianism, for Arendt, inheres in the way it radicalizes those aspects of bourgeois massculture which have already attenuated the sphere of public participation as capable of embodying a plurality of skilled public-political personae.
I would suggest that we continue to read Arendt's analytical questions from an 'immanent', typologically focused perspective once we encounter her most tendentious and controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was initially published in a series of reports for the New Yorker journal on the 1961 Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann for 'crimes against the Jewish People'. I would suggest that it is not Adolf Eichmann the empirical individual, but Eichmann the hybrid persona of totalitarianism, the anti-type to the 'political' 'who' with all their capacities of novelty, spontaneity, pathetic distance and communicative élan, that intrigues Arendt. As a persona at the convergence of traditional petit-bourgeois philistinism and a new form of nihilistic idealism, the analysis of Eichmann confronts us with the sheer 'thoughtlessness' of familiar normative discourses and their possible transformation into something horrific and unprecedented. At the juncture of idiosyncratic singularity and mass conformism, Eichmann's character portrait encourages involuntary movements of identification and revulsion, relation and separation on the reader's behalf.
Arendt begins her portrait of Eichmann with a biographical exploration of a rootless, déclassé son of a middle-class family, whose inability to identify with his numerous jobs, the last as a travelling salesman, led him to join the Nazi 'movement' in an attempt to fill in a vacuum of purpose and direction. An upwardly mobile, career-focused parvenu, disaffected with a bourgeois society that shunned his mediocre status and attainments, his motivations for joining the SS typically lacked the conviction of a public interest or common cause. Eichmann is a version of Arendt's atomized 'mass man', a philistine dominated by the instrumentalism of private initiative, whose only worldly attachments are to power and success as embodied by an adventurously expansionist state.[30] The philistine disposition of Eichmann, deprived of sociable interaction and its pluralist recognitions, lends itself to semiotic solipsisms, a complete inability to utter 'a single sentence that is not a cliché', or stock phrase.[31]
In the philosophically stern terminology of Arendt, Eichmann's aphasia, his inability to 'speak', is closely connected with his inability to 'think', which means to think from the standpoint of somebody else. Living in a circumscribed imaginary of normatively sanctioned, symbolic manoeuvres, Eichmann continues even under heated courtroom interrogation and powerful testaments to incredible suffering, to be 'safeguarded' against the words and presence of others, and hence against 'reality as such'.[32] Consistent with that mixture of narrow, privative self-interest and profound conformism that characterized the parvenu in Arendt's typology, Eichmann's criminal activities did not disturb his conscience for particular reasons. As he noted the zeal and eagerness with which 'good society' everywhere reacted as he did, Eichmann's conscience spoke with a 'respectable voice', that of 'respectable society'. Thus the transformation of Eichmann into a criminal of unprecedented proportions is enabled by that incremental destruction of legality and inversion of social ethics that creates a 'world-upside down', a 'total moral collapse in respectable European society', from which the unimaginative philistine can establish no critical distance.[33] Here we have in nuce, Arendt's methodological procedure, an analysis of the linguistic subject in its reciprocal response to the breakdown of perspective and communication in a completely de-politicized society.
Engaging the services of the atomized, philistine 'mass man' such as Eichmann, the Nazi movement allowed them to retain their conscience by routinizing their activities with a sanitized, coded form of language, the Sprachregelung or 'language rules'.[34] These rules, which allowed the bureaucrat the self-importance of a 'bearer of secrets', deployed terms such as 'final solution', 'evacuation', and 'special treatment' to, in Arendt's terms, 'normalize' the grisly work of mass killing. Eichmann's susceptibility to catch-words and platitudes, his incapacity to make the sociable adjustments of ordinary speech, made him an ideal subject for these 'language rules'. In her observance of Eichmann, Arendt felt that she also caught a glimpse of some 'idealist' traits in, for example, Eichmann's use of self-affecting 'elating' clichés, such as his grandiloquent end-of-war claim that he would 'jump into his grave laughing' about the murder of the Jews being on his conscience, a boast only apparently contradicted by his self-important statement in the Jerusalem court that he would 'gladly hang himself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth'; or in his great respect for the Zionist leader of the Hungarian Jewish Council Rudolf Kastner, a fellow 'idealist' willing to sacrifice people and resources for the sake of an idea, the preservation of the best 'biological material' . What matters in Arendt's analytic, is the consistent, if delusionary, feelings of intoxication and elation that propel the 'mass man' along in an automatic fashion, regardless of ideological sea-changes.
Evil, then, can no longer be located in some kind of demonic or incomprehensible agency, the will to defy all moral norms. Rather the 'word and thought defying banality of evil' is a double-edged phrase. It captures the mixture of the platitudinous and the utterly fantastical and nihilistic, which Arendt located as the more disturbing aspect of that evil which incrementally and without purposive intent, can spread like a 'fungus' and lay waste to civilized life. The utilization of an unimaginative or aperspectival mind under totalitarianism is enabled by the loss of discursive communication and political sociability in the society that engenders it. 'It was the most banal motives -- a consciousness of duty and powerful self-identification as an honest job-holder -- not especially wicked ones (like sadism or the wish to humiliate or the will to power) which made Eichmann such a frightful evil-doer'.[35]
Arendt's conception of evil shifts decisively from theological considerations of its radicality or conventional moralizations of sinfulness or sadism, towards an engagement with a broad spectrum of political and communicative deficiencies which relate to the comportment of bourgeois, romantic and idealist sensibilities in a mass era of eroded common interests.
In the 'terrifying normality' of Eichmann, Arendt had found that sometimes contradictory blend of bourgeois philistine and sentimentally self-consistent psycho-social traits analysed in her previous work; modes of affect and comportment that result from the diminution of a textured public medium and which can produce horrific results when instrumentalized by totalitarian regimes: the overweening ambitions of private life divorced from the collective interests of a common world, the philistine association of virtue with normative conduct, the self-identification of the job-holder with limited instrumental ends ('labour' as opposed to worldly 'work'), the 'mass man's' adventurist desires for intoxicating attacks on traditional moral constraints and public interests, and a deprived imagination and discursive ineptitude which ignores tangible or visible plurality in human affairs.
Appropriating the Holocaust
I have been arguing that Eichmann in Jerusalem was an instalment in Arendt's ongoing inquiry into the erosion of the political as a robust communicative disposition in mass modernity. Arendt's desire to encourage a broad conversation about our own political deficiencies in a nationalistic and capitalist era is a crucial factor in her vehement opposition in Eichmann in Jerusalem to the hidden pedagogical and geo-political imperatives behind Eichmann's arrest and trial. Throughout this work, Arendt is pitiless on the subject of Israel's attempt to appropriate the Holocaust for moral and political advantage.
Arendt writes sardonically of the 'lessons' David Ben-Gurion, Israel's Prime Minister, hoped the Jewish and non-Jewish world would learn from this 'show-trial'. Gentiles, according to Ben-Gurion must be cognizant that Judaism had always faced a hostile world, while Jews must be inculcated with the lesson that the moral degeneration of the diaspora had enabled them to go to their death like sheep, illustrating the difference between Israeli heroism and traditional Jewish submissive meekness. Furthermore, the new 'Sabra' youth of Israel must forego complacency and remember what had happened to the Jewish people.
This 'Jewish consciousness' that Ben-Gurion, through his surrogate, the trial's prosecuting attorney Gideon Hausner, sought to inculcate, could only in Arendt's mind, encourage a paranoid and indiscriminate sensitivity to a 'ubiquitous and eternal' anti-Semitism. Such an anti-modernist disposition was, according to Arendt, the most 'potent ideological factor' in the Zionist movement; for Arendt it was a mentality in dire need of reform because its undifferentiated and omnipresent fear of the Gentile had enabled Zionist co-operation with the Nazis in Germany and occupied Hungary, under-estimating their enemies because 'they somehow thought all Gentiles were alike'.[36]
In a thematic discussion, Arendt critiqued Zionism for its inability to conceive of the Jews as a people among peoples; as a nation state Israel was now dependent on a 'plurality', no longer permitting an age-old and religiously anchored dichotomy of Jew and Gentile. In 1945, Arendt had published an essay in the Jewish journal Menorah titled 'Zionism Reconsidered', reproaching the 1944 resolution of the American Zionist Congress to demand an 'undivided' Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine, for its unwillingness to acknowledge the rights of, and negotiate with, Palestinians.[37] The unwillingness to mention the Arab residents of Palestine suggested they would be forced to choose between voluntary emigration and second-class citizenship. Zionism's unwillingness to create a pluralist 'homeland' with local self-government and municipal and rural councils with Jewish/Arab co-operation, suggested that it had assimilated to the ethnocentrism and 'pseudo-sovereignty' of the nation state, a disastrous repetition of history. In Eichmann In Jerusalem, Arendt is sardonically astonished by Gideon Hausner's trial criticism of the 1935 Nuremberg laws in Germany against racial inter-marriage, given contemporary Israel's interdiction against the marriage of Jew and non-Jew, and its consideration of the children of mixed marriage as legal bastards. Israeli society, both secular and religious, was tacitly agreed upon the undesirability of a 'constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelt out'.[38]
Arendt envisaged that Israel would now continue on in the imperialist vein that Theodor Herzl had imagined for it in the nineteenth century, as a broker for powerful western powers, and a 'beacon' of European culture and productivity in the benighted Orient. In thematic terms, Arendt felt the nation of Israel had forfeited its capacity for Jews to act as 'pariahs' in the world, performatively articulating difference and mobile political agency within a plural field of relations; that it had become a narrow, a-perspectival parvenu identified with existing forms of power, enacting the insidious and constitutionally unverifiable 'social values' of a majoritarian nation-state in ways quite similar to its putatively antithetical European fore bears. In terms of the enormous question of representing the Holocaust, Eichmann in Jerusalem continues Arendt's strategy of displacing its significance from easy moralism or ideological triumphalism.
Peter Novick: The Holocaust as Consensual Symbol
In The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick ponders the extraordinarily vehement ad feminam attack on Arendt following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Novick cites the contemporary reaction: 'Self-Hating Jewess Writes Pro-Eichmann Series for New Yorker Magazine' screamed one Jewish newspaper, an 'evil book' claimed the Anti-Defamation League.[39] Novick felt that with the individualized Nazi portrait of Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt had contravened comfortable verities and protocols. By questioning the deeply rooted image of Eichmann as a 'monstrous sadist and driven anti-Semite', she had consequently de-emphasized the role of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust. In her portrait of the collaborative and similarly 'idealistic' behaviour of the Judenräten or Jewish Councils during the war, Arendt had disrupted the comfortable demarcation of 'pure evil and pure virtue', active malevolence and passive victimhood.[40] Arendt failed to 'abide by these norms' suggests Novick, instead 'stressing complexity and ambiguity' and a 'sardonic mode of expression which rubbed many the wrong way'.[41]
Novick's own investment in problematizing the instrumentalization of the Holocaust and the consequent loss of inter-group communication and relational nuances, is made manifest throughout this challenging work. The only wisdom to be gained from contemplating an historical event, Novick explains, is 'confronting it in all its complexity and its contradictions; the ways in which it resembles other events to which it might be compared as well as the ways it differs from them'.[42] Novick's Arendtian inflected drive in encountering the 'past in all its messiness' is to bring the Holocaust closer to home, to make its significance again unfamiliar and disturbing.[43] In his own witty and sceptical tone he wishes to confront a past that has been 'shaped ... so that inspiring lessons will emerge', to critique the idea of the Holocaust as a 'consensual symbol' underpinning a normative identity politics.[44]
Novick's inquiry runs along a number of fault lines. He discusses the integrationist ethos of both American Jewish organizations and non-Jewish America in the Cold War period; the notion that the Jews, though prominent, were one of a number of victims of the Nazis in the Second World War; that their catastrophe illuminated the evils of Nazi and now Stalinist totalitarianism; the need for humanist universalism and national unity. From this historical injunction to humanist pluralism, Novick is then concerned with the emergence in the 1960s of a transcendentally distinct object of 'collective memory', called 'the Holocaust', invoked as a 'consensual symbol' for ethnocentric conclusions, and pro-Israeli barracking. Novick discusses the assimilationist tendencies of American Jewish organizations throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, their unwillingness to claim the Holocaust as a 'Jewish issue', their downplaying of the prominence of Jews in the ranks of DPs or Displaced Persons arriving in America in the late 1940s, their Cold-War desire to control anti-German feeling in grass-roots Jewish communities, their repeated calls to portray Jews as good, assimilated American citizens, as soldiers and victorious athletes.
Indicating that most American Jews look for the 'official sanction' of Jewish organizations for 'appropriate responses' to the Holocaust and 'public communal emblems' of its significance, Novick emphasizes the crucial importance of the rightward or 'insular' direction taken by establishment Jewry in America since the waning of the Cold War and Israel's victorious 1967 war against neighbouring Arab states.[45] With the relaxation of Cold War pressure for homogeneity and the impressive display of expansionist military power by the Jewish state, now a geo-political ally in American eyes, Jewish organizations began to instrumentalize the Holocaust for aggressively particularist ends. Viewed now as a redemptive guarantee of the Jewish people's covenant with their God, so threatened by the abject horror of the Holocaust, Israel's existence, putatively born of the expiatory support of the western world, provided proof of the West's earlier guilt, and the necessity of its continuing support for Israel, come what may.[46] Israel, Ben-Gurion claimed, was the 'heir of the six million ... the only heir'.[47]
One can see the outlines of Arendtian themes here, a profound scorn for a self-serving Jewish officialdom, as an assimilationist parvenu becomes aggressive idealist, always abiding close to new sources of power; and the effect of colonial expansion and insularity on the American Jewish psyche, engendering a greed for politics as an instrument for unannounced imperatives and self-aggrandizement.
'Language matters' suggests Novick, beginning a discourse analysis of the psycho-social effects of consistently invoking and moralizing an event as extreme as the Holocaust.[48] It is questionable in discursive terms, as to whether the 'very extremity of the Holocaust ... [can] provide lessons applicable in our everyday world'.[49] Novick concludes that Holocaust invocation since the 1960s is symptomatic of the 'inward turn of organized American Jewry', indicative of a dangerous 'fortress mentality'.[50] Novick discusses Israel's mobilization of the extreme emotional resonances of the Holocaust, such as Prime Minister Menachem Begin's claim that the PLO was a neo-Nazi organization.[51] Novick questions the anti-diaspora paranoia generated by organized tours of Auschwitz for American Jewish students, with armed guards emphasizing the youths' danger in anti-Semitic Poland, celebrated as achieving a 'Zionist perspective which many hours in suburban Jewish classrooms could not transmit'.[52] Novick suggests that by investing the complex issues of the Middle East with the 'moral clarity' of the Holocaust, disaster inevitably follows. Prodded by the widespread conception that Arabs are latter-day Nazis -- the next incarnation of the Gentile war of Jewish extermination -- Holocaust-obsessed Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre, decides it is a good idea to kill Arabs before they kill Jews.[53]
In America, Novick is bemused by journalist Norman Podhoretz's suggestion that a journalist who supported black community control of schools was one of those who wanted to 'shove the Jewish people back into the gas ovens'.[54] All this, remarks Novick, in a comparative golden age for Jews, the single most successful ethnic group in America, in an age where states such as Iowa, with almost no Jewish population were electing Jewish senators. This collapse of 'common sense' and its concomitant emphasis on the defence of distinctively Jewish interests, has 'so far proved permanent'.[55] It is the consequence, suggests Novick, of a transition from 'history' to 'myth', from the complex trajectories generated by historical circumstance to the 'eternal truths' appealed to by an ethnocentric obsession with victimhood.
Such elevation of the Holocaust to the paradigmatic instance of genocide and ultimate victimization, can only desensitize, suggests Novick, noting the pains the Clinton administration went to prove that the atrocities being committed in Bosnia were not 'truly genocidal', so justifying their inaction. The collective memorialization of the Holocaust as myth or fetishized secular theology is of grave concern to Novick, whose book updates Arendt's interest in the depoliticization of public discourse.
Holocaust Invocation and the Narrowing of Historiography
As an historian, Novick is aware that the erosion of critical distance and agonistic respect in the American publicsphere has not left historiography untouched. He rebukes Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's thesis in Hitler's Willing Executioners that a murderous German anti-Semitism with Christian roots was the single motivating precondition for the Holocaust. Novick suggests that Goldhagen's unannounced objective is to overturn reflexive post-Arendtian concerns with modernity, the disturbingly normal psychology of the perpetrator of genocide, and the circumstantial workings of the Nazi regime, including its rhetorical appeal. Goldhagen wishes to substitute a particularist emphasis on the supra-historical nature of eliminationist anti-Semitism, its Jewish victims, and the centrality of intentionality as an analytical category.[56]
Novick is similarly impatient with the arguments of prominent genocide scholar Steven Katz who, in The Holocaust in Historical Context, denies that the term genocide is applicable to anything other than the travails of European Jewry in World War II. On the basis of this ethnocentric, self-serving work, Novick notes with irony, Katz was named head of the Washington Holocaust Museum, an institution that has done its best in its short history to marginalize non-Jewish Holocaust aspects of World War II, including the genocidal decimation of more than two-thirds of Europe's gypsy population.[57] Novick suggests that the doctrine of uniqueness, which sits astride all of contemporary Jewish discourse on the Holocaust, dresses its social and geo-politically motivated claim for pre-eminence in suffering, with the dubious guise of scholarly curiosity.[58]
Taking the ideological fixations of American Holocaust invocation to task, Novick's neo-Habermasian themes are the waning of pluralist sensitivities and pragmatic common sense in political, journalistic and scholarly discourse, the disintegration of a community of reason. Novick's nostalgia for a lost common ground is both a strength and a weakness. His book provides a vital critique of the discourses serving an elite-driven sectarianism, yet his interpretative prism is strongly beholden to the logic of the contemporary American culture wars. Novick indicates in his introductory comments that the Holocaust has been put on the American agenda because of a profound paradigm shift in American society, the decline of an integrationist ethos and the rise of particularism. Sounding very much like a spokesperson for conservative academia in this debate, Novick glosses an integrationist ethos as that which focuses on what we 'have in common and what unites us', as opposed to the particularist emphasis on 'what differentiates and divides us'.[59] Hence the rise of completing claims to victimhood by Jewish, African and gay Americans owes less to an incremental shift in our historical sense than to a culture which now 'eagerly embraces' victimhood, rather than 'universally shunning' it as it once did: an Hesiodic lament for the passing of an integrated, heroic culture, now splintered and decadent.[60] I would suggest that Novick's somewhat staid call for a return to certain core values, the commonalities of disciplinary probity and rational assessment, provide only partial and sometimes defensive responses to the historiographical challenges posed by multiculturalism and particular post-colonial struggles. Novick, disturbed by particularism per se, treats American Jewry as just one among a number of cultures to have taken the unfortunate step towards ethnocentric victimological obsessions, thereby sidestepping a thorough and searching examination of the political and media power of pro-Zionist lobby groups in the United States of America. It is time to review some recent Holocaust literature which does relate representations of genocide more directly to battles for cultural-capital and political and cultural rights.
Future Directions, The Holocaust and Post-Colonialism
In The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Norman G. Finkelstein acknowledges a critical debt to Novick, indicating that his book will engage in a 'critical dialogue' with the account of Holocaust memorialization given in his text.[61] Finkelstein, however, will have little truck with Novick's suggestion that collective memory is shaped and constrained by circumstance, frequently a matter of intuitive or tacit choices, rather than a calculation of advantage and disadvantage. Dismayed by the 'bland, depoliticized language' of concerns and memory, Finkelstein prefers an intentionalist model; Holocaust memory simply 'is an ideological construct of vested interests'.[62] Little interested in debating postmodern identity politics or in providing detailed rhetorical analyses of Holocaust representation, Finkelstein is an unencumbered Chomskyite, his mission to uncover the insidious power nexus supporting the overwhelming primacy of Holocaust memory in the United States. In particular, Finkelstein believes that invocations of the Nazi genocide are not only opportunistic, as Novick argues, but exploitative, used to justify the 'criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies'.[63]
As it stands, most memorializations of the Holocaust are a tribute to 'Jewish aggrandizement' rather than 'Jewish suffering'.[64] Acknowledging an analytical debt to Arendt, Finkelstein pursues her concerns: the utilization of Holocaust memory to support a Zionist agenda; the conformism of the Jewish leadership to American imperial interests; the policing role and institutional power of Zionist lobby groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League; the 'Zionist lessons' taught by the new Holocaust museum; and, in particular, the pro-Israeli ideological utility of the Holocaust-as-unique-and-incomparable position supported by academics such as Deborah Lipstadt and Stephen Katz, as well as by public crusaders for Holocaust memorialization such as Elie Wiesel.[65] The analysis is often crudely functionalist, indiscriminate, wildly accusatory and tinged with paranoia; Finkelstein is adamant that Holocaust invocation bears no relation to Jewish anxieties about ethnic survival, no pathos of theological isolation. In all cases it is a matter of a 'Holocaust industry' increasing production or 'inventing' memory to increase the negotiating leverage of Israel.[66] This often splenetic work does, however, compensate in some ways for Novick's deficiencies, illuminating Holocaust invocation as a discourse of established academic and statist power rather than as a sign of postmodern weakness, a discourse working to silence post-colonial voices and revisionist histories of indigenous genocide. In his most touching and apposite formulation, Finkelstein suggests that the time is long past to open our hearts to the rest of humanity's sufferings -- of African-Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians -- to multiply the victims of holocausts and evoke an expanded memory for transformative political struggles.
Conclusion: An Anti-Genocidal Praxis
Ward Churchill, a self-described Native American historian, argues strongly in A Little Matter of Genocide that future arguments over the comparative basis for genocide studies cannot be separated from the struggle of oppressed groups, including his own Amerindian people, to regain much needed cultural capital and historical acknowledgment, forging the basis of a 'viable counter-genocidal praxis'.[67] In a context in which the theft and despoliation of Native American lands continues apace, in which unopposed genocides beget new genocides, Churchill suggests the contextualization of genocide as a continuing colonial project, a powerfully performative counterpoint to the less focused Novickian project of recovering a moderate centre in these debates.[68]
Churchill takes fierce issue with the exclusivist or uniqueness concept of the Nazi genocide propounded by both Lipstadt and Katz, which tends to view the Nazi genocide as the only truly gratuitous and universally annihilationist atrocity against a people, treating other possible instances as the incidental byproducts of the more pragmatic goals of colonialism (the Amerindian genocide), communism (the Cambodian genocide) or nationalism (the Armenian genocide). Inheriting Arendt's genealogical critique of the psychic effects of western colonialism, Churchill points out that the fantastical aims of Nazism belong in a spectrum of European colonial practices of genocide, that the destruction of Native Americans and colonization of their land suggested the actual possibility of Aryan Lebensraum to the Nazis, as the Armenian genocide of 1918 suggested the deportation and elimination of the Jews to Hitler.[69]
As Arendt suggests, one has to look at the nineteenth-century depredations of democratic politics and cosmopolitan pluralism in Europe's violent peripheries as the necessary matrix for the emergence of the most extreme forms of genocidal thinking. Here in Australia, the vexed question of genocide in relation to the generations of 'Stolen Children' can be approached in these terms, contextualized within an inherited European pattern of colonial expansion and mono-cultural domination requiring a response that is both urgent and historically 'deep', removed from pedantic legalism and myopic political imperatives.
Endnotes
1. H. Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1973, pp. 50 -- 2.
2. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London, Faber & Faber, 1963.
3. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1951.
4. P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
5. N. G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Verso, New York, 2000.
6. For a useful discussion of Arendt's seemingly conservative views on desegregation and public housing, her desire to separate politics from economic and social questions, or 'freedom' from 'necessity', and its criticism by her contemporaries, see S. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Thousand Oaks, California, Sage Publications, 1996, pp. 146 -- 60.
7. The Human Condition, p. 45.
8. Shakespeare's Coriolanus thematizes a similar problematic: the dangerous consequences for a body politic of an overriding conception of honour and integrity which cannot brook the political arts of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise. See S. Fish's essay on Coriolanus' thematization of rhetoric in Is There a Text in this Class, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1980.
9. Arendt has in mind Cicero's idea of the vir bonus, the orator as a republican exemplar of civic pride and commitment to the public world of the polity, a persona he felt to be under grave threat from the tyrannical designs of Caesar. Cicero's 'Brutus', a genealogy of the multifaceted civic contributions of political and legal orators (consuls and advocates) is written within a context of a gloomy future for this republican institution.
10. 'In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world. This disclosure of "who"... can almost never be achieved as a wilful purpose... [it] remains hidden from the person himself ... This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them -- that is, in sheer human togetherness'. See The Human Condition, pp. 179, 80. This last sentence reveals Arendt's preference for a performative fluidity in human intercourse which resists the polarizations (for, against) of party-political ideologies or the crudity of mob psychology. Such language resonates with Nietzsche's sympathy for a public intercourse capable of appreciating technical virtuosity and continuities of formal innovation beyond a normative 'content'.
11. The Human Condition, p. 206.
12. Arendt, On Revolution, Suffolk UK, Penguin, 1963.
13. On Revolution, p. 34.
14. On Revolution, p. 32.
15. On Revolution, p. 34.
16. On Revolution, p. 274.
17. On Revolution, p. 253.
18. See Benhabib's discussion of Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, 1957, pp. 5 -- 31. An example of an emancipated Jewish woman who discovered the joy of egalitarian conversation and intimate friendship with Gentiles in the Berlin salons of the 1790s, Rahel Varnhagen's passionate romantic personality nevertheless helped her to enact her difference as a Jewish woman. Here again we see that mixture of sympathetic humanism and performed cultural difference that Arendt sought as a basis for public sociability.
19. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 336.
20. On Revolution, pp. 86 -- 90.
21. On Revolution, p. 86, 87.
22. Arendt's thinking seems influenced by Nietzsche's call in Twilight of the Idols for an appreciation of the diverse and sometimes antithetical figures thrown up by public-intellectual participation a 'spiritualization of enmity' which enjoined an agonistic appreciation of the prig, the priest, and Christian pity, a mode of 'agonistic respect' in the political theorist William Connolly's terms.
23. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 362.
24. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 312.
25. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 383.
26. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 465.
27. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 447.
28. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 351.
29. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 337.
30. Eichmann, ch. 2.
31. Eichmann, p. 44.
32. Eichmann, p. 44.
33. Eichmann, p. 111.
34. Eichmann, p. 81.
35. My immanent approach to Arendt's portrait of Eichmann is sympathetic to her concerns for perspective and rhetorical skill in the public sphere. I agree entirely with those critiques of Arendt which criticize and complicate her portrait of Eichmann as a cog in a vast bureaucratic machine, neither ideologically zealous nor particularly anti-Semitic. The evidence seems to suggest that he was ruthless in the prosecution of his task of organizing the deportation and extermination of Jews, and a motivated anti-Semite, as most selected Nazi leaders were. Arendt is ironically misled by the 'performative' pathos of Eichmann's presentation under the extremely different circumstances of defeat.
36. See Eichmann, p. 8: 'Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of anti-Semitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist movement ... it was also the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German Jewish community to negotiate with the Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime'. Arendt's socio-psychological emphasis, her suspicion of 'Herzlian' Zionism's brand of European imperialism and ethnocentrism, as well as her general distrust of normative pedagogies, made her disinclined to accept anti-Gentile feeling and anti-diasporic Israeli boosterism as a sound representational basis for Holocaust discussion.
37. See The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, p. 39.
38. Eichmann, p. 5.
39. The Holocaust in American Life, pp. 134, 314.
40. Holocaust, p. 141.
41. Holocaust, p. 141.
42. Holocaust, p. 261.
43. Holocaust, p. 261.
44. Holocaust, pp. 261, 7.
45. Holocaust, pp. 98, 107.
46. Holocaust, p. 159.
47. Holocaust, p. 147.
48. Holocaust, p. 165.
49. Holocaust, p. 244.
50. Holocaust, p. 181.
51. Holocaust, p. 161.
52. Holocaust, p. 160.
53. Holocaust, p. 163.
54. Holocaust, p. 177.
55. Holocaust, p. 178.
56. Holocaust, p. 137. For a fascinating and balanced discussion of the meta-historical implications of the Goldhagen debate as irreducible to protocols of facticity or professional orthodoxy, see A. D. Moses, 'Structure and Agency in the Holocaust', in History and Theory, vol. 37, no. 2, 1998, pp. 197ff. The meta-historical wrangling Moses discusses is usually between ideological intentionalists, who foreground prior anti-Semitism as the crucial factor in the Holocaust, and the structural-functionalists, who wish to reflexively implicate the bureaucratism and technocratic mindset of western modernity in their accounts. I'd also like to thank Dirk Moses for his tremendous help in collating references and information for this article.
57. For a fascinating account of the role of museum exhibits, in particular the 1995 display of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian, in debates over memory and the use and abuse of American power, see T. Luke, 'Nuclear Reactions: The (Re)Presentation of Hiroshima at the National Air and Space Museum', Arena Journal, no. 8, 1997.
58. Holocaust, p. 197: 'Does anyone (except, just conceivably, those making the argument) believe that the claim of uniqueness is anything other than a claim for pre-eminence?'
59. Holocaust, pp. 6, 7.
60. Holocaust, p. 8.
61. Finkelstein, p. 4.
62. The Holocaust Industry, p. 5.
63. The Holocaust Industry, pp. 6, 7.
64. The Holocaust Industry, p. 8.
65. See The Holocaust Industry, p. 73: Finkelstein extends Novick's queries about the relationship between the Washington Holocaust museum and the depoliticizing of American history and its present geo-political imperatives; substituting as the museum does for any memorialization of crimes (colonialism, slavery) in the course of American history, downplaying the discriminatory United States immigration quotas before World War II, suggesting that the Holocaust goes against the grain of the American ethos and, with its representations of Jewish survivors struggling to enter Palestine (reminiscent of the closing scenes of Spielberg's Schindler's List), an argument for Israel as the appropriate response to Nazism.
66. The Holocaust Industry, p. 27.
67. A Little Matter of Genocide, San Francisco, City Light Books, 1997,p. 8.
68. A Little Matter of Genocide, p. 12.
69. A Little Matter of Genocide, p. 52 and note: Churchill suggests the United .States 'clearing' operations against the indigenous peoples of North America served as a conceptual/practical mooring to the Hitlerian rendering of Lebensraumpolitik, just as the world's indifference to the Armenian genocide assured Hitler that no negative consequences would greet his plans for Poland.
