In his piece on Seyla Benhabib and Eichmann/Arendt, Richard Wolin writes,It is at this point that the ultimate stakes of the debate over Eichmann’s banality emerge most clearly. For if Eichmann was banal, then the Holocaust itself was banal. That gets Arendt exactly backwards of course: the horror of Eichmann, for her, was that his banality was matched with the monstrosity of the Holocaust. That was the terrifying puzzle she was trying to work out: that mismatch between the smallness of the man and the magnitude of his deeds. Setting that aside, though, I wonder what it means to Wolin and other critics of Arendt to flinch at the (mistaken) idea that the Holocaust was banal. For the opposite of banal is...what? Profound, no? Arendt, I think, was repelled by that idea, that the Holocaust is profound. Only the good has depth, as she said, only the good can be profound. But what is at stake for people in denying that? Does it have something to do with the negative character of so much postwar political theory, in which western theorists mobilize against a positive vision of the good (as embodied, say, in Marxism) by claiming that such an orientation can only lead to mass violence, and that the best prophylactic against that orientation is a negative theory that rests for its foundation upon events like the Holocaust (or the gulag)? So that if you deny that the Holocaust has depth, you seem to deny the one and only thing that people can hold onto, the one bit of firm ground they can stand on: namely, the knowledge of radical (or profound) evil? Just wondering.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 20:30:37 +0000
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