Now, I am going to be honest here, at the risk of
embarrassing myself. I think the essay is genuinely brilliant, and
very important. [It never got much
notice, but then I am the Rodney Dangerfield of Philosophy.] It can be found in Volume II of my Collected
Published and Unpublished Papers, From
Each According to His Need, available on Amazon.com. It is not an easy essay, ranging quickly as
it does over literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and Marxian
theory. If you are not its author [as I
am], you may not find your mind cutting through it effortlessly like a hot
knife through butter. But I genuinely
believe that it is worth the effort.
For those of you who [quite rightly] resent having to pay
$9.99 to Amazon [even though my share of the take goes to McMaster University
to fund the Robert P. Wolff Dissertation Prize], I have up-loaded it in .pdf
form to box.net, accessible via the link at the top of this blog.
1 comment:
I enjoyed your essay on Arendt--thanks for making it available. Your comments on the public/private distinction stand alone as interesting and important apart from any other issue, and I might engage with those at another time somewhere else. Your criticisms of Arendt generally hit their target too. But I do believe there is more room for agreement than you may suspect.
Especially in the case of Eichmann, the question of the ontological status of both narrative and historical facts can cut both ways: despite the amount we know about the historical Eichmann, he remains elusive. And not because we lack total information about him, but because what is at stake for those in the debate about Arendt's "the banality of evil" tends to be the meaning of Eichmann as character in the story of 20th century totalitarianism. Arendt's account offends because her Eichmann doesn't live up to the extreme and morally odious nature of the factual Holocaust. So we would like to hyperbolize Eichmann, as well as other doers of evil, to fit the image of the evil mastermind with which we are familiar from fictional accounts.
Which account hits the mark with Eichmann is difficult to tell. It seems plausible to me that a rational, purposeful, morally corrupt agency and a kind of unthinking banality could cohabit in the same person of Eichmann. But maybe Stangneth's book helps decide that? All the more reason to read it I guess.
Either way, I'm glad I came upon your essay as its relevant to a lot of current Arendt discussion.
Post a Comment