Amor Mundi - 8/18/13

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Judgment in Extremis

In May 2013, the Hannah Arendt Center and ECLA of Bard sponsored a conference in Berlin: Judgment in Extremis, a conference Inspired by the Fiftieth Anniversary of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The video from the conference is now online and you can watch lectures by Roger Berkowitz, Jay Bernstein, Seyla Benhabib, Kerry Bystrom, Andreas Nachama, Gerd Hankel, and Christoph Menke. The conference focuses on the fact that Arendt's book on Eichmann's trial is actually a book less about Eichmann and the banality of evil than an inquiry into the problems of doing justice in extreme cases of evil of the kind Eichmann represented. This is especially apparent in the keynote talks by Roger Berkowitz and Christoph Menke. As Berkowitz frames the question, Arendt "didn't go to the trial to develop a thesis on the banality of evil; she went to the trial in order to answer this question on the adequacy and inadequacy of law to deal with extreme crimes like genocide. She had already developed this in the 1940s in correspondence with Karl Jaspers, and she writes, "We have no tools at hand except legal ones, with which we have to judge and pass sentence on something which cannot be adequately represented, either in legal terms, or in political terms." So she is dealing with a problem that she has already identified, and that problem is that law is just a way we deal with a trial and deal with crimes, and is inadequate for these kinds of experiences. In the Eichmann in Jerusalem book, proper, she repeats this same point. This is but one example among many to convey the inadequacy of the prevailing legal system, and the current judicial concepts, to deal with the fact of administrative massacres, organized by the state apparatus. I want to suggest here that this is really the question she goes to Israel to answer." For both Berkowitz and Menke, Eichmann in Jerusalem is a book about the inadequacy of law to deal with extreme cases of wrong and Arendt's response to that inadequacy. You can watch all the videos here.

The Pay is Too Damn Low

James Surowiecki  over at the New Yorker  writes about the recent walkouts by fast food workers and attempts at local and federal levels to pass living wage bills. The real problem, he argues, is that fast-food workers are now family breadwinners: "[T]he reason this has become a big political issue is not that the jobs have changed; it's that the people doing the jobs have. Historically, low-wage work tended to be done either by the young or by women looking for part-time jobs to supplement family income. As the historian Bethany Moreton has shown, Walmart in its early days sought explicitly to hire underemployed married women. Fast-food workforces, meanwhile, were dominated by teen-agers. Now, though, plenty of family breadwinners are stuck in these jobs. That's because, over the past three decades, the U.S. economy has done a poor job of creating good middle-class jobs; five of the six fastest-growing job categories today pay less than the median wage. ... More of them are relying on their paychecks not for pin money or to pay for Friday-night dates but, rather, to support families." Surowiecki argues we need legislation to require higher wages and also increased governmental safety nets to guarantee a middle class life. But maybe also we need to face the reality that across the country, the standard of living we associate with a middle class lifestyle is simply beyond the means of most middle class jobs.

The Future in the Present

Rebecca Bates talks to editor Jesse Pearson about the second issue of his magazine Apology, which he calls his "apologia against... the state of magazines today." When he elaborates, he talks about a way of publishing that is outside of time, noting that "many magazines seems to be overly obsessed with the new and are often lifestyle/culture catalogs for new, new, new, new, new. I like the idea of doing a magazine that owes nothing to the current moment."

Portrait of the Artist

Ryan Bloom recently  translated a wordless play of Albert Camus's. In the mimeodrama, an artist becomes distracted from his life by his art; as he paints, he removes himself from the world and the world passes him by.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

In a review of Anna Segher's recently republished book Transit, Adam Levy considers the German-Jewish-born Segher's experience of trying to find a way out of Marseilles in the first few years of World War II. Instead of writing her attempts to leave into her novel, she invents a protagonist who is desperate to stay; in doing so, Levy says, she turns the tragedy of the refugee on its head: "You could say that permanence is the goal of the displaced, and not always to return home. For the narrator of Transit this is certainly the case. What home is left for him to return to? And if home resides somewhere else... what would be the point in continuing to run? The logistics of staying put, however, set the narrator paradoxically on the road to departure: to stay in Marseille he must prove that he is preparing to leave."

The Newspaper in its Twilight

In the wake of Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos's purchase of the Washington Post, Todd Gitlin writes about just what happened to the American newspaper: "The business model built on advertising and circulation to sustain a professional staff lasted roughly a century, and is now skidding and smoldering when it is not crashing and burning. Suburbanization killed afternoon papers, and along with television, drained department stores of their taste for full-page display ads. The Internet ate up the classifieds. At both high and low-end papers, circulation, stagnant for years at best, plunged, as did profits, especially the sort of superprofits that became de rigueur as newspaper chains and other publicly traded media companies squeezed the newsrooms for more (and less news) for their bucks."