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Hannah Arendt at Documenta 15

Roger Berkowitz
This was the 15th Documenta, and the most controversial. It was marred by charges of antisemitism which were returned with accusations of racism. I am not an artist and had never been to a Documenta. But I was particularly interested because I would be participating in Documenta 15 as part of the final installation by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and her Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR). The Arendt Center sponsored three talks throughout the week. 

Nervous States

Roger Berkowitz
William Davies’ Nervous States is one of my favorite books published in recent years. In it, Davies argues that we are past the point of no return at which emotion has overwhelmed reason as the foundation of our public life.

Rage and Reason: The Case for Rage

Roger Berkowitz
Myisha Cherry argues that anger and rage are, in certain circumstances, and for some people, appropriate responses to injustice. "Anger makes us attentive to wrongdoing and motivates us to pursue justice." Cherry, a philosopher at University of California at Riverside, turns to the thinker Audre Lorde who herself embraced rage that aims at change. For Cherry and Lorde, this "anti-racist rage can be used to engage in action that brings about such a change." 

Rage and Reason: The Age of Anger

According to Pankaj Mishra in his book The Age of Anger: A History of the Present, we "find ourselves in an age of anger, with authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of furious majorities." Mishra turns back to the German Romantics of the 19th century and their rebellion against enlightenment reason to argue that “we must return to the convulsions of that period in order to understand our own age of anger.” The holy wars of today recall the revolutionary messianism of the Italian nationalists who joined “political crusades in remote places, resolved on liberty or death.” As Mishra writes, “Then as now, the sense of being humiliated by arrogant and deceptive elites was widespread, cutting across national, religious and racial lines.” Hannah Arendt called this common feeling of humiliation and anger “negative solidarity” and Arendt’s insight is “rendered more claustrophobic by digital communications.” 

Truthtellers

Roger Berkowitz
Jonathan Rauch tells the story of Stephen Richer, the Republican Maricopa County recorder in Arizona. As country recorder, Richer is responsible for registering voters and counting votes. This has put him in the crosshairs of the MAGA movement.

Thinking Without a Banister

Roger Berkowitz
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock gave a major foreign policy speech last week in which she began and ended her speech by referencing Hannah Arendt’s idea of “thinking without a banister.”

The Great Replacement in Hungary

Roger Berkowitz
Hungarian President Viktor Orbán has advocated illiberal democracy. In a recent speech, however, he has gone further and explicitly embraced what is called the “great replacement” theory, the idea that ethnic Europeans are being replaced by non-whites and explicitly Arabs and Jews. An article in Politico showed that European leaders, and even some of Orbán's supporters, are worried that the Hungarian President has gone too far. 

A letter from Roger Berkowitz

This week, Italy's government fell apart and two far-right parties are favored to win upcoming elections. A war of aggression in Europe has upended basic assumptions about the liberal world order. And, in the United States, former President Trump threatens to run again for President even as a Congressional Committee has painstakingly demonstrated his efforts to illegally subvert a democratic election. It is at times like these that we must remember Hannah Arendt's warning: totalitarianism is now an ever-present possibility in our world. In such a world, Arendt argues, the fear of concentration camps and total domination invalidates all political differentiations and serves as "the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not."

The Eichmann Tapes are Discovered (Again)

Roger Berkowitz
Few books have defined an entire world-historical event as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Not only has Arendt’s book dominated the reception of Adolf Eichmann and his trial, but also her account of the banality of evil has become a cultural, moral, and legal touchstone, an insight perennially invoked (rightly or wrongly) to explain how and why everyday people engage in genocidal and other evil acts.

Now Yariv Mozer, an Israeli filmmaker, has created and directed a new documentary series The Devils Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes that played recently in Israel. Transcripts of the tapes have existed since before the Eichmann trial, and Arendt read many of them. But the actual tapes had long been thought lost. Mozer uses excerpts from these tapes to argue that Eichmann was in fact an ideological Nazi and was hardly banal.