Irony as an Antidote to Thoughtlessness

10-07-2013

People blame [übel nehmen] me for one thing—and I can understand that to some extent, outwardly—namely that I can still laugh [about it], right? And I was really of the opinion that Eichmann was a clown [ein Hanswurst], and I tell you, I read this police interrogation, 3600 pages, very carefully, and I don’t know how often I laughed, but loudly. Now, this reaction is what people blame me for. I can’t do anything against that. But I know one thing. I would probably still laugh three minutes before [certain death]. And that, you say, is the tone. The tone is widely ironic, of course. That is completely true. That is exactly, the tone is in this case really the human being. When people [reproach] me, then, in this story that I supposedly accused the Jewish people, that is a malicious propaganda lie, and nothing more. The tone, however, is an objection against me as a person; I can’t do anything against that.

Interview with Günter Gaus, October 28, 1964, trans. mine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqj_LdNQKNE&feature=relmfu

The reproach addressed by Arendt in this quote had been expressed, most importantly, by Gershom Scholem in an open letter to Arendt a year earlier, in which he wrote:

So why does your book then leave behind such a feeling of bitterness and shame, and not with respect to that which is reported, but with respect to the reporter? Why does your report cover over to such a large extent that which is brought forward in that book, which you rightly wanted to recommend for reflection? The answer, insofar as I have one, and which I cannot suppress, precisely because I esteem you so highly, (…) [is] what stands between us in this matter [Sache]. It is the heartless, often even derisive [hämische] tone in which this matter that concerns us in the real center of our life is dealt with by you. There is in the Jewish language something that can in no way be defined and is entirely concrete, which the Jews call Ahabath Israel, love for the Jews. Of that, dear Hannah, nothing is noticeable, like with so many intellectuals who have emerged from the German left. (…) I don’t have sympathy for the style of lightheartedness, I mean the English “flippancy,” which you muster all too often (…) in your book. It is unimaginably unbefitting for the matter of which you speak. [Es ist auf unvorstellbare Weise der Sache, über die Sie sprechen, unangemessen]. Was there really no place, at such an occasion, for what one might name with the modest German word Herzenstakt? [“tact of heart”] (June 23, 1963)

Arendt had responded to Scholem’s letter in a letter of her own, dated July 24, 1963. In this letter, Arendt suggests that Scholem failed to get the irony in her writing: “I never made Eichmann out to be a ‘Zionist.’ If you missed the irony of the sentence—which was plainly in oratio obliqua, reporting Eichmann’s own words—I really can’t help it.” But if Scholem may have missed the irony in this particular instance, Scholem’s objection, as Arendt implicitly recognizes in her interview with Günther Gaus one year later, is that it is precisely her ironic tone that is “unimaginably unbefitting.” The interpretation that I want to explore briefly in this blog post is that Arendt’s irony might be precisely the most “befitting” response to the Sache or subject matter, which Arendt analyzes as Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness.”

A free translation of what Arendt lacks, according to Scholem, Herzenstakt, could be “thoughtfulness.” Arendt’s choice of the word “thoughtlessness” was already contested by Mary McCarthy, because Arendt clearly does not mean that Eichmann was not thoughtful (McCarthy’s alternative suggestion, “inability to think,” is not quite right either, because Arendt does not argue that Eichmann could not think but that he did not think). What is at stake for Arendt is thinking.

Amos Elon suggests in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem that Arendt’s sarcasm was “often self-defeating.” According to Elon, “Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has wisely written that Arendt posed the true moral issue but obscured it with needless irony. With chutzpah too, perhaps.” The question, however, is whether Arendt’s posing of the “true moral issue” can be separated from her irony, that is, whether the irony merely adds (possibly counterproductive) flourish to her “posing” of an “issue.” Is her rhetoric nothing but an ornament that obscures the “content,” or a vehicle that fails to deliver the “message”?

(It should be noted that towards the beginning of her discussion of the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem, Young-Bruehl mentions a citation from Bertolt Brecht that Arendt’s husband found years after the trial that “gave him and Hannah Arendt the courage of their convictions.” The beginning of the citation reads: “The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter.”)

In her response to Scholem, Arendt makes two frequently cited claims. First, Arendt writes: “(…) in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.” Second, Arendt states: “What unsettles [verstört] you is that my arguments and my approach are different from what you are used to; in other words, what is irritating [das Ärgerliche] is that I am independent. By this I mean, on the one hand, that I do not belong to any organization and always speak only for myself, and on the other hand, that I have great confidence in Lessing’s Selbstdenken, for which, I think, no ideology, no public opinion, and no ‘convictions’ can ever be a substitute.” It might seem from these two claims that Arendt is opposing the thinking of an independent self to the feelings (love, sympathy, Herzenstakt) of the collective. Irony could then be seen as the means by which the independent individual distances herself from the collective. However, it is important to remember that for Arendt, thinking never happens in isolation. Therefore, a better reading of Arendt’s tone might be that Arendt attempts to position herself, through irony, as a person in public or in a public. If Eichmann’s thoughtlessness reduces language to rationalization and calculation devoid of any orientation towards publicness, Herzenstakt is not going to remedy this problem. Arendt’s irony, on the other hand, might call into being a public, opening up space for publicness where thinking might become possible again.

According to this reading of Arendt’s tone, the idea that Arendt was right about Eichmann but should have communicated her “message” differently for it to be “effective” misses the point. Instead, what is called for is an attunement to Arendt’s writing that does not separate “content” from rhetoric, a responsiveness in the interest of a publicness that does not require tact, sympathy, or agreement, but thinking.

Irony in Eichmann in Jerusalem has recently become a central topic in Arendt scholarship. For further reading, I particularly recommend the chapters on Eichmann in Jerusalem in Lyndsey Stonebridge’s The Judicial Imagination (2011) and in Judith Butler’s Parting Ways (2013).

-Michiel Bot