The politics of Holocaust representation.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Curthoys, Ned
• Date: 01 January 2001

The Worldly Typologies of Hannah Arendt

'... the public realm, as the common world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time'. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. With these words Hannah Arendt issued a vibrant challenge to the 'unworldliness' she felt had pervaded the mass society of late industrial capitalism, establishing the conditions for the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Arendt's thinking on the need to maintain a shared 'world' continues to stimulate and provoke thought. In The Human Condition, she suggests that the common world we share is manifested in the spaces between us, akin to a table which both relates and separates us, gathers us together and yet prevents us falling over each other. (1) This article examines the relationship between Arendt's vigilantly anti-totalitarian concept of political worldliness and its controversial issue in her notorious and exhilarating hybrid of reportage, sociological inquiry, hermeneutic character-study, and historical narrative, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (2) A successor to the groundbreaking The Origins of Totalitarianism, (3) Eichmann in Jerusalem continues to problematize theories that ascribe the absolute motivating role of wilful evil and ideological zealotry to the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide. Arendt prefers to combine structural analysis of the processes of modernization with a differentiated hermeneutic grasp of its resultant psychological and social 'types', the rootless 'mass man', the dutiful philistine, the fanatic, the adventurous bohemian, their various modes of existence characterized by an impoverished sensibility and inability to interact with a wider civil society. Eschewing the externalities of conventional political science, Arendt's historicist methodology is immanently focused, anticipating the post-Foucauldian focus on discourse analysis and cultural imaginaries as potent nodes of power and its reproduction.

There is, I think, a strong worldly investment emanating from Arendt's insistence on cultural typologies. Both The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem militate against mythologizing or transcendentalizing the Holocaust as a universalizable icon of unfathomable evil, or localizing its significance as either a peculiarly German problem--the aberration of a zealous fascist elite--or simply a question of a barbaric, gentile anti-Semitism. Hence Arendt's caustic attitude towards the mise en scene of Adolf Eichmann's trial, the anti-diasporic and anti-gentile Zionist lesson the Israeli establishment hoped the trial would teach about the Holocaust. Indignant about any attempt to make Nazism and the Holocaust separable as objects of moralization or ideological triumphalism for the West, Arendt insists that political extremism emerges from modern ways of life, the erosion of the capacity for imagining oneself as a member of a civil society with plural modes of association, fluid identities and sub-cultural differences. Beyond any ideology or logic of history, a healthy politics will need to address its capacity to embrace plurality, its comportment towards community, and its sensitivity to difference.

In what follows I argue that Peter Novick's recent The Holocaust in American Life converses with and reprises an Arendtian commitment to representing the Holocaust in ways that respect civic pluralism rather than sectarian ends. (4) Novick evinces a wry scepticism about the paranoia, ethnocentric insularism, and sectarian complacency discursively produced by contemporary evocations and institutional memorializations of the Holocaust in the United States. Acute about the present political investments of historical discourses, Novick subtly suggests that a communal imaginary dominated by an atrocity as singular as the Holocaust will find itself in an atavistic limbo, incapable of dealing with contemporary social and perspectival differences and positively dangerous in its attitude towards geo-political relationships. I also discuss other recent literature on Holocaust representation, principally Norman G. Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry and Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide. (5) Both texts illuminate Novick's contention that an as yet little acknowledged culture war is being fought over representations of the Holocaust, between forces for ethnocentric insularity and humanist progressivism, Zionism and Diaspora, the discursively powerful and the powerless, statist imperatives and post-colonial critique.

Arendt: The Political and the Social

A resurgence of critical interest in Arendt's ideas has unsettled the dismissive critique which charged her with an elitist nostalgia for the politics of ancient Greece, engendering a fatal split between the 'political' and the 'social' in her thinking. I take it for granted that Arendt's consistent desire to separate politics from social issues such as wealth redistribution, equal access to education, housing, desegregation of schooling, or the feminist desire to make the private realm political, and other issues that left liberal politics hold dear, is untenable, elitist, and naive. (6) However, I think it is worth trying to comprehend why, in works like The Human Condition and On Revolution, Arendt went to such pains to delimit a distinct arena of experiential possibilities and inspirational activity called the 'political', from social needs and grievances. For Arendt, genuine political activity has its own genealogy of inherited oratorical skills and performative personae; it should not be made a function of modish public opinion or ideological programs.

In The Human Condition, Arendt finds her political ideal in the ancient Greek polis, a public assembly where propertied equals can debate issues of moment. Here particular perspectives must publicize themselves as themes of universal concern by processes of persuasion and negotiation. The political specificity of the Athenian polis is its capacity for spontaneous actions, decisions, and mobilizations of various kinds. It is a lively forum that incarnates both deliberation and pragmatic compromise, and a capacity for individual excellence and distinction. In this robust sphere of interactions, the decision-making process is not bureaucratized or disciplined along party and factional lines. Arendt imagines a fluid mode of governance that is yet to be functionalized as mere administration, economy, or 'housekeeping' in Arendt's contemptuous terms. (7) Like the ancient Greek civic forum, the agora, the polis is a realm where language in its very performance can effect 'action', indeed can be reckoned a political activity in its own right. As we shall see, the relationship of the political subject to symbolic forms remains a crucial theme in Arendt's corpus, receiving maximum extrapolation in the psychological reflections of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Rhetoric and the Public Sphere

The active political language Arendt seeks is, surprisingly enough, rhetorically adept, emanating from a culture whose elites were educated and trained in the persuasive arts, and where a certain degree of formal variety and esprit in speech delivery was demanded. Reversing our usual conceptions of rhetoric as manipulative and/or cliched language, Arendt follows Cicero in valorizing rhetoric as the basis for an acculturated political and legal praxis, a civil science and republican virtue. Rhetoric, in this non-utilitarian sense of the word, provides the necessary social skills for a heady interactive public space such as the democratic assembly, the agora or marketplace. Rhetorical training for participation in these spaces inculcates the art of vigorous argument, sociable persuasion, exercises in perspective, and a delight in controversy between equals, imbuing public spiritedness and a desire for civic participation.

Yet rhetoric balances the continuities of humanist training with a radical potential. The capacity for great rhetoric to transform likely political outcomes and generate new and dangerous mobilizations of will has been a subject of fascination in rhetorical theory and aesthetics. The ambiguous possibilities of a labile, rhetoricized public space is powerfully theatricalized in Antony's ironic speech to the Romans in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Brutus' selflessness and artless idealism engenders murderous violence, thematically related to his incapacity to meet the formal argumentative demands and persuasive skills of political rhetoric, powerfully embodied in Antony's incendiary ironies. (8)

Suffice to say here that Arendt's public-political ideal, which marginalizes motivating forces such as social inequality and party ideology, rebuking bureaucratic and technocratic modes of governance, owes much to her tenacious desire to revivify a politics driven by a mixture of rhetorical linguistic initiatives and robust republican oratorical virtues. (9) In a rhetoricized habitus the political subject is related to and separated from others in multiple and shifting ways, free from reified economic and ideological identities.

Arendt draws from a German intellectual tradition, including figures like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, which valorized the putative political purity of the Greek polis, its freedom from mundane social necessities such as labour and reproduction, its attainment of freedoms unknown in mass societies that dignify labour and a levelling productivist ethic. In the hierarchical and authoritarian society of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany, a labile participatory space open to intellectual provocations and multiple perspectives held enormous appeal and projective power for a relatively insignificant intelligentsia seeking to engender new forms of cultural capital.

In The Human Condition, Arendt's concern is with the possibility of natality in politics, or those activities which engender the 'birth' of new trajectories; of...