Terada - Thinking for Oneself: Realism and Defiance in Arendt

839Rei TeradaELH 71 (2004) 839–865 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

THINKING FOR ONESELF:REALISM AND DEFIANCE IN ARENDT

BY REI TERADA

Very few are clear as to what the standpoint of desirability, every“thus it should be—but is not” or even “thus it should have been,”contains within itself: a condemnation of the total course of things.

—Nietzsche, Will to Power, §331

The world, as given, is disliked; it is disliked in large part just becauseit is given.

—George Kateb, “Technology and Philosophy”

Experience tells us, indeed, what is, but not that it must necessarilybe so, and not otherwise.

—Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

I. INTRODUCTION

How could Hannah Arendt, a lifelong champion of the publicsphere, write at the end of her life that thinking, not acting, is whatcounts “when the chips are down”? For political theorists whosefavorite book by Arendt is The Human Condition, her late work is adisappointment, even a cause for “consternation.”1 Arendt did notfinish The Life of the Mind, the book that was to sort out theconnections between thinking, willing, and judging, and in it she doesnot seem sure where she is going. She often asserts that thinking issignificant because it predisposes us to judging, its public manifesta-tion. Thus, much of the commentary on late Arendt argues aboutwhether thinking actually predisposes people to judge, or helps themjudge better, in ways that improve the world.2 Both claims aredubious; more to the point, this angle of approach—hers and ours—evades Arendt’s more difficult suggestion that it is worth consideringwhat thinking is like when it has no public consequence. When

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Arendt writes that thinking “deals with invisibles,” she means that it isinvisible itself, definitionally thinking that no one else knows about.3

Like Kant’s noumenal realm, this thinking is best grasped as thenegative of what presents itself—everything around a judgment thatis not visible.

If Arendt’s writing on thinking underperforms as moral philoso-phy, perhaps we should try looking at it instead as a theory of reality.Reality is always and ever one of her big subjects—not metaphysicalreality, but “the claim on our thinking attention which all events andfacts arouse by virtue of their existence,” as she puts it.4 Thinking inthis sense is not particularly processive, although it has to have someminimal temporal continuity such as the capacity to be remembered.Rather, it is paradigmatically the registration of a perception, arealization. Such thinking logically precedes judgment on particulars,which Arendt models on Kantian judgments of taste. Things are notquite that simple, however; it is not the case that we always knowwhat we’re dealing with before we respond to it. As we’ll see, amental proto-judgment—for instance a sensation of displeasure—may be the only thing that motivates investigation of the interior andexterior world in the first place. Freud’s account of the developmentof the sense of reality out of disavowal and negation suggests that thesense of reality depends on the recognition of feelings of objectionand outrage. This psychic landscape, I’ll suggest, leaves room forArendt’s self to defy exigency without disavowing it. At the same time,it explains why we so easily take defiance, and even dislike, for denial:the line between them is indeed very fine. Realization emerges fromdisavowal by way of dislike, and adaptation and defiance are its modalchoices. Although Eichmann is Arendt’s case study in how to avoidreality, his failings nonetheless point her, in the late essays and TheLife of the Mind, to her own complementary tendencies. Thethinker’s love of reality testing, she explains and shows stylistically inher prose, is at worst a defense, at best a resistance against livingoblivion that draws from its priority to the public self the power tooutlast its annihilation. In this dark period of Arendt’s work, what shepraises as “best” may not, in ordinary terms, even be the good. Still,after her encounter with Eichmann, especially, Arendt proposes thatreality testing, more than any ethical principle, promulgates whatgoes by the name of “ethics.”

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II. THINKING FOR ONESELF

Before interpreting Arendt’s view, it’s worth noting how politicallyirrelevant and even self-absorbed her rendition of thinking cansound. Kant’s treatment of moral dilemmas offers one model forradically noninstrumental thinking; although this notion of thinkingconceives the self as a multiplicity of voices, and in that sense it is notsolipsistic, it also locates the contest of voices entirely within the(multiple) self and claims that the outcome matters even if it neverrejoins the rest of the world. Arendt’s reading of Kant, however, turnsdisinterest inside-out into self-involvement:

Kant’s insistence on the duties toward myself . . . restricts [the]condition of plurality to a minimum. The notion . . . is self-interest,not interest in the world. . . . In other words—and these are wordsrepeated many times by Kant, though usually as asides—the greatestmisfortune that can befall a man is self-contempt. “The loss of self-approval [Selbstbilligung],” he writes in a letter to Mendelssohn(April 8, 1766), “would be the greatest evil that could ever happen tome,” not loss of the esteem in which he was held by any other person.(Think of Socrates’ statement “It would be better for me to be atodds with the multitudes than, being one, out of harmony withmyself.”)5

While conventional glosses on Kant stress that lying, for example, iswrong because the inner moral law tells us so, Arendt’s variant is thatit is important not to do things that disgust her because it would beworse for her. She thus peculiarly combines pure noninstrumentalitywith perverse self-interest. She specifies, however, that her logicholds sway only when the real, public self is already completelyalienated from its society. In totalitarian conditions, the real self thatcomes into being when it speaks in public is effectively dead. Whatwe have left is a self stripped of significant appearance and aban-doned to its thinking devices. In times of extreme deprivation, Arendtsuggests, we can legitimately be glad to have such a self.

The point of self-consistency at the expense of consistency withothers is to strengthen the capacity for defiance. In the late lecture“Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” Arendt examines ahypothetical example of thinking during terror raised in Lionel Abel’sreview of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Like many other commentators,Abel had taken issue with Arendt’s indictment of the so-called Jewishcouncils that collaborated with the Nazi regime. Positing a man who“holds a gun at the head of another and forces him to kill his friend,”


Abel argued that the first man will appear “aesthetically less ugly”than the second who does the physical killing, and that Arendtsuccumbs to this aesthetic illusion when she picks on the victimizedexecutioners of the world. To this Mary McCarthy replied, “Nobodyby possession of a weapon can force a man to kill anybody; that is hisown decision.”6 Arendt commends McCarthy for debunking the“widespread conviction . . . that none of us could be trusted or evenbe expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to betempted and to be forced are almost the same.”7 Against this popular“fallacy” she sets Socrates’ statement in Gorgias that “it is better tosuffer than to do wrong.”8 Abel, McCarthy, and Arendt all agree thatthe man shouldn’t kill his friend: it is Arendt’s reason that is startling,that refusing is better for the self. Many justifications are available—the law against murder, amelioration of the friend’s dying moments,the possible edification of the torturer or the audience if any. Withthese in full view, Arendt chooses benefit “to the self ”—not just inany circumstances, but in the weakest possible, when the selfbenefited is likely to benefit only seconds longer.

Arendt goes out of her way to make the same choice when sheunpacks Gorgias in an adjacent essay, “Thinking and Moral Consider-ations”:

The two positive Socratic propositions read as follows: The first: “It isbetter to be wronged than to do wrong”—to which Callicles, theinterlocutor in the dialogue, replies what all Greece would havereplied: “To suffer wrong is not the part of a man at all, but that of aslave for whom it is better to be dead than alive, as it is for anyonewho is unable to come either to his own assistance when he iswronged or to that of anyone he cares about.” The second: “It wouldbe better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out oftune and loud with discord, and that multitudes of men shoulddisagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out ofharmony with myself and contradict me.” Which causes Callicles totell Socrates that he is “going mad with eloquence,” and that it wouldbe better for him and everybody else if he should leave philosophyalone. (“T,” 181)

“As to the first,” Arendt explains, “it is a subjective statement,meaning, it is better for me to suffer wrong than to do wrong” (“T,”182).9 The whole passage specifically compares the “better” to the“better for me,” as Callicles underscores when he concludes ironi-cally that Socrates’ shutting up “would be better for him andeverybody else.” Bypassing the opportunity to moderate the matter

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by reading Socrates as merely replying in Callicles’ terms, Arendtembraces the contrast between the moral perspective of the citizen,who cares for the object of the wrong, and the self-involved perspec-tive of Socrates, who cares about his own opinion.10 “From theviewpoint of the world,” as she casually puts it,

we would have to say what counts is that a wrong has beencommitted; it is irrelevant who is better off, the wrongdoer or thewrong-sufferer. As citizens we must prevent wrongdoing since theworld we all share, wrongdoer, wrong-sufferer, and spectator, is atstake; the City has been wronged. . . . In other words, Socrates doesnot talk here as a citizen who is supposed to be more concerned withthe world than with his own self. It is rather as though he said toCallicles: If you were like me, in love with wisdom and in need ofexamining, and if the world should be as you depict it—divided intothe strong and the weak where “the strong do what they can and theweak suffer what they must” (Thucydides)—so that no alternativeexists but to either do or suffer wrong, then you would agree with methat it is better to suffer than to do. The presupposition is if you werethinking, if you were to agree that “an unexamined life is not worthliving.” (“T,” 182–83)

This discussion—and similar discussions of emergency situationsin late Arendt—goes to the heart of what is scandalous about herthinking. It doesn’t matter whether thinking leads to judging, andjudging to moral influence. Gorgias is the right reference, since it isthe locus classicus for the failure of persuasion (Arendt thinks aboutGorgias often in the wake of Eichmann, as she struggles with her ownfailure to convince an audience). It is preferable to suffer than dowrong because it is more consistent with being a thinking person.What is involved in being a thinking person? Imagining the reasoningof those who did not participate in Nazi crimes and traditionalmoralists who did, Arendt speculates about the former:

Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves towhat extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselvesafter having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it wouldbe better to do nothing, not because the world would then bechanged for the better, but simply because only on this conditioncould they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also choseto die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, theyrefused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to thecommand “Thou shalt not kill,” but because they were unwilling tolive together with a murderer—themselves.11


Thinking is parsed Socratically as talking to, hence living withoneself, hence wishing to avoid enmity in “silent dialogue.”12 We areneither so fascinating nor so bored, however, as to make the desire forour own company self-explanatory. An ego-ideal seems to be at stake,and the self appears to be choosing this ego-ideal over the bodyalthough the first cannot survive without the second—the self-contradiction of the master in Hegel’s account of the “trial bydeath.”13 (Is Arendt picturing herself dying in style, like MarleneDietrich in Dishonored, refreshing her lipstick before going out tothe firing squad?14) Yet the acute constriction of the public self thatseems to make the argument from self-interest contradictory alsomakes it pertinent. The public self is all but finished. The greater theself’s constriction—the more chips are down—the more it is a merelythinking self. As we’ll see, the forte of this mainly thinking self who is“in love with wisdom” is a particular kind of response: a radicalobjection to the given conditions of living in the world. The “benefit”that such an objection confers upon the thinking self is that it makesit bearable to perceive reality: on the compensating condition thatthey do so under protest, the eyes stay open. During totalitarian rule,the ability to be satisfied with that comes in handy.

III. THINKING AS REALIZATION

How does one get to be “in love with” thinking? Freud’s answer tothis question is relevant, since he too articulates thinking and judgingin relation to empirical reality. Early in the career of the baby, Freudsuggests, “whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presentedin a hallucinatory manner”:

It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, thedisappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of thisattempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, thepsychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the realcircumstances in the external world and to endeavor to make a realalteration in them [Anstatt seiner mußte sich der psychische Apparatentschließen, die realen Verhältnisse der Außenwelt vorzustellenund die reale Veränderung anzustreben]. A new principle of mentalfunctioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mindwas no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if ithappened to be disagreeable.15

Although one might expect something as vital as the reality principleto be an instinct, Freud calls the infant’s awakening a decision of the

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psychical apparatus.16 The notion of decision may seem like just a wayof speaking; Spinoza mocks this kind of talk when he writes that “Theinfant believes he freely wants the milk.”17 In the history of politicalphilosophy, from the consent theories of Hobbes and Hegel to thoseof Louis Althusser and Judith Butler, survival skills are said to revealthe admixture of dependence in agency. Freud, too, notes that thepsychical apparatus “had to decide” in reality’s favor or die. Yet—andhere we might think of the man with the gun to his head—he doesnot withdraw the figure of decision:

It will rightly be objected that an organization which was a slave tothe pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external worldcould not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it couldnot have come into existence at all. The employment of a fiction likethis is, however, justified when one considers that the infant—provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother—does almost realize a psychical system of this kind.18

This utterly characteristic passage issues from the core of Freud’s wayof thinking, where ontic ambiguity reigns. Freud won’t say that thedecision actually occurs, nor that the figure is unjustified. What iscertain is that the infant “does almost realize” a system that “neglect[s]”external reality. This brush with success, this almost having got awaywith it, forever colors the sense of reality with surprise. Fantasy isn’tworking well enough; it occurs to the infant that it should try to forma conception of its real circumstances. With this realization, the firstantinomy of reality, the deconstruction of the reality principle if youwill, also appears: the incentive for getting to know reality is thepossibility of “mak[ing] a real alteration” in it. Freud never portraysHomo sapiens’ relation to reality as anything but scheming. “Actually[in Wirklichkeit],” he remarks, “the substitution of the reality prin-ciple for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasureprinciple, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure,uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along thenew path an assured pleasure at a later time.”19 “Actually”: thearchitect of the reality principle demonstrates his realism by acknowl-edging the limits of the principle—this is a logic we’ll have to reckonwith again. My point is that the onset of the sense of reality is not inany way characterized by acceptance of the real conditions at hand.Just the reverse: nonacceptance is the paradigmatic realistic attitude;anyone who “accepts reality” has not yet formed a conception of ourreal circumstances.


In Freud’s scenario, a hedonistic proto-judgment of dissatisfac-tion—“This isn’t good enough”—initially leads to ignoring. Furtherdissatisfaction—with the result obtained by ignoring—leads fromhallucination through negation to what Arendt calls thinking.20 Arendt’sthinking is like Freud’s infant’s originary idea to take note of what ishappening, although she inherits her conception, not from Freud,apparently, but from the mythic beginnings of European politicaltheory. Plato’s Statesman provides an epigraph for The Life of theMind: “Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream andthinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up to find that heknows nothing.” Socrates “knows how to arouse the citizens who,without him, will ‘sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives,’unless somebody else comes along to wake them up again. And whatdoes he arouse them to? To thinking” (“T,” 174). “Thinking” in suchusages is nothing philosophical, only “think[ing] what we are doing.”21

What Arendt calls Eichmann’s failures to “think” are failures tonotice: simple facts “had not occurred to him,” “contradictions . . .had not bothered him,” he secured himself with clichés “againstreality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which allevents and facts arouse by virtue of their existence” (“T,” 160); “hemerely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he wasdoing” (E, 287). Arendt does not explain systematically what countsas realizing, but suggests that mental representation that articulatescontact with reality, prolongs its duration, and makes it more likely tobe remembered, is a minimal requirement: “[W]e must repeat thedirect experience in our minds after leaving the scene where it tookplace. To say it again, every thought is an after-thought” (LM, 1:87).“To say it again”: Arendt demonstrates what she means, that to thinkabout something we “say it again” to ourselves.22 Otherwise,automatisms of habit keep the consciousness of external reality to aminimum. One may go through life, like Eichmann, using negativehallucination, moral exhortation, and forgetting to keep unpleasant-ness at bay. For Arendt as for Freud and Karl Jaspers, realism arriveswhen the self can register facts and feelings that it does not accept(except in the limited sense in which you “accept” things you arestruggling to change). There would be no thinking, and no sense ofreality, if we could not also render very general negative proto-judgments on our real conditions.

Arendt knows well the resistance such an idea faces, even whentransferred from global conditions to individual people and actions:“How troubled men of our time are by this question of judgment (or,

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as is often said, by people who dare ‘sit in judgment’)” (E, 295).Nietzsche argues that in fact we cannot screen judgment on particu-lars from global judgment; the radical desire of aesthetic judgment isjudgment on the right of things to exist, even things in general. Heaccuses “nihilist” philosophers of using “the absurd valuation: to haveany right [Recht] to be, the character of existence would have to givethe philosopher pleasure.”23 Nietzsche correctly discerns that theprerealistic question “Is this good enough for me?” challenges theright of the world to be the way it is. Although the primal scene ofproto-judgment and realization precedes the concept “world,” some-thing like it, the proto-concept “all I know,” is indeed being judged.To describe the matter in Nietzsche’s vocabulary, realization occurs—if ever—when the world’s loss of its right to be the way it is does not,for once, result in a retreat to the belief that it isn’t the way it is. Thisvague sense of “world” remains up for judgment in ordinary life, I’dsuggest, and Arendt is among the few people who do not blink atadmitting this. Her critics suspect that she is willing to judge theplanet, as we’ll see. It is my thesis that she accepts this seeminglyabsurd position out of a belief that a willingness to judge already hasto have existed in order for the self to come into reality at all.

IV. SEEING THE SIGHTS

Thinking expresses the right (to continue in Nietzsche’s language)of the self to register that fantasy is not working and conditions aren’tgood enough. Arendt attests that, further, some people fall in lovewith looking at reality. Falling in love with reality testing would be anunderstandable reaction formation to indignation at real conditions;the self could then adopt reality testing as an adaptive strategy whileinvesting in it the force of its indignation. For the thinker who takesup the observation of reality as an end in itself, this new end is stilleudemonistic in a new way. Deriving satisfaction simply from beingable to see that her circumstances are poor, she is always compen-sated, up to a point. To be “in love with wisdom” is to engage inpleasurable activity, one that tends to contribute to a purpose but alsobears “sweetness” in itself if there is no purpose (LM, 1:200). Goodand harm to others, “for the best and for the worst,” still isn’t in thepicture except insofar as others are within the self as “the actualiza-tion of the difference given in consciousness” (LM, 1:191).24 Do otherothers need to be in the picture? I don’t mean to ask whether Arendtfinds it desirable that the self imagine others’ perspectives—unam-


biguously, she does—but whether it is an absolutely necessary part ofwhat she calls thinking.25

Stretches of Eichmann in Jerusalem seem to answer no. Eichmannbears out the idea that thinking for oneself begins in thinking foroneself: he cannot do the first because he cannot do the second; heignores the genocide in order to ignore his own hardship.26 Would itbe an advance for Eichmann simply to realize that he was having ahard time? Hovering near this question, Arendt takes special interestin his description of a sequence of trips to Lublin, Kulm, and Minsk,“the killing centers in the East” (E, 93). Here Arendt’s prose usesEichmann’s language as the foil for and object of its own triumph ofreality testing:

For me . . . this was monstrous. I am not so tough as to be able toendure something of this sort without any reaction. . . . If today I amshown a gaping wound, I can’t possibly look at it. I am that type ofperson, so that very often I was told that I couldn’t have become adoctor. I still remember how I pictured the thing to myself, and thenI became physically weak, as though I had lived through some greatagitation. Such things happen to everybody, and it left behind acertain inner trembling. (E, 87)

Arendt follows Eichmann closely through what he says he isn’t toughenough to see, and the more inane he is, the more hard-boiled herstyle. She narrates the details with some relish, emphasizing hisrepeated and expanding exposure to the intolerable:

The system . . . was not a foolproof shield against reality, asEichmann was soon to find out. . . . Well, he had been lucky, for hehad still seen only the preparations for the future carbon-monoxidechambers at Treblinka. . . . This is what Eichmann saw. . . . Very soonafter that, he was to see something more horrible. . . . at first itseemed as though he would be lucky. . . . Still, he saw . . . his host wasdelighted to show him the sights, although Eichmann tried politelyto excuse himself. Thus, he saw another “horrible sight.” . . . This wasnot yet the end. Although Eichmann told him that he was not “toughenough” for these sights, that he had never been a soldier, had neverbeen to the front, had never seen action, that he could not sleep andhad nightmares, Müller, some nine months later, sent him back tothe Lublin region. . . . Eichmann said that this now was the mosthorrible thing he had ever seen in his life. . . . The fact is thatEichmann did not see much. (E, 86–89)

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Arendt, too, seems “delighted to show him the sights.”27 In herrecreation (based on Eichmann’s own), Eichmann’s almost infinite artof evasion fights the stimulus to form a real conception of hiscircumstances. Eichmann thinks for a moment when he “picture[s]the thing to [him]self ”; that—not “the thing” but the picturing, hissaying it again, as it were—makes him “physically weak.” His remarkthat it was “as though [he] had lived through some great agitation”manages to miss the point that he was greatly agitated. Still unable torealize his disturbance, he downplays it as merely what “happen[s] toeverybody.” It would be the beginning of thought if he only didsomething apparently very hard—if he dwelled on how terrible hefelt.28 Thus Arendt doesn’t look for concern for others from him justhere, but monitors his revulsive impulses. Of course she knows by thevery fact that Eichmann is in front of her that he never succeeded inrealizing his horror. He had never been in love with wisdom, andnever got to the compensations of thinking.

When Arendt claims that Eichmann’s problem was not that helacked a conscience, but that his conscience “began to function theother way around,” her point is that conscience as self-denial has littlemoral traction (E, 95).29 With the aid of conscience “the murdererswould be able to say: ‘What horrible things I had to watch in thepursuance of my duties!’” Arendt observes that this statement oc-cludes the possibility of saying instead, “What horrible things I did topeople”(E, 106). I would add that it also occludes a second, not yetmoral statement, “I felt horrible.” This analysis of what self-denialdoes and does not say suggests, first, that self-denial is above all akind of denial; and, second, that conscience, that ill-defined concep-tion in Arendt, is not self-denial, whatever else it may be—that is,that self-denial can’t be the active ingredient of conscience. Of courseEichmann’s moral degradation lies in his occlusion of the firststatement. Nonetheless, the two statements may be inseparable, as inmultifold psychoanalytic and philosophical models for relation. MelanieKlein believes that awakening to reality consists in the infant’sbecoming aware of the disturbing co-implication of the self with theother on which it feeds, hence in understanding the extent to whichself and other are not entirely separate even as their needs conflict.30

Alternatively, we might invoke Jean-Luc Nancy’s contention that thefirst person plural pre-exists the separation of “you” and “I,” orremember Stanley Cavell’s idea that “there are no others for me”before I declare my existence to others.31 Any version ofintersubjectivity that goes all the way down changes what it means to


ask how far Eichmann could have got just by realizing his “own”situation. How could he understand other people’s pain—or thedifference between a surgical incision in 1961 and a murder victim in1941—if he couldn’t even feel the dimensions of his upset at being“shown a gaping wound”?

V. THE CONSOLATIONS AND LIMITS OF REALISM

The consolation of philosophy undiscovered by Eichmann isevident everywhere in Arendt’s noirish prose. Above all she prizesbeing the sort of person who can stand seeing a wound. Instantly sherisks falling into defense. Arendt’s reaction to Eichmann’s aversion tohis gory tours is to formulate a research program: “[I]t was of greatpolitical interest to know how long it takes an average person toovercome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactlyhappens to him once he has reached that point” (E, 93). Resource-fully, she finds empirical grounds for an unambiguous answer—“about four weeks.” This is how she does it: she observes that inSeptember 1941, after the first of his visits East, Eichmann directeda transport that was supposed to go to Russia to Lodz instead, “wherehe knew that no preparations for extermination had yet been made”(E, 94). Three weeks later, however, Eichmann agreed in a meetingto send new transports to Riga and Minsk. By this evidence Arendtmeasures how long it takes, at the maximum, for Eichmann toovercome his repugnance: “[H]is conscience functioned in the ex-pected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function theother way around” (E, 95). My guess is that readers will divide intheir reactions to this tour de force of positivist wit: does Arendttrivialize a vast question with a cynical mental game, or does sherender intelligible a problem to which most historians would respondwith mystifications or not at all? By casting Eichmann as an outstand-ing research opportunity, she responds to trauma as one who haslearned to love the apprehension of reality as an end in itself.Eichmann resists his fear of disintegration by ignoring his feelings ofhorror; Arendt resists her own similar fears by mobilizing herenjoyment in thinking against what must have been her horror andsorrow at Eichmann’s story. To an extent, she replaces helplessnessbefore what she likes to call “the facts” with satisfaction at her ownability to see them as facts. As a lover of reality testing, the hardestfact for Arendt to bear is the fact that there are things that even shecan’t bear.

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It was her tone of enjoyment and self-satisfaction that mostoffended Arendt’s critics and bonded her to McCarthy and Jaspers,who shared her predilection for it. Gershom Scholem calls Arendt’stone “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious,” whileMcCarthy dislikes Scholem’s “tone of infinite sad wisdom,” andJaspers praises Arendt’s ability to laugh.32 McCarthy herself wasberated for the following airheaded statement in her reply to Abel:

To me, Eichmann in Jerusalem, despite all the horrors in it, was morallyexhilarating. I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too heard apaean in it—not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paean oftranscendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of Figaroor the Messiah. . . . The reader “rose above” the terrible material ofthe trial or was borne aloft to survey it with his intelligence.33

McCarthy later wrote to Arendt that she regretted “putting in Mozartand Handel” but had done it so as not to hide true feelings: “[M]yinternal alert system warned me too. But just because of that I left itin. On the ground of refusing to suppress something—not to be likethem.”34 Arendt wrote back,

I always loved the sentence because you were the only reader tounderstand what otherwise I have never admitted—namely that Iwrote this book in a curious state of euphoria. And that ever since Idid it, I feel—after twenty years [since the war]—light-hearted aboutthe whole matter. Don’t tell anybody; is it not proof positive that Ihave no “soul”?35

McCarthy’s and Arendt’s reflections are striking expressions of psy-chic satisfaction with thinking as contact with reality. Inspired by theexhilaration of Arendt’s prose, McCarthy responds with more exhila-ration and admission of her own feelings just because they were herfeelings. For her part, Arendt loves McCarthy for acknowledgingArendt’s feelings more than Arendt herself had done—indeed, shestates that McCarthy’s understanding was the form her own acknowl-edgment took—and thus encouraging her to confess still more.36

Only in the thinking realist does the exposure of “never admitted”feelings inspire love.

As Arendt’s critics claim, then, satisfaction in one’s own thinking,and its costs in direct horror and sorrow, are central to her work.McCarthy’s manic levitation above “the terrible material”—remem-ber that “elation” is the sentiment Arendt identifies with Eichmann


(E, 62)—may give us some retrospective reservations about Arendt’swell-known reading of a Kafka parable in Between Past and Future.In the parable, “Thoughts on the Year 1920,” Kafka imagines “twoantagonists” pressing a man from “behind” and “ahead.” “His dream,”Kafka writes, “is that some time in an unguarded moment . . . he willjump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of hisexperience in fighting, to the position of umpire.”37 Arendt notes thatthe traditional response to the strain of rectilinear time is the fantasyof floating above history to “a timeless, spaceless suprasensuousrealm,” and recommends instead thinking that is not “above themelee” but diagonal to it. Although Arendt wants to think in time andspace, she still shares Kafka’s purpose in rising above them, namely“to offer ‘the umpire’ a position from which to judge the forcesfighting with each other with an impartial eye.”38 The diagonal lineoffers this viewpoint as much as ever. Similarly, to Abel’s (alsotriangular) emergency scenario, the solution of Arendt and McCarthyis to demand that the man in the middle, whom Abel sees as a victim,see himself as a judge—as though the advantage of judging were thata judge could not be a victim. Arendt shares this logic with theimplicit goal of the Eichmann trial, to transform a nation of victimsinto a nation of judges.

As distant from the achievement of thought as Eichmann, for her,is the camp survivor who calls himself K-Zetnik, who suffers a mildstroke on the witness stand at the Eichmann trial. K-Zetnik intro-duces himself as a resident of “Planet Auschwitz,” declares that hesees a vision of the dead right there in the courtroom, and passes out.As Shoshana Felman points out, K-Zetnik’s bizarre performance isthe target of “some of [Arendt’s] harshest language and some of herfiercest irony.”39 Both Arendt and Felman interpret K-Zetnik’s physi-cal disintegration psychically, as an extension of his speech. ForArendt, it is the logical conclusion of his incoherence; for Felman, itsymbolizes his loyalty to those who died. According to Felman, K-Zetnik literally relives Auschwitz because of the pressures of the trial:“When the judge admonishes Dinoor [using his legal name] from theauthoritarian position of the bench, coercing him into a legal mode ofdiscourse and demanding his cooperation as a witness, K-Zetnikundergoes severe traumatic shock in reexperiencing the same terrorand panic that dumbfounded him when, as an inmate, he wassuddenly confronted by the inexorable Nazi authorities of Auschwitz.”Felman does not ask whether K-Zetnik’s traumatic shock is war-ranted. She writes as though his panic, natural to say the least in the

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past, were automatically natural now because of the presence of thatpast: “[O]nce more, the imposition of a heartless and unbending ruleof order violently robs him of his words and, in reducing him tosilence, once more threatens to annihilate him, to erase his essence asa human witness.”40 On the literal level, this is not what is happeningwhen the presiding judge says “Mr. Dinoor, please, please, listen to[prosecutor] Mr. Hausner and to me” (E, 224): Felman substitutes K-Zetnik’s inner reality for his external circumstances and appraisesboth at the same value. While I agree with Arendt that K-Zetnikwould do better to pay attention to the external present as well as theinner presence of the past, I agree with Felman that Arendt cannotforgive him because he “does not seize his legal chance to overcomethe trauma” but “is, rather, once more overcome by it,” and “what isworse . . . makes a spectacle of his scandalous collapse within thelegal forum.”41 There is indeed something K-Zetnik performs thatcannot be represented in Arendt’s style and that marks a limit of herrealism. Because she imagines the thinker and the victim to bemutually exclusive, she views sheer thoughtless suffering, as well assheer thoughtless violence, as a kind of degradation. Under herconstruction of thinking, K-Zetnik’s realization of his circumstances—inner and outer, past and present, feelings of helplessness includedbut not exclusively—should in itself be the management of hiscircumstances. But that can’t always be enough.

When she is true to thinking form, Arendt admits as much.(Indeed, by her logic, she should love to.) Her invention of thethinking diagonal, so often quoted by commentators, is followed by aless popular realist disclaimer:

But, one is tempted to add, this is “only theoretically so.” What ismuch more likely to happen—and what Kafka in other stories andparables has often described—is that [Kafka’s] “he,” unable to findthe diagonal which would lead him out of the fighting-line and intothe space ideally constituted by the parallelogram of forces, will “dieof exhaustion,” worn out under the pressure of constant fighting,oblivious of his original intentions, and aware only of the existence ofthis gap in time which, as long as he lives, is the ground on which hemust stand, though it seems to be a battlefield and not a home.42

The long sentence sounds increasingly autobiographical. It illustratesthe further thinking, the always more thinking, that thinking requiresin order to draw more compensation: thinking that realizes thatthinking is not compensation enough, that realism is not realization


enough. Arendt’s prose thus recalls that of Adorno, and Jameson’scomment that each sentence of Adorno wins a temporary victory isappropriate to her as well. The more she is able to say that thinking isnot consolation enough, the closer it comes to being enough. Notonly at the end of thinking, however, but inside it, lies a helplessnessthat even thinking cannot help, and in which there is neither shamenor a privileged figure for “humanity.”43 At some never predictablepoint, any living system breaks down into a thinking jelly.

VI. FROM DISAVOWAL TO DEFIANCE

Defying exigency (the mode of Arendt) is not the same asdisavowing it (the mode of Eichmann), although they may look thesame. Eichmann gets as far as feeling uncomfortable, but alwaysturns back to the cave of the irreal. All “posthumous” statements, allstatements sub specie aeternitatis, are uttered from there. Eichmannspeaks from there at the gallows, and Arendt makes fun of him for it,even as she remarks that he is in his element:

Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. . . . Hewalked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calmand erect, with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tiedhis ankles and knees, he asked them to loosen the bonds so that hecould stand straight. “I don’t need that,” he said when the black hoodwas offered him. He was in complete command of himself, nay, hewas more: he was completely himself. Nothing could havedemonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness ofhis last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was aGottgläubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was noChristian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded:“After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is thefate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long liveAustria. I shall not forget them.” In the face of death, he had foundthe cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memoryplayed him the last trick; he was “elated” and he forgot that this washis own funeral. (E, 252)

It turns out that Eichmann performs so well because he has forgottenthe facts: “he merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realizedwhat he was doing” (E, 287). He doesn’t need the black hood becausehe is always, so to speak, wearing his own.

Arendt is capable of making statements that look the same:

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The manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is theability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeedmay prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare momentswhen the chips are down. (“T,” 189; LM, 1:193; my emphasis)

The awkwardness of all possible reactions to this statement hints thatsuch last judgments strain the normal science of moral philosophy.It’s difficult even to contemplate it without wandering into our ownfantasies of omnipotence. Nancy Fraser forgets something—or ev-erything—about totalitarianism when she writes of late Arendt:

[J]udging here remains a monological process wherein one goesvisiting in imagination, as opposed to in reality. One imagines oneselfjudging from different perspectives instead of going out and talkingto and listening to other people. One elaborates an interior, not anexterior, dialogue. In this way, one avoids the risk of hearing othersjudge in ways that one could not imagine oneself judging in theirsituation. As a result, one insulates oneself from the sort of provocationthat could actually lead one to change one’s perspective.44

But Arendt specifies that in order for all this to be true, the chipsmust be down. By this she means not when dialogue of Fraser’s sortis going on, but when the chance for such a dialogue is nil: “[I]tspolitical and moral significance comes out only in those rare mo-ments in history when ‘Things fall apart’ . . . when everybody is sweptaway unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in” (“T,”188). Self-involvement looks better and better as society goes out ofits mind. Then, nothing could be more desirable than to “[insulate]oneself from the sort of provocation that could actually lead one tochange one’s perspective.” Who is more out of touch: Fraser, whenshe implies that in the conditions specified by Arendt, one should goout and open one’s mind, or Arendt, when she writes as though, inthe very same conditions of already catastrophic political collapse,catastrophe for oneself could still be prevented?

Ronald Beiner, a sensitive reader of late Arendt, understands herinward turn as a reaction to the problem of “how to subduetemporality, how to consolidate and stabilize a mortal existence,rendering it less fleeting, ontologically less insecure.” He also per-ceives that Arendt finds the effort to subdue temporality in thoughtappropriate specifically in the absence of any possibility of a publicnarrative that could subdue it. Given such a vacancy, not likingexigency becomes her way of not giving up on the past.45 Another way


of putting this might be that when right action is impossible, defiantinaction hits the peak of its appeal.

Arendt’s worst nightmare is the possibility of events that are nevernarrated, recalled, or recognized—what she calls “holes of oblivion.”Arendt famously decides that “holes of oblivion” don’t exist (E, 232).Yet they do exist in one sentence of the bleakest chapter of Eichmann,the chapter on the Final Solution. The sentence occurs between twoheartening examples of civil disobedience: first “the two peasant boyswhose story is related in Günther Weisenborn’s Der lautlose Aufstand(1953), who were drafted into the S.S. at the end of the war andrefused to sign.” Second, the story of the brother and sister Scholls, ofMunich University, who distributed leaflets calling Hitler a massmurderer. In between comes this passage, which at first refers to theexecution of the two peasant boys:

The position of these people, who, practically speaking, did nothing,was altogether different from that of the [military] conspirators[against Hitler]. Their ability to tell right from wrong had remainedintact, and they never suffered a “crisis of conscience.” There mayalso have been such persons among the members of the resistance,but they were hardly more numerous in the ranks of the conspiratorsthan among the people at large. They were neither heroes nor saints,and they remained completely silent. Only on one occasion, in asingle desperate gesture, did this wholly isolated and mute elementmanifest itself publicly. (E, 104; my emphasis)

At this point Arendt goes on to the story of the Scholls. What isfascinating is that she narrates the “hole of oblivion.” The martyredpeasant brothers “practically speaking, did nothing”—that is, theywere notable for refusing to do something—but they were actualpeople, and they refused plainly and in writing. Arendt moves fromtheir historical case to hypothetical persons that “there may also havebeen”; astonishingly, she goes on to discuss the number and motivesof these people, quite as though they were actual. The conditionaltense disappears, replaced by the simple past, and Arendt substituteshuman silence for the nonhuman unknown. Nothing is so irreal asher hearing as silence the noiselessness of these merely possibleexistences. In the next sentence, she is out of the hole: the “muteelement manifest[s] itself publicly” (E, 104). This remarkable mo-ment, which seems to be trying to tell what it is like inside oblivion, atleast tells how Arendt’s mind works when she considers it. The idea ofthe “silent” judgment of possibly nonexistent people figures thinking

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at its farthest remove from human contact. It proposes to fill, andthus calls attention to the possibility of, a space between the end ofpublicity and the annihilation of the body and/or mind.

Such a space may seem to be a transcendental possibility only—a“nowhere” or utopia (LM, 1:199–200). As long as there are avenuesfor public speech and action, Arendtian thinking will be a redundantkind of magical thinking that makes no contribution of its own. ButArendt reminds us of its pressing actuality in totalitarian emergency,the deathbed, and the crib. As crisis and psychosis transmute asociety’s norms, the “political and moral significance comes out” ofthis inner place (“T,” 188)—the position of initial realization, in myscheme—that predates the self’s commitment to survival, and towhich part of the thinking self has adhered through its love ofthought. Arendt’s metaphor is of the exposure of creatures in atidepool: “When everybody is swept away . . . those who think aredrawn out” (“T,” 188). It is in this place that defiance of exigency ispossible.

Defying exigency is not the same as disavowing it because between(1) the decision to form a conception of one’s circumstances and (2)the decision to take steps to survive them lies a chance to reject thecircumstances without denying them:

DefianceDisavowal → Negation → Objection/Realization →⟨ ↓(Negative Adaptation hallucination) ↵

The chance for defiance is easy to overlook—it’s overlooked by Hegelin the master-slave dialectic—because defying exigency is assumed tobe a kind of denial. But Arendt in effect implies that an acquired tastefor decision 1 (Objection/Realization) makes it easier to say no todecision 2 (Adaptation). Because there is something the self “loves”prior to adaptation (namely, realization itself), because a good deal ofthe self is rooted to that spot, acting against adaptation doesn’tcontradict all self-interest, but rather interests a different self, thethinking self. So far, love of reality testing has the general function ofbeing something, anything, more fundamental than the desire tosurvive. The realism that belongs to this kind of realization is thus notthe cynical “realism” of getting on the winning side. It is even theopposite of that, if getting on the winning side means overlookingone’s realization. Arendt insists that thinking holds on to the thread of


self-interest, and at the same time that self-interest can differ fromself-survival whenever survival comes into disastrous conflict with thedesire for autonomy. The self that learned to look at and object to itsconditions did so without the assistance of the self that decided toadapt. This primordial self may say “Fuck you” to a man holding agun to its head, even if no one benefits. It may, of course, do so forthe wrong reasons.

VII. BETTING WITH ARENDT

Arendt’s critics point out that her late writings do not furnish astrong account of ethics. We might recast this conclusion in thepositive, and say that Arendt takes issue with the very relevance ofethics as either a set of universal principles or a priori subordinationto the other. As commentator after commentator has noted, thereseems to be nothing necessary about the layering of ethics onto herthinking.46 Even if thinking prepares for ethics, we don’t necessarilymake good on our preparation, and even if we do evolve an ethics, it’sonly an ethics for good or evil, transformation or destruction (LM, 1:192).

That’s why it’s crucial that the thinker, open to both defiance andadaptation, has a history of objection and the love of reality testingwith her: the combination of indignation and reality testing is acheck-and-balance system. Thinking operates negatively in the sym-bolic world; it “dissolves accepted rules of conduct” and restrainsillusion and egoism, internal and external. Although we get ac-quainted with reality only because it leaves something to be desired,part of reality is the full scope and limit of our ability to changereality. It is not clear that, if we get as far as a realistic grasp of that,we are better off ethically, but it is at least clear that if we do not getthat far, we are in even worse shape—subject to self-absorption anddelusions of omnipotence.47 Arendt’s bet—and in this empirical andrational realm, it is indeed a matter of betting—is that an empiricalskepticism that asks, “Is that the way things really are?” is more likelyto support a tolerable world, and less likely to support an intolerableone, than affirmative fidelity to anything else, no matter how univer-sally or singularly good. There are more politicians whose imperialfantasies could be corrected by realism than there are ones who couldbe corrected by ethics: most imperial fantasies happily invoke ethicswithout encountering anything in the ethical field that can’t bedomesticated by a little interpretation. That is, “Don’t harm another

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human being” is not necessarily helpful because there can bedisagreement about what a human being is; indeed the very creationof the maxim also creates a motive to make sure that some people arenot counted as human. Ethics remains vulnerable to Hume’s critiqueof taste because form will always get filled with content, and at themoment it is, we’re back to square one.

Hence Arendt’s preface to Part One of The Origins of Totalitarian-ism declares that responding to the path from anti-Semitism to theNazi genocide “call[s] not only for lamentation and denunciation butfor comprehension,” and goes on to align comprehension withdefiance, not acceptance, of reality:

Comprehension . . . means . . . examining and bearing consciouslythe burden that events have placed upon us—neither denying theirexistence nor submitting meekly to their weight as though everythingthat in fact happened could not have happened otherwise.Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentivefacing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or mighthave been.48

Similarly, Arendt’s writings about the Vietnam War focus on the realand irreal more than on the ethical and the unethical. She believes,for instance, that a theory attributing U.S. actions in South Asia to a“consistent imperialist policy that aims ultimately at world rule,”while having some explanatory power, “could hardly account for thefact that this country was madly insisting on ‘pouring its resourcesdown the drain in the wrong place,’” as Undersecretary of StateGeorge Ball put it in 1965—delightfully implying that the alternativewas pouring our resources down the drain in the right place.49 Insteadshe addresses the U.S. fantasy of “omnipotence”—for Freud andFerenczi, the positive symptom of the absence of reality in infancy:

American policy pursued no real aims, good or bad, that could limitand control sheer fantasy: “Neither territory nor economic advantagehas been pursued in Vietnam. The entire purpose of the enormousand costly effect has been to create a specific state of mind.” And thereason such excessively costly means, costly in human lives andmaterial resources, were permitted to be used for such politicallyirrelevant ends must be sought not merely in the unfortunatesuperabundance in this country, but in its inability to understandthat even great power is limited power. Behind the constantlyrepeated cliché of the “mightiest power on earth,” there lurked thedangerous myth of omnipotence.50


It may be surprising that Arendt finds the greatest “arrogance ofpower” in “the pursuit of a mere image of omnipotence, as distin-guished from an aim of world conquest.” For her it is bad news thatthe U.S. objective is not actual world domination (!), since that wouldat least involve serious planning and therefore reckoning with facts.In comparison, the “aim” of impact on world opinion is not reliablymeasurable and therefore easier to pretend to pursue with “nonexist-ent unlimited resources.”51 Not only would acting on a desire toconquer the world bring the state rapid evidence of its shortcomings;even formulating such a desire would mean noticing in the first placethat world domination is not what one currently has. It is more deeplymad to trust in one’s omnipotence so thoroughly that no wish toactualize it arises—only the inclination to play at it by desultorilyspending resources and lives in the hope of getting others to playalong.

Of course, those who hate reality (as President Bush says terrorists“hate freedom”) can’t be shown it. It is not a matter of arguingevidence with someone else, but of each grasping reality for herself.Reality’s recognition may never be won; its economic ratios arediscouraging, since after a certain point, the worse things are, the lessmotive there is for realizing them. Arendt bets on reality rather thanethics, thinking as registration rather than thinking as process, onlybecause the “inherent contingency” of facts, being less predictableand more palpably consequential, is more likely than ethical abstrac-tion to take fantasy aback.52

In Arendt’s account, there seems to be no way to foster or predictthe love of thinking, no way to understand why some people developand preserve it and others don’t. On one hand “thinking in its non-cognitive, non-specialized sense” is “a natural need of human life”; onthe other, “everybody may come to shun” it. If thinking is a“decision,” as both Freud and Arendt seem to believe, and “a lifewithout thinking is quite possible,” what keeps thinking from vanish-ing from the face of the earth (LM, 1:191)? This is an even largerquestion than how long it takes the average person to overcome hisrepugnance toward crime, but in chapter 14 of Eichmann, “Evidenceand Witnesses,” Arendt actually answers it: “[T]here are simply toomany people in the world to make oblivion possible” (E, 233). In thisworld of only statistical certainties, the odds are with us that notliterally everyone will ignore the wages of slaughter. This statisticalfact, not any necessity or plausibility of thinking’s enhancement of thepublic sphere, is her real explanation of why, “in the long run,” “this

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planet . . . remain[s] a place fit for human habitation” (E, 233).Whether we like Arendt’s conclusion or not will depend on how muchwe agree with her that cold comfort is the best.

University of California, Irvine

NOTES1 Martin Jay, “Afterword” to Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig

Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 338.2 See Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1996), 154–78; Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge,1992); Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt(New York: Routledge, 1994), 101–38; Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror:Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999),55, 87–106. George Kateb sees much of The Life of the Mind as “a qualifiedaccusation of philosophical thinking” (Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil[Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984], 189).

3 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1971), 1:193. Hereafter abbreviated LM and cited parenthetically by page number.In The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), Arendt writes:

For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others aswell as by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with the realitywhich comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces ofintimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, thedelights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existenceunless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized,as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. (50)

It’s a matter of course that thought that reaches others, however indirectly, hasvalue. If Arendt’s late argument were limited to such thought, it would be not onlyconsistent with The Human Condition, but redundant with it.

4 Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment,ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 160. Hereafter abbreviated“T” and cited parenthetically by page number.

5 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago:Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 20.

6 Mary McCarthy, “The Hue and Cry,” in The Writing on the Wall and OtherLiterary Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971), 68–69. Arendt also admiresMcCarthy’s answer in a letter to McCarthy in Between Friends: The Correspondenceof Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace, 1995), 160.

7 Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” in Responsibility andJudgment, 18. Arendt incorporated formulations from both “Thinking and MoralConsiderations” and “Personal Responsibility” into The Life of the Mind. AlthoughThe Life of the Mind is the later text, I generally cite the essays, since their narrativecontinuity often provides useful context.

Arendt expresses a similar objection to behaving “as though there existed a law ofhuman nature compelling everybody to lose his dignity in the face of disaster.”


(Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, revised ed. [New York:Viking Press, 1964], 132; hereafter abbreviated E and cited parenthetically by pagenumber). For Giorgio Agamben, there is such a law: shame is “the fundamentalsentiment of being a subject” (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive,trans. Daniel Heller Roazen [Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002], 107). Agambenwrites, “[T]here is certainly nothing shameful in a human being who suffers onaccount of sexual violence,” yet goes on, “but if he takes pleasure in his sufferingviolence, if he is moved by his passivity—if, that is, auto-affection is produced—onlythen can one speak of shame” (110). Why even then? a tough psychoanalyst mightask. Arendt, in contrast to Agamben, is keen to avoid the conclusion that shame isconstitutive of human experience. Her value on intelligibility moves toward thepossibility of shameless victimhood, even though Arendt herself still feels shame atvictimhood and is anxious to prevent the feeling from arising. Better than eitherArendt’s resistance to shame or Agamben’s embrace of it is the possibility ofrendering traumatic vulnerability even more intelligible.

8 Arendt, “Personal Responsibility,” 18.9 Here I am connecting two passages in “Personal Responsibility” and “Thinking.”

In “Personal Responsibility” Arendt quotes McCarthy and declares, “I had somehowtaken it for granted that we all still believe with Socrates that it is better to sufferthan to do wrong” (18). In “Thinking,” she adds “for me” (182). Of course, it could bebetter for her because of the law or the possible feelings of the friend and the enemy,but this doesn’t change the fact that what counts is her evaluation of the effect ofthose factors on herself.

10 The distinction remains standard; for Richard Moran, for example, moralresponsibility consists in concentrating on the consequences of one’s actions for theobject rather than what one thinks of them oneself. See Moran, Authority andEstrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,2001).

11 Arendt, “Personal Responsibility,” 44. See also the similar discussion in “SomeQuestions of Moral Philosophy,” in Responsibility and Judgment, 60–146.

12 Arendt, “Personal Responsibility,” 45.13 Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977),

§188.14 After Arendt’s death McCarthy, who had for a long time been unofficially

editing Arendt’s prose style, gave in to the temptation to become her imageconsultant, explaining her decision to change one of Arendt’s favorite phrases tosomething higher-toned: “‘When the chips are down’: I cannot say why the phrasegrates on me, and particularly coming from her, who, I doubt, ever handled a pokerchip. But I can see her (cigarette perched in holder) contemplating the roulette tableor chemin de fer, so it is now ‘when the stakes are on the table’—more fitting, morein character” (Editor’s Postface to LM, 2:248). McCarthy, apparently even lessexperienced at cards than Arendt, misses the point that poker, unlike roulette, is aninterpersonal game of stoicism and challenge.

15 Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning”(1911), Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. JamesStrachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 12:219; Freud, Gesammelte Werke,18 vols. (London: Imago Publishing Co., Ltd., 1940–68), 8:231; my emphasis.

16 As Arendt puts it, “Whether what affects you exists or is mere illusion dependson your decision whether or not you will recognize it as real” (LM, 1:155).

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17 Spinoza, The Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans.and ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), 157.

18 Freud, Standard Edition, 8:220 n.19 Freud, Standard Edition, 8:223. Sandor Ferenczi is the great theorist of the

impossibility of simply establishing the sense of reality. See Ferenczi, “Stages in theDevelopment of the Sense of Reality” (1913), in First Contributions to Psychoanaly-sis (New York: Bruner-Maazel, 1980), 213–39; and “The Problem of Acceptance ofUnpleasant Ideas—Advances in Knowledge of the Sense of Reality” (1926), inFurther Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. JohnRickman (London: Hogarth, 1950), 366–79.

20 The capacity to realize that circumstances aren’t good enough isn’t in itselfsomething to celebrate; it may lead to destructive aggression, a new strategy forremoving whatever we don’t like. Derrida points out in his reading of Arendt’s textson lying that the seed of totalitarian violence, as well as of constructive action, is thedesire to change reality, which entails recognition of the events and facts of Arendt’spublic sphere. Thus lying, for Arendt, is “linked in an essential manner to theconcept of action, and, more precisely, political action. She often recalls that the liaris a ‘man of action’”—Derrida goes on, “I would even add: par excellence.” SeeDerrida, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” in Without Alibi, trans. and ed. PeggyKamuf (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 66.

21 Arendt, Human Condition, 5. Karl Jaspers’s General Psychopathology (1913),which Arendt must have known, similarly characterizes experiential reality by threefeatures: “What is real is what we concretely perceive,” “Reality lies in the simpleawareness of Being,” and “What is real is what resists us.” See Jaspers, GeneralPsychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton, 2 vols. (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1:94.

22 Thanks to Bernard Richter for showing me this passage, and for many otherideas.

23 Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed.Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), §36.

24 Derrida, “History of the Lie,” 60, (“for the best”).25 Some commentators view adopting the perspective of others as the main

element of Arendt’s thinking; see Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits ofPhilosophy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994). One touchstone for this interpreta-tion might be Arendt’s equation, at one point in Eichmann, of thinking with“think[ing] from the standpoint of somebody else” (E, 49). Seyla Benhabib remarks,“[T]his did not mean empathizing or even sympathizing with the other, but ratherthe ability to recreate the world as it appeared through the eyes of others,” that is, torecognize “the perspectival nature” of the world (“Hannah Arendt and the Redemp-tive Power of Narrative,” Social Research 57 [1990]: 189). Again, in The Life of theMind that external somebody else is within, as the difference in consciousness withwhich the Socratic self must harmonize.

26 See Alan Bass’s consideration of disavowal’s “global generalization of defensiveprocesses” in Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford: StanfordUniv. Press, 2000), 17, 45.

27 Arendt goes on to name what she wishes he had seen: “Eichmann did not seemuch. . . . It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and Höss, with whom he hada very friendly relationship, spared him the gruesome sights. He never actuallyattended a mass execution by shooting, he never actually watched the gassing


process, or the selection of those fit for work—about twenty-five per cent of eachshipment, on the average—that preceded it at Auschwitz” (E, 89–90).

28 In 1918, Karl Kraus links disavowal to the supposedly Germanic trait ofendurance: “Sticking it out, for example—we revel in it. . . . There are in fact nohardships, but we take them joyfully in our stride. That’s the trick of it. We havealways done that well.” See Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind: A Tragedy in FiveActs, trans. Alexander Gode and Sue Ellen Wright, ed. Frederick Ungar (New York:Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974), 35–36. Compare Arendt on Himmler (E,105).

29 Ferenczi argues that reality testing, too, can function the other way around: wecan use it to avoid reality. This would be reality testing without falling in love with it,hence not thinking (“Stages,” 235).

30 See Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-DepressiveStates” (1935) and “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940),in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 1, Love, Guilt and Reparation and OtherWorks 1921–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1975).

31 For Jean-Luc Nancy, see his Being Singular Plural (1996), trans. Robert D.Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000). ForStanley Cavell, see The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, andTragedy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 462.

32 For Gershom Scholem, see “Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Lettersbetween Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt,” in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H.Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 241. For McCarthy’s response to Scholem’stone, see Between Friends, 157. Jaspers writes: “What does this mean? One candiscuss back and forth how, in life itself, laughter and irony can be founded inextraordinary seriousness. Plato says: Only a great writer of comedies can be a greatwriter of tragedies.” See Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Edith Erlich, Leonard H.Erlich, and George B. Pepper (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1986), 521, quoted inJoanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, “Interpretive Essay,” in theiredition of Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,1997), 210–11.

33 McCarthy, “The Hue and Cry,” 66.34 Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, 166.35 Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, 168.36 Namely, that she had felt lighthearted “ever since.” Ever since when? Brightman,

the editor of the Arendt-McCarthy correspondence, interpolates “since the war” toalleviate the confusion. Arendt associates World War II and the Eichmann contro-versy, “after twenty years” and “ever since” Eichmann in Jerusalem. Does she meanto suggest that it’s as though Eichmann were twenty years ago? By “the wholematter,” does Arendt mean the Eichmann affair or the war?

37 Kafka, quoted in Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in PoliticalThought (1961) (New York: Penguin, 1993), 7. Arendt repeats much of thediscussion in The Life of the Mind, 1:202–11.

38 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 11, 12.39 Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the

Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), 140. On K-Zetnik’sname, “a slang word meaning a concentration camp inmate,” and the issues it raises,see Felman, 134–36, 147–49.

40 Felman, 146.

865Rei Terada

41 Felman, 150.42 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 12–13. In The Juridical Unconscious, Felman

describes K-Zetnik’s collapse as though he were Kafka’s protagonist meeting hislikely end: “[B]etween the present and the past, he falls as though he were himself acorpse” (149).

43 For more discussion of the relation between shame and victimhood, please seenote 7 above.

44 Nancy Fraser, “Communication, Transformation, and Consciousness-Raising,”in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, 171–72. I am being a little unfair toFraser, because she is responding in this passage to an essay by Lisa Disch thatcompares Arendt’s idea of “visiting” to consciousness-raising; Fraser gets heremphasis on talking and listening from this context. Since thinking is emphaticallystated by Arendt to be significant only after the negotiation of social norms hasbroken down, however, it’s off the mark to complain that it does not participate insuch a negotiation, regardless of the variety of negotiation in question.

45 Beiner, “Hannah Arendt on Judging,” in Lectures, 155, 153.46 In Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Bernstein comments: “The very

intelligibility of her claims depends on the assertion that thinking does have thisliberating effect on the faculty of judging. But Arendt does not really provide anyarguments to justify this assertion” (173).

47 For speculations on moral implications of the reality principle in Freud, seeElizabeth Rottenberg, “A Testament to Disaster,” Modern Language Notes 115(2000): 941–73. Rottenberg concludes that “there would be nothing in the world tomove us beyond the pleasure principle” without “the relationship to a non-personwhose force or power remain utterly unresponsive to the ego”; this she calls “thebond to absolute difference” (970). A Levinasian responsibility to all that is not theself becomes available here. This “bond” is perhaps another version of the primarymasochism incorporated by Hobbes, Althusser, Agamben, and others in narratives ofsubjectivation—if so, it is preferable to many other versions for its full recognition ofthe suffering involved. In comparison, the Arendtian cathexis to reality testing lookslike a kind of fetishization, binding the self ’s feelings to the process of discoveryrather than to the endangering circumstances discovered. I would argue, however,that it is a good thing to stop short of masochism. Then the self ’s feelings of objectionand its particular position continue to be recognized, and with them more of reality.

48 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1973), xiv. Thanks to David Lloyd for suggesting and talking over thisreference.

49 Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers,” in Crises of theRepublic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1972), 27.

50 Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” 38. Arendt quotes Richard J. Barnet in RalphStavins, Barnet and Marcus G. Raskin, Washington Plans an Aggressive War (NewYork: Vintage, 1971), 209.

51 Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” 39.52 Arendt speculates that the disappearance of nonfantasy would not lead to “an

adequate substitute for reality,” but transform fact and fantasy alike “back into thepotentiality out of which they originally appeared” and from which fantasy must everagain fight to emerge (Between Past and Future, 257).

Terada - Thinking for Oneself: Realism and Defiance in Arendt

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