Isabelle Delpla, Le Mal en proces

In the recent feature film entitled ‘Arendt’, the protagonist struggles to reconcile the stark contrasts in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She ponders Eichmann’s lack of expression contrasted with the emotionality present in the courtroom and, more generally, in Israel, where survivors of the Holocaust and other immigrants are struggling to develop a shared national identity. Throughout the film, we see Hannah Arendt pausing to remember interactions with her lover, Martin Heidegger, the philosophy professor who became infamous for collaborating with the Nazis. In one scene, Heidegger remarks on the centrality of thinking to an individual’s existence. Later, Arendt makes sense of Heidegger’s role as a Nazi in much the same way that she makes sense of Eichmann’s role in the Final Solution: in simple terms, they must not have been thinking. Many of Arendt’s contemporaries did not support this thesis and neither does philosopher Isabelle Delpla. Le Mal en procès: Eichmann et les théodicées modernes presents a sharp critique of Arendt, including both her scholarly methods as well as the general utility of her theory. Delpla’s basic thesis is that Arendt mistook a juridical strategy for a personality trait and, as a result, undermined her understanding of the nature of mass violence. While shining a critical eye on the so-called ‘banality of evil’, she expounds on the limits of philosophy, international criminal justice, and social science. From her perspective, the idea that this was an ordinary man committing extraordinary acts is both historically and philosophically unsubstantiated

Aesthetics · Epistemology · German · Identity (music · Nazism · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Holocaust · Theology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Philosophy