Not guilty in the sense of the indictment

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt thinks through mid-century totalitarian movements in relation to statelessness and human rights. According to Arendt, statelessness and rightlessness correspond: it is only through inclusion and participation in a human community that one possesses any rights at all. Controversially, Arendt’s text demonstrates that, by virtue of totalitarian conditioning, Eichmann himself was deprived of fundamental human rights even before he was illegally captured in Argentina in May 1960. This essay argues that the texture of Arendt’s prose – including narrative ordering, ironic tone, and performative language – challenges the totalitarian structures that produce statelessness. At the same time that Arendt reveals an internal incoherence to statelessness – the stateless person can either be a refugee or a cosmopolitan subject – the form and content of Eichmann in Jerusalem reveals the precarious political existence of the stateless, and therefore rightless, person in either guise

Art · Citizenship · Epistemology · Hegelianism · Human rights · Linguistics · Literature · Metanarrative · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Stateless protocol · Statelessness · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism