For fifty years, since Arendt’s report on Eichmann, we’ve been assured that what characterises evil is its banality. A cliché deployed against a cliché. The avatar of evil’s enormity, goes the claim, is no operatic Satan, but a dull quotidi…Evil may indeed often be the most banal Eichmann. Perhaps sometimes it comes instead with Mephistophelean splendour. But very often it’s a party-goer;
boisterous; braying; a frat alumnus; a bully who loves being a bully; a successful profe…
Adolf Eichmann
historical · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Eichmann appears primarily as a touchstone for Hannah Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil," invoked in these readings to question whether evil's ordinariness is itself now a cliché that obscures rather than illuminates its nature. The course uses him to complicate the relationship between bureaucratic rationality and moral catastrophe, asking whether reducing atrocity to banal administrative function actually lets us understand—or evade—the varied affective and social forms evil can take.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.