Unlearning with Hannah Arendt
Marie Luise Knott
[Granta]
Hannah Arendt shocked the world when she declared that Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi high official whose Jerusalem trial she reported on in 1961, was a ‘random buffoon’ rather than a monster. Dismissing her previous idea that National Socialism represented some new and radical form of evil, she contended that Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, his blind bureaucratic dedication to his post, was at the heart of his lethal role in the extermination of the Jews, thus coining the now famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’. Marie Luise Knott’s Unlearning with Hannah Arendt examines this and other instances, in which Arendt, faced with the intellectual devastation of the twentieth century, “unlearned” established conceptions of Western thought – even her own – in favor of profound, innovative insights.
Drawing from her extensive knowledge of Arendt’s published works as well as personal conversations and correspondence, Knott describes the major pathways of ‘unlearning’ which allow Arendt to maintain a critical distance from her subject while she re-appraises it. One of these is the ‘laughter’, with which Arendt responds to Eichmann’s incoherent testimony, using irony ‘as a protection against panic and powerfully aggressive impulses’, granting her the distance to ‘think it through’. Thus, the laughter that scandalised her contemporaries is shown not to be a means of avoidance, but of contemplating the inconceivable in order to more fully grasp it. Throughout, Knott draws astute connections between Arendt’s experiences of National Socialism, escape, and exile and how these inform the areas in which she ‘unlearned’ inherited thought. The necessity of translation and the distance between Arendt’s native German and her English of exile, for instance, becomes a vital arena for producing new meaning, rather than an intraversable chasm. Similarly, Arendt’s forgiveness is no passive forgetting, but instead demands an active acceptance of the facts; forgetting only the inherited ideas that surround them. This work is obscure and challenging in parts, but Knott successfully transmits her own fascination with how, through “unlearning”, Hannah Arendt eludes the dead ends of traditional thought, breathing hope into philosophy after devastation.
Words: Mònica Tomàs
