The Role of Emotions in Hannah Arendt’s Writing on Jewish Politics

• In Event: Shame and Other Political Emotions: From Cohesion to Dissent

Abstract

Following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt was castigated by critics for her ‘heartless’ style and a lack of ‘love for the Jewish people.’ Her report prompted a surge of commentary that escalated beyond a scholarly debate – emotion took centre stage. While Arendt was charged with a lack of feeling, central to her criticism of Eichmann’s trial was its showcasing of Jewish suffering. Shame in particular emerged as a contentious public emotion, especially tangible in accusations against Arendt of mishandling the story of the cooperation and coercion in holocaust.
This paper develops a conceptual framework to evaluate the political and theoretical significance of emotion for Arendt. From individual compassion to globalised pity, and localised guilt to collective shame, Arendt’s concern is for the perversion of emotion in the collective, rather than emotion itself. This study offers a critique of Arendt’s ambivalence toward emotion and argues for its centrality in her commentary on Jewish politics: emotion informs the individual’s moral judgement, but its meaning is lost when conflated with political principles. A close reading of Eichmann in Jerusalem and the controversy that followed demonstrates the danger of politicizing fear, hope and love, with a focus on the way that shame is invoked by both Arendt and her critics in a struggle for moral authority in telling the history of the holocaust. Drawing from critical theory and psychology, the history of emotions and political theory, the paper evaluates emotions in Arendt’s work and compare the reactions within the post-war climates of Germany, Israel and North America.

Author

• Tsiona Lida, Harvard