Jerusalem in Hannah Arendt?

• In Event: The Uses and Disadvantages of Arendt's Concept of the Nation

Abstract

In an essay responding to work by Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt compares cosmopolitans to hermaphrodites and dismisses both as monstrous. This paper will review Arendt's embrace of the nation and her related analyses in Eichmann in Jerusalem that genocide but not war is evil. Questions the paper will engage include: Can we continue to dignify the categorical distinction Arendt and others make between war and genocide -- explicitly purposed to excuse the perpetrators of the former from judicial judgment -- as a matter of polite disagreement? Have Arendt and those who embrace the nation-state and rationalize war but condemn genocide made it too easy for our contemporaries to choose the easy solace of her beguiling writing on behalf of commonplace fantasies about the "authentic" nation, and to ignore how Arendt's beliefs cast as truisms about nationality and diversity are enemies of humanity, thinking, and imagination? If, as Arendt claims, in times of war those who plan the deaths of others and thus are the furthest removed from killing are the ones who are the most responsible, should we not be considering the complicity of her and most intellectuals who aggrandize the nation and its fables and thus ensure the persistence of nativism, deportation, and war?

Author

• Jacqueline Stevens, Northwestern University