Arendt on Acts
'It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.' - Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1994), 273.
posted by MH at 11:01 am
1 Comments:
I quite like this Blog. I found it by doing a search in Google on "Foucault + death" (I'm essay writing...).
On Arendt, I had the privilege of studying "Eichmann in Jerusalem" last year in a law subject.
We studied it from the perspective of historical trauma-- the way in which Arendt tried to grapple with the impact of the Holocaust on the collective memory of Jews and the West at large.
That quote, for me, encapsultaes the way in which traumatic acts such as the Holocaust can never fully be understood or comprehended. Psychoanalytic theory would suggest that the inability to understand and to comprehend means that it cannot be assimilated into our collective historical memory. Our inability to understand it consciously means that we are bound to repeat it unconsciously.
That begs the question: has there been a repetition of an act similar to the holocaust?
Keep up the good work with the Blog.
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