PER UNA CRITICA DELL’AMBIZIONE

HANNAH ARENDT E LA BANALITÀ DEL MALE, FRA “IDIOZIA” E “DISUMANITÀ”

Luisa Giulia Musso

This study revisits Hannah Arendt’s perspective on leading Nazi figure Adolf Eichmann. It takes inspiration from her celebrated Report on The Banality of Evil while drawing on the rest of her oeuvre and the debate re-ignited by recent historical research on the Jerusalem defendant. His peculiarity is his imperviousness to others’ presence, so the banality of evil acquires an air of inhumanity, for it is in the political nature of action and judgement that people exercise that free response to the world that effectively makes them human. Moved by an egocentric ambition for career, Eichmann’s way of functioning efficiently therefore represents the perversion of Arendtian action, inspired by a principle that safeguards its freedom as much as its horizon of meaning. And the epilogue to which it leads provides food for thought not only for the author and her immediate interlocutors but for us all.