ABSTRACT
This chapter will bring together two areas of Arendt’s thought which may at first sight appear to have very little in common. It will consider her interpretation of the work of the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and in particular a series of lectures that Arendt gave in 1970 on Kant’s book Critique of Judgement (1790) at the New School for Social Research in New York. Blended together with this attention to Arendt’s reading of Kant, this chapter will also begin to consider Arendt’s work on totalitarian rule in Germany, and in particular her effort to think about the Holocaust, by examining her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Arendt’s lectures on a book by Kant which is concerned with questions about art and beauty, and her writing on the trial of a former member of the SS, may seem to have very little to do with each other. Not only that, but it may even seem to be distasteful to juxtapose the study of artistic beauty with questions about the Nazi genocide against the Jews. Arendt’s account of totalitarian rule, and of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in particular, was controversial, and did seem distasteful and tactless to a number of her contemporary readers, as it still does to some readers today (Ceserani 2007). Yet Arendt was not alone in thinking about the Holocaust in the context of issues about artistic beauty. Her contemporary, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, famously argued in an essay published in the same year as The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, that to write poetry after Auschwitz is ‘barbaric’ (Adorno 2003:281). What is it that brings together two such different topics as the Holocaust and the status of art in modernity?
