ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to understand Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” from a psychoanalytic perspective. In addition to the evil that is a product of madness, badness or outright sadism, I am proposing, following Arendt, that there is another form of evil that is the result of a particular sort of mindlessness, a failure to be a person which is the result of surrendering one’s mind, memory or capacity for self-reflection and therefore shame to a totalitarian regime or leader. Arendt calls this “banal evil” as opposed to the evil perpetrated with the intention of making the other superfluous that she terms “radical evil”, as it is rooted in individual omnipotence. This chapter will concentrate on “banal evil” and will not address the issue of “radical evil” except as a counterpoint to what is “banal”. While the totalitarian leader may be motivated by excessive sadism and/or a drive to power due to his own narcissistic needs – and in these respects may be differentiated from the totalitarian “follower” – there is nevertheless the allure of an ideology of illusion that we are all susceptible to, particularly when individual or group identity is threatened or when the development of identity has been impaired in the first place. This is the deathly allure of becoming a “nobody”, existing without a mind and without roots in the world. The “nobody” does not experience alienation; he incarnates it. For Arendt this is the greatest evil.
