"Eichmann and His Ghosts: Affective States and the Unstable Status of the Human"

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Cultural Critique, Number 88, Fall 2014, pp. 79-124 (Article)

P bl h d b n v r t f nn t PrDOI: 10.1353/cul.2014.0033

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I was not surprised by the “sensitivity of some Jews [responding to Eichmann in Jerusalem],” and since I am a Jew myself, I think I had every reason not to be alarmed by it. . . . However, the violence and, especially, the unanimity of public opinion among organized Jews (there are very few exceptions) has surprised me indeed. I conclude that I hurt not merely “sensitivity” but vested interests, and this I did not know before.

—Hannah Arendt, Jewish Writings

Eichmann in amErica, Post-9/11

As the controversial and inXuential Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil reached its Wfty-year anniversary, Hannah Arendt has been very much on the minds of humanities scholars and public intellectuals. Throughout the post-9/11 era, Arendt has been the sub-ject of journal and newspaper articles, editorials, monographs, edited collections, special journal issues, Wlms, and conferences.1 The Arendt revival can be attributed to a number of conditions within as well as beyond the academy that have thrown deWnitions of the human into crisis, and raised urgent questions regarding the interrelations between humans and human rights that Arendt’s political theorizing addresses. Arendt’s investigations in works including Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, and The Human Condition of humans’ relationships to authority, freedom, civil dissent, violence, imperialism, and power prove timely today. As Dirk Moses remarks, “Hailed once again as a thinker for our ‘dark times’ in offering guid-ance on all manner of pressing issues, her star shines in the Wrma-ment” (872).2 The United States’ ongoing war on terror and the escalation of violence against Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian

Eichmann and his GhostsaffEctivE statEs and thE UnstablE statUs of thE hUman

Cynthia G. Franklin

cultural critique 88—Fall 2014—copyright 2014 regents of the University of minnesota

Cynthia G. Franklin80

Territories (oPt) give Arendt’s writings particular pertinence. Arendt provides ways to understand—and challenge—contemporary human rights violations perpetrated by Israel and the United States that cru-cially depend on deployments of clear-cut binaries between the human and the inhuman. So, too, in the humanities, turns to the “posthuman” and to affect studies give Arendt’s writings currency. Arendt is preoc-cupied not only with what constitutes the human condition, but also with the relationship between reason and emotion. As well, disputes over Arendt’s own affect in Eichmann in Jerusalem provide insights both into consequential understandings of who and what count as human, and also into the ideological role affect plays in determining this.

In the humanities today, we see narratives about scholars’ inap-propriate affect working to undermine the academy as a site that can foster critical dissent, and more expansive understandings of who gets recognized as human and therefore deserving of human rights. Affect is at once evasive and invasive; palpably present, yet open to misinter-pretation; individual yet collective; variable yet structurally constituted; tied to thought, yet set in opposition to the more highly valued quali-ties of reason and the intellect; a marker of humanity, yet viewed as a competitor with the uniquely human quality of rationality. Precisely because affect encompasses these various and often contradictory meanings, it is deployed in wars of ideas in multiple, unpredictable, and often difWcult-to-pin-down but powerful ways. Through attention to stories focused on intellectuals’ affect, or on their emotional state, or feelings—when tracking their ideological function, these terms resist precise differentiation—I look to how affect gets marshaled to defend and camouXage the human rights violations that sustain impe-rialism and other forms of structural oppression.3 Narratives that cas-tigate individuals for having the wrong emotions or feelings, or for lacking them altogether, stand in for and distract from an engagement with their ideas. We can see a particularly clear delineation of how this works in stories that represent public intellectuals’ support for Pales-tinians or opposition to Zionism as character deWciencies, as evidence of their anti-Jewish sentiment, their hate mongering, and/or their rude-ness and insensitivity. This conversion of anti-Zionist thinking into anti-Jewish or otherwise undesirable sentiment is not a new phenom-enon, and as I focus on this symptomatic—and in itself urgent—exam-ple, for insights into how this process works, I turn to past and present

81Eichmann and his Ghosts

controversies surrounding Hannah Arendt and her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem. I also consider the role that life narratives can play in dis-rupting the status quo. Attention to Eichmann in Jerusalem suggests how life narratives, largely because of their affective power, can challenge as well as reinforce human/inhuman binaries upon which so much systemic violence depends.

Life writing texts (broadly deWned to include narratives or analy-ses that focus on an individual’s character or trials and tribulations) serve as apt vehicles to understand affect’s ideological potency in main-taining as well as resisting hegemony. Lauren Berlant, whose analysis of affect as an extension of ideology critique resonates with my own approach, contends that what gets understood as a visceral response or as intuition might be individually experienced, but is collectively constituted and historical, and also open to misrecognition when encountered in its speciWc articulations. Berlant states, “The training of intuition is the story of individual and collective biography. Catching this drift is not just a matter of coding affect into normative emotion. It enables us to formulate, without closing down, the investments and incoherence of political subjectivity and subjectiWcation in relation to the world’s disheveled but predictable dynamics” (2011, 53). This essay, in focusing on biographical texts, literalizes Berlant’s formulation in order to build upon her insights into how to analyze the political stakes of affective states, or what Raymond Williams has suggestively called “structures of feeling.”

As I will be arguing, attacks on Arendt that denounce her for her affect in Eichmann in Jerusalem obfuscate even as they often arise from the challenges she poses to Zionism. Upon Eichmann in Jerusalem’s pub-lication and also more recently, as exempliWed in Deborah Lipstadt’s 2011 The Eichmann Trial (taken up toward this essay’s conclusion), Arendt’s representation of Eichmann has occasioned outrage, as has Arendt’s response to him and to her fellow Jews. Then and now, her critics have charged her with simultaneously exhibiting inappropriate feelings (sympathy for Eichmann, antipathy for her fellow Jews), and with lacking feelings altogether (she was read as insensitive, uncar-ing, ironic, and cold). Arendt’s analysis of the banality of Eichmann’s evil and her sharp criticism of Israel’s use of the trial as political the-ater disrupted the trial’s clear-cut binaries that justify Zionism by upholding Jews as innocent and persecuted, and Palestinians (or Arabs)

82 Cynthia G. Franklin

as either akin to Nazis or as nonexistent. Today, Eichmann in Jerusalem remains at issue as struggles over Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state intensify. And as with Arendt, we see contemporary scholars’ criti-cisms of Zionism dismissed on the basis of these academics’ inappro-priate affect. I situate controversies over Arendt and Eichmann in relation to these recent attacks. I argue that focusing attention on individuals’ affect—whether that of Arendt or of scholars with the temerity to criti-cize Israel—regularly serves to justify, and also camouXage, the expul-sion of and other human rights violations against Palestinians that have accompanied Zionism.

In the contemporary United States, supporters of Israel’s coloni-zation and occupation of Palestine depend not only upon dehuman-izing Palestinians, but also upon delegitimating, through stories about their inappropriate affect, those who denounce Israeli’s actions. Directed with particular force against academics whose condemnations reach beyond the university, these stories suggest both the threat posed by critical challenges to the status quo, and the power that narratives focused on individuals’ affective states hold to undermine analyses of state violence.4

Edward Said stands as a strong example of how academics who oppose the hegemonic understandings of the human upon which Zion-ism and imperialism in the Middle East depends are delegitimated through stories that cast them as dangerous, disruptive, and Wlled with hate—in short, as domestic (or domesticated) versions of the Arab ter-rorist. In the stories outside the academy that most widely circulate about him, Said’s espousals of humanism, his investments in classical Western music and literature, his foundational theorizing of colonial-ism, his intellectual and political commitment to “criticism before soli-darity,” and his work toward peace and justice in Israel/Palestine are disregarded. Instead, he is represented as an anti-Jewish proponent of terrorism. In 2000 Said cast a stone toward an Israeli guard house over half a mile away, to celebrate Israel pulling out of Lebanon. Then and years later, at the time of his death, in mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times, the story of this “rock-throwing” incident, stripped of its context, stands as emblematic of Said, who in 1989 was dubbed “The Professor of Terror” (Alexander, 49). The furor over what Said described as “a symbolic gesture of joy,” instead represented as a “gratuitous act of random violence” directed at Israeli soldiers and


evidencing Said’s anger at Jews,5 has persisted to the point that even some obituaries about him feature this “event” as a deWnitive one in Said’s long, illustrious, and varied life. His support for Palestinians’ “permission to narrate” their own history to counter the dominant Zion-ist version is cast as evidence of his violent hatred for Jews.6

In the wake of 9/11, similar narratives attacking individual aca-demics who write or speak out against Zionism have become more widespread and systematic, with the establishment of such groups as AMCHA, Campus Watch, and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Virtually any professor issuing criticisms of Israel can meet with charges of anti-Semitism. (And here it is worth noting the problems with this term commonly referring only to discrimination against Jews, since Arabs are also Semitic. Through such usage, the term supports the erasure of Palestinian existence and the connections and overlaps between Jews and Arabs, as it helps maintain the Arab–Jewish binary so central to Zionism.) Hegemonic U.S. culture supports the equation that to support Arab, Muslim, or Palestinian rights is to hate Jews, Israel, and America. This false binary makes it possible for professors and students, once they have been labeled as anti-Jewish, to be cen-sored or disciplined on the basis that their challenges to Zionism con-stitute a form of hate speech. In this way, we see language instituted to protect racially or sexually marginalized students hijacked to pre-serve power. That it is privilege being protected is obfuscated because anti-Semitism against Jews does indeed exist, sometimes as part of anti-Zionist positions. As a result, even challenges to the equation “anti-Zionist criticism equals anti-Jewish hate speech” are converted into further evidence of being anti-Jewish. This chain of reasoning forecloses the possibility of taking a stand against Judeophobia and Zionism as it also translates criticism into dangerous affect into punishable action. The bitter result of this is also to align those who are anti-Jewish (whether or not they support Israel) and Jewish Zionists.7

Counterhegemonic thinking about Israel is also being deWned in related but more amorphous terms as biased, uncollegial, unprofes-sional, or hostile. As with other affective states, “bias” and “hostility” can be difWcult to deWne or disprove, and even as they inhere in indi-viduals, they then can infect others, creating a “hostile environment.” Therefore, to so deWne anti-Zionist criticism works yet again to protect privilege via language developed to Wght oppression (in this case, sexual


harassment). By this means, too, scholars who support Palestinians’ rights can be censored or disciplined for criticism that disrupts the sta-tus quo. In 2005, for example, Zionist students at Columbia University charged Joseph Massad, a professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture (MEALAC), with biased and “uncol-legial” or “unprofessional” behavior for his criticism of Israel, setting off a university investigation. The charges resulted not only in the disciplining of Massad but also in restrictions to MEALAC’s hiring practices.8 In 2006 when Juan Cole, noted historian and president of the Middle East Studies Association, was rejected for a tenured posi-tion in Yale’s history department, Cole noted that the “‘vicious attacks on my character and my views were riddled with wild inaccuracies,’ . . . adding that this criticism was ‘motivated by a desire to punish me for daring to stand up for Palestinian rights, criticize Israeli policy, [and] criticize Bush administration policies’” (qtd. in Jaschik). Archaeologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, an award-winning scholar, was subjected to an online petition opposing her tenure at Barnard, with colleagues charg-ing that she “hates Israelis” (Brostoff). DePaul University’s 2007 deci-sion not to tenure Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors and a widely published critic of Israeli policy in Palestine, was based on the rationale that he was uncollegial—that his writing and state-ments were hurtful and contained ad hominem attacks.9 Terri Ginsberg experienced punitive actions by North Carolina State University for her criticisms of Zionism that were deemed “uncollegial” as well as “biased.”10 Ward Churchill was Wred from his tenured position at the University of Colorado after an uproar ensued in 2005 over a 2001 essay in which he called Wnance workers killed on 9/11 “little Eichmanns.”11 The charges against Churchill conXate his inXammatory rhetoric and insensitivity with academic dishonesty, identity fraud, a “dangerous” demeanor, and the expression of critical dissent in ways that have fueled attacks on other anti-imperialist academics, regardless of these critics’ affective register or scholarly rigor.12 As stories about these critics’ per-sonal failings and inappropriate and even threatening affect circulate through mainstream and right-wing news channels and scholarly ven-ues, these narratives distract from, as they become conXated with, criti-cism of state-sponsored violence.

These cases can be usefully put in dialogue with the controversies surrounding Hannah Arendt that were triggered by the publication of


Eichmann in Jerusalem, and that continue today.13 Arendt stands as a predecessor to academics presently under attack for their challenges to Zionism, and she offers possibilities that remain highly relevant for conceptualizing the human in ways that resist rather than uphold practices of state violence. The controversies surrounding Arendt, in combination with Arendt’s own position on reason and emotion, also help to illuminate questions of affect. As humanities scholars grapple with the structure and signiWcance of affect and also with the slippery status of the human in an era characterized by extreme human rights violations, Eichmann in Jerusalem has lessons to teach us. This work, and the controversies it triggered in the United States and Israel, also suggests ways that narratives of individual lives—and critical reading practices developed in the humanities—can challenge exclusionary understandings of the human and ideologies of affect that support hegemonic thinking.

Before turning to the ways in which Arendt and the Wgure of Eich-mann throw understandings of the human into crisis, I would like to delineate my approach to the human. Scholarship grappling with this subject ranges across time, cultures, and disciplines. Posthumanism, the most recent attempt to theorize the human, problematizes the con-cept in different and often noncomplementary ways. These include drawing on the natural sciences or environmental studies to question anthropocentrism or the special status given to the human; challeng-ing, from a variety of approaches (including animal, digital, or disabil-ity studies) distinctions between humans and other animals, life forms, objects, and machines; and critiquing, from postcolonial, feminist, queer, and disability studies perspectives, the false universalism, violence, and exclusions that have accompanied various but especially Enlight-enment formulations of the human and human rights discourse. From a perspective that aligns with the third, I start with the premise that any deWnition of the human will involve problematic and often violence-inducing exclusions. And yet, even as I approach humanity as “a shift-ing mode of being” (Whitlock, vii), my intent is not to decenter or move beyond “the human.” As some posthuman scholars themselves have noted, such a move can serve profoundly reactionary purposes when so many groups of people denied human rights must seek recourse through the insistence that they are human.14 Instead, then, I aim, through readings of narratives about individual lives, to expose and


challenge exclusions to the human, speciWcally those inhering in impe-rialism. In the introduction to “(Post)Human Lives,” a special issue of the journal Biography, Gillian Whitlock notes, “The life of the ‘autobio-graphical’ self is profoundly invested in the human. For this reason it is persistently haunted by its non-, in-, and sub-human other: the mon-strous, the animal, the dead, the irrational, the primitive, the mechan-ical” (vi). In the sections that follow, as I track investments in the human and the hauntings that attend formulations of the human in biograph-ical as well as autobiographical narratives occasioned by the Eichmann trial, I seek not to disinvest in the category of the human in order to exorcise its ghosts. Instead, I look to how these narratives can serve not only to justify but also to illuminate and unsettle imperialist param-eters of the human.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, as Arendt covers a 1961 trial, she pro-vides a view into an Israel that is still consolidating itself as a Jewish state. This trial, which played an important part in Israel’s develop-ment, took place thirteen years after the founding of Israel and is some-times referred to as Israel’s coming-of-age event, or bar mitzvah. The fourteen-week trial also unfolded six years before the Six-Day War. This 1967 war subjected hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom already had been expelled to Gaza and the West Bank dur-ing the Nakba (the catastrophic War of 1948) to further displacement as Israel once more violently expanded its national borders. Keenly aware of the extent to which human rights depend on national belong-ing, Arendt opposed the statelessness that accompanies Zionism: her condemnation of the trial’s nation-building purposes includes a denouncement of the displacement of Palestinians.15 In 1963 Arendt’s criticisms of Israel were deemed scandalous. Today, human rights vio-lations against Palestinians (including deportation, indeWnite detention, over Wfty discriminatory laws against Palestinian citizens of Israel, force feeding of prisoners, executions, land theft, home demolitions, crop destruction, unsafe and radically curtailed electricity and water sup-plies, censorship, road blocks, pass laws, check points, blockades, the “Separation” Wall, unchecked settler violence—what Stephen Lend-man and others have called “slow-motion genocide”) have reached such crisis proportions that even dedicated Zionists are speaking out against the Jewish settlements in the oPt in an attempt to preserve the idea of Israel as a democracy (see, e.g., Beinart). At such a moment,


and in ways I later explore through a reading of Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial, although Arendt’s analyses in Eichmann in Jerusalem are inXuen-tial and respected, they nonetheless remain the subject of controversy precisely because they are so pertinent to work being done by anti-Zionist intellectuals.

At the time of Eichmann in Jerusalem’s publication, Arendt’s depic-tion of Eichmann and her refusal of clear-cut binaries between good and evil, and between Jews and Nazis, were deemed scandalous. Arendt, a Jew who Xed Germany to escape the Nazis, eventually assumed citi-zenship in 1950 in the United States, where she held academic positions at institutions including the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the New School, Princeton, Wesleyan, and Yale. Her serial coverage of the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker and the subsequent 1963 publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem drew Wre in major U.S. newspapers and magazines from readers incensed by what they perceived to be her sympathy for Eichmann, as well as her coldness and Xippancy toward those Jews who died in the camps, her insistence that Jewish Council members’ cooperation with Nazis made possible the astronomical death toll,16 and her condemnation of the Israeli court proceedings. Coming at a time when Israel’s nation-building efforts and U.S. support for Zionism were being mobilized through this trial that juxtaposed the terrible suffering of Holocaust survivors to Eich-mann’s monstrous anti-Semitism, Arendt’s analysis could not have been more out of step.17 The controversy that erupted over Eichmann in Jerusalem was judged by Anson Rabinbach to be “the most bitter public dispute among intellectuals and scholars concerning the Holo-caust that has ever taken place” (2004, 97; see also Ezra). The highly charged opposition to Arendt focused on her inappropriate affect; her analysis was deemed unforgivably heartless.

At issue in the angry response to Arendt was her break, in both tone and substance, with hegemonic U.S. and Israeli narratives about victims and perpetrators of “inhuman” acts that undergird support for Zionism. Returning to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and also review-ing the contentious history of False Gods, a memoir Eichmann wrote in an Israeli prison during 1961–62 while awaiting trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, provide a context from which to investi-gate the signiWcance of Arendt’s Eichmann, past and present, in consid-ering the status of the human, as well as still-pressing questions involving


the place of life narratives in relation to the ongoing history of Zionism and U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. U.S. policy in the Middle East largely has depended on a division of the world into good versus evil, and the human versus the inhuman or the terrorist.18 Analysis of the struggles waged over Eichmann’s humanity indicate the power as well as the instability of these binaries, the affective role that narratives about individuals play in establishing them, and the need to resist human–inhuman divides on political as well as ethical grounds. More broadly speaking, then, the stakes surrounding the struggles over the Wgure of Eichmann indicate the need to take a critical humanism—and the role of the humanities—seriously, and they suggest the impor-tance of factoring a concern with individual human lives and the power of affect into structural critiques.19 Competing representations of Eich-mann expose the slippery status of the human, the ideological charge of affect, and the stakes that attend formulations of the human, par-ticularly but not only in establishing and maintaining Israel as a Jew-ish state.

arEndt’s Eichmann

Infamous for his role as the SS ofWcer who orchestrated the mass depor-tation of Jews to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe, Adolf Eichmann is widely known as “the architect of the Holocaust.” After World War II, Eichmann took refuge in Argentina, where he lived under a false identity as Ricardo Klement until the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, kidnapped him in 1960 and smuggled him to Israel, where in 1962 he stood trial for war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and crimes against humanity.20 Found guilty by the civilian court, he was executed by hanging. As historians have noted, the Eichmann trial played a crucial role in putting diasporic Jewish identity and the suf-fering of Jews during World War II in the service of consolidating Isra-el’s identity as a Jewish nation. Arendt vigorously objected to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s Wrst prime minister, using the trial to serve politi-cal purposes, and it is her criticism of the trial as well as her assess-ment of Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem that created such bitter controversy. Her account and the responses to it in the United States and Israel illuminate both the forms of humanization and dehumanization


required to justify Israel as a Jewish state, and the affective role narra-tives about individuals play in this process.

Before turning to Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is important to review the Eichmann trial’s contexts. The historical signiWcance of—and emo-tional charge surrounding—the Eichmann trial derived in part from its relationship to the Gruenwald–Kastner trial (1954–55), the Wrst in Israel to focus on the Nazi era. In this trial, Rudolph Kastner, a promi-nent Zionist and member of the Mapai (Israel’s labor party) who was on the candidate list for the Knesset, sued Malkheil Gruenval for libel. Gruenval, a political opponent of Kastner’s who had lost most of his family in Hungary to the Nazis, accused Kastner of having cynically sold out Hungarian Jews to the Nazis when Kastner’s dealings with Eichmann, initially an attempt to save the lives of a million Jews in exchange for ten thousand trucks, instead resulted in the rescue of 1,685 Jews, including a number of Kastner’s friends and family members. During the trial, Kastner was portrayed as a modern-day Faust by the defense lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, and by the sole judge, Benjamin Halevi, who, in his unexpected ruling, declared that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil” in his dealings with the Nazis. Although Kastner’s appeal to the Supreme Court was successful and Halevi’s conduct criti-cized, Kastner was assassinated before this decision was rendered. Serv-ing as a counter to this trial and its demonizing of Kastner, the Eichmann trial, presided over by Halevi and two other judges, instead turned the spotlight on Eichmann and the Nazis as the embodiment of evil.21

Whereas the Kastner Affair suggested Jewish complicity in Nazi war crimes, the Eichmann trial bolstered popular support for Israel as a Jewish state both by focusing on Eichmann as a stand-in for Nazi Germany and a longer history of persecution of Jews, and also by build-ing identiWcation between Israeli Jews and Jews living in Europe who had experienced the Shoah. One way the trial did so was through its inclusion of testimony by 112 survivors. This testimony was crucial for the survivors, who, after experiencing the horrors of the death camps, often not only had to contend with guilt for having lived, but also then were subjected to shame for not having risen up against the Nazis. Par-ticularly in Israel, Jews who experienced the Shoah were cast—and often cast aside—as shamefully weak and effeminate, in contrast to the strong, masculine, militarized identity Israel was claiming for Jewish people.22 As Israeli historian Hanna Yablonka explains, perceptions


toward survivors did not shift until the early 1960s, in part as a result of the publication of their eyewitness accounts, including hundreds of community memorial books (167).23 The Eichmann trial both energized and reXected the interest in the early 1960s in these survivors’ mem-oirs, many of which were published in Israel.24 For the witnesses, to be able to tell of the atrocities they had suffered to a court of law and to a worldwide audience served as a much-needed initial antidote to their experiences of being shunned in the aftermath of the death camps. As the survivors’ testimony enabled listeners to empathize with them, it helped to counter public misconceptions that compounded the suffer-ing and dehumanization that survivors had experienced in the camps.

For Israel, this testimony served yet another, more speciWcally polit-ical purpose: together with the representation of Eichmann as but the most recent incarnation of an ages-old anti-Jewish hatred, this testi-mony played a critical role in legitimating Israel’s existence as a Jew-ish state.25 As Yablonka observes, the prosecution arranged testimony by carefully chosen witnesses to present a chronological account of Jews’ suffering during World War II “ranging from the description of Hitler’s rise to power down to the very last witness, Aharon Hoter-Yishai, who described the meeting of the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade and the survivors they came upon toward the end of the war” (241). Although irrelevant to the legal charges against Eichmann (at issue was not Jews’ suffering, but Eichmann’s responsibility for it), these eyewit-ness accounts played a critical role in turning the trial into a rendition of history that dramatized the horrors of the Shoah; indeed, a high point of the trial occurred when Yehiel Dinur (aka KZ-nik) collapsed during his testimony. Ya’akov Robinson, assistant to the attorney general, makes explicit the live testimony’s extralegal purposes when he states that it was included “to introduce tension and to elevate the trial out of dull routine” (qtd. in Yablonka, 99). Hausner himself announced that the purpose of the trial was to “shock the heart” (qtd. in Buerkle, 217 n.26). As these remarks make clear, testimony that for individual wit-nesses was traumatic if cathartic was for the state a dramatic orches-tration calculated to support the trial’s extralegal purposes.

Although the piles of documents detailing Eichmann’s responsi-bility in ordering or approving measures leading to mass deaths offered insurmountable evidence of his guilt, they were also dry and bureau-cratic (indeed, therein lay their banal horror). By contrast, the witness


testimony highlighted for its followers the human consequences of Eichmann’s orders in a way that, in creating an emotional bond between survivors and Israelis who did not experience Nazi Germany, consoli-dated diasporic and Israeli Jewish identity. The very fact that Israel claimed the right to try Eichmann in a criminal trial even though his crimes took place outside of Israel itself registers how Israel purported to represent all Jews, claiming an authority and positioning that was at once national and international, and that brought together Israeli and diasporic Jews. Daily Israeli radio broadcasts of the trial, which was also televised in the United States, contributed to the trial’s objec-tives to establish Israel as a religious state conjoining Israeli and dias-poric Jews. Every evening the Voice of Israel broadcast the Trial Diary, which provided summaries of recorded testimonies, and Ari Avner hosted a weekly program called The Week at the Eichmann Trial (Yablonka, 61). These programs, presenting Israel as arbiter and spokesperson for Jews everywhere, were widely followed: 60 percent of Israelis over age fourteen listened to the opening day broadcasts of the trial in part or in full.

Making the trial an emotion-laden event that provided a historical account of the Jews’ experience of World War II as it simultaneously made Nazi Germany stand in for the entire, and ongoing, history of anti-Jewish persecution contributed to a state-building project that justi-Wed the dehumanization, and expulsion, of Palestinians. As Idith Zer-tal argues, the trial imbued Israeli Jews with the sense that “the dangers which Israel confronted and still confronts are Nazi in essence and scope, and any military threat or apparent threat to Israel means a new holocaust” (114).26 Indeed, had it not been for the Eichmann trial, Zer-tal suggests, the 1967 war might not have been justiWed as a response to an “existential threat” to avert a catastrophe of Holocaust dimen-sions, but rather seen by Israelis as the launching of a military preemp-tive strike (115). Inside and outside of Israel, historians have made the case that the Eichmann trial served not only to justify the need for a Jewish state to save all Jews in the wake of World War II, but also to position anyone opposed to the establishment of the Israeli state as anti-Jewish, as akin to Nazis. This would include, as Zertal notes, Palestin-ians and other Arabs. And here it is worth noting the exclusions that attended the trial’s representation of Jews affected by the Shoah. The trial did not include any testimony by North African Jews, and the


trial’s architects treated Sephardic Jews who would trouble the con-cretizing of a Jewish–Arab binary as unconnected to the Shoah—aside from Belgium, Bulgaria was the only European country not represented. Through its use of witnesses, the trial played a key role in creating a sense of the “Jews” who experienced the Shoah as not only having the right, as a result of the persecution they had undergone, to a genealogi-cal return from Europe to historic Palestine, but also as being a people distinct from Jewish Palestinians or Arabs.27

Shoshana Felman’s celebration of the trial’s innovative use of wit-nesses not only captures the power and importance of their testimony, but also reveals the problems with the exclusionary narrative that their testimonials, taken together, constructs. In “Theaters of Justice,” Felman argues that through its use of witnesses, the Eichmann trial created a new legal language, one that translates “thousands of private, secret traumas into one collective, public, and communally acknowledged one” (227). For Felman, this act of translation makes a revolutionary contribution not only to Jews, history, law and culture, but also “to humanity at large” (230). She celebrates the way that the trial, “through its monumental legal record and its monumental legal chorus of the testimonies of the persecuted, unwittingly became creative of a canon-ical or sacred narrative” (236). As she evokes the language of the sacred and canonical to describe the narrative that comes into creation as a result of survivors’ combined testimony, she endows the individual witnesses with an exalted agency that is at once their own and God-given. Meanwhile, the state and its role in cannily conducting this “legal chorus” go entirely unacknowledged.28 This inattention enables Fel-man to celebrate without qualiWcation how the trial creates “the privi-leged text of a modern folktale of justice” (238). Focusing so exclusively on how the trial radically transforms victims into historical agents, Fel-man need not distinguish between the signiWcance that testimony held for the individual Jewish witnesses and that which it held for the Israeli state. Indeed, as Felman articulates how the state uses the legal system to construct a narrative that encompasses—and conXates—the religious, political, and historical spheres, she ignores and in so doing reveals how the trial’s “sacred” narrative, and its universalizing of a “folk” and “folktale,” renders Palestinians’ narratives simultaneously sacri-legious or illegitimate, and nonexistent.29 In short, Felman’s analysis recapitulates precisely, if unwittingly, not only the affective power, but


also the unacknowledged erasures that sustain the Zionism advanced in the Eichmann trial.

In reviewing the Eichmann trial and its Zionist purposes, what emerges is the central role played by its emotionally engaging repre-sentations of individual lives and the human–inhuman binaries that they mobilized: Jewish victims and their human suffering are opposed to the Nazi Eichmann and his monstrous evil. In a more subterranean way, Jews also are deWned against Arabs, who, in the context of the new state of Israel, either stand in for Nazis as a threat to Jewish exis-tence or simply do not exist—two contradictory but nonetheless com-plementary forms of dehumanization. It is precisely the trial’s politically motivated appeals to emotion that Arendt opposes, and in Eichmann in Jerusalem it is her lack of sympathy for the Jewish victims and her refusal to simply vilify Eichmann that makes Eichmann in Jerusalem so discomWting. Arendt insisted on the power of human thought as the key to resisting totalitarianism and promoting human dignity, free-dom, and plurality. For Arendt, emotions impair thinking. Arendt is outraged by the affective structures that the trial’s architects mobilize, along with the nationalism and exclusionary politics that power them. Despite her prewar sympathies for Zionism, Arendt objected to how in establishing itself as a Jewish state Israel would subject Palestinians to the very conditions that brought so many Jews to Israel in the wake of World War II.30 In 1951, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt states, “like virtually all other events of the 20th century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people” (1973, 290). Arendt not only condemns chau-vinistic nationalism, statelessness, and colonial occupation, but she also casts suspicion on how structures of feeling impair individuals’ judgment in ways that make possible nationalist justiWcations of such inhumane conditions.31

Arendt’s investments in judgment undistorted by emotions and her related suspicions of nationalism are at the heart of what her con-temporaries found so offensive in Eichmann in Jerusalem; they objected to her appraisal of Eichmann (some found her too dispassionate, oth-ers felt her to be sympathetic), her hostile response to the survivors’ testimony, and her critical assessments of the Israeli state and the Jew-ish people. As she casts a coldly analytic and often ironic eye on the


trial proceedings, Arendt upends the prevailing view of Eichmann and the Jews who endured Nazism, and, more broadly, refuses binaries of good and evil, and human and inhuman. These disruptions account both for Eichmann in Jerusalem’s intellectual, ethical, and political sig-niWcance and also for the ire it aroused in Israel and in the United States. As Arendt addresses questions that pertain to Eichmann’s humanity, her analysis and her affective stance (as I argue, charges of “heartless-ness” and irony exist within the realm of affect) disrupt newly hege-monic approaches to Israel, Nazi Germany, and the Shoah, as Arendt also challenges understandings of justice, good and evil, and the nature and deWnition of the human.

Throughout Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt strenuously opposes the political purposes to which Ben-Gurion put the trial. Arendt condemns Ben-Gurion for using the trial to pass judgment on Nazi Germany and an even longer history of persecution against Jews. Observing how prosecutor Hausner began his opening speech with the Pharaoh, Arendt castigates Hausner for making “‘anti-Semitism throughout history’” (2006, 19) central to the trial. Arendt Wnds this approach to be “bad history and bad rhetoric; worse, it was clearly at cross-purposes with putting Eichmann on trial.” For Arendt, “the focus of every trial is upon the person of the defendant, a man of Xesh and blood with an individ-ual history” (285). Justice requires not a history lesson on anti-Semitism, but rather a cool consideration of “the importance of Adolf Eichmann, son of Karl Adolf Eichmann, the man in the glass booth built for his protection” (5), and she condemns the state for turning the courtroom into a theater, and Eichmann into a spectacle.

Although Arendt states an interest in maintaining the same strict parameters that she believes should be adhered to by those conduct-ing the trial itself, Eichmann in Jerusalem provides acute—and far from affect-free—insights not only into Eichmann, but also into his larger signiWcance. Despite her insistence that only her epilogue goes beyond “simple reporting” (2006, 287), it is her complexly layered account of “all the things that go beyond” the encased Eichmann that makes her narrative so compelling. As she dwells on the Wgure of Eichmann, she grapples with what Eichmann tells us about the state of Israel, and with the historical and sociopolitical as well as ethical and philosoph-ical signiWcance of his ordinariness. Moreover, even as Arendt pres-ents her point of view as one that exists independently of her emotions,


the biting irony and coldness that characterizes so much of her report-age not only arouses emotions in readers offended by her lack of sym-pathy, but also is itself inextricable from Arendt’s own anger with the state of Israel and her contempt for Eichmann. That Arendt’s irony is so poorly understood by those readers who perceive her to be sympa-thetic to Eichmann, and that the affective dimensions of her irony are as unmistakably present as they are difWcult to decode are interpretive problems that often accompany deployments of irony. Even as Arendt, then, is perceived to be lacking in emotion (and presents her report as devoid of emotion), the strong emotional response that Eichmann in Jerusalem regularly arouses in its readers owes not, I would argue, to Arendt’s lack of affect, but rather to the way that her irony, given its elusiveness and subtleties, conclusively breaks with the trial’s emo-tional tenor and the binaries the trial’s affective register engenders. Arendt’s critical and at times even scornful and ridiculing irony, directed as it is at Israel and the Jewish victims as well as at Eichmann himself, disrupts the trial’s attempts to establish Israelis’ and worldwide view-ers’ empathy and identiWcation with the purely innocent Jewish vic-tims and absolute antipathy toward an inhumanly evil Eichmann.

That Arendt does not achieve her stated objective to provide an emotion-free account of the trial focused only on Eichmann accounts in large part for its power and provocations. Eichmann in Jerusalem is not only a trial narrative, but also a character study, philosophical med-itation, political theory, and World War II history. That Arendt crosses disciplines and genres arguably compounds the controversies and inter-pretive difWculties of deciphering Arendt’s affect. The trial narrative’s layers and complexities, although they go against Arendt’s expressed intentions, constitute not a failure but a strength. Eichmann in Jerusa-lem evidences the ways that a text can bridge a focus on a singular life and commentary on a larger history. As Arendt notes, it is not in the purview of the criminal justice system to try an entire country or cul-ture, but rather an individual. This means criminal courts cannot ade-quately address crimes that a state sanctions or creates. By contrast, narratives focused on an individual are well suited to explore the interrelations between an individual and a society’s structures and beliefs, whether they are conventional biographies or, as with Eich-mann in Jerusalem, narratives that include a strong biographical com-ponent. Such narratives, along with other life-writing texts, can serve


as crucial supplements to—and critiques of—the legal justice system: they can account for crimes that are societal but nonetheless depend upon individual agency. As such, these texts constitute sites to inter-rogate conceptualizations of justice that focus on the individual, even as they themselves may investigate but a single life. They offer a way to demand accountability from individuals (both a text’s readers and its subject) without forgoing an exploration of ethical questions, and structural analysis and critique. Moreover, the author’s emotional investments in her or his subject can be as appropriate to a biographical text as they are inextricable from its potency, and they can serve not only to reinforce, but also to challenge, affective responses that are central to hegemonic ideologies. Moreover, as I later discuss, Arendt’s affect also disrupts and illuminates the norms that govern accounts of the Shoah.

As Arendt explores Eichmann’s signiWcance, she enters into the contest over the status of his humanity, which is Wercely at issue for Eichmann and his lawyer Robert Servatius, and for Ben-Gurion and Hausner. Although none seriously question Eichmann’s guilt in legal terms, the struggle over his humanity exceeds this question as it illu-minates the trial’s larger historical and political stakes. The differences among their positions are suggestive of just how central—and difWcult to pin down—are deWnitions of the human and humanity. In Undoing Gender (2004), Judith Butler theorizes the political and ethical stakes of destabilizing the binary between the inhuman and the human. As But-ler argues, rights depend upon being recognized as human, and this recognition is regularly granted or denied in the interest of forwarding speciWc political agendas, and in issuing judgments that support these agendas. In these deWnitional struggles, the more clearly that inhu-man acts line up with inhuman actors, and human acts with human actors, the more comfortable we are, and the easier it is to issue judg-ments, and build political consensus.

It is unsurprising, then, that for Eichmann, asserting his status as a recognizable and feeling human being was central to his defense. In cross-examination, when asked by Hausner if he was guilty, Eichmann replied, “Legally not, but in the human sense . . . yes” (qtd. in Rosen-baum)—a response that doubles as a plea for legal exoneration and, through admission of his human failings, an assertion of his human-ity. Arendt describes how, during the trial, Eichmann claimed moral


rectitude by portraying himself as an idealist who followed orders regardless of his emotional response to them (2006, 42). He insisted on his lack of anti-Jewish sentiment and on his extreme distress for the scenes of carnage he encountered (87–88), and he justiWed his adher-ence to orders in the name of Kantian ethics (136). Eichmann wishes to be judged not by his actions or the orders he followed, but rather by the workings of his heart and mind: “‘I am not the monster I am made out to be,’ Eichmann said. ‘I am the victim of a fallacy’” (248). Through assertions of his abhorrence for carrying out what he saw to be his responsibilities, he strives for a position of moral rectitude and ethical innocence based on distinction between his feelings and actions.

Eichmann further attempted to combat the perception that he was a “monster” through voluminous outpourings that supplement his courtroom testimony and insist on his ordinary humanity. His tape-recorded interview with a police examiner resulted in a transcript of 3,564 typed pages, and he handwrote a 1,300-page memoir while await-ing trial between 1961 and 1962.32 Although this memoir still has not been published, the abstracts, excerpts, and descriptions of it that have circulated indicate its reliance on an outpouring of largely quotidian details and ordinary emotional responses to extraordinary crimes. In the Wrst 220 pages, Eichmann chronicles his life from childhood until 1944 in a way that emphasizes his ordinariness. He also stresses through-out his lack of anti-Jewish feeling. Eichmann calls the Holocaust “the greatest crime committed in the history of humanity,” but he repeat-edly minimizes his personal guilt, at times by describing himself as one in a team of horses, driven by a Werce master. Paradoxically, by cast-ing himself as less than human—as a beast of burden—and thereby refusing responsibility for his actions, he asserts his humanity. He accompanies this abnegation with page after page of “thick” and often repetitive description that characterizes him as human in the most uncontroversial of ways. Some details are quotidian; others document his horror in the face of mass murder. As a result, although scholars who have seen the memoir agree that it only repeats his trial argu-ments, they also remark, as does Israeli state archivist Evytar Friesel, that in the memoir, “‘You have a human being, there is no doubt, you do not have a monster. You have a man, living and talking like a human being who is beginning to recognise he is part of a terrible crime, but saying, ‘what could I do’” (qtd. in Goldenberg). If this memoir does


not challenge Eichmann’s legal guilt, it does, in large part through appeals to Eichmann’s emotional responses to the Shoah, apparently unsettle the certainty through which the state seeks to excise Eichmann from the realm of the human.

Whereas Eichmann strives to establish his ordinary humanity, it is precisely Eichmann’s humanity that the prosecution is intent on dis-proving. Their case focuses on proving him a monster who embodies a long history of anti-Jewish hatred and acts with demonic volition. This arguably explains Ben-Gurion’s decision to suppress the memoir Eichmann wrote to assist with his trial: if establishing Eichmann’s “humanness” was not at issue in determining the verdict of the trial, it was at odds with the trial’s nation-building purposes. Although Ben-Gurion sought to cast Eichmann as representatively German and anti-Jewish, as he works to consolidate Israel as a strong Jewish nation able to bring Eichmann, as representative of all persecutors of the Jewish people, to justice, he and Hausner simultaneously represent Eichmann as a monster devoid of rational thought or recognizable emotions, creating as much distance as possible between him and the judges and world citizens following the trial. Ben-Gurion’s order that the memoir be locked in a safe in the state archives is consonant with this strat-egy.33 By casting Eichmann as a monstrous and hate-Wlled executer of evil, the prosecution can condemn not only Eichmann himself, but also the anti-Semitism that he embodies. By arousing in those following the trial an extreme antipathy for Eichmann and rendering him inhu-man due to the magnitude of his evil actions, Ben-Gurion uses the legal system to ground Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

Arendt’s position disrupts the human–inhuman binaries that Eich-mann and Ben-Gurion attempt, from opposing sides, to occupy. Whereas for Eichmann, explanations of his ordinariness and conformity are exonerating, for Arendt, they evidence an all-too-human evil. Arendt’s Eichmann emerges as a petty bureaucrat, someone whose actions in overseeing the evacuation and execution of millions of people derive not from monstrous hatred, nor from insanity, but rather from his invest-ments in following the orders of his Nazi superiors both to advance his career and because he believed it right to carry out the law of the land, however Xawed. Through his utter ordinariness and banal rea-soning, Arendt’s Eichmann does not obviate but embodies the cate-gory of evil, and he makes the enormity of the Shoah digestible if not


palatable: Eichmann makes evil a graspable state that remains within even as it unsettles the category of the human. Such is the horror of Arendt’s Eichmann.

Arendt accomplishes this unsettling most fully through the para-doxical processes of rendering Eichmann at once inhuman and ordinary in his actions, and then as simultaneously ghostlike and human in his later affective responses to them: “And the more ‘the calamity of the Jew-ish people in this generation’ unfolded and the more grandiose Mr. Hausner’s rhetoric became, the paler and more ghostlike became the Wgure in the glass booth, and no Wnger-wagging: ‘And there sits the monster responsible for all this,’ could shout him back to life” (2006, 8). Through describing Eichmann’s transformation into a ghost, Arendt criticizes the prosecution’s attempt to make Eichmann stand in for the Shoah, with the result that Eichmann the man vanishes. And yet Arendt’s description also suggests that this strategy affects Eichmann himself: as the prosecutor speaks, Eichmann absorbs this history and registers its horrors through the draining of blood from his body. In his discussion of shame, Giorgio Agamben claims that “Xush is the remainder that, in every subjectiWcation, betrays a desubjectiWcation and that, in every desubjectiWcation, bears witness to a subject” (112). If a Xush registers recognition of our shameful identiWcation with that which repulses (106) and “desubjectiWes” us in a way that simultaneously testiWes to our sub-jectivity and evidences the precariousness of subjectivity itself, Arendt’s description of Eichmann’s pallor registers a related dynamic. As the prosecutor introduces them, the details of the Shoah appear quite liter-ally to suck the life out of Eichmann, each one issuing a small death to his status as human at the same time as his pallor evidences an emo-tional response that is an eminently human reaction to the inhumanity of mass murder. That Eichmann oversaw the extermination of millions of humans makes him a specter of the human. And yet, as the descriptions of the death camps drain the life out of him, this transformation is para-doxically the ground upon which his humanity rests. In other words, Eichmann’s affective response—his lack of immunity to horror—makes him human at the same time as his responsibility for the horriWc acts dehumanizes him; the terrible magnitude of these actions removes him from the category of humanity that he continues, in ghost form, to haunt.

Arendt similarly uses quotidian details that betray Eichmann’s vacuity to throw the category of the human into crisis. In contrast to


Eichmann himself and to the prosecution, Arendt takes up the ordi-nary details that for Eichmann are exonerating and for the prosecution are threatening, and she Wnds in them evidence that condemns Eich-mann as they simultaneously unsettle the category of the human. For Arendt, the details that Eichmann uses to establish his humanity work in contradictory ways owing to their banality. On the one hand, their cumulative weight evidences Eichmann’s ordinariness. On the other hand, that this unmitigated banality accompanies unprecedented crimes against humanity is not only horrifying, but also demonstrates such a lack of thought that Eichmann appears subhuman, even monstrous. Eichmann appears inhuman not only on the basis of his already-known actions, but also precisely because his justiWcations of these actions and his account of himself are so clichéd that he appears to be devoid of individual consciousness. The more Eichmann says, the less human he seems to Arendt, not because his utterances are so extraordinary, but because they are so generic.

In depicting an Eichmann who can only parrot the words of other people, Arendt demonstrates how precariously close, even indiscern-ible, are the human and inhuman, and also the ordinariness of Eich-mann’s evil. As Arendt notes, “ofWcialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché” (2006, 48). Arendt tells of how at his hanging, after assert-ing the party-line disbelief in an afterlife, he immediately proclaims, “After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again” (252). For Arendt, the mindlessness of these clashing clichés makes Eichmann “com-pletely himself” (252), which is to say, devoid of a self. For Arendt, these moments before his death encapsulate what Eichmann has to teach us: “the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” (252). Arendt remarks, “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal” (276). Agamben draws on Arendt’s understanding of the banality of evil when he discusses how Hitler’s Germany provides an instance in which the normal and the limit case “show their complicity” (50). How-ever, whereas for Agamben the Muselmann perishing in the death camps in an extraordinary state of emaciation and near-death “embodies that liminal zone between the human and the inhuman” (55), in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann in all his ordinariness occupies this destabilizing


position. If in Agamben’s account it is almost impossible to look at the Muselmann because the Muselmann is and is not recognizably human, Eichmann, through Arendt’s rendering, is unnervingly human in a way that disrupts the trial’s showcasing of him as a sealed-off specimen of evil.34 As Arendt insists on his ordinariness, she suggests the Wne line between average humanity and monstrosity, and reminds us that acts of inhumanity and dehumanization are all too human.

Arendt’s strategy through much of Eichmann in Jerusalem is to inhabit Eichmann’s point of view not to establish her own or readers’ sense of empathic identiWcation with Eichmann, but rather to mercilessly expose—and condemn and caution against—his utter inability to think. Indeed, Arendt pinpoints Eichmann’s most “decisive Xaw” as the “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view” (2006, 47–48). Far from excusing Eichmann, by at times adopting his point of view in her reportage, Arendt exposes the extrem-ity of his moral and intellectual failings. This approach of occupying another’s point of view has been viewed by critics including Deborah Nelson as an affect-free one that is ethical and imaginative—one that follows from Arendt’s refusal in On Revolution of emotion or sympathy because it “dissolves otherness by eliminating distance, which main-tains the distinction between self and the other that makes plurality attainable” (Nelson, 233–34). For Nelson, Arendt’s “irony can be viewed as an attempt at plurality, as mocking as it was. By taking him [Eich-mann] at his word, Arendt is able to display his self-understanding and its ludicrousness at the same time. That irony is an affectless rheto-ric suggests the distance between plurality and empathy” (232). While I agree with Nelson that through irony, Arendt works both to inhabit Eichmann’s point of view and to expose its absurdity, as I have been arguing, irony is not affect free (and through her reference to the “mock-ing” quality of Arendt’s irony, Nelson too suggests this), and the plu-rality that Arendt creates through her irony involves denunciation as well as preservation of Eichmann’s point of view. Therefore, I argue that Arendt’s plurality, though at a decided distance from empathy, is not outside of affect. Rather, through an ironic rendering of Eich-mann’s vacancy that carries a carefully composed contempt and out-rage, Arendt condemns him along with any others who will not, or cannot, think for themselves. Moreover, in doing so, she upsets the affective structures that the trial mobilizes in its state-building project,


and places her readers in a decidedly less comfortable, and more com-plicit, space.

At the same time as Arendt precludes readers’ empathy for Eich-mann by insisting on the banality of his evil, through an insistence that he is not unique, she does not enable readers to experience deWni-tive distance from him. As she exposes Eichmann’s lack of individual-ity, she makes us consider how we might be like him, and she calls upon us to exert agency and to claim moral responsibility for our actions, regardless of whether or not they are legal or culturally sanctioned. In other words, she in no way exonerates Eichmann, nor does she com-plicate the wrongness of his actions; instead, she upends readers’ sense of our own righteousness and goodness. Arguably, it is this disturbing perspective that Arendt affords, compounded by her emotionally unset-tling irony that also conveys a sense of her own intellectual and moral superiority, that renders her representation of Eichmann so off-putting.

If her irony precludes empathy in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt does insist on recognition of others’ humanity, in ways that crucially distinguish her affective stance from those of Eichmann and the Nazi regime. In ways that Zygmunt Bauman elaborates, the emotional dis-tance between Nazis and their victims made possible the death camps (26). Exploring the Holocaust as a profoundly modern event, Bauman establishes how industrial technology and bureaucracy created for Nazis a necessary distancing that rendered their victims’ humanity impercep-tible.35 What bureaucracy and technology enable, as Bauman points out, is a form of violence that “is free from emotions and purely ratio-nal” (98). As he remarks, the “Final Solution” “arose out of a genuinely rational concern, and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose” (17). Indeed, it is the layers of bureaucracy and the removes afforded by industrial technology compounded by his lack of critical intelligence that allow Eichmann to send trainloads of human beings to their deaths. He is unable to discern the immorality of his actions because he operates so squarely within the distancing structures and logic of the Nazi regime. The man who faints when he witnesses a sin-gle act of suffering is unXappable about having signed memos that deliver thousands of people to gruesome deaths. Whereas the Shoah depends on a distance and principles of rationality that preclude aware-ness of others’ humanity, Arendt instead advocates a critical distance that enables good judgment and ethical behavior. That her “heartless”


representation of Eichmann and those who partook in his trial created such an emotional disturbance in readers owes in large part to how, rather than keeping him sealed off in his glass booth, Arendt asks that we inhabit Eichmann’s viewpoint and explore its relationship to our own, in a way that brings us up against, but with a need to resist, our all-too-human capacity for evil. Her “heartlessness” in regard to Eich-mann, in other words, might be a refusal of empathy, but it is far from indifference, detachment, or a lack of caring: it is precisely an insistence that we use our imaginations and critical intelligence to recognize, not remove ourselves from, the humanity of others, without relying on forms of empathy that collapse others into ourselves.

When it comes to Arendt’s “heartlessness” toward the trial’s wit-nesses, however, her irony operates more to distance readers from the witnesses’ humanity. As she berates the trial’s architects for politiciz-ing the trial, the witnesses become so much collateral damage to her critique of how Israel mobilizes affect for state-building purposes, and the witnesses’ humanity is diminished. Arendt’s few passages devoted to the witnesses assume enormous importance for critics who use them to issue a wholesale condemnation of the “heartlessness” of Eichmann in Jerusalem and of Arendt’s anti-Semitism. Although I believe critics can rightly point to these paragraphs as places where Arendt forgoes the humanity of the survivors in order to make her structural criticisms, her irony throughout the rest of her book more consistently serves to insist that we recognize the humanity of others. That these pages are used to issue a totalizing denouncement of Arendt’s critique owes, I would argue, not only to her own failure to treat the witnesses with humanity, but also to just how discomWting Eichmann in Jerusalem’s overarching criticisms and calls for accountability are.

The disruptiveness of Arendt’s account was registered at the time not only by the thousands of angry reactions in U.S. papers, but also by the suppression of Arendt’s writing in Israel. Although widely attacked in the Hebrew press, Eichmann in Jerusalem was not published in Israel until 2000, even though it had been translated into Hebrew decades earlier. Shortly after its publication in the United States, Ger-shom Scholem wrote a letter to the Hebrew daily paper accusing Arendt of lacking “love for the Jewish people.” In her reply, Arendt insists on the violence that attends love for a distinct people, and she instead endorses a “love of humanity” and of individual people. The Hebrew


press failed to publish her response, leaving Hebrew-speaking readers only able to read Scholem’s criticism of a book unavailable to them (Kimmerling). What is symptomatic about this partial representation of Arendt’s position is the way in which her critique of the exclusionary and often violent character of nationalism is obscured and instead cast as an emotional deWcit—as a lack of love for her fellow Jews. The focus on Arendt as an individual, and on her affective failure (her “lack of love”), stands in for, and serves to invalidate, her structural analysis of nation-alism. The ways Arendt has and has not circulated in the United States and Israel, and the need to isolate and externalize Eichmann’s evil as an embodiment of Nazi Germany and as timeless persecution of Jews, reg-ister ways support for Israel as a Jewish state depends on clear-cut divi-sions between innocence and guilt, good and evil, human and inhuman, and us and them that can both be Wgured and challenged through sto-ries about individuals that mobilize affect in support of these binaries.

As attention both to the historical Wgure of Eichmann and to the controversies surrounding Arendt indicate, narratives about individ-uals are of ethical and political consequence in large part because of their emotional power. Understandings of larger histories, and of what and who counts as human, are often shaped by these stories, and through the affective structures they sustain and disrupt. In an interview that remained unpublished until 2007, and that I quote from in my epigraph, Arendt describes how the “violence” and “unanimity” of the response to Eichmann in Jerusalem revealed for her that she “hurt not merely ‘sensitivity’ but vested interests” (qtd. in Piterberg). What Arendt’s assessment of Eichmann in Jerusalem brings to the surface is the extent to which individual affect (or “sensitivity”) is structured in relation to political interests.

Scholars in trauma studies provide a way to think about intercon-nections between the hurt feelings of Arendt’s readers and their “vested interests.” In her analysis of the Eichmann trial’s signiWcance, Carolyn Dean Wnds a “new anxiety about the fragility of empathy,” and worry over “human indifference to the fates of others” (4). Given these anxi-eties, it is unsurprising that Eichmann in Jerusalem hits a nerve. With her opposition to empathy as an antidote to the indifference that makes mass murder possible, Arendt disrupts the way that, as Dean contends, “dignity and empathy have become nothing less than synecdoches for the properly human” (44). As Dean probes responses to Holocaust texts


that refuse empathy as the measure for “the properly human,” she urges critics to question comfort, and to “explore in more depth our responses to works that make us squirm” (75). Her provocation to analyze the “consistent and complex narratives of denial and displacement” (14) at work in “normative frameworks” for remembering the Jewish vic-tims of the Holocaust (14) provides a way to consider the vested inter-ests that underlie the ire Arendt arouses.36

If the mass murders of World War II catalyzed a crisis in the cate-gory of the human—one connected to anxieties about the fragility of empathy and the strength of human indifference—the “vested inter-ests” Arendt hurts seem more particularly related to the state of Israel serving Jews as a refuge and as a bulwark against future threats of geno-cide. In normative accounts that address World War II or Israel, the Shoah justiWes the founding of Israel as a Jewish state. These hege-monic accounts partake in a broader repression in the collective uncon-scious of the Nakba. With the establishment of Israel as a state sustained by the myth that it is “a land without a people, for a people without a land,” Palestinians are quite literally displaced, and their existence is denied when they are not demonized as displaced Nazis or terrorists. When Arendt refuses to love or empathize with the Jewish (or indeed any) people and when she ironically assesses the all-too-human failings of the Israeli state and Eichmann, she disrupts reigning formulations of the human. She also challenges the righteousness of Israeli and U.S. investments in the Eichmann trial and the entire Zionist project.

Today, Arendt serves as both a powerful predecessor for anti-Zionist intellectuals, and as a continuing provocateur for Zionism’s defenders. Indeed, in some quarters, the anger against Arendt has become ampliWed as vested interests in Israel as a Jewish state have become at once more powerful and increasingly challenged. Ad homi-nem attacks on Arendt, and on those who challenge Israel’s human rights abuses, continue to highlight these critics’ inappropriate affect to counter, and cover over, their anti-Zionist criticism. In the concluding section, I look to Deborah Lipstadt’s account of the Eichmann trial and to her quarrel with Arendt. Lipstadt’s narrative suggests the continuing relevance that affect-laden stories about individual lives—and Eich-mann and Arendt in particular—hold for understanding, and opposing as well as upholding, investments in Zionism, and the human/inhu-man binaries that Zionism perpetuates.


a talE oF two trials: Eichmann, and arEndt, rEvisitEd

Deborah E. Lipstadt’s 2011 The Eichmann Trial evidences ways that com-peting narratives concerning Eichmann—and Arendt—continue to play a role in struggles over the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state, during a period when Zionism is assuming increasingly contested and violent forms. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish His-tory and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, has received interna-tional recognition for her scholarship. She has served as an advisor to Presidents Clinton and Bush on commemorating the Shoah, on fostering religious freedom, and on combating anti-Semitism and intolerance.37 In The Eichmann Trial, she takes up two trials that have anti-Semitism at their core: she interjects into her narrative of the Eichmann trial points of comparison with her own 2000 trial when, in accordance with the U.K.’s legal system, David Irving brought—and lost—a libel suit against Lipstadt and her English publisher, Penguin.38 Irving sued Lip-stadt because in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993), she described Irving as a Holocaust denier and as anti-Jewish. In The Eichmann Trial, Lipstadt connects the “deep-seated Jew hatred” (2011, 129) that she, as a historian, testiWed to and expe-rienced Wrsthand in the suit Irving brought against her, to the anti-Semitism that Holocaust survivors bore witness to during the Eichmann trial. Although Lipstadt identiWes signiWcant differences between the two trials, as she focuses on the “link between those who perpetuated these horrors [of the Holocaust] and those who deny them” (129), through her foregrounding of continuities between Eichmann and Irving, and between past and present-day genocidal hatred of Jews, her trial narrative reinscribes and updates Ben-Gurion’s aims in the Eichmann trial: to justify the need for Israel as a Jewish state.

As Lipstadt addresses the Eichmann trial and her own, she also puts Arendt and her representation of Eichmann on trial in a way that is crucial to her defense of Israel. Arendt does not enter The Eichmann Trial until Lipstadt’s penultimate chapter. However, the book’s cover art—a photo of Arendt positioned between images of Eichmann on trial and of the judges and a witness—signals just how central Arendt is to Lipstadt’s narrative. In her sixth chapter, Lipstadt indicts Arendt for her account of the Eichmann trial, a rendering that her own trial


narrative, presented in the Wrst Wve chapters, refutes. Lipstadt departs from Arendt not only because she Wnds the testimony by the Holo-caust victims to be the most important part of the Eichmann trial, but also because she Wnds Arendt guilty of “cruel statements and haphaz-ard treatment of historical data” (2011, 185). She condemns Arendt for “a breach of faith with readers” (180) because Arendt fails to reveal how much of the trial she missed and gleaned from transcripts. Chal-lenging Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann based on Arendt’s inabil-ity to observe Eichmann during the trial, she claims a greater authority for herself. She derives this authority in signiWcant part from references to her singular access to Eichmann’s memoir, released to Lipstadt by the Israeli state during her own trial, to aid her in defending against Irving’s libel charges (xix, 164).

Lipstadt’s aim in this chapter on Arendt, and more generally in Eichmann on Trial, is to evidence Eichmann’s anti-Jewish hatred, and to overturn Arendt’s conviction that Eichmann’s genocidal actions derived from banal careerist ambitions. Lipstadt contends that Arendt’s disavowal of Eichmann’s hatred derives not only from her inability to fully observe Eichmann, but also from Arendt’s disregard for the anti-Jewish sentiment that underwrites the European political theory in which she was so invested, and from her close relationships with its leading male intellectuals, particularly Martin Heidegger. For Lipstadt, Arendt’s abjuration of Eichmann’s anti-Semitism derives from her schol-arly inadequacies, her intellectual biases, and her personal attachments. Building toward the chapter’s conclusion, Lipstadt posits an increase in anti-Jewish hatred, and she ends the chapter by implicating Arendt in this genocidal hate:

One cannot and should not draw a direct line from Arendt’s view of the Eichmann trial to those who berate Jews for making too much of contem-porary anti-Semitism. Nor, however, can one dismiss the way in which she so seamlessly elided the ideology that was at the heart of this geno-cide. She related a version of the Holocaust in which anti-Semitism played a decidedly minor role. Others who have found her work a convenient foil for their own political views have picked up the ball and run with it, some of them in order to justify views she would probably never have condoned. (2011, 187)

Despite language that seems directed toward withholding judgment (“One cannot and should not draw a direct line”; “views she would


probably never have condoned”), Lipstadt Wnds Arendt complicit in a dangerous anti-Jewish sentiment that her own her trial narrative, with its support for Ben-Gurion’s state-building objectives, counters.

Lipstadt’s Zionist agenda emerges most explicitly through the way that she positions the Eichmann trial and her account of it as part of a battle against not only the ongoing threat of anti-Jewish genocide, but also other genocides. Lipstadt opens The Eichmann Trial by detailing how Stephen Tyrone Johns, a special ofWcer at the U.S. Holocaust Memo-rial Museum, was fatally shot by “a racist, anti-Semite, and Holocaust-denier” (2011, n.p.) during the period that she was doing the research for The Eichmann Trial at the museum as a visiting scholar. She dedi-cates her book to Johns and the two other ofWcers who “prevented this tragedy from assuming far greater proportions” (n.p.). Given her insis-tence on the historical continuities between past and present hatred of Jews, and then this shooting’s inclusion in the book’s appended chro-nology that situates the Eichmann trial in relation to the Holocaust and other genocides, her reference to “far greater proportions” connects this attack on the museum to the genocide it commemorates. She concludes her book by describing a moment at a conference at Yad Vashem. At dinner with some Rwandans, a young man says to her, “I want to tell my story and help my fellow Rwanda survivors tell theirs. Just like the Holocaust survivors” (202). After translating this man’s next words from French into English—“Future generations, those who were not there, must remember. And we who were there, must tell them”—she closes her trial narrative by stating, “This may be the most enduring legacy of what occurred in Jerusalem in 1961” (203). This frame for The Eichmann Trial conjoins two genocides, and positions the Eichmann trial itself, along with Lipstadt’s account of it, in resistance to ongoing geno-cidal threats.

As The Eichmann Trial connects and combats modern genocides, it maintains silence in regard to Israel’s human rights abuses against Pal-estinians and includes no mention of present-day debates as to whether Israel’s treatment of Palestinians can be considered genocidal. Instead, Jews everywhere remain solely, and simply, victims of genocidal hatred. In the chronology appended to the narrative, alongside dates that per-tain to the Eichmann trial, Lipstadt includes entries about the Arme-nian genocide, the massacres of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda, and the


Bosnian Serbs’ massacre of Bosniaks. Palestine, however, appears only twice and once it is under Occupation as deWned by international law, not at all. Lipstadt Wrst references Palestine in an entry for 1929, where she writes of “Arab riots . . . , organized by radicals in the Palestinian nationalist movement” (2011, 224), and again, in an entry for 1947, where she writes that the United Nations voted “to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states” (230). In the narrative itself, Palestinians are all but absent, referenced only vaguely as threats to Israel’s survival. She includes, without comment, Ben-Gurion’s perception of Arabs as Nazis’ heirs (29, 105), and, in the two references to 1967 (a date not entered into her chronology), Lipstadt Wnds the Six-Day War signiW-cant because it “gave Diaspora Jews a sense of pride in Israel that they had not had before. With it came an increased willingness to speak of why Israel was so crucial to them. The Holocaust was an essential part of that” (199; see also 189). The book includes no criticism of Israel; when remarking on a contemporary rise in anti-Jewish sentiment, Lipstadt attributes this only to an apparently reasonless “embrace” of anti-Semitism by “select portions of the Muslim community and by parts of the left as well” (186). Her few mentions of anti-Israel sentiments are ahistorical even as she evokes her authority as a historian; she notes, “Distasteful and historically absurd comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis” (186), and she Wnds “gross accusations against Israel” to be “rooted in traditional anti-Semitism” (187). Her only example of criticism leveled against Israel is “the charge that an Israeli medical team went to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake to harvest body parts” (187). The book’s silence regarding Israeli settlements that the United Nations have found to be in violation of the Fourth Geneva Conven-tion, and its refusal to address documented human rights violations against Palestinians, works in tandem with Lipstadt’s insistence on Eichmann’s anti-Jewish hatred and Arendt’s cruel insensitivity to—and indeed her complicity in—his antipathy for Jews. This resound-ing silence regarding Palestinians furthers the Zionist agenda that animates Lipstadt’s trial narrative as it supports the binaries explored at the outset of this essay. With the Shoah as her Wxed and overarching point of reference, Lipstadt equates any criticism of Zionism with anti-Jewish sentiment, and opposes Jewish victims to Nazi perpetra-tors and to Arabs who are at once enemies and nonexistent.39


morE than a FEEling: anti-Zionism and hUman storiEs

The Eichmann Trial revives, at a particularly ugly and contentious moment in Israel’s history, the purposes at work in the Eichmann trial itself—to defend Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Whereas Arendt writes Eichmann in Jerusalem at a time when Israel is working to consolidate its legitimacy and power as a Jewish state, Lipstadt writes at a time when Israel is an imperial power that is—with more than three billion dollars a year in support from the United States—illegally extending and, through its construction of a more-than-four-hundred-mile “secu-rity wall,” consolidating its control throughout the oPt, while also sub-jecting Palestinians within its internationally recognized borders to practices of racism, settler-colonialism, and Apartheid. In contrast, then, to Arendt, who challenges the nationalist agenda of the Eichmann trial at a time when Israel is still establishing itself as a state, Lipstadt de- fends Zionism at a differently precarious moment—one wherein Isra-el’s human rights abuses against Palestinians and U.S. support for them have reached a crisis point and are attracting increasingly criti-cal international attention.40 As Lipstadt composes her trial narrative, she reinforces binaries that support U.S. and Israeli imperialism—those that align Israelis with the human, Jewish, and democratic, and Palestinians with the inhuman, Arab, and terrorist, or as simply non-existent—at a time when these binaries are not only powerful, but also unstable.

Particularly given its historical contexts, it is noteworthy that not one of the many reviews of The Eichmann Trial addresses its Zionism. Critics for the New York Times, the HufWngton Post, and other mainstream and scholarly venues instead take up the merits of Lipstadt’s interpre-tation of Eichmann and assess the validity of her critique of Arendt.41 This inattention is all the more signiWcant when contrasted to the out-rage that greets scholars who espouse critical positions on Israel. As discussed at the outset of this essay, academics speaking out against Israel’s human rights violations often meet with threats, censure, and sometimes job loss. Whereas Lipstadt is received as a respected histo-rian sought after by U.S. presidents as well as media sources including NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, academics who criticize Israel are often condemned in professional as well as


mainstream media venues as rude, biased, full of anti-Jewish hatred, and threatening.

Indeed, as Israel meets with more widespread international oppo-sition, criticisms of Zionism are increasingly being countered by con-verting any criticism into an expression of anti-Jewish hate speech. In 2012 California passed a resolution to outlaw anti-Semitism on its col-lege campuses, with language leading up to the resolution that deWnes any criticism of Israel as a “cloaked” form of anti-Semitism.42 A num-ber of campuses have passed measures to outlaw student groups that support Palestinian rights as “uncivil” or anti-Semitic, and students as well as professors have received sanctions and disciplinary actions for taking anti-Zionist stands.43 When it comes to Israel, expressions of dissent over its policies and practices are equated with exhibiting inci-vility, a sympathy for terrorism, or a violent disregard for human life.44 As in Lipstadt’s book, challenges to Zionism are regularly perceived to be anti-Jewish extensions of Nazism.45 The successes of recent pro-fessional organizations, including the Association for Asian American Studies, the Association for Humanist Sociology, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the American Studies Asso-ciation, in passing resolutions that support the call from over 170 Pal-estinian civil society organizations to boycott Israeli academic institutions have met with a particularly Werce backlash. Condemnations from more than 150 university administrators, hate mail directed at support-ers of academic boycott, and state and federal legislative initiatives share in common a refusal to consider anti-Zionism as reasoned criti-cism rather than anti-Semitism.46 In particular, the media frenzy over the ASA boycott resolution indicates how support for human rights is equated with hate-fueled support for the very abuses that those endors-ing the resolution oppose.

In the post-9/11 era, when humanities scholars are experiencing a silencing of counterhegemonic dissent and are also grappling with the status of the human in an era of widespread human rights violations, it is no coincidence that Arendt is everywhere in the air. Her work has been particularly pertinent to intellectuals who, as Judith Butler recently has done, position themselves “as defending and continuing a Jewish ethical tradition that includes Wgures such as Martin Buber and Han-nah Arendt” when contesting the actions of the Israeli state and the United States’ role in Israel (Butler 2012a). Lipstadt’s narrative can itself


be read not only as a challenge to Arendt, but also as a counter to schol-ars who look to Arendt when formulating criticisms of Israel and when theorizing the interrelations of the human and the nation state. When such scholars turn to Arendt, it is often because she anticipates, and resists, the emotion-fueled nationalistic and violence-inducing bina-ries that underwrite the ongoing “war on terror” and the violence of Israeli and U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Rather than external-ize the inhuman as evil in a metaphysical sense, she holds individuals responsible for resisting, rather than unthinkingly participating in acts of inhumanity. With these positions, Arendt disrupts often-fatal forms of dehumanization, and so it is no wonder that academics today turn to Arendt when striving to formulate an ethical politics.

As well, there are lessons to be learned from the ongoing contro-versies that concern Arendt’s politics and her persona in Eichmann in Jerusalem. I am especially interested in how, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt’s irony—often interpreted simultaneously as evidence of her cruelty or lack of caring for her fellow Jews and of her sympathy for Eichmann—has served as the grounds upon which to dismiss and dis-tract from the structural critiques that she makes of forms of inhuman-ity that characterize not only the Nazi regime, but also the everyday workings of “civil” societies, Israel included. Attacks on Arendt’s heart-lessness articulate with contemporary charges of rudeness, hatred, and incivility leveled against academics who challenge Zionism and U.S. support for it—then, as now, a focus on individual affect serves to over-shadow or invalidate structural criticism. That Lipstadt’s affect and emotional investments in The Eichmann Trial have, by contrast, gone unquestioned owes not only to the way that her language conforms to scholarly conventions, but also, and I believe importantly, to how the book supports hegemonic U.S. views of Israel and Palestine.

Thought and emotion are intertwined in scholarship (as in life), try as we might to separate them. The boundary between reason and emotion is not stable; it is political. Embedded in the formulation that dominant ideologies seem like “common sense” is the understanding that what seems reasonable or rational is also tied to the collective and the status quo (the common) and to the senses. Thinking, regardless of the affect accompanying it, that is counterhegemonic often is perceived as, and also dismissed for, being inappropriate if not threatening in its affect. Critical challenges to the status quo are regularly rendered


illegitimate or simply cannot be heard on the basis of the emotions they arouse—outrage, discomfort, fear, guilt—and because these criticisms are then subsequently coded as irrational, overly emotional, rude, biased, shrill, strident, hysterical—in short, as opposed to what reigns as reason or common sense. So, too, affect often goes unquestioned or undetected when what is expressed falls in line with hegemonic think-ing. Inextricably bound, reason and affect are often deployed, even as their articulations are often obfuscated, to maintain hegemony. Con-troversies surrounding the Eichmann trial bring into focus the com-plexity of the interrelations between thought and feeling, and they also illustrate how, when the human is in crisis, affect gets policed, in the interest of crisis management, to establish or maintain hegemony. Arendt upsets this crisis management. With an independence of thought inextricable from her irreverent affect, she destabilizes understandings of Eichmann as repository for anti-Semitic evil and of the rightness of Israel as a refuge for Jews who are victims of hate and persecution.

As I hope my readings of the Eichmann texts illustrate, critically engaging emotion-Wlled narratives about individuals and the debates that surround them can serve as a means to understand and intervene in high-stakes contestations over the human. The debates that surround Arendt’s as well as Eichmann’s (in)humanity suggest the power that stories about individual lives hold, and the possibilities they afford for understanding how questions of affect articulate with structural anal-yses in ways that can exceed and impede as well as line up with these analyses. Such inquiry seems particularly important because often the response on the left to personalized attacks on individual academics has been to forward a purely systemic analysis, one that neglects the power, and the signiWcance, of affect, with all its human complexities and political implications. At the same time, those working in affect studies often do not fully confront, or else obscure, systemic workings of power. I am arguing here that attention to affect need be neither an escape from the shortcomings of ideology critique, nor simply a repli-cation of the work that has long been done under its name. Rather, affect plays a crucial role in shaping and resisting dominant ideology. Its complexities bear critical and particularized scrutiny in understand-ing how hegemony is established, maintained, and resisted.

As we see by attending to the struggles over Eichmann in his vari-ous guises—by the state ofWcials and lawyers and witnesses involved


in the trial, by Eichmann himself in his memoir, in the trial narratives by Arendt and Lipstadt—stories about individuals move us in ways that can be as unpredictable as they are patterned. Critical attention to the unstable status of the human in these narratives can be a means of exposing and opposing, as well as supporting, acts of imperial violence. Arendt’s Eichmann and Eichmann’s continuing afterlife provide insights into the affective structures and forms of dehumanization that govern Zionism and U.S. policy in the Middle East. They also speak to just how destabilizing and enabling life narratives that unsettle vio-lently settled states and stretch the limits of the human can be.

cynthia g. Franklin is professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i and coedits the journal Biography. Her publications include Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today (2009) and Writ-ing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies (1997).

notes

For their careful readings and constructive feedback on this essay at different stages, thanks go to anonymous readers at Cultural Critique, Cristina Bacchilega, Lauren Berlant, Timothy Brennan, Monisha Das Gupta, Miriam Fuchs, Salah Has-san, J. K�haulani Kauanui, Linda Lierheimer, Kieko Matteson, Dirk Moses, Naoko Shibusawa, Patrick Wolfe, Mari Yoshihara, John Zuern, and especially Laura Lyons and S. Shankar. This essay also has been shaped by audience responses to papers delivered at the American Studies Association Conference, the Galway Conference on Colonialism, the International Association for Biography and Autobiography Conference, the Modern Language Association Conference, and at the University of Hawai‘i.

1. The relevance that Arendt holds for the present moment can be registered by how extensively we see cultural critics engaging with her work. Arendt’s work is the subject of articles in newspapers including the Guardian and the New York Times, and is the focus of any number of conferences, scholarly books, and journal articles. A small sampling includes Steven E. Aschheim’s edited collection Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem; Seyla Benhabib’s (2003) edited collection Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt and Benhabib’s The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt; Roger Berkowitz, Thomas Keenan, and Jeffrey Katz’s edited collection, Han-nah Arendt on Ethics and Politics; Peg Birminghamn’s Hannah Arendt and Human Rights; Julia Kristeva’s Hannah Arendt; and Serena Parekh’s Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity. Judith Butler, who has published extensively on and is writing


a book about Arendt, is the Hannah Arendt Professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. In 2006, to mark Arendt’s one hun-dredth birthday, Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities held its Wrst conference, “Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics”; Wesleyan hosted an Arendt conference in September 2013 to mark the Wfty-year anniversary of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic, Hannah Arendt, also was released in 2013 to critical acclaim. 2. Countering contemporary takes on Arendt, Moses argues that Arendt was committed to settler colonial projects that she thought advanced civilization. Because my concern here is not with the limits of Arendt’s anti-imperialism, I do not take up Moses’s compelling critique. 3. My approach to affect studies is shaped by the strain of affect theory exem-pliWed in Cruel Optimism, where Lauren Berlant (2011) investigates affect in rela-tion to ideology. This is but one of many possible trajectories in affect studies. For an overview of approaches, see Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s The Affect Theory Reader. I break with many affect studies critics who distinguish between affect and emotion, especially if they follow in the tradition of Deleuze. For my purposes, to differentiate emotion and affect is akin to establishing clear-cut dis-tinctions between nature and culture. I therefore join Ann Cvetkovich in approach-ing affect generically, as she does in Depression: A Public Feeling. My approach to affect has also been shaped by Karyn Ball, Carolyn Dean, and other critics located at the intersections of psychoanalysis, trauma studies, affect studies, and Holo-caust studies. Their work, as it investigates the economies of affect, is particularly useful not only in illustrating ways to draw on psychoanalysis (an often neglected antecedent of affect studies), but also in thinking, as Ball does in her edited collec-tion Traumatizing Theory, about the representation and transmission of the trauma that attends the Holocaust, and how to understand “the dynamics of affective investiture between the private and public realms” (xxiv). 4. My larger project situates these dynamics in relation to what I call individ-ual versus structural incivility. In exploring the interrelation between these terms, my interest is in how individuals are monitored or censored for their “bad man-ners” or individual acts of incivility or intolerance when they call out structural or state forms of violence or incivility. This disciplining and silencing of individuals in the name of their uncivil behavior not only restricts their civil rights, but also works to maintain and cover over the human rights abuses (or structural incivil-ity) these individuals are protesting. Thanks go to S. Shankar for suggesting the term “structural incivility.” 5. See Saliba; Arenson. I address the case of Said more fully in Franklin (2009). 6. “Permission to Narrate” was Said’s title for a 1984 article in the London Review of Books. For comment on this phrase, see Parry. 7. See Butler (2012b) for a rigorous disarticulation of Zionism and Jewishness. 8. For an incisive analysis linking the events at Columbia University to the broader attack on critical dissent in the academy, see Makdisi (2005).


9. The letter giving this rationale by the DePaul President Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider appears in full in Finkelstein. 10. See the account of this in Ginsberg. 11. For a detailed account of the Churchill case, see Eron, Hudson, and Hulen. 12. See, for example, Horowitz. 13. In “Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem,’” Roger Berkowitz (2013) notes that the 2013 release of the Wlm Hannah Arendt (von Trotta) has “unleashed emo-tional commentary that mirrors the Werce debate Arendt herself ignited over half a century ago.” 14. In his talk “The Humanities as Total Science,” Timothy Brennan rightly discussed the impossibility of moving beyond a human perspective, as he also traced the current craze around posthumanism back to the ideological scientism of Enlightenment thinkers including Leibniz and Spinoza, and explored its uncon-scious collusion with present-day devaluing and underfunding of the humanities. 15. Although a critic for this reason of Zionism, Arendt’s relationship to Zion-ism was complex and changed over time. See Piterberg for a superb analysis of this. See also Arendt (2007); Bernstein (2001); and Butler (2012b). 16. Although Arendt’s discussion of these Councils in Eichmann in Jerusalem took up no more than a few pages, it provoked outrage, particularly her remark that “wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leader-ship, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had been really unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people” (2006, 125). 17. See Nelson for analysis of this dissonance, esp. 229. 18. See Hofstadter for a historical account of binary thinking in U.S. politics. See also Berlant (2005). 19. This is an argument I formulated with Laura E. Lyons; see Franklin and Lyons. 20. To read the Wfteen charges from the court transcripts, go to the Trial of Adolf Eichmann, “The Eichmann Trial—Proceedings: The 15 Charges,” at http://www.remember.org/eichmann/charges.htm. 21. For a discussion of the ways in which the judge issued a simplistic judg-ment against Kastner, see Bilsky. See also Kimmerling; Zertal. 22. For example, Holocaust Remembrance Day, established in Israel in 1951, was timed to coincide on the Hebrew calendar with the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; see the brief commentary by Rees, Time’s former Jerusalem bureau chief, in the Daily Beast. For discussions of Israeli masculinity, see Yosef, chap. 3; or Segev. 23. This attitude, according to some, persists. See, for example, Rees. 24. Speaking more broadly to memoir’s role, Bauman states, “The Jewish state tried to employ the tragic memoirs as the certiWcate of its political legitimacy, a safe-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and above all as the advance pay-ment for the injustices it might itself commit” (ix).


25. Zertal also makes this argument. 26. Weizman makes related point about how “the discourse of the Holocaust” functions as “an evil, the escape from which the entire political Weld must be dedi-cated. Nothing validates human rights and humanitarian action more than the cry ‘never again’” (39). In addition, Butler explores how, “As instrumentalized, the Shoah becomes a way of silencing critique, rationalizing state violence and lend-ing legitimacy to Israeli practices that ought properly to be objected to and refused, as [Primo] Levi clearly did” (2012b, 188). 27. For a longer historical perspective on this fashioning of Jewish identity in relation to Zionist ideology, see Wolfe; see also Ginsberg; Shohat. 28. This omission is one that a psychoanalytic approach, with its focus on individual subjectivity, can but need not enable. Karyn Ball, who, along with Fel-man, is a leading scholar in trauma and Holocaust studies, employs psychoanalysis while probing its limits in Traumatizing Theory (Ball, ed.). In that edited collection, she and other contributors explore “the coalescence of the personal, cultural, social, and political registers of affect not only in the realm of events, but also in the area of theory itself” (xxiv). 29. In Excitable Speech, Butler analyzes, in a way relevant to this discussion, “the use of censorship in the codiWcation of memory, as in state control over monu-ment preservation and building, or in the insistence that certain kinds of historical events only be narrated one way” (1997, 132). 30. As Butler observes, for Arendt, “there was, she believed, a political obli-gation to analyse and oppose deportations, population transfers and statelessness in ways that refused a nationalist ethos. Hence her critique of both Zionism and assimilationism” (2007). See also Butler 2012b, esp. 35, 150. 31. See Nelson, who explores how “On Revolution is an extended defense of heartlessness” (225). 32. For an abridged version of the interview, see von Lang. 33. Tracking the fate of Eichmann’s memoir suggests the importance of such personal accounts and their intersections with the workings of justice and with larger histories. To date, only a few select pages of the memoir have been released. As I discuss later, the memoir was released in 2000 to aid in a court case in which Holocaust-denier David Irving sued Professor Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel. Lipstadt’s attorney argued for the release of excerpts from Eichmann’s memoirs to refute Irving’s central claim that Hitler did not know about the “Final Solution” until almost the war’s end. If in Eichmann’s trial, the memoir’s personal nature was potentially a means to mitigate Eichmann’s indi-vidual responsibility for the death camps, years later the memoir was seen as a historical document. The memoir’s history indexes the high emotions and political stakes that attend writing about the Shoah, and the mutable lines between life writing and history. 34. Muselmann translates from the German to “Muslim,” and was the term used derogatorily among Jews in the camps for those barely recognizable as human. Drawing on Primo Levi, Agamben uncritically employs this term in Remnants of


Auschwitz. This implicates Agamben in an unthinking Islamophobia, the pervasive-ness of which can be registered by critics’ inattention to his use of this term. I thank Timothy Brennan for noting the signiWcance of Agamben’s invocation of this term. 35. In In the Shadow of Catastrophe, Anson Rabinbach also explores connec-tions between modernity and the Shoah, and he Wnds that for Heidegger, Jaspers, Horkheimer, and Adorno, “it is modernity itself that is now held culpable for the catastrophe” (2001, 206). 36. Ball’s Disciplining the Holocaust (2009) provides related insights and pro-ductive angles into approaching what gets deemed appropriate and inappropriate responses to the Holocaust. As does Dean, Ball takes up as one of her case studies Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners to analyze why Holocaust historians’ emotional investments provoke controversy and disciplinary policing. Urging scholars to recognize the unconscious desires and drives that govern responses to the Holocaust, she challenges scholars to “break down unacknowl-edged obsessions, end a cycle of ritualized scandals, and thereby discover a differ-ent way of counting ourselves among the accountable, to become more accountable still” (218). 37. This information appears in her bio for the September 2013 Wesleyan Conference on Hannah Arendt, for which Lipstadt was an invited speaker (http://arendt.conference.wesleyan.edu/participants/). 38. See Lipstadt 2005 for her book-length account of that trial. 39. Both Ball (2009) and Butler (2012b) provide insights into and caution against a use of the Holocaust that, when it is invoked as “the object proper (or trauma proper)” (Ball 2009, 191) can shut down accountability and serve reaction-ary purposes. Butler argues the need for “some historical translations” to “allow the Holocaust to become history rather than the kind of trauma that knows no historical distinction between then and now” (2012b, 195). 40. See Jones for a discussion of how this wall evidences Israel’s vulnerabil-ity as well as its imperial power. As Erakat contends, the 2013 unanimous endorse-ment by the National Council of the American Studies Association of a resolution in support of the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli academic institutions is also an indicator of ways Israel is increasingly experiencing scrutiny and condemnation for its “settler-colonial campaign aimed at dominating the land and diminishing its Palestinian population.” The ASA membership went on to endorse the national council’s decision as but one of the many indicators as we enter the year 2014 of a “turning tide” in relation to Israel, registered through growing international sup-port for the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions movement. For example, as I undertake the Wnal edits to this article, students at the University of Ireland Gal-way voted two-to-one to endorse the BDS campaign, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a March 4 address to AIPAC in Washington, D.C., went on a frontal attack that indicates the increasing threat the movement poses to his government: “Those who wear the BDS label should be treated exactly as we treat any anti-Semite or bigot. They should be exposed and condemned. The boycotters should be boycotted” (qtd. in Abunimah 2014a). Abunimah understands the growing


success of the BDS movement as a sign that, in what is a battle of ideas, “the Pales-tinians are winning the argument” (Abinumah 2014b, xiii). 41. Examples include reviews by Foer, G. Gordon, P. Gordon, Rudin, and Wald. Similarly, even as the biopic Hannah Arendt (von Trotta) has been greeted with much acclaim as well as vigorous debate about its representations of Arendt and Eichmann, critics have ignored how the Wlm mutes Arendt’s criticisms of Zion-ism and downplays Arendt’s objections to Israel’s use of the trial for political pur-poses. As a result, Arendt’s intolerance for the emotionalism evoked by the trial comes across largely as a character Xaw, rather than as integral to her political and philosophical opposition to the violence and displacement that attend nationalism. 42. For the language of HR 35, see http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11–12/bill/asm/ab_0001–0050/hr_35_bill_20120823_amended_asm_v98.html. 43. Examples of this include the experiences of the Irvine 11; and, at both North-eastern and Florida Atlanta, those of the Students for Justice in Palestine. See Porell. 44. Kanazi addresses another use of how affect gets marshaled to silence struc-tural criticism in his performance poem “This Divestment Bill Hurts My Feelings.” 45. See, for example, the defamatory “public service” ad that the David Horow-itz Freedom Center ran in the New York Times on April 24, 2012. This ad equates the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to “calls for a new Holocaust” and ancient blood libels, and advocates that those who have endorsed the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) be “publicly shamed and condemned for the crimes their hatred incites.” For an image of the ad and analysis of it, see Abunimah (2012). 46. I have addressed this phenomenon in an op-ed (Franklin 2014). For par-ticularly dramatic examples of how ASA supporters meet with charges of being an anti-Semite or a Nazi-sympathizer for questioning Israeli policies, see “BDS Love Letters.” For an account of legislative initiatives produced in New York, Maryland, and Illinois, and at the federal level in response to the ASA resolution, that bar public universities from providing funds to academic organizations that support boycotts of Israel, see Durkay. See also Salaita, a response to Michael Oren’s Polit-ico article. In this response, which Politico declined to publish, Salaita looks to how Oren smears ASA president Curtis Marez with anti-Semitism as part of his appeal to the U.S. Congress to take action over the ASA resolution.

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