THINKING FOR ONESELF:

REALISM AND DEFIANCE IN ARENDT

BY REI TERADA

Very few are clear as to what the standpoint of desirability, every

“thus it should be—but is not” or even “thus it should have been,”
contains within itself: a condemnation of the total course of things.
—Nietzsche, Will to Power, §331

The world, as given, is disliked; it is disliked in large part just because

it is given.
—George Kateb, “Technology and Philosophy”

Experience tells us, indeed, what is, but not that it must necessarily
be so, and not otherwise.
—Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

I. INTRODUCTION

How could Hannah Arendt, a lifelong champion of the public

sphere, write at the end of her life that thinking, not acting, is what
counts “when the chips are down”? For political theorists whose
favorite book by Arendt is The Human Condition, her late work is a
disappointment, even a cause for “consternation.”1 Arendt did not
finish The Life of the Mind, the book that was to sort out the
connections between thinking, willing, and judging, and in it she does
not seem sure where she is going. She often asserts that thinking is
significant because it predisposes us to judging, its public manifesta-
tion. Thus, much of the commentary on late Arendt argues about
whether thinking actually predisposes people to judge, or helps them
judge better, in ways that improve the world.2 Both claims are
dubious; more to the point, this angle of approach—hers and ours—
evades Arendt’s more difficult suggestion that it is worth considering
what thinking is like when it has no public consequence. When

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Arendt writes that thinking “deals with invisibles,” she means that it is
invisible itself, definitionally thinking that no one else knows about.3
Like Kant’s noumenal realm, this thinking is best grasped as the
negative of what presents itself—everything around a judgment that
is not visible.
If Arendt’s writing on thinking underperforms as moral philoso-
phy, perhaps we should try looking at it instead as a theory of reality.
Reality is always and ever one of her big subjects—not metaphysical
reality, but “the claim on our thinking attention which all events and
facts arouse by virtue of their existence,” as she puts it.4 Thinking in
this sense is not particularly processive, although it has to have some
minimal temporal continuity such as the capacity to be remembered.
Rather, it is paradigmatically the registration of a perception, a
realization. Such thinking logically precedes judgment on particulars,
which Arendt models on Kantian judgments of taste. Things are not
quite that simple, however; it is not the case that we always know
what we’re dealing with before we respond to it. As we’ll see, a
mental proto-judgment—for instance a sensation of displeasure—
may be the only thing that motivates investigation of the interior and
exterior world in the first place. Freud’s account of the development
of the sense of reality out of disavowal and negation suggests that the
sense of reality depends on the recognition of feelings of objection
and outrage. This psychic landscape, I’ll suggest, leaves room for
Arendt’s self to defy exigency without disavowing it. At the same time,
it explains why we so easily take defiance, and even dislike, for denial:
the line between them is indeed very fine. Realization emerges from
disavowal by way of dislike, and adaptation and defiance are its modal
choices. Although Eichmann is Arendt’s case study in how to avoid
reality, his failings nonetheless point her, in the late essays and The
Life of the Mind, to her own complementary tendencies. The
thinker’s love of reality testing, she explains and shows stylistically in
her prose, is at worst a defense, at best a resistance against living
oblivion that draws from its priority to the public self the power to
outlast its annihilation. In this dark period of Arendt’s work, what she
praises as “best” may not, in ordinary terms, even be the good. Still,
after her encounter with Eichmann, especially, Arendt proposes that
reality testing, more than any ethical principle, promulgates what
goes by the name of “ethics.”

840 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

 II. THINKING FOR ONESELF

Before interpreting Arendt’s view, it’s worth noting how politically

irrelevant and even self-absorbed her rendition of thinking can
sound. Kant’s treatment of moral dilemmas offers one model for
radically noninstrumental thinking; although this notion of thinking
conceives the self as a multiplicity of voices, and in that sense it is not
solipsistic, it also locates the contest of voices entirely within the
(multiple) self and claims that the outcome matters even if it never
rejoins the rest of the world. Arendt’s reading of Kant, however, turns
disinterest inside-out into self-involvement:

Kant’s insistence on the duties toward myself . . . restricts [the]

condition of plurality to a minimum. The notion . . . is self-interest,
not interest in the world. . . . In other words—and these are words
repeated many times by Kant, though usually as asides—the greatest
misfortune that can befall a man is self-contempt. “The loss of self-
approval [Selbstbilligung],” he writes in a letter to Mendelssohn
(April 8, 1766), “would be the greatest evil that could ever happen to
me,” not loss of the esteem in which he was held by any other person.
(Think of Socrates’ statement “It would be better for me to be at
odds with the multitudes than, being one, out of harmony with
myself.”)5

While conventional glosses on Kant stress that lying, for example, is

wrong because the inner moral law tells us so, Arendt’s variant is that
it is important not to do things that disgust her because it would be
worse for her. She thus peculiarly combines pure noninstrumentality
with perverse self-interest. She specifies, however, that her logic
holds sway only when the real, public self is already completely
alienated from its society. In totalitarian conditions, the real self that
comes into being when it speaks in public is effectively dead. What
we have left is a self stripped of significant appearance and aban-
doned to its thinking devices. In times of extreme deprivation, Arendt
suggests, we can legitimately be glad to have such a self.
The point of self-consistency at the expense of consistency with
others is to strengthen the capacity for defiance. In the late lecture
“Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” Arendt examines a
hypothetical example of thinking during terror raised in Lionel Abel’s
review of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Like many other commentators,
Abel had taken issue with Arendt’s indictment of the so-called Jewish
councils that collaborated with the Nazi regime. Positing a man who
“holds a gun at the head of another and forces him to kill his friend,”

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Abel argued that the first man will appear “aesthetically less ugly”
than the second who does the physical killing, and that Arendt
succumbs to this aesthetic illusion when she picks on the victimized
executioners of the world. To this Mary McCarthy replied, “Nobody
by possession of a weapon can force a man to kill anybody; that is his
own decision.”6 Arendt commends McCarthy for debunking the
“widespread conviction . . . that none of us could be trusted or even
be expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be
tempted and to be forced are almost the same.”7 Against this popular
“fallacy” she sets Socrates’ statement in Gorgias that “it is better to
suffer than to do wrong.”8 Abel, McCarthy, and Arendt all agree that
the man shouldn’t kill his friend: it is Arendt’s reason that is startling,
that refusing is better for the self. Many justifications are available—
the law against murder, amelioration of the friend’s dying moments,
the possible edification of the torturer or the audience if any. With
these in full view, Arendt chooses benefit “to the self ”—not just in
any circumstances, but in the weakest possible, when the self
benefited is likely to benefit only seconds longer.
Arendt goes out of her way to make the same choice when she
unpacks Gorgias in an adjacent essay, “Thinking and Moral Consider-
ations”:

The two positive Socratic propositions read as follows: The first: “It is
better to be wronged than to do wrong”—to which Callicles, the
interlocutor in the dialogue, replies what all Greece would have
replied: “To suffer wrong is not the part of a man at all, but that of a
slave for whom it is better to be dead than alive, as it is for anyone
who is unable to come either to his own assistance when he is
wronged or to that of anyone he cares about.” The second: “It would
be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of
tune and loud with discord, and that multitudes of men should
disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of
harmony with myself and contradict me.” Which causes Callicles to
tell Socrates that he is “going mad with eloquence,” and that it would
be better for him and everybody else if he should leave philosophy
alone. (“T,” 181)

“As to the first,” Arendt explains, “it is a subjective statement,

meaning, it is better for me to suffer wrong than to do wrong” (“T,”
182).9 The whole passage specifically compares the “better” to the
“better for me,” as Callicles underscores when he concludes ironi-
cally that Socrates’ shutting up “would be better for him and
everybody else.” Bypassing the opportunity to moderate the matter

842 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

by reading Socrates as merely replying in Callicles’ terms, Arendt
embraces the contrast between the moral perspective of the citizen,
who cares for the object of the wrong, and the self-involved perspec-
tive of Socrates, who cares about his own opinion.10 “From the
viewpoint of the world,” as she casually puts it,

we would have to say what counts is that a wrong has been

committed; it is irrelevant who is better off, the wrongdoer or the
wrong-sufferer. As citizens we must prevent wrongdoing since the
world we all share, wrongdoer, wrong-sufferer, and spectator, is at
stake; the City has been wronged. . . . In other words, Socrates does
not talk here as a citizen who is supposed to be more concerned with
the world than with his own self. It is rather as though he said to
Callicles: If you were like me, in love with wisdom and in need of
examining, and if the world should be as you depict it—divided into
the strong and the weak where “the strong do what they can and the
weak suffer what they must” (Thucydides)—so that no alternative
exists but to either do or suffer wrong, then you would agree with me
that it is better to suffer than to do. The presupposition is if you were
thinking, if you were to agree that “an unexamined life is not worth
living.” (“T,” 182–83)

This discussion—and similar discussions of emergency situations

in late Arendt—goes to the heart of what is scandalous about her
thinking. It doesn’t matter whether thinking leads to judging, and
judging to moral influence. Gorgias is the right reference, since it is
the locus classicus for the failure of persuasion (Arendt thinks about
Gorgias often in the wake of Eichmann, as she struggles with her own
failure to convince an audience). It is preferable to suffer than do
wrong because it is more consistent with being a thinking person.
What is involved in being a thinking person? Imagining the reasoning
of those who did not participate in Nazi crimes and traditional
moralists who did, Arendt speculates about the former:

Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to

what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves
after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would
be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be
changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition
could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose
to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they
refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the
command “Thou shalt not kill,” but because they were unwilling to
live together with a murderer—themselves.11

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Thinking is parsed Socratically as talking to, hence living with
oneself, hence wishing to avoid enmity in “silent dialogue.”12 We are
neither so fascinating nor so bored, however, as to make the desire for
our own company self-explanatory. An ego-ideal seems to be at stake,
and the self appears to be choosing this ego-ideal over the body
although the first cannot survive without the second—the self-
contradiction of the master in Hegel’s account of the “trial by
death.”13 (Is Arendt picturing herself dying in style, like Marlene
Dietrich in Dishonored, refreshing her lipstick before going out to
the firing squad?14) Yet the acute constriction of the public self that
seems to make the argument from self-interest contradictory also
makes it pertinent. The public self is all but finished. The greater the
self’s constriction—the more chips are down—the more it is a merely
thinking self. As we’ll see, the forte of this mainly thinking self who is
“in love with wisdom” is a particular kind of response: a radical
objection to the given conditions of living in the world. The “benefit”
that such an objection confers upon the thinking self is that it makes
it bearable to perceive reality: on the compensating condition that
they do so under protest, the eyes stay open. During totalitarian rule,
the ability to be satisfied with that comes in handy.

III. THINKING AS REALIZATION

How does one get to be “in love with” thinking? Freud’s answer to
this question is relevant, since he too articulates thinking and judging
in relation to empirical reality. Early in the career of the baby, Freud
suggests, “whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented
in a hallucinatory manner”:

It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the

disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this
attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the
psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real
circumstances in the external world and to endeavor to make a real
alteration in them [Anstatt seiner mußte sich der psychische Apparat
entschließen, die realen Verhältnisse der Außenwelt vorzustellen
und die reale Veränderung anzustreben]. A new principle of mental
functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind
was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it
happened to be disagreeable.15

Although one might expect something as vital as the reality principle

to be an instinct, Freud calls the infant’s awakening a decision of the

844 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

psychical apparatus.16 The notion of decision may seem like just a way
of speaking; Spinoza mocks this kind of talk when he writes that “The
infant believes he freely wants the milk.”17 In the history of political
philosophy, from the consent theories of Hobbes and Hegel to those
of Louis Althusser and Judith Butler, survival skills are said to reveal
the admixture of dependence in agency. Freud, too, notes that the
psychical apparatus “had to decide” in reality’s favor or die. Yet—and
here we might think of the man with the gun to his head—he does
not withdraw the figure of decision:

It will rightly be objected that an organization which was a slave to

the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external world
could not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it could
not have come into existence at all. The employment of a fiction like
this is, however, justified when one considers that the infant—
provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother—
does almost realize a psychical system of this kind.18

This utterly characteristic passage issues from the core of Freud’s way
of thinking, where ontic ambiguity reigns. Freud won’t say that the
decision actually occurs, nor that the figure is unjustified. What is
certain is that the infant “does almost realize” a system that “neglect[s]”
external reality. This brush with success, this almost having got away
with it, forever colors the sense of reality with surprise. Fantasy isn’t
working well enough; it occurs to the infant that it should try to form
a conception of its real circumstances. With this realization, the first
antinomy of reality, the deconstruction of the reality principle if you
will, also appears: the incentive for getting to know reality is the
possibility of “mak[ing] a real alteration” in it. Freud never portrays
Homo sapiens’ relation to reality as anything but scheming. “Actually
[in Wirklichkeit],” he remarks, “the substitution of the reality prin-
ciple for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure
principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure,
uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the
new path an assured pleasure at a later time.”19 “Actually”: the
architect of the reality principle demonstrates his realism by acknowl-
edging the limits of the principle—this is a logic we’ll have to reckon
with again. My point is that the onset of the sense of reality is not in
any way characterized by acceptance of the real conditions at hand.
Just the reverse: nonacceptance is the paradigmatic realistic attitude;
anyone who “accepts reality” has not yet formed a conception of our
real circumstances.

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 In Freud’s scenario, a hedonistic proto-judgment of dissatisfac-
tion—“This isn’t good enough”—initially leads to ignoring. Further
dissatisfaction—with the result obtained by ignoring—leads from
hallucination through negation to what Arendt calls thinking.20 Arendt’s
thinking is like Freud’s infant’s originary idea to take note of what is
happening, although she inherits her conception, not from Freud,
apparently, but from the mythic beginnings of European political
theory. Plato’s Statesman provides an epigraph for The Life of the
Mind: “Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and
thinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up to find that he
knows nothing.” Socrates “knows how to arouse the citizens who,
without him, will ‘sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives,’
unless somebody else comes along to wake them up again. And what
does he arouse them to? To thinking” (“T,” 174). “Thinking” in such
usages is nothing philosophical, only “think[ing] what we are doing.”21
What Arendt calls Eichmann’s failures to “think” are failures to
notice: simple facts “had not occurred to him,” “contradictions . . .
had not bothered him,” he secured himself with clichés “against
reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all
events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence” (“T,” 160); “he
merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was
doing” (E, 287). Arendt does not explain systematically what counts
as realizing, but suggests that mental representation that articulates
contact with reality, prolongs its duration, and makes it more likely to
be remembered, is a minimal requirement: “[W]e must repeat the
direct experience in our minds after leaving the scene where it took
place. To say it again, every thought is an after-thought” (LM, 1:87).
“To say it again”: Arendt demonstrates what she means, that to think
about something we “say it again” to ourselves.22 Otherwise,
automatisms of habit keep the consciousness of external reality to a
minimum. One may go through life, like Eichmann, using negative
hallucination, moral exhortation, and forgetting to keep unpleasant-
ness at bay. For Arendt as for Freud and Karl Jaspers, realism arrives
when the self can register facts and feelings that it does not accept
(except in the limited sense in which you “accept” things you are
struggling to change). There would be no thinking, and no sense of
reality, if we could not also render very general negative proto-
judgments on our real conditions.
Arendt knows well the resistance such an idea faces, even when
transferred from global conditions to individual people and actions:
“How troubled men of our time are by this question of judgment (or,

846 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

as is often said, by people who dare ‘sit in judgment’)” (E, 295).
Nietzsche argues that in fact we cannot screen judgment on particu-
lars from global judgment; the radical desire of aesthetic judgment is
judgment on the right of things to exist, even things in general. He
accuses “nihilist” philosophers of using “the absurd valuation: to have
any right [Recht] to be, the character of existence would have to give
the philosopher pleasure.”23 Nietzsche correctly discerns that the
prerealistic question “Is this good enough for me?” challenges the
right of the world to be the way it is. Although the primal scene of
proto-judgment and realization precedes the concept “world,” some-
thing like it, the proto-concept “all I know,” is indeed being judged.
To describe the matter in Nietzsche’s vocabulary, realization occurs—
if ever—when the world’s loss of its right to be the way it is does not,
for once, result in a retreat to the belief that it isn’t the way it is. This
vague sense of “world” remains up for judgment in ordinary life, I’d
suggest, and Arendt is among the few people who do not blink at
admitting this. Her critics suspect that she is willing to judge the
planet, as we’ll see. It is my thesis that she accepts this seemingly
absurd position out of a belief that a willingness to judge already has
to have existed in order for the self to come into reality at all.

IV. SEEING THE SIGHTS

Thinking expresses the right (to continue in Nietzsche’s language)

of the self to register that fantasy is not working and conditions aren’t
good enough. Arendt attests that, further, some people fall in love
with looking at reality. Falling in love with reality testing would be an
understandable reaction formation to indignation at real conditions;
the self could then adopt reality testing as an adaptive strategy while
investing in it the force of its indignation. For the thinker who takes
up the observation of reality as an end in itself, this new end is still
eudemonistic in a new way. Deriving satisfaction simply from being
able to see that her circumstances are poor, she is always compen-
sated, up to a point. To be “in love with wisdom” is to engage in
pleasurable activity, one that tends to contribute to a purpose but also
bears “sweetness” in itself if there is no purpose (LM, 1:200). Good
and harm to others, “for the best and for the worst,” still isn’t in the
picture except insofar as others are within the self as “the actualiza-
tion of the difference given in consciousness” (LM, 1:191).24 Do other
others need to be in the picture? I don’t mean to ask whether Arendt
finds it desirable that the self imagine others’ perspectives—unam-

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biguously, she does—but whether it is an absolutely necessary part of
what she calls thinking.25
Stretches of Eichmann in Jerusalem seem to answer no. Eichmann
bears out the idea that thinking for oneself begins in thinking for
oneself: he cannot do the first because he cannot do the second; he
ignores the genocide in order to ignore his own hardship.26 Would it
be an advance for Eichmann simply to realize that he was having a
hard time? Hovering near this question, Arendt takes special interest
in his description of a sequence of trips to Lublin, Kulm, and Minsk,
“the killing centers in the East” (E, 93). Here Arendt’s prose uses
Eichmann’s language as the foil for and object of its own triumph of
reality testing:

For me . . . this was monstrous. I am not so tough as to be able to

endure something of this sort without any reaction. . . . If today I am
shown a gaping wound, I can’t possibly look at it. I am that type of
person, so that very often I was told that I couldn’t have become a
doctor. I still remember how I pictured the thing to myself, and then
I became physically weak, as though I had lived through some great
agitation. Such things happen to everybody, and it left behind a
certain inner trembling. (E, 87)

Arendt follows Eichmann closely through what he says he isn’t tough

enough to see, and the more inane he is, the more hard-boiled her
style. She narrates the details with some relish, emphasizing his
repeated and expanding exposure to the intolerable:

The system . . . was not a foolproof shield against reality, as

Eichmann was soon to find out. . . . Well, he had been lucky, for he
had still seen only the preparations for the future carbon-monoxide
chambers at Treblinka. . . . This is what Eichmann saw. . . . Very soon
after that, he was to see something more horrible. . . . at first it
seemed as though he would be lucky. . . . Still, he saw . . . his host was
delighted to show him the sights, although Eichmann tried politely
to excuse himself. Thus, he saw another “horrible sight.” . . . This was
not yet the end. Although Eichmann told him that he was not “tough
enough” for these sights, that he had never been a soldier, had never
been to the front, had never seen action, that he could not sleep and
had nightmares, Müller, some nine months later, sent him back to
the Lublin region. . . . Eichmann said that this now was the most
horrible thing he had ever seen in his life. . . . The fact is that
Eichmann did not see much. (E, 86–89)

848 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

Arendt, too, seems “delighted to show him the sights.”27 In her
recreation (based on Eichmann’s own), Eichmann’s almost infinite art
of evasion fights the stimulus to form a real conception of his
circumstances. Eichmann thinks for a moment when he “picture[s]
the thing to [him]self ”; that—not “the thing” but the picturing, his
saying it again, as it were—makes him “physically weak.” His remark
that it was “as though [he] had lived through some great agitation”
manages to miss the point that he was greatly agitated. Still unable to
realize his disturbance, he downplays it as merely what “happen[s] to
everybody.” It would be the beginning of thought if he only did
something apparently very hard—if he dwelled on how terrible he
felt.28 Thus Arendt doesn’t look for concern for others from him just
here, but monitors his revulsive impulses. Of course she knows by the
very fact that Eichmann is in front of her that he never succeeded in
realizing his horror. He had never been in love with wisdom, and
never got to the compensations of thinking.
When Arendt claims that Eichmann’s problem was not that he
lacked a conscience, but that his conscience “began to function the
other way around,” her point is that conscience as self-denial has little
moral traction (E, 95).29 With the aid of conscience “the murderers
would be able to say: ‘What horrible things I had to watch in the
pursuance of my duties!’” Arendt observes that this statement oc-
cludes the possibility of saying instead, “What horrible things I did to
people”(E, 106). I would add that it also occludes a second, not yet
moral statement, “I felt horrible.” This analysis of what self-denial
does and does not say suggests, first, that self-denial is above all a
kind of denial; and, second, that conscience, that ill-defined concep-
tion in Arendt, is not self-denial, whatever else it may be—that is,
that self-denial can’t be the active ingredient of conscience. Of course
Eichmann’s moral degradation lies in his occlusion of the first
statement. Nonetheless, the two statements may be inseparable, as in
multifold psychoanalytic and philosophical models for relation. Melanie
Klein believes that awakening to reality consists in the infant’s
becoming aware of the disturbing co-implication of the self with the
other on which it feeds, hence in understanding the extent to which
self and other are not entirely separate even as their needs conflict.30
Alternatively, we might invoke Jean-Luc Nancy’s contention that the
first person plural pre-exists the separation of “you” and “I,” or
remember Stanley Cavell’s idea that “there are no others for me”
before I declare my existence to others. 31 Any version of
intersubjectivity that goes all the way down changes what it means to

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ask how far Eichmann could have got just by realizing his “own”
situation. How could he understand other people’s pain—or the
difference between a surgical incision in 1961 and a murder victim in
1941—if he couldn’t even feel the dimensions of his upset at being
“shown a gaping wound”?

V. THE CONSOLATIONS AND LIMITS OF REALISM

The consolation of philosophy undiscovered by Eichmann is

evident everywhere in Arendt’s noirish prose. Above all she prizes
being the sort of person who can stand seeing a wound. Instantly she
risks falling into defense. Arendt’s reaction to Eichmann’s aversion to
his gory tours is to formulate a research program: “[I]t was of great
political interest to know how long it takes an average person to
overcome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactly
happens to him once he has reached that point” (E, 93). Resource-
fully, she finds empirical grounds for an unambiguous answer—
“about four weeks.” This is how she does it: she observes that in
September 1941, after the first of his visits East, Eichmann directed
a transport that was supposed to go to Russia to Lodz instead, “where
he knew that no preparations for extermination had yet been made”
(E, 94). Three weeks later, however, Eichmann agreed in a meeting
to send new transports to Riga and Minsk. By this evidence Arendt
measures how long it takes, at the maximum, for Eichmann to
overcome his repugnance: “[H]is conscience functioned in the ex-
pected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the
other way around” (E, 95). My guess is that readers will divide in
their reactions to this tour de force of positivist wit: does Arendt
trivialize a vast question with a cynical mental game, or does she
render intelligible a problem to which most historians would respond
with mystifications or not at all? By casting Eichmann as an outstand-
ing research opportunity, she responds to trauma as one who has
learned to love the apprehension of reality as an end in itself.
Eichmann resists his fear of disintegration by ignoring his feelings of
horror; Arendt resists her own similar fears by mobilizing her
enjoyment in thinking against what must have been her horror and
sorrow at Eichmann’s story. To an extent, she replaces helplessness
before what she likes to call “the facts” with satisfaction at her own
ability to see them as facts. As a lover of reality testing, the hardest
fact for Arendt to bear is the fact that there are things that even she
can’t bear.

850 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

 It was her tone of enjoyment and self-satisfaction that most
offended Arendt’s critics and bonded her to McCarthy and Jaspers,
who shared her predilection for it. Gershom Scholem calls Arendt’s
tone “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious,” while
McCarthy dislikes Scholem’s “tone of infinite sad wisdom,” and
Jaspers praises Arendt’s ability to laugh.32 McCarthy herself was
berated for the following airheaded statement in her reply to Abel:

To me, Eichmann in Jerusalem, despite all the horrors in it, was morally
exhilarating. I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too heard a
paean in it—not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paean of
transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of Figaro
or the Messiah. . . . The reader “rose above” the terrible material of
the trial or was borne aloft to survey it with his intelligence.33

McCarthy later wrote to Arendt that she regretted “putting in Mozart

and Handel” but had done it so as not to hide true feelings: “[M]y
internal alert system warned me too. But just because of that I left it
in. On the ground of refusing to suppress something—not to be like
them.”34 Arendt wrote back,

I always loved the sentence because you were the only reader to
understand what otherwise I have never admitted—namely that I
wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria. And that ever since I
did it, I feel—after twenty years [since the war]—light-hearted about
the whole matter. Don’t tell anybody; is it not proof positive that I
have no “soul”?35

McCarthy’s and Arendt’s reflections are striking expressions of psy-

chic satisfaction with thinking as contact with reality. Inspired by the
exhilaration of Arendt’s prose, McCarthy responds with more exhila-
ration and admission of her own feelings just because they were her
feelings. For her part, Arendt loves McCarthy for acknowledging
Arendt’s feelings more than Arendt herself had done—indeed, she
states that McCarthy’s understanding was the form her own acknowl-
edgment took—and thus encouraging her to confess still more.36
Only in the thinking realist does the exposure of “never admitted”
feelings inspire love.
As Arendt’s critics claim, then, satisfaction in one’s own thinking,
and its costs in direct horror and sorrow, are central to her work.
McCarthy’s manic levitation above “the terrible material”—remem-
ber that “elation” is the sentiment Arendt identifies with Eichmann

Rei Terada 851

(E, 62)—may give us some retrospective reservations about Arendt’s
well-known reading of a Kafka parable in Between Past and Future.
In the parable, “Thoughts on the Year 1920,” Kafka imagines “two
antagonists” pressing a man from “behind” and “ahead.” “His dream,”
Kafka writes, “is that some time in an unguarded moment . . . he will
jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his
experience in fighting, to the position of umpire.”37 Arendt notes that
the traditional response to the strain of rectilinear time is the fantasy
of floating above history to “a timeless, spaceless suprasensuous
realm,” and recommends instead thinking that is not “above the
melee” but diagonal to it. Although Arendt wants to think in time and
space, she still shares Kafka’s purpose in rising above them, namely
“to offer ‘the umpire’ a position from which to judge the forces
fighting with each other with an impartial eye.”38 The diagonal line
offers this viewpoint as much as ever. Similarly, to Abel’s (also
triangular) emergency scenario, the solution of Arendt and McCarthy
is to demand that the man in the middle, whom Abel sees as a victim,
see himself as a judge—as though the advantage of judging were that
a judge could not be a victim. Arendt shares this logic with the
implicit goal of the Eichmann trial, to transform a nation of victims
into a nation of judges.
As distant from the achievement of thought as Eichmann, for her,
is the camp survivor who calls himself K-Zetnik, who suffers a mild
stroke on the witness stand at the Eichmann trial. K-Zetnik intro-
duces himself as a resident of “Planet Auschwitz,” declares that he
sees a vision of the dead right there in the courtroom, and passes out.
As Shoshana Felman points out, K-Zetnik’s bizarre performance is
the target of “some of [Arendt’s] harshest language and some of her
fiercest irony.”39 Both Arendt and Felman interpret K-Zetnik’s physi-
cal disintegration psychically, as an extension of his speech. For
Arendt, it is the logical conclusion of his incoherence; for Felman, it
symbolizes his loyalty to those who died. According to Felman, K-
Zetnik literally relives Auschwitz because of the pressures of the trial:
“When the judge admonishes Dinoor [using his legal name] from the
authoritarian position of the bench, coercing him into a legal mode of
discourse and demanding his cooperation as a witness, K-Zetnik
undergoes severe traumatic shock in reexperiencing the same terror
and panic that dumbfounded him when, as an inmate, he was
suddenly confronted by the inexorable Nazi authorities of Auschwitz.”
Felman does not ask whether K-Zetnik’s traumatic shock is war-
ranted. She writes as though his panic, natural to say the least in the

852 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

past, were automatically natural now because of the presence of that
past: “[O]nce more, the imposition of a heartless and unbending rule
of order violently robs him of his words and, in reducing him to
silence, once more threatens to annihilate him, to erase his essence as
a human witness.”40 On the literal level, this is not what is happening
when the presiding judge says “Mr. Dinoor, please, please, listen to
[prosecutor] Mr. Hausner and to me” (E, 224): Felman substitutes K-
Zetnik’s inner reality for his external circumstances and appraises
both at the same value. While I agree with Arendt that K-Zetnik
would do better to pay attention to the external present as well as the
inner presence of the past, I agree with Felman that Arendt cannot
forgive him because he “does not seize his legal chance to overcome
the trauma” but “is, rather, once more overcome by it,” and “what is
worse . . . makes a spectacle of his scandalous collapse within the
legal forum.”41 There is indeed something K-Zetnik performs that
cannot be represented in Arendt’s style and that marks a limit of her
realism. Because she imagines the thinker and the victim to be
mutually exclusive, she views sheer thoughtless suffering, as well as
sheer thoughtless violence, as a kind of degradation. Under her
construction of thinking, K-Zetnik’s realization of his circumstances—
inner and outer, past and present, feelings of helplessness included
but not exclusively—should in itself be the management of his
circumstances. But that can’t always be enough.
When she is true to thinking form, Arendt admits as much.
(Indeed, by her logic, she should love to.) Her invention of the
thinking diagonal, so often quoted by commentators, is followed by a
less popular realist disclaimer:

But, one is tempted to add, this is “only theoretically so.” What is

much more likely to happen—and what Kafka in other stories and
parables has often described—is that [Kafka’s] “he,” unable to find
the diagonal which would lead him out of the fighting-line and into
the space ideally constituted by the parallelogram of forces, will “die
of exhaustion,” worn out under the pressure of constant fighting,
oblivious of his original intentions, and aware only of the existence of
this gap in time which, as long as he lives, is the ground on which he
must stand, though it seems to be a battlefield and not a home.42

The long sentence sounds increasingly autobiographical. It illustrates

the further thinking, the always more thinking, that thinking requires
in order to draw more compensation: thinking that realizes that
thinking is not compensation enough, that realism is not realization

Rei Terada 853

enough. Arendt’s prose thus recalls that of Adorno, and Jameson’s
comment that each sentence of Adorno wins a temporary victory is
appropriate to her as well. The more she is able to say that thinking is
not consolation enough, the closer it comes to being enough. Not
only at the end of thinking, however, but inside it, lies a helplessness
that even thinking cannot help, and in which there is neither shame
nor a privileged figure for “humanity.”43 At some never predictable
point, any living system breaks down into a thinking jelly.

VI. FROM DISAVOWAL TO DEFIANCE

Defying exigency (the mode of Arendt) is not the same as

disavowing it (the mode of Eichmann), although they may look the
same. Eichmann gets as far as feeling uncomfortable, but always
turns back to the cave of the irreal. All “posthumous” statements, all
statements sub specie aeternitatis, are uttered from there. Eichmann
speaks from there at the gallows, and Arendt makes fun of him for it,
even as she remarks that he is in his element:

Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. . . . He

walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm
and erect, with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied
his ankles and knees, he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he
could stand straight. “I don’t need that,” he said when the black hood
was offered him. He was in complete command of himself, nay, he
was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have
demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of
his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a
Gottgläubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no
Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded:
“After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the
fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live
Austria. I shall not forget them.” In the face of death, he had found
the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory
played him the last trick; he was “elated” and he forgot that this was
his own funeral. (E, 252)

It turns out that Eichmann performs so well because he has forgotten

the facts: “he merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized
what he was doing” (E, 287). He doesn’t need the black hood because
he is always, so to speak, wearing his own.
Arendt is capable of making statements that look the same:

854 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

 The manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the
ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeed
may prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments
when the chips are down. (“T,” 189; LM, 1:193; my emphasis)

The awkwardness of all possible reactions to this statement hints that

such last judgments strain the normal science of moral philosophy.
It’s difficult even to contemplate it without wandering into our own
fantasies of omnipotence. Nancy Fraser forgets something—or ev-
erything—about totalitarianism when she writes of late Arendt:

[J]udging here remains a monological process wherein one goes

visiting in imagination, as opposed to in reality. One imagines oneself
judging from different perspectives instead of going out and talking
to and listening to other people. One elaborates an interior, not an
exterior, dialogue. In this way, one avoids the risk of hearing others
judge in ways that one could not imagine oneself judging in their
situation. As a result, one insulates oneself from the sort of provocation
that could actually lead one to change one’s perspective.44

But Arendt specifies that in order for all this to be true, the chips
must be down. By this she means not when dialogue of Fraser’s sort
is going on, but when the chance for such a dialogue is nil: “[I]ts
political and moral significance comes out only in those rare mo-
ments in history when ‘Things fall apart’ . . . when everybody is swept
away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in” (“T,”
188). Self-involvement looks better and better as society goes out of
its mind. Then, nothing could be more desirable than to “[insulate]
oneself from the sort of provocation that could actually lead one to
change one’s perspective.” Who is more out of touch: Fraser, when
she implies that in the conditions specified by Arendt, one should go
out and open one’s mind, or Arendt, when she writes as though, in
the very same conditions of already catastrophic political collapse,
catastrophe for oneself could still be prevented?
Ronald Beiner, a sensitive reader of late Arendt, understands her
inward turn as a reaction to the problem of “how to subdue
temporality, how to consolidate and stabilize a mortal existence,
rendering it less fleeting, ontologically less insecure.” He also per-
ceives that Arendt finds the effort to subdue temporality in thought
appropriate specifically in the absence of any possibility of a public
narrative that could subdue it. Given such a vacancy, not liking
exigency becomes her way of not giving up on the past.45 Another way

Rei Terada 855

of putting this might be that when right action is impossible, defiant
inaction hits the peak of its appeal.
Arendt’s worst nightmare is the possibility of events that are never
narrated, recalled, or recognized—what she calls “holes of oblivion.”
Arendt famously decides that “holes of oblivion” don’t exist (E, 232).
Yet they do exist in one sentence of the bleakest chapter of Eichmann,
the chapter on the Final Solution. The sentence occurs between two
heartening examples of civil disobedience: first “the two peasant boys
whose story is related in Günther Weisenborn’s Der lautlose Aufstand
(1953), who were drafted into the S.S. at the end of the war and
refused to sign.” Second, the story of the brother and sister Scholls, of
Munich University, who distributed leaflets calling Hitler a mass
murderer. In between comes this passage, which at first refers to the
execution of the two peasant boys:

The position of these people, who, practically speaking, did nothing,

was altogether different from that of the [military] conspirators
[against Hitler]. Their ability to tell right from wrong had remained
intact, and they never suffered a “crisis of conscience.” There may
also have been such persons among the members of the resistance,
but they were hardly more numerous in the ranks of the conspirators
than among the people at large. They were neither heroes nor saints,
and they remained completely silent. Only on one occasion, in a
single desperate gesture, did this wholly isolated and mute element
manifest itself publicly. (E, 104; my emphasis)

At this point Arendt goes on to the story of the Scholls. What is

fascinating is that she narrates the “hole of oblivion.” The martyred
peasant brothers “practically speaking, did nothing”—that is, they
were notable for refusing to do something—but they were actual
people, and they refused plainly and in writing. Arendt moves from
their historical case to hypothetical persons that “there may also have
been”; astonishingly, she goes on to discuss the number and motives
of these people, quite as though they were actual. The conditional
tense disappears, replaced by the simple past, and Arendt substitutes
human silence for the nonhuman unknown. Nothing is so irreal as
her hearing as silence the noiselessness of these merely possible
existences. In the next sentence, she is out of the hole: the “mute
element manifest[s] itself publicly” (E, 104). This remarkable mo-
ment, which seems to be trying to tell what it is like inside oblivion, at
least tells how Arendt’s mind works when she considers it. The idea of
the “silent” judgment of possibly nonexistent people figures thinking

856 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

at its farthest remove from human contact. It proposes to fill, and
thus calls attention to the possibility of, a space between the end of
publicity and the annihilation of the body and/or mind.
Such a space may seem to be a transcendental possibility only—a
“nowhere” or utopia (LM, 1:199–200). As long as there are avenues
for public speech and action, Arendtian thinking will be a redundant
kind of magical thinking that makes no contribution of its own. But
Arendt reminds us of its pressing actuality in totalitarian emergency,
the deathbed, and the crib. As crisis and psychosis transmute a
society’s norms, the “political and moral significance comes out” of
this inner place (“T,” 188)—the position of initial realization, in my
scheme—that predates the self’s commitment to survival, and to
which part of the thinking self has adhered through its love of
thought. Arendt’s metaphor is of the exposure of creatures in a
tidepool: “When everybody is swept away . . . those who think are
drawn out” (“T,” 188). It is in this place that defiance of exigency is
possible.
Defying exigency is not the same as disavowing it because between
(1) the decision to form a conception of one’s circumstances and (2)
the decision to take steps to survive them lies a chance to reject the
circumstances without denying them:

Defiance
Disavowal → Negation → Objection/Realization →〈 ↓
(Negative Adaptation
hallucination) ↵

The chance for defiance is easy to overlook—it’s overlooked by Hegel

in the master-slave dialectic—because defying exigency is assumed to
be a kind of denial. But Arendt in effect implies that an acquired taste
for decision 1 (Objection/Realization) makes it easier to say no to
decision 2 (Adaptation). Because there is something the self “loves”
prior to adaptation (namely, realization itself), because a good deal of
the self is rooted to that spot, acting against adaptation doesn’t
contradict all self-interest, but rather interests a different self, the
thinking self. So far, love of reality testing has the general function of
being something, anything, more fundamental than the desire to
survive. The realism that belongs to this kind of realization is thus not
the cynical “realism” of getting on the winning side. It is even the
opposite of that, if getting on the winning side means overlooking
one’s realization. Arendt insists that thinking holds on to the thread of

Rei Terada 857

self-interest, and at the same time that self-interest can differ from
self-survival whenever survival comes into disastrous conflict with the
desire for autonomy. The self that learned to look at and object to its
conditions did so without the assistance of the self that decided to
adapt. This primordial self may say “Fuck you” to a man holding a
gun to its head, even if no one benefits. It may, of course, do so for
the wrong reasons.

VII. BETTING WITH ARENDT

Arendt’s critics point out that her late writings do not furnish a
strong account of ethics. We might recast this conclusion in the
positive, and say that Arendt takes issue with the very relevance of
ethics as either a set of universal principles or a priori subordination
to the other. As commentator after commentator has noted, there
seems to be nothing necessary about the layering of ethics onto her
thinking.46 Even if thinking prepares for ethics, we don’t necessarily
make good on our preparation, and even if we do evolve an ethics, it’s
only an ethics for good or evil, transformation or destruction (LM, 1:
192).
That’s why it’s crucial that the thinker, open to both defiance and
adaptation, has a history of objection and the love of reality testing
with her: the combination of indignation and reality testing is a
check-and-balance system. Thinking operates negatively in the sym-
bolic world; it “dissolves accepted rules of conduct” and restrains
illusion and egoism, internal and external. Although we get ac-
quainted with reality only because it leaves something to be desired,
part of reality is the full scope and limit of our ability to change
reality. It is not clear that, if we get as far as a realistic grasp of that,
we are better off ethically, but it is at least clear that if we do not get
that far, we are in even worse shape—subject to self-absorption and
delusions of omnipotence.47 Arendt’s bet—and in this empirical and
rational realm, it is indeed a matter of betting—is that an empirical
skepticism that asks, “Is that the way things really are?” is more likely
to support a tolerable world, and less likely to support an intolerable
one, than affirmative fidelity to anything else, no matter how univer-
sally or singularly good. There are more politicians whose imperial
fantasies could be corrected by realism than there are ones who could
be corrected by ethics: most imperial fantasies happily invoke ethics
without encountering anything in the ethical field that can’t be
domesticated by a little interpretation. That is, “Don’t harm another

858 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

human being” is not necessarily helpful because there can be
disagreement about what a human being is; indeed the very creation
of the maxim also creates a motive to make sure that some people are
not counted as human. Ethics remains vulnerable to Hume’s critique
of taste because form will always get filled with content, and at the
moment it is, we’re back to square one.
Hence Arendt’s preface to Part One of The Origins of Totalitarian-
ism declares that responding to the path from anti-Semitism to the
Nazi genocide “call[s] not only for lamentation and denunciation but
for comprehension,” and goes on to align comprehension with
defiance, not acceptance, of reality:

Comprehension . . . means . . . examining and bearing consciously

the burden that events have placed upon us—neither denying their
existence nor submitting meekly to their weight as though everything
that in fact happened could not have happened otherwise.
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive
facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might
have been.48

Similarly, Arendt’s writings about the Vietnam War focus on the real
and irreal more than on the ethical and the unethical. She believes,
for instance, that a theory attributing U.S. actions in South Asia to a
“consistent imperialist policy that aims ultimately at world rule,”
while having some explanatory power, “could hardly account for the
fact that this country was madly insisting on ‘pouring its resources
down the drain in the wrong place,’” as Undersecretary of State
George Ball put it in 1965—delightfully implying that the alternative
was pouring our resources down the drain in the right place.49 Instead
she addresses the U.S. fantasy of “omnipotence”—for Freud and
Ferenczi, the positive symptom of the absence of reality in infancy:

American policy pursued no real aims, good or bad, that could limit
and control sheer fantasy: “Neither territory nor economic advantage
has been pursued in Vietnam. The entire purpose of the enormous
and costly effect has been to create a specific state of mind.” And the
reason such excessively costly means, costly in human lives and
material resources, were permitted to be used for such politically
irrelevant ends must be sought not merely in the unfortunate
superabundance in this country, but in its inability to understand
that even great power is limited power. Behind the constantly
repeated cliché of the “mightiest power on earth,” there lurked the
dangerous myth of omnipotence.50

Rei Terada 859

It may be surprising that Arendt finds the greatest “arrogance of
power” in “the pursuit of a mere image of omnipotence, as distin-
guished from an aim of world conquest.” For her it is bad news that
the U.S. objective is not actual world domination (!), since that would
at least involve serious planning and therefore reckoning with facts.
In comparison, the “aim” of impact on world opinion is not reliably
measurable and therefore easier to pretend to pursue with “nonexist-
ent unlimited resources.”51 Not only would acting on a desire to
conquer the world bring the state rapid evidence of its shortcomings;
even formulating such a desire would mean noticing in the first place
that world domination is not what one currently has. It is more deeply
mad to trust in one’s omnipotence so thoroughly that no wish to
actualize it arises—only the inclination to play at it by desultorily
spending resources and lives in the hope of getting others to play
along.
Of course, those who hate reality (as President Bush says terrorists
“hate freedom”) can’t be shown it. It is not a matter of arguing
evidence with someone else, but of each grasping reality for herself.
Reality’s recognition may never be won; its economic ratios are
discouraging, since after a certain point, the worse things are, the less
motive there is for realizing them. Arendt bets on reality rather than
ethics, thinking as registration rather than thinking as process, only
because the “inherent contingency” of facts, being less predictable
and more palpably consequential, is more likely than ethical abstrac-
tion to take fantasy aback.52
In Arendt’s account, there seems to be no way to foster or predict
the love of thinking, no way to understand why some people develop
and preserve it and others don’t. On one hand “thinking in its non-
cognitive, non-specialized sense” is “a natural need of human life”; on
the other, “everybody may come to shun” it. If thinking is a
“decision,” as both Freud and Arendt seem to believe, and “a life
without thinking is quite possible,” what keeps thinking from vanish-
ing from the face of the earth (LM, 1:191)? This is an even larger
question than how long it takes the average person to overcome his
repugnance toward crime, but in chapter 14 of Eichmann, “Evidence
and Witnesses,” Arendt actually answers it: “[T]here are simply too
many people in the world to make oblivion possible” (E, 233). In this
world of only statistical certainties, the odds are with us that not
literally everyone will ignore the wages of slaughter. This statistical
fact, not any necessity or plausibility of thinking’s enhancement of the
public sphere, is her real explanation of why, “in the long run,” “this

860 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

planet . . . remain[s] a place fit for human habitation” (E, 233).
Whether we like Arendt’s conclusion or not will depend on how much
we agree with her that cold comfort is the best.
University of California, Irvine
NOTES
1
Martin Jay, “Afterword” to Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig
Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 338.
2
See Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1996), 154–78; Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge,
1992); Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 101–38; Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror:
Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999),
55, 87–106. George Kateb sees much of The Life of the Mind as “a qualified
accusation of philosophical thinking” (Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil
[Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984], 189).
3
Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1971), 1:193. Hereafter abbreviated LM and cited parenthetically by page number.
In The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), Arendt writes:
For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as
well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with the reality
which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of
intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the
delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence
unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized,
as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. (50)
It’s a matter of course that thought that reaches others, however indirectly, has
value. If Arendt’s late argument were limited to such thought, it would be not only
consistent with The Human Condition, but redundant with it.
4
Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment,
ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 160. Hereafter abbreviated
“T” and cited parenthetically by page number.
5
Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 20.
6
Mary McCarthy, “The Hue and Cry,” in The Writing on the Wall and Other
Literary Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971), 68–69. Arendt also admires
McCarthy’s answer in a letter to McCarthy in Between Friends: The Correspondence
of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1995), 160.
7
Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” in Responsibility and
Judgment, 18. Arendt incorporated formulations from both “Thinking and Moral
Considerations” and “Personal Responsibility” into The Life of the Mind. Although
The Life of the Mind is the later text, I generally cite the essays, since their narrative
continuity often provides useful context.
Arendt expresses a similar objection to behaving “as though there existed a law of
human nature compelling everybody to lose his dignity in the face of disaster.”

Rei Terada 861

(Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, revised ed. [New York:
Viking Press, 1964], 132; hereafter abbreviated E and cited parenthetically by page
number). For Giorgio Agamben, there is such a law: shame is “the fundamental
sentiment of being a subject” (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive,
trans. Daniel Heller Roazen [Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002], 107). Agamben
writes, “[T]here is certainly nothing shameful in a human being who suffers on
account of sexual violence,” yet goes on, “but if he takes pleasure in his suffering
violence, if he is moved by his passivity—if, that is, auto-affection is produced—only
then can one speak of shame” (110). Why even then? a tough psychoanalyst might
ask. Arendt, in contrast to Agamben, is keen to avoid the conclusion that shame is
constitutive of human experience. Her value on intelligibility moves toward the
possibility of shameless victimhood, even though Arendt herself still feels shame at
victimhood and is anxious to prevent the feeling from arising. Better than either
Arendt’s resistance to shame or Agamben’s embrace of it is the possibility of
rendering traumatic vulnerability even more intelligible.
8
Arendt, “Personal Responsibility,” 18.
9
Here I am connecting two passages in “Personal Responsibility” and “Thinking.”
In “Personal Responsibility” Arendt quotes McCarthy and declares, “I had somehow
taken it for granted that we all still believe with Socrates that it is better to suffer
than to do wrong” (18). In “Thinking,” she adds “for me” (182). Of course, it could be
better for her because of the law or the possible feelings of the friend and the enemy,
but this doesn’t change the fact that what counts is her evaluation of the effect of
those factors on herself.
10
The distinction remains standard; for Richard Moran, for example, moral
responsibility consists in concentrating on the consequences of one’s actions for the
object rather than what one thinks of them oneself. See Moran, Authority and
Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
2001).
11
Arendt, “Personal Responsibility,” 44. See also the similar discussion in “Some
Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in Responsibility and Judgment, 60–146.
12
Arendt, “Personal Responsibility,” 45.
13
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977),
§188.
14
After Arendt’s death McCarthy, who had for a long time been unofficially
editing Arendt’s prose style, gave in to the temptation to become her image
consultant, explaining her decision to change one of Arendt’s favorite phrases to
something higher-toned: “‘When the chips are down’: I cannot say why the phrase
grates on me, and particularly coming from her, who, I doubt, ever handled a poker
chip. But I can see her (cigarette perched in holder) contemplating the roulette table
or chemin de fer, so it is now ‘when the stakes are on the table’—more fitting, more
in character” (Editor’s Postface to LM, 2:248). McCarthy, apparently even less
experienced at cards than Arendt, misses the point that poker, unlike roulette, is an
interpersonal game of stoicism and challenge.
15
Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning”
(1911), Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James
Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 12:219; Freud, Gesammelte Werke,
18 vols. (London: Imago Publishing Co., Ltd., 1940–68), 8:231; my emphasis.
16
As Arendt puts it, “Whether what affects you exists or is mere illusion depends
on your decision whether or not you will recognize it as real” (LM, 1:155).

862 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

 17
Spinoza, The Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans.
and ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), 157.
18
Freud, Standard Edition, 8:220 n.
19
Freud, Standard Edition, 8:223. Sandor Ferenczi is the great theorist of the
impossibility of simply establishing the sense of reality. See Ferenczi, “Stages in the
Development of the Sense of Reality” (1913), in First Contributions to Psychoanaly-
sis (New York: Bruner-Maazel, 1980), 213–39; and “The Problem of Acceptance of
Unpleasant Ideas—Advances in Knowledge of the Sense of Reality” (1926), in
Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. John
Rickman (London: Hogarth, 1950), 366–79.
20
The capacity to realize that circumstances aren’t good enough isn’t in itself
something to celebrate; it may lead to destructive aggression, a new strategy for
removing whatever we don’t like. Derrida points out in his reading of Arendt’s texts
on lying that the seed of totalitarian violence, as well as of constructive action, is the
desire to change reality, which entails recognition of the events and facts of Arendt’s
public sphere. Thus lying, for Arendt, is “linked in an essential manner to the
concept of action, and, more precisely, political action. She often recalls that the liar
is a ‘man of action’”—Derrida goes on, “I would even add: par excellence.” See
Derrida, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” in Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Peggy
Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 66.
21
Arendt, Human Condition, 5. Karl Jaspers’s General Psychopathology (1913),
which Arendt must have known, similarly characterizes experiential reality by three
features: “What is real is what we concretely perceive,” “Reality lies in the simple
awareness of Being,” and “What is real is what resists us.” See Jaspers, General
Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton, 2 vols. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1:94.
22
Thanks to Bernard Richter for showing me this passage, and for many other
ideas.
23
Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed.
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), §36.
24
Derrida, “History of the Lie,” 60, (“for the best”).
25
Some commentators view adopting the perspective of others as the main
element of Arendt’s thinking; see Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of
Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994). One touchstone for this interpreta-
tion might be Arendt’s equation, at one point in Eichmann, of thinking with
“think[ing] from the standpoint of somebody else” (E, 49). Seyla Benhabib remarks,
“[T]his did not mean empathizing or even sympathizing with the other, but rather
the ability to recreate the world as it appeared through the eyes of others,” that is, to
recognize “the perspectival nature” of the world (“Hannah Arendt and the Redemp-
tive Power of Narrative,” Social Research 57 [1990]: 189). Again, in The Life of the
Mind that external somebody else is within, as the difference in consciousness with
which the Socratic self must harmonize.
26
See Alan Bass’s consideration of disavowal’s “global generalization of defensive
processes” in Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 2000), 17, 45.
27
Arendt goes on to name what she wishes he had seen: “Eichmann did not see
much. . . . It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and Höss, with whom he had
a very friendly relationship, spared him the gruesome sights. He never actually
attended a mass execution by shooting, he never actually watched the gassing

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process, or the selection of those fit for work—about twenty-five per cent of each
shipment, on the average—that preceded it at Auschwitz” (E, 89–90).
28
In 1918, Karl Kraus links disavowal to the supposedly Germanic trait of
endurance: “Sticking it out, for example—we revel in it. . . . There are in fact no
hardships, but we take them joyfully in our stride. That’s the trick of it. We have
always done that well.” See Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind: A Tragedy in Five
Acts, trans. Alexander Gode and Sue Ellen Wright, ed. Frederick Ungar (New York:
Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974), 35–36. Compare Arendt on Himmler (E,
105).
29
Ferenczi argues that reality testing, too, can function the other way around: we
can use it to avoid reality. This would be reality testing without falling in love with it,
hence not thinking (“Stages,” 235).
30
See Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive
States” (1935) and “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940),
in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 1, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other
Works 1921–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1975).
31
For Jean-Luc Nancy, see his Being Singular Plural (1996), trans. Robert D.
Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000). For
Stanley Cavell, see The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and
Tragedy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 462.
32
For Gershom Scholem, see “Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters
between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt,” in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H.
Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 241. For McCarthy’s response to Scholem’s
tone, see Between Friends, 157. Jaspers writes: “What does this mean? One can
discuss back and forth how, in life itself, laughter and irony can be founded in
extraordinary seriousness. Plato says: Only a great writer of comedies can be a great
writer of tragedies.” See Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Edith Erlich, Leonard H.
Erlich, and George B. Pepper (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1986), 521, quoted in
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, “Interpretive Essay,” in their
edition of Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1997), 210–11.
33
McCarthy, “The Hue and Cry,” 66.
34
Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, 166.
35
Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, 168.
36
Namely, that she had felt lighthearted “ever since.” Ever since when? Brightman,
the editor of the Arendt-McCarthy correspondence, interpolates “since the war” to
alleviate the confusion. Arendt associates World War II and the Eichmann contro-
versy, “after twenty years” and “ever since” Eichmann in Jerusalem. Does she mean
to suggest that it’s as though Eichmann were twenty years ago? By “the whole
matter,” does Arendt mean the Eichmann affair or the war?
37
Kafka, quoted in Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political
Thought (1961) (New York: Penguin, 1993), 7. Arendt repeats much of the
discussion in The Life of the Mind, 1:202–11.
38
Arendt, Between Past and Future, 11, 12.
39
Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), 140. On K-Zetnik’s
name, “a slang word meaning a concentration camp inmate,” and the issues it raises,
see Felman, 134–36, 147–49.
40
Felman, 146.

864 Realism and Defiance in Arendt

 41
Felman, 150.
42
Arendt, Between Past and Future, 12–13. In The Juridical Unconscious, Felman
describes K-Zetnik’s collapse as though he were Kafka’s protagonist meeting his
likely end: “[B]etween the present and the past, he falls as though he were himself a
corpse” (149).
43
For more discussion of the relation between shame and victimhood, please see
note 7 above.
44
Nancy Fraser, “Communication, Transformation, and Consciousness-Raising,”
in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, 171–72. I am being a little unfair to
Fraser, because she is responding in this passage to an essay by Lisa Disch that
compares Arendt’s idea of “visiting” to consciousness-raising; Fraser gets her
emphasis on talking and listening from this context. Since thinking is emphatically
stated by Arendt to be significant only after the negotiation of social norms has
broken down, however, it’s off the mark to complain that it does not participate in
such a negotiation, regardless of the variety of negotiation in question.
45
Beiner, “Hannah Arendt on Judging,” in Lectures, 155, 153.
46
In Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Bernstein comments: “The very
intelligibility of her claims depends on the assertion that thinking does have this
liberating effect on the faculty of judging. But Arendt does not really provide any
arguments to justify this assertion” (173).
47
For speculations on moral implications of the reality principle in Freud, see
Elizabeth Rottenberg, “A Testament to Disaster,” Modern Language Notes 115
(2000): 941–73. Rottenberg concludes that “there would be nothing in the world to
move us beyond the pleasure principle” without “the relationship to a non-person
whose force or power remain utterly unresponsive to the ego”; this she calls “the
bond to absolute difference” (970). A Levinasian responsibility to all that is not the
self becomes available here. This “bond” is perhaps another version of the primary
masochism incorporated by Hobbes, Althusser, Agamben, and others in narratives of
subjectivation—if so, it is preferable to many other versions for its full recognition of
the suffering involved. In comparison, the Arendtian cathexis to reality testing looks
like a kind of fetishization, binding the self’s feelings to the process of discovery
rather than to the endangering circumstances discovered. I would argue, however,
that it is a good thing to stop short of masochism. Then the self’s feelings of objection
and its particular position continue to be recognized, and with them more of reality.
48
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1973), xiv. Thanks to David Lloyd for suggesting and talking over this
reference.
49
Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers,” in Crises of the
Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1972), 27.
50
Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” 38. Arendt quotes Richard J. Barnet in Ralph
Stavins, Barnet and Marcus G. Raskin, Washington Plans an Aggressive War (New
York: Vintage, 1971), 209.
51
Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” 39.
52
Arendt speculates that the disappearance of nonfantasy would not lead to “an
adequate substitute for reality,” but transform fact and fantasy alike “back into the
potentiality out of which they originally appeared” and from which fantasy must ever
again fight to emerge (Between Past and Future, 257).

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