NTU Studies in Language and Literature Number 21 (June 2009), 57-80

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The Banality of Radical Evil in the Name of Enjoyment: Hannah Arendt Revisited through Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Han-yu Huang Associate Professor, Department of English National Taiwan Normal University ABSTRACT Hannah Arendt is always preoccupied with the problem of evil in her political and moral theory. Her conceptualizations of the radical evil and banality of evil in totalitarian regimes, however, provoke a great amount of controversies over moral thinking, judgment and responsibility. In light of Lacanian psychoanalytic ethics and iekian ideology critique, this essay will elucidate the conceptual consistency of radical evil and banality of evil: hence, the banality of radical evil. Such a theoretical framework of political and moral analysis is grounded in the centrality of desire, fantasy and enjoyment, and places much weight on the entanglement of the superego with morality as well as evil. The final part of this essay will explore how the banality of radical evil in the name of enjoyment outlives totalitarian regimes and continues to haunt us today.
Keywords : enjoyment, evil, perversion, superego, totalitarianism

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The Banality of Radical Evil in the Name of Enjoyment: Hannah Arendt Revisited through Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Han-yu Huang Introduction: Arendt in Context In her lifelong career of thinking and writing, Hannah Arendt never stops being preoccupied with the problem of evil. Her political theory of human rights, government, civil society, and so on, are mainly developed from her long-term observation and study of the political crises engendered by totalitarian regimes in terms of the breakdown in morality (Kohn, Introduction x). Accordingly, Arendts prolific works substantiate the necessity of revising traditional philosophical, political, moral and sociological conceptualizations of evil. One may be easily tempted to disregard Arendt as irrelevant to the early twenty-first century we are living in, on the grounds that most totalitarian regimes have already collapsed, and Nazis anti-Semitism, deportations, concentration camps, gas chambers, the Holocaust . . . are purely too exceptional to apply to normal situations. Unwittingly based on a rather crude demarcation between the state of normality and exception, such rejections concern an imprecise interpretation of Arendtnamely, that Arendts works make sense only in the particular political, historical situations under which they were writtenand unjust judgments on her contributions to political and moral theory; more fundamentally, they betray a defensive resistance to look at evil in its true face. As Margaret Canovan comments, Totalitarianism as portrayed by Arendt was not a plague that had descended on humanity from some external source. It was self-inflicted, the outcome of human actions and the processes they set off. . . . While totalitarian regimes were exceptional events, they were in her eyes the most extreme example of a phenomenon that was alarmingly common in the modern world, as men set off destructive processes, and then . . . do their best to speed these processes along. (35)

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In other words, Arendt does not conceive of totalitarian evil in metaphysical, religious terms; its extreme destructiveness, absolutely immanent and secular in modernity, is perpetrated by men themselves through institutional, technological means and engages our moral thinking on both systemic and individual (existential) aspects. Moreover, the complication of the exceptional, most extreme and the normal, alarmingly common at issue here deserves our critical concerns as well; it is a theme that has been repeatedly, albeit in different contexts, invoked by political theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Jacques Rancire, Giorgio Agamben, to name only a few. As a matter of fact, contemporary theory does not lack its critical (re)turn to Arendt. In the fields of biopolitics and biophilosophy, Arendt is often understood as the person who early observes the political effects of human birth, labor or, in Agambens terms, bare life as such and, more generally, the roots of modernity in biopolitics (Esposito 149-50, 177-79). Besides, contemporary Leftist thinkers of radical politics, in their universalizing projects and rethinking, reformulations of the political, receive Arendt in a highly critical vein. Among them, Badiou seems to voice the most determined critiques of Arendts political philosophy as a whole for its submission of political analysis to ethical norms and reduction of the political to plurality of opinions, consensus and, ultimately, parliamentarianism (Ethics 115-16; Metapolitics 11, 22-24). To accurately position Arendt in the intellectual background and formation of discourses and to intervene in the controversies as briefly sketched above, though a task worth our efforts, will be beyond the attempted scope of this paper. Instead, this paper sets out to complete a more limited but concise goal: that is, revisiting Arendts ethico-political theory of evil through psychoanalytic ethics. In this aspect, the major controversy that Arendt arouses circles around the difficulty, if not impossibility, of thinking together radical (absolute) evilmainly developed in her Origin of Totalitarianism (1951) and other works around 1950sand banality of evil, the subtitle of her Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), a problematic coinage that she continuously elaborates through her later works. Arendt first consciously applies the Kantian language radical evil in her study of totalitarianism (Matutik 95; Young-Bruenl 2), but later replaces it with banality of evil. This involves not merely a terminological revision but also her break with Kants formalistic moral philosophy1: for example, Kant posits subjective
1

For Kant, morality has no need of material, empirical determining grounds; it is separated from

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freedom as a priori, as manifested even in the case of radical evil, while Arendt posits the possibility of its destruction (Matutik 95). The latter part of this paper will present the conceptual consistency of radical evil and banality of evilmore accurately put, the two sides of one single conceptand the persistent concerns of Arendts moral thinking on evil in more details. At this moment, we only need to recapitulate the theme of Clint Eastwoods Mystic River (2003). Does the film not confront us with the traumatic understanding that radical, horrible evil can be disguised under the semblance of banal, mundane routines of daily life? Does the film not dramatize the banality of radical evil in question: to reunite family and to make normal life go on, what does it matter to execute a friend, since it is easy to pretend that nothing really happens? And does this moral theme not also apply to the Bush administrations call for returning to ordinary life after 11 September 2001 and during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Revisiting Arendt through ethics of psychoanalysis, to a great extent, brings about the confrontation of two lacks. On the one hand, although Arendt makes her frequent presence in the existing psychoanalytic-ethical literature by, for example, iek and Copjec, and in a number of psychoanalyticallyinformed contributions to Radical Evil (1996), these works fail to open up any integrated understanding of radical evil and banality of evil by way of a systematic engagement in both Freuds and Lacans clinical assessments and theoretical conceptualizations of the superego and perversion. After his rather sketchy reference to Richard Bernsteins proposal in Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (1996) that we observe the compatibility, rather than the contradiction of Arendts notions of radical evil and banality of evil, iek does touch upon the perverts subjective position but immediately drops the discussion of Arendt and turns to Kant instead (PF 231-32).2 On the other
ends and solely bound with the condition of freedom (33-34). And the subjects conformity to the law, which testifies the subjects a priori freedom, requires no verification by reason and empirical examples. This does not mean that actions and consequences do not count anything in moral judgment, but that they are not self-sufficient and what fundamentally determines a moral good or evil lies beyond the subjects consciousness. The roots of radical evil, accordingly, do not lie in any natural impulses or objects but in the subjects choice of a priori evil maxim, in a rule that the power of choice itself produces for the exercise of its freedom (46): in other words, this evil is radical in the sense that it corrupts the ground of all maxims (54). The abbreviation of The Plague of Fantasies. Other books by iek will be hereafter cited as DSST (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?), FA (The Fragile Absolute), LA (Looking Awry), ME (The Metastasis of Enjoyment), PD (Puppet and Dwarf), PF (Plague of Fantasies), PV (The Parallax View), SOI (The Sublime Object of Ideology), TKN (For They Know Not What They Do), ZR (The iek Reader). For data of publications, see Works Cited.

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hand, Arendt in many crucial aspects, such as thoughtless and superficiality, which she takes to be the operation definitions of evil, seems to resist or fall short of psychoanalytic explanations (Alford 54; Young-Bruehl 4). Arendts lack, or silence, at issue here has its counterpart in Kants moral philosophy, to which Lacan himself and Lacanian theorists add the supplement of the superego. In light of Lacanian psychoanalytic ethics and iekian ideology critique, this essay will elucidate the conceptual consistency of radical evil and banality of evil: hence, the banality of radical evil. Such a theoretical framework of political and moral analysis is grounded in the centrality of desire, fantasy and enjoyment, and places much weight on the entanglement of the superego with morality as well as evil: put in Lancanian/iekian terms, any given public ideology and power grip the subject only on condition that they appeal to its superego, drives and enjoyment as their underside, obscene supports, and so does moral evil. The banality of radical evil conceptualized in this paper, accordingly, manifests the doubling of the subjective/institutional, depth/surface and inside/outside, Lacanian extimacy, or the unconscious is on the outside. The final part of this paper will explore how the banality of radical evil in the name of enjoyment outlives totalitarian regimes and is still haunting us today. Radical Evil in Totalitarian Regimes To examine how totalitarian regimes engender a collapse of morality as well as political crises, we need a self-reflexive understanding of the difficulty of political and moral judgments in the first place. The totalitarian power system, in spite of its public faade, greatly relies on secret, ubiquitous, constant, but incalculable and unpredictable spying and surveillance (Arendt, OT 403, 431).3 Totalitarian subjects under such conditions can never be sure who are who and whom can be trusted. Moreover, it is hard, if not impossible, to draw the boundaries between criminals and normal persons, the guilty and innocent, since the neutral zone of ordinary life, a space of irrevocable uniqueness not touched and foreseen by the law (EU 334), which was supposed to be a protective shield of privacy and freedom against the
3

The abbreviation of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Other books and collections of essays by Arendt will hereafter be cited as EJ (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil), EU (Essays in Understanding 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism), LM (The Life of the Mind) and RJ (Responsibility and Judgment). For data of publications, see Works Cited.

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infringement of political power, has been destroyed and the existence of individuals depends on either actual crimes or complicity in crimes (EU 124-25). Moral understanding, judgments and actions, therefore, become out of the question. Thinking such a state to its most horrible extreme, we may follow Arendt to posit that a whole people could be employed in systematic mass murder, which defies human reason and imagination, explodes the traditional categories of political, legal and moral thought and action, and tears apart the intelligible constitution of human existence (Arendt, EU 126; Kohn, Introduction xix). The aforementioned collapse of private space synecdochically exemplifies the ubiquity, as well as obscenity, of the political power of totalitarian regimes which, as can be characterized in no better way than tautological expressions, aims at total domination. What is at issue here does not merely involve the perfection of techniques of domination; more crucially, as Arendt professes to demonstrate, we must resort to our fearful imagination and take on the difficult task of making political, moral judgment on the destructivenesshence, radical evilperpetrated by the unlimited domination of totalitarian regimes to the substance of human existence. Totalitarianism in power, unlike totalitarianism in its revolutionary movement, captures the whole social fabric in a state of stasis; no single aspect of ordinary life however private is left untouched, and all individuals are fixed in definite places (OT 456). In fact, totalitarian subjects are no longer entitled to the appellation individuals, since their infinite plurality and possibility have been organized and reduced into a never-changing identity (OT 438): they have been transformed into cogs in the mega-machine of the regime and can be transferred, replaced or eliminated anytime they no longer fit in the power mechanism: in one word, they have lost their autonomy, unpredictability, spontaneity . . . all the traits that attest to their humanity, and they are thus made superfluous.4 Such superfluity attests to the totalitarian radical evil not only in morality but also in human existential values (Kateb 825-26); human existence is nullified from its roots and reduced to nothing but a banal fact: hence, the banality of radical evil. Moreover, we must notice a spectral trend
4

For Arendt, Nazis concentration camps stand as the most extreme, horrible instance of this transformation: hence, the three steps to total domination, as well as the preparation of living corpses. People living under totalitarian rule are deprived of the rights to have rights and are no longer sheltered by any existent legal, juridical systemput in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, they belong to no recognizable Symbolic; their conscience is made questionable when death has lost its meaning, human solidarity been corrupted, and martyrdom become impossible. For details, see OT 447-57.

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that may outlive the regimes themselves and continue even when they have been destroyed (Villa, Politics 14); it does not come from outside but is fully within modernity; it is the destructive, nihilistic drive of modern institutionalization, systematization and technologization carried to its most horrible extreme. To further understand Arendts conceptualizations of radical evil, we need to examine how the law functions or malfunctions or how it is perverted in totalitarian regimes. First of all, the permanent state of lawlessness does not have any implication of arbitrariness, which means that a definite logic of law, albeit essentially different from the secular positive law, still functions in totalitarian regimes. As Arendt herself qualifies in On the Nature of Totalitarianism (1954), Totalitarian rule is lawless insofar as it defies positive law, yet it is not arbitrary insofar as it obeys with strict logic and execute with precise compulsion the laws of History or Nature (EU 339-40). It is exactly such strict, precise, compulsive execution of the laws of History or Nature that distinguishes totalitarian evil from the evil of other tyrannies. Such laws legitimate the pretension of totalitarian reign of justice on earth; they are not applied to standards of individuals behaviors but to species in general (EU 462), with the latter turned into not only the objects but also the carriers or instruments of those laws; they aim at the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future (OT 469-70). In this aspect neither ideological conviction, which is always viewed as an unreliable support of the regime, nor the truth or falsehood of those laws is at issue; what preoccupies Arendt is how ideology transformed into living reality leads to unthinkable terror. It is misleading, however, to claim that Arendt denies the anti-Semitic ideology in both Russian and German totalitarianism. Indeed, Arendt persistently downplays the centrality of ideology, as well as the implied dialogue with psychoanalytic theory, in her works on evil, and stresses that no deeply-rooted ideological convictions are necessary to make evil radical and unthinkable: hence, the disjunction between belief, intention and action which engenders the difficulties of political and moral judgment in the case of totalitarianism. In this aspect, Villas clarification that [Arendt] refuses to locate the meaning of totalitarian terror in the patent irrationality of ideological fantasy or racial hatred (Politics 19) does not help our understanding of the true function of the laws of History or Nature in question. Arendts refusal of psychoanalytic explanations of ideology, of course, allows for further research or conjecture. In the juncture of the arguments here, we only need to draw on the typically

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iekian perspective that ideological fantasy does not merely involve blind obedience and irrational thinking: it deploys a network of rationalizations for the kernel of the symbolic belief that is always excessively permeated with enjoyment. Ideology grips its subjects not only through the symbolic identificationin the context of this essay, the identification with the Master signifiers such as History, Nature, Nation, People, etc.but also through the underside fantasmatic support of enjoyment, which is an absolute Otherness unable to be symbolized and subjectivized, and always remains excessive, spectral, aberrant and undecidable (PF 48-50). It is exactly with such enjoyment qua the underside fantasmatic support of ideology that we can think together the totalitarian reign of terror, laws of History or Nature, and superego (voice of conscience): hence, the banality of radical evil in the name of enjoyment. To execute the Laws of History or Nature and speed up their movement to consummation, totalitarianism must constantly identify objective enemies to meet the factual situations reiterated by the rulers (OT 425, 465) and demand the permanent elimination of hostile or parasitic or unhealthy classes or races in order to enter upon its bloody eternity (EU 321, emphasis mine). Moreover, the fantasy of unconditional sacrifice is mobilized to realize and translate the Laws of History or Nature into living reality and to make them race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous action (OT 465). What must be sacrificed to make way for such a reign of terror, if not all intelligible human traits such as individuality, spontaneity, unpredictability or, in psychoanalytic terms, desire or possibility of desiring? As mentioned above, people under totalitarian rule are frozen in a static social fabric, and their individual, free, private living space is destroyed; they are denatured, rendered interchangeable and replaceable, and made cogs in the mega machine of the regime, the carriers, instruments or, in Villas words, transparent embodiment of the all-pervasive law of Nature of History (Politics 20). Does such superfluity not attest to the most horrible extreme the seductive fantasy of sacrifice can reach, as well as the fantasy of the undivided society/Other for which the subject sacrifices the objet a of desire and, hence, the possibility of desiring in response to the Causes of History, Nature, Nation, People . . . ? What comes to the fore here, from Lacanian psychoanalytic perspectives, is the perverts position. No longer the subject of desire, the pervert identifies with the object to sustain the enjoyment located in the Other (Maccannell 48-50, 56). As iek also explicates, The pervert does not pursue his activity for his own pleasure, but for the enjoyment of the

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Otherhe finds enjoyment precisely in this instrumentalization, in working for the enjoyment of the Other (LA 109). Such fantasy of sacrifice, to a great extent, corresponds to the imaginary scenario of theft of enjoyment (by objective Enemies, in the context of the arguments here), which is paradoxical in nature: the state of full enjoyment (or, the possession of a Nation-Thing in ieks terms) and its loss at the same time. The totalitarian/pervert subject defies positive laws through the semblance of transgressive activities and constructs the imaginary Law that is more tied to the circuit of jouissance rather than desire (since a pervert does not have desire of his own); in answering to the Others call, he submits to jouissance qua the obscene Law more than ever. Such obedience to the Law does not testify the subjects free will but his slavery. Ultimately, totalitarianism remains a site of castration.5 The translation of the laws of History or Nature, as well as fantasy of sacrifice for the Others jouissance, into living realities in a precise, compulsive manner as discussed above perverts the law as such from its root in the collapse of transcendence into immanence (Birmingham 85), and this also actualizes the totalitarian reign of terror: infernal terror, severed from its transcendental support of sin and punishment, becomes a purely immanent living reality with no hope of redemption. Terror no longer functions as the means to frighten people but as the essence of the regime (OT 440), nor does it aim at suppressing oppositions, since total terror emerges after oppositions have already been suppressed (Canovan 27). Such excessive, total terror seems to run by itself without any definite purpose in view and, therefore, beyond any (economic, military, political) utilitarian considerations (Arendt, OT 440, RJ 42; Dietz 88), as is best illustrated by the economically useless labor and murder in the concentration camp (OT 445). All elements of historical tyrannical ruleswars, massacre, slavery and, of course, concentration campscan be practiced to freeze people, destroy their free private living space and turn them into replaceable cogs, meld them together but isolate, atomize them in a desert of neighborlessness and loneliness and tranquility of the cemetery (EU 348). All these characteristics have their more horrible realization in Nazis concentration camps, where human masses, totally engulfed in the atmosphere of loneliness and unreality, can be tormented and slaughtered in places completely hidden to the outside world
5

The perverts position in question will be explored in more detail later in this essay through a critical survey of the nature of superego.

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and can be known only from the world of perverse, malignant fantasies (OT 445). Such unthinkable terror crystallizes the nihilistic principle of everything is permitted to its fullest degree: no limits on human power to commit evil deeds can be recognized (Villa, Politics 30). What do we have here, if not the trinity of the laws of History or Nature, terror, and radical evil set in motion in totalitarian regimes? The message condensed in Arendts figure of speech world of perverse, malignant fantasies as quoted above concerns the difficulty of political and moral judgment on totalitarian radical evil, as is real-ized through purely immanent, unthinkable, unprecedented infernal horror. To think the unthinkable and unprecedented does not ascribe any Satanic greatness to Nazis horrendous crimes; it means that the faculty of human judgment in the face of totalitarian radical evil has no conventional political, moral and philosophical categoriesnot to mention common senseto rely on. Forcing us into speech horror, radical evil could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; [sic] and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive. . . . [W]e actually have nothing to fall back on in order to understand a phenomenon that nevertheless confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we know. (OT 459)6 Evil conceptualized this way is radical in the sense that it disrupts the correspondence between action and motivation, moral standards of understanding and judgment, human sentiments, legal justice, and languages; it obliterates the foundations of human community and forces human subjects into moral, epistemological, emotional and linguistic abyss. Accordingly, the traditional conception of evil as the absence (or privation) of good loses its expressive, conceptual and interpretative values in the face of radical evil on the surface and in the state of excess. As Peg Birmingham comments, The problem for Arendt is that the Western tradition has not faced up to our very real capacity for incalculable evil, preferring instead to see evil as a kind of nothingnessa lack of Being or the Good (82). To this point, we must avoid
6

These ideas demonstrate how banality is always germane to Arendts conceptualization of radical evil and, therefore, why Arendt is reluctant to seek for psychoanalytic explanations, a reluctance that precludes Arendt from realizing the full implications of the banality of radical evil according to her conceptualization. For more qualifications of speech horror, see Arendt, RJ 23, 56, 75; Villa, Politics 33.

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mystifying radical evil with supernatural, Satanic greatness: it is human, all too human; it need not be grounded in evil motives but can seamlessly fit in mores, manners, customs, which can be changed at will and socially accepted by ordinary men (RJ 43, 53-54) and which keeps normal society going into the conformity that allows and even encourages the ideological passions of a comparative and few to create a whole system of evil (Kateb 829). Radical evil, in conclusion at this point, is the most alien kernel of our being and human communityhence, Lacanian extimacythat resists full symbolization and domestication, forces us into an abyss of thinking and judgment, where we have nothing to rely on, and, hence, confronts us with the urgency of rethinking and reviewing political, moral and philosophical categories. If anything, this paper, through the Lacanian notions of superego and enjoyment, builds up some psychoanalytic-ethical perspectives for looking at radial evil in its state of excess and impossibility. Evil Is But a Skin Deep: From Radical Evil to Banality of Evil Eichmann in Jerusalem provokes more controversies than any other works by Arendt, who loses a number of friendships and is alienated from the Jewish community because of the book (Kohn, Introduction xi). Adolf Eichmanns trial in Jerusalem, for Arendt herself and her critics as well, constitutes a difficult affair in political, jurisprudential and moral theory that engenders the tension between the international and national, universal and particular (Benhabib 77-78). Should Israel hand over the juridical right to an International Court? Is Israel justified to speak for all the victims of Eichmann? In what charge should Eichmann be put to trial? What precedents can be cited to pass judgment on him? During the trial, the judges never cease to question Eichmanns conscience. However, it is not the absence but presence of conscience, as always a problematic issue in political and moral theories, that leads to the difficulty of understanding the evil coming to the fore from his crimes: namely, the banality of evil that is as fearsome, word-and-thought-defying (EJ 252) as radical evil. Eichmann under Arendts analysis, therefore, mediates and embodies these two sides of evil, since he is the chief executor of the Final Solution. The banality of evil, first of all, refers to the specific quality of mind and character of the doer himself (Benhabib 74) which lies underneath the semblance of ordinariness, no matter how extraordinarily horrendous the acts themselves are. In using the phrase, as well as in her conceptualization of

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radical evil, Arendt departs from the traditional metaphysical conception of evil as the deprivation of good and ultimate depravity, corruption, or sinfulness (Benhabib 75). Disrupting the proportion between actions and motives, Arendts conception of the banality of evil does not trivialize, not to mention exonerate, the horrendous crimes committed by Eichmann and Nazis and make them less guilty and monstrous (Kohn, Introduction xii; Kristeva 144). Rather, it points to the fact that crimes not grounded in demonic motives are exceedingly, incomparably worse, more dreadful than any other normal crime. As Susan Neiman accurately elaborates, Precisely the belief that evil actions require evil intentions allowed totalitarian regimes to convince people to override moral objections that might otherwise have functioned. Massive propaganda efforts undertook to convince people that the criminal actions in which they participated were guided by acceptable, even noble motives. (275) How are people like Eichmann convinced of the disproportion between actions and motives in question, if not through their superego? Accordingly, we should not reduce what is involved here to blatant lies or ideological falsifications of propaganda. If we follow Arendt to characterize the specific quality of mind and character of Eichmann as thoughtlessness, what is at issue is not the privation of thought. On the contrary, Eichmann is too thought-ful, full of the thoughts of the Other, or he is thought through by the superego qua the Other. And what is disavowed in his thoughtlessness is his ability, as well as responsibility, to resist what makes him thought-ful. Moreover, we should not oppose the banality of evil, as well as Arendts repeated accentuation that the greatest evil is not radical (RJ 72, 95), to radical evil as such and claim that Arendt changes her mind or is battling with herself in her thinking and writing on evil. At its most obvious, Arendts exposition of totalitarian evil as radical argues for a fundamental reviewing of existing institutions and legal, political and moral theories, and the banality of evil in her later works exactly consistently corresponds to and elaborates such concerns (Ludz 798; Phillips 130). Throughout her career, Arendt is consistently preoccupied with the disproportion between acts and motivations. Hence, The greatest evil is not radical can only be taken as a qualification that evil is radical on the surface, not in terms of deeply-rooted evil motives, pathology or ideological convictions. If superfluousness of human existence in the modern (totalitarian) system stands as one of the central themes in Arendts earlier works, it also pertains to the banality of evil

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or, more accurately, the banality of radical evil: the existential fragility, finitude and superfluousness of the modern subject accounts for the emergence of radical evil that Nazis perpetrate through their execution of the laws of History or Nature and promise of undivided identity and society. The above existential bases of the modern subject pertain to the bourgeois subject, a purely modern everyman. Radical evil need not be committed by any Satanic figure with perverted motivations or fatal power; it fits in the life of paterfamilias with all the outer aspects of respectability. Such a manquite ordinary and commonplace, neither demonic nor monstrous, neither a fanatic, sex maniac nor a sadist (EU 129, LM 4)is ready to sacrifice his beliefs, his honor, and his human dignity (EU 129) for the sake of his wife, his children and his pension. He does not stand out; he is an anonymous mob man who only coordinates himself and does not act out of conviction: such anonymity, as well as superfluousness, is the key to the modern socialization and institutionalization of banality (May, Socialization 89) and accounts for the transmutation paterfamilias into the instrument of madness and horror, or the instrument of the Others jouissance as conceptualized above. The transmutation in question also returns us to Eichmanns thoughtlessness, or his inability to think, which should not be confused with stupidity, since it can be found in intelligent people (RJ 164). As pointed out above, Eichmann is spoken or thought through by the Other, as can be observed from his language and conscience. The language Eichmann uses during the trial is composed of self-fabricated clichs, stock phrases, conventional and standardized expressions. One is tempted to agree with the judges that Eichmann feigns his empty talk most of the time without noticing its striking consistency. For example, every time the judges appeal to Eichmanns conscience during the cross-examination, they unexceptionally meet his elated clichs like I shall gladly hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth (EJ 53).7 Even at his death,
7

Two more examples will suffice: One of the few gifts fate bestowed upon me is a capacity for truth insofar as it depends upon myself. (EJ 54) Today no man, no judge could every persuade me to make a sworn statement, to declare something under oath as a witness. I refuse it, I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or any other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony. I wont do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me. (EJ 54-55)

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Eichmann does not relinquish his elated, grandiose style; he draws on the clich from funeral oratory: 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 (EJ 252). Eichmanns enslavement by clichs is symptomatic of the connection of his thoughtlessness, his inability to think with his inability to speak: he mutates into an affectless dummy who has lost his individuality and been possessed, instrumentalized by the Others discourse. As Arendt comments, No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such (EJ 49). All the standardized expressions, ultimately, protect Eichmann against all the horrible realities which he contributes to building up and against the responsibility of thinking and judgment (Meade 122). To better understand how superfluousness and thoughtlessness constitute the banality of radical evil, or how Eichmann is thought and spoken through by the Other, we also need to bring the problem of conscience into discussion. First of all, the banality of radical evil deviates from the conventional conception of evil as the absence of (moral) conscience. Eichmanns conscience is not silenced but perverted; it continues to tell him not what is right and wrong but what duty is (Villa, Politics 45): hence, the conflation of morality with legality, or reception of voice as written laws. Eichmanns conscience, like the clichs he addictively relies on, soothes him with the self-indulgent falsifications that no one is against the Final Solution (EJ 116) and executing mass killing requires great ability, courage, loyalty, or whatever heroic or moral virtues; it always speaks with the voice of respectable society around him (EJ 126). In other words, responding to the voice of conscience, for a bourgeois subject or paterfamilias like Eichmann, is the way to build up social respectability, to be coordinated into realities and recognized by the Other. We are thus brought back to the perverts position as sketchily depicted above: conscience works beyond individual decisions and turns the subject into a mere executor of the will of the group/Other (Maccannell 61). In fact, the will of the group/Other in question, as well as the law, is identified with the will and desires of the Fhrer, which are elevated to the status of universal and transcendental law and need not be put down in words but work through an identical voice in all mens heart: Thou shalt kill (EJ 148), purely the listeners own creation to fill the empty voice of conscience with contents. Eichmanns claim that he strives to live up

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to Kants moral philosophy, accordingly, is worse than hypocritical cover-up; it demonstrates how the Law has been perverted, corrupted from its root, since what is supposed to liberate man in Kant, the moral law, turns out to be the source of evil (Hewitt 84). Ultimately, the banality of radical evil embodied by Eichmann attests to the most horrible extreme of modern bureaucracy, as is run by perverted, consequence-blind bureaucrats wielding expert knowledgein Lacanian terms, the University Discoursewhich reduces the population to disposable bare life (Young-Bruehl 5; iek, PV 298). The voice of conscience of such a bourgeois family man as Eichmann sooths, or seduces, him with social respectability and recognition, the morality of mores, manners, customs and conventions, which are socially accepted by ordinary men and susceptible to change at will. What is horrible about the banality of radical evil at issue, if not its entanglement with the superego morality of mores that forecloses truly ethical judgment and responsibility, and allows for concentration camps, gas chambers and the Holocaust? Thus said, however, the other side to such morality, the concept of collective guilt, is equally flawed according to Arendt. Collective guilt upon the first glance seems to work well as the antidote to the mass crimes based on mass morality but ends up with the moral nihilism as that of the latter. As Arendt emphatically points out, collective guilt may turn out to be a highly effective whitewash of all those who had actually done something, for where all are guilty, no one is (RJ 21). For Arendt, guilt or innocence only makes sense when it is applied to individuals, who, like Eichmann, are judged for their specific responsibility. Both superego morality of mores and collective guilt, as well as cog theory, sever freedom of choice and responsibility from morality; and it is exactly such severance in the guise of normality and ordinariness that constitutes the banality of radical evil. Superego and Evil in the Name of Enjoyment From the above discussion, we may acquire a psychoanalytic-ethical lesson that the roots of the banality of radical evil lie in the perverts position, superegos voice of conscience, and morality of mores, all of which are inseparable from the affective attachments of, for example, sense of guilt, shame and anxiety. We may surmise that what makes the banality of radical evil unthinkable for Arendt is exactly the conductivity of such moral affects to horrendous crimes rather than moral acts. Although Arendt is much reserved

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about guilty feelings, her repeated characterization of moral thinking as the silent dialogue between me and myself (RJ 93)8only makes the case more complicated, though we can fully understand her persistent concern for man in the singular, rather than men in the plural (Ludz 806). How are we to rationalize Arendts equation of moral thinking with silence? How can such a silent dialogue be distinguished from the voice of conscience that makes Eichmann thoughtless, the voice that is rather sonorous, ferocious than silent? At this moment, we should first bear in mind that, from psychoanalytic perspectives, what seduces the thoughtless, superfluous, replaceable totalitarian subject into the fantasy of sacrifice (for Nature, History, People, Nation etc.) and perverts the Law from its root is the obscene, superegoic voice of conscience charged with the command to transgress/enjoy. To elucidate how superegoic voice of conscience, which is supposed to dictate the subjects moral thinking and acts, ends up being entangled with enjoyment and evil, it will be fruitful to recapitulate the vicissitude of the superego in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Roughly from 1920s onwards, Freud gradually dissociates the tie between the superego and the ego ideal (social expectation and recognition, or the Symbolic in the Lacanian sense) along with the maturation of the tripartite topography of id-ego-superego, and the most fundamental shift is that death drive becomes the central concept in the theory of the superego, as characterized with severity, sense of guilt and tension with the ego, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), Civilization and Its Discontent (1930) (Boothby, Death and Desire 5, Freud as Philosopher 173-74; Garcia 223). Freud now conceptualizes the superego in relation to the desexualization, sublimation of the love object, identification of the object inside the ego, and transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido: in other words, the formation of the superego corresponds to the process in which libido turns from the object to the ego itself or takes the ego as its object (The Ego and Id 30-31). Such desexualization and sublimation of object-choice turns out to be the source of aggressiveness (which is originally bound by erotic components). Aggressiveness is inhibited not through extraneous influence, fear of external authority or social anxietynamely, the bad conscience which is likely to lead to bad behaviors as long as they are not caughtbut in the form of introjected conscience, which takes over a portion of the ego (The Economic Problem of Masochism 170, Civilization
8

Also see RJ 21, 29, 57, 69, 96-97, 100

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and Its Discontents 123, 125, 127-28). Therefore, the formation of the superego carries the more primordial tension between the id and ego to a more severe stage: though coming into being from a portion of the ego, the superego turns the forces drawn from the id against the ego (The Ego and Id 52-53). In its service to the three overbearing masters (id, the superego, and realities), the ego is subject to self-judgment and sense of humility and guilt, which may not originate from actual behaviors (The Ego and Id 37, Civilization and Its Discontents 123): hence, the dominance of moral masochism or culture of death instinct. The superego never ceases to blame the ego for the unsatisfied aggressive instincts. More instinctual renunciations only make the superego crueler and more insatiable. Ultimately, the more one submits to the superegoic commands, the more uncertain, difficult moral behaviors turn out to be. The Freudian conceptions of the superego as depicted above acquire more theorized formulations through Lacanian perspectives. What comes to the fore is the superegos paradoxical, split nature: the moral conscience speaks No! to the subject, while the obscene, perverted underside of the superego knows the subjects jouissance and commands it to enjoy/transgress. This also constitutes the vicious circle that traps the subject: [T]he more one sacrifices to [the superego], the more it demands (Lacan, Seminar VII 302). In other words, the more the subject represses the transgressive desire in service of the moral law, the more desire returns to obsess the subject, which ends up feeling guiltier for not enjoying enough (iek, DSST 100, FA 141, ME 68, PV 90). The subjects psychical balance is thus always intruded, disturbed and persecuted by the superegos voice that is loaded with excessive contents: the will and desires of the Fhrer qua the Father-jouissance or the command Thou shalt kill in Nazis case. Such voice deflects the ethical voice of the moral law, the empty voice without content, or the enunciation without a statement (Dolar 98; Zupani 164). The moral law, as well as the Others desire, now loses its status of an enigma; Che vuoi? (what do you want from me) qua the enigmatic question of both becomes out of question. Rather, the superegoic voice haunts the subject in its overproximal, too full presence with the commands to transgress/enjoy. When everything is permitted, namely, when all positive laws can be transgressed at will in service of the Laws of Nature or History, or jouissance qua the Law as such, when Hitler as the Father-jouissance through the superegos voice persecutes the totalitarian subject with the unbearable, insatiable will-to-jouissance, as is embodied in the utopian fantasy of the undivided identity and society, the

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subject, now identifying with the objet a or the instrument of the Others jouissance, also sacrifices the possibility of desiring. More accurately, the pervert desires to be fully acknowledged by the Others jouissance that is elevated to the status of the Law, and, as iek reminds us, we should not fail to see an irony at work here: [T]he pervert, this transgressor par excellence who purports to violate all the rules of normal, decent behavior, effectively longs for the very rule of Law (ZR 118). Accordingly, the totalitarian regime remains a site of castration. It is at this point that we can perceive the intimacy of the perverts position to interpassivity. In actively responding to the Others demandsbe they calls of History, Nation, or Peoplethe totalitarian subjects/perverts displace the burden of enjoyment, always excessive, transgressive and unbearable, to the Other and have the Other to enjoy in their place; in so doing, they may remain passive toward their fantamastic structure. Such interpassivity can be conceived as the fundamental fantasy or the necessary minimum of subjectivity: [I]n order to be an active subject, I have to get ridand transpose onto the otherthe inner passivity which contains the density of my substantial being (iek, The Interpassive Subject para. 17). However, what we see in the totalitarian regime is not merely the public staging but the political mobilization of such (inter)passivity to such a maximal, totalized degree that no aspects of social fabric and private life are left untouched. Is this not what the banality of radical evil is all about? After all this, we may be tempted to query if Arendt revisited through ethics of psychoanalysis leads us to any final solution to the banality of radical evil. However, as already pointed out previously in this paper, totalitarian evil outlives the regime itself trough a will to total domination of knowledge and fully transparent understanding. This does not bring us back to obscurantist mystification of evil. Rather, at their most, both Arendts work and psychoanalytic ethics clear the ground for looking at and responding to evil ethically. Addressing the ethical response to the speechless horror of Nazis horrendous crimes, Arendt warns us against contenting ourselves with the hypocritical confession God be thanked, I am not like that; instead, she urges us to realize what man is capable of in fear and trembling (EU 132). For Arendt, to recognize our speechlessness and powerlessness, as analogous to Lacanian subjective destitution, in the face of radical evil, is essential to breaking with our moral, political illusions. Does the pretense that we need not make any structural transformation in ourselves and the society as long as life can go on in its normal track not constitute the banality of radical evil in

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contemporary liberal-democratic, multiculturalist, global capitalist society of enjoyment, the evil in the name of enjoyment that keeps our fantasmatic structure intact? Contemporary society of enjoyment, as can be also named culture of drive, permissive society, or plague of fantasies in ieks terms, is driven by the excessive imperatives to consume, transgress and enjoy (McGowan 34). However, in the first place, we must not misrecognize excessive, transgressive consumption and enjoyment as the satisfaction or liberation of desire, when the symbolic Fathers prohibitive laws that say No! are said to lose their function. From Lacanian perspectives, the symbolic law and power cannot function without enjoyment as its superegoistic, fantasmatic underside support (Lacan, Seminar VII 20-21, 76, 177, 185; iek, FA 131-32, PD 104, PF 50, TKN 9-10). However, when enjoyment directly takes the form of imperative necessity or acquires the status of the Law, the Symbolic will be unsettled and the subject will encounter more blocks of desiring. Under the drive to encounter and consume Otherness qua the sublime commodity, todays consumer-subject never ceases to feel anxiety toward not being sufficiently exposed to and getting too close to the Others gaze at the same time. Does The Truman Show not enact the anxiety in question here? When Truman takes the heroic move to quit the show and leave the studio, is he not still imagining a Beyond, the Other of the Other, and does he not thus still fall prey to the superego imperatives to enjoy the (non-simulated, real) Thing? When the film is interpreted this way, does it not end with an interpassive gesture that leaves the status quo and fantasmatic structure intact? Moreover, when the consumer-subject is offered anywhere and anytime a multiplicity of choices of products, tastes, life styles, body figures, sexualities and identities, and excessive consumption is commanded, what he actually experiences is a higher degree of difficulty, if not impossibility, of choosing and desiring (iek, PF 154). Such difficulty brings us back to the paradoxical, split nature of superego discussed above. In the final analysis, the superegos excessive imperatives to enjoy hinder the subjects access to enjoyment and, hence, triggers castration anxiety with too much enjoyment much more efficiently than downright prohibitions (iek, PF 114, SOI 37, TKN 30). Certain rigidity beneath fluidity thus lurks in contemporary permissive society of enjoyment. Is it not the uncanny double of the banality of radical evil which makes men superfluous even after the collapse of totalitarian regimes?

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[Received 9 February, 2009; Accepted 1 May, 2009]

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