The Case of Eichmann Restaged : Arendt, Evil, and the Complexity of Mimesis

• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Date: 01 June 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920911201
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920911201

Political Research Quarterly

2021, Vol. 74(2) 479 –490

© 2020 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912920911201

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Article

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were

like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor

sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly

normal.

—Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 276.

Like a mirror he reflected people’s fears and expectations,

whether they were fearing for their own lives or hoping he

would confirm a theory of evil.

—Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem, 367.

It might not be popular to say it, but a plurality of critical

voices is currently warning us that the shadow of fascism

haunts, once again, the contemporary scene. Political

theorists, historians, and philosophers have recently

claimed that the growing popularity of far-right leaders,

in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere around the

world, should not simply be defined as conservative,

right-wing, or populist. Rather, influential scholars across

disciplines forcefully show that phenomena like Donald

Trump in the United States, Marine Le Pen in France, Jair

Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Boris Johnson in the United

Kingdom, among many others, may not be identical to

fascist leaders like Mussolini and Hitler, and should thus

not be confused with them.1 And yet, to borrow William

Connolly’s (2017a) phrase, they “aspire to fascism”

nonetheless in their rhetoric, bodily drives, and tyrannical

policies. They also manifest characteristics of what

Umberto Eco, writing in the 1990s, called “Ur-Fascism,”

which include “fear of difference,” “the appeal to a frus-

trated middle class,” “machismo,” “irrationalism,” “dis-

agreement is treason,” and “contempt for the weak” (Eco

1995). Interestingly, among emerging symptoms, Eco

also included a type of TV “newspeak,” or “impoverished

Internet language,” we are by now accustomed to. It has,

in fact, become the lingua franca of politicians with an

authoritarian bent who rely on new media to trigger a

type of mimetic contagion that is constitutive of what I

called, “(new) fascism” (Lawtoo 2019a).

Building on emerging genealogies of fascism, old and

new, I now seek to reevaluate the contagious powers of

mimesis at play not only in authoritarian leaders but in

submissive subjects and supporters, mimetic and uncon-

scious powers that can deprive otherwise normal people

of the ability to think critically, and thus act ethically. I

shall do so by revisiting Umberto Eco’s untimely obser-

vation about an “impoverished vocabulary” that has the

power “to limit the instruments for complex and critical

reasoning” (Eco 1995)—a symptom characteristic of

911201PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920911201Political Research QuarterlyLawtoo

research-article2020

1KU Leuven, Belgium

Corresponding Author:

Nidesh Lawtoo, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Kardinaal

Mercierplein 2, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.

Email: nidesh.lawtoo@kuleuven.be

The Case of Eichmann Restaged :

Arendt, Evil, and the Complexity

of Mimesis

Nidesh Lawtoo1

Abstract

This essay reframes Hannah Arendt’s evaluation of the “banality of evil” in light of Eichmann’s mimetic psychology,

which Arendt intuited but did not fully articulate. Rather than considering the banality of evil as symptomatic of

Eichmann’s “inability to think,” the essay foregrounds the affective, contagious, and, in this sense, mimetic tendencies

at play in Eichmann’s personality (from Latin, persona, theatrical mask). This move is instrumental to articulate a middle

path between Arendt’s theoretical diagnostic of Eichmann as “terrifyingly normal” and Bettina Stangneth’s recent

historical account of Eichmann as a “fanatical National Socialist.” My wager is that the ancient problematic of mimēsis

(from Greek, mimos, mime) casts a new and original light on the psychic foundations of a type of evil that is as relevant

to understand the psychology of fascism in the past century as its rising shadow in the present century.

Keywords

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann, banality of evil, Nazism, (new) fascism, mimesis