Is this thing on?
David suggested I post this here.
I have an idea for a future Enid's Circle book, one which might be pretty timely: Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Basically it's Arendt's journalistic account and philosophical meditation on the Israeli trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in the early 60s.
Anyway, not only is it historically and intellectually important in its own right, I thought it also might be interesting to think about in terms of what's going on right now in New York with the Mohammed trial.
Just throwing it out there...
Your man in LA,
Evan
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I think this is a really good idea. Interesting in terms of Mohammed and the 9/11 trials. Might also be interesting in terms of John Allen Muhammad -- the DC Sniper who was killed last week but whose defense claimed that he had suffered from Gulf War Syndrome and had been trained by the military.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there is a book coming out that attempts to recontextualize all philisophical understandings of Heidegger in terms of his Nazi affiliations. It discusses Arendt's construction of "banality of evil" as being a philosophy "contaminated by Heidegger and other anti-Semitic writings" even though Arendt was Jewish.
Here's an article about that:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/books/09philosophy.html
Great idea.
furthermore, the heidegger controversy brings up all kinds of interesting ideas surrounding collective memory (an idea sontag abhors) and collective amnesia in german cultural history, esp. in relation to the historikerstreit ("battle of the historians" - man, you gotta love the germans) in the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteplus, i've always been curious to read arendt (i've only come across passages in the past).