Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion
Here, Hannah Arendt was right in her otherwise problematic thesis on the 'banality of Evil':
The falsity of Schindler's List is therefore the same as the falsity of those who seek the clue to the horrors of Nazism in the 'psychological profiles' of Hitler and other Nazi figures. Here, Hannah Arendt was right in her otherwise problematic thesis on the 'banality of Evil': if we take Adolf Eichmann as a psychological entity, a person, we discover nothing monstrous about him - he was just an average bureaucrat; his 'psychological profile' gives us no clue to the horrors he executed. No wonder, then, that no one, not even the most severe guardians of the flame of the Absolute Evil, was offended by Life Is Beautiful, the story of an Italian Jewish father who, in Auschwitz, adopts a desperate strategy of shielding his young son from the trauma by presenting what is going on to him as a staged competition in which you must stick to the rules (eat as little as possible, etc.) - the one who wins the most points will, at the end, see an American tank arriving.
Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion
Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion
