This article explores the role of tragedy and comedy as hermeneutic perspectives present in some passages of Hannah Arendt's thought. The first claim is that, as a hermeneutic device applied to the understanding of history, tragedy can be a key to interpreting On Revolution. The Aristotelian concept of mimesis and the characteristics of tragic theatre set out in Poetics are important sources of this approach. Secondly, the article examines the sardonic tone that Arendt uses at the end of the first chapter of On Revolution, where she accuses the protagonists of the bloodiest phase of the Russian Revolution of being the ‘fools of history’. Some suggestions are made regarding the meaning of this comedic key, which reappears, not coincidentally, in another of the philosopher's most important historical analyses: Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Introduction
In a letter from May 1969, Jaspers writes to Arendt that he has understood the essence of On Revolution: at the heart of the book lies a tragedy (Arendt & Jaspers, 1995, p. 505). Thus emerges a line of analysis that will be explored in the first part of this paper. The hypothesis considered here is that tragedy can be a key to interpreting On Revolution (1990), insofar as it functions as a hermeneutic device applied to the understanding of history. To this end, the article focuses on the Arendtian recovery of mimesis and the characteristics of tragic theatre set out in Aristotle's Poetics. As we shall see, Arendt uses these concepts to face challenges that exceed the Aristotelian framework, namely she returns to the Greeks in order to highlight and understand the singularity of modern experience.
The second section of the paper turns to an approach that appears to invert the perspective developed in the first, and whose presence in On Revolution, while more episodic, is no less striking: comedy. The question under discussion is the ironic tone that Arendt uses to close the first chapter of that work, accusing the protagonists of the bloodiest phase of the Russian Revolution of being the ‘fools of history’. We shall examine the meaning of this comedic key, which reappears, not coincidentally, in another of the philosopher's most important historical analyses: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964). It will be argued that the comic perspective, like the tragic one, enables an understanding of what has happened, a way of understanding especially required under modern conditions of action. In both cases, what is at stake is a reconstruction, in political terms, of our relationship to the past.
Tragedy and history
In the aforementioned letter, Jaspers writes: ‘Ultimately, the whole [of the book On Revolution] is your vision of a tragedy that does not leave you despairing: an element of the tragedy of humankind’ (Arendt & Jaspers, 1995, p. 505). To this, Arendt responds: ‘every word you wrote strikes to the very heart of what I meant to say. A tragedy that warms and lightens the heart because such great and simple things were at stake’ (1995, p. 507). But what is it that makes modern revolutions a tragedy in this sense?
A remark on Greek culture can help answer this question. In Between Past and Future (1961), Arendt points out that what ‘contributed … to the tragic aspect of Greek culture in its greatest manifestations’ is the paradox contained in the fact that ‘greatness was understood in terms of permanence while human greatness was seen in precisely the most futile and least lasting activities of men’ (p. 45). In other words, the tragedy was that humans could only achieve a greatness similar to that of the Gods and the cosmos through their essentially ephemeral actions and words, and, at the same time, this greatness depended precisely on the possibility of acquiring a permanence or duration similar to that of the Gods and the cosmos, that is, it depended on the possibility of combatting this inherent futility. The Greek solution was the public space, in which actions and words were preserved by poets and historians willing to tell their stories, and spectators willing to lend their ears, to re-create them in their imaginations, and use them as references for action.
By way of analogy, it may be stated that at least one of the tragic cores of On Revolution has Greek echoes, to the extent that what it is at stake there is also the fragility of action, albeit in a different sense. In modernity, says Arendt in The Human Condition (1998, p. 232), the focus is not on the futility that is born out of the contrast with an unchanging cosmos, but on the ‘uncertainty’ of action. This occurs in a world in which ‘everything has become perishable’ (1961, p. 44). The modern problem is how to preserve the radical newness created by action when all stable references that could house it have been lost. Under such conditions, action shows not its futility so much as its danger: it can easily start processes that escape the intentions of those who started them and turn against the possibilities of freedom brought into being by the action itself.
The tragedy of the French Revolution is a particular variant of this conflict. Overwhelmed by what their own actions had created, the French revolutionaries ultimately experienced the revolution as an irresistible movement, as a force that seemed beyond the reach of their control and in the face of which the only option was to surrender: the ‘revolutionary storm’, ‘the torrent of the revolution’, a revolution that ‘devours its own children’. The tragedy is born out of the failure to live up to the challenge that the radical newness of action poses for the action itself: ‘It seemed as though a force greater than man had interfered when men began to assert their grandeur and to vindicate their honour’ (1990, p. 49). In the case of the American Revolution, Arendt perceives – to some extent – an inverse conflict, although similar in its final consequences. The constitution was the great invention the Americans gave themselves in order to provide the republic with a foundation stable enough to preserve the revolutionary achievements. Nevertheless, this invention was not enough to keep the movement of permanent reinvention alive, the always-reborn novelty which defines every action space. The final (although not necessary) cost of the constitution's stability was the petrifaction of the revolutionary birth.
Now, what is it that makes of the American and French revolutions a tragedy that ‘warms and lightens the heart’? To answer this question, it is necessary to make a detour, momentarily leaving the historical events aside in order to examine the way in which they are understood. For Arendt, tragedy is primarily a narrative form, and it can be traced in her account of revolutionary history. This detour from event to narrative concerns the particular way in which she understands the link between actor and spectator. The realm of human affairs ‘would remain forever unknown if there were no spectator to look out for it, admire it, straighten out the stories and put them into words’ (1978, p. 133). Tragedy works here as a way to look out for, admire and put into words what happened and, thus, realize its meaning. Hence, we turn first to the view of the tragic spectator of history (Arendt) and not its protagonists. The starting point will be Aristotle. We are especially interested here in the dialogue that Arendt's work establishes with Aristotle, because, as noted by Taminiaux (1997), Arendt was interested in the specific perspective of Greek theatre audiences as a way of understanding human affairs. According to Taminiaux, the tragic spectator's gaze is a singular exercise of judgement:
Before the Platonic invention of bios theoretikos, the only theoria corresponding to the isonomic City consisted in the gaze of the spectators at the theater: the spectators attending a performance could cast their gaze upon human affairs not in order to detach themselves from the world of appearing so as to reach a higher region of contemplation but rather in order to find the means of judging in the company of others, at the heart of plurality. (p. 105)
The tragic spectator of history
In The Human Condition (1998), Arendt contends, following Aristotle, that theatre is ‘the political art par excellence’, since ‘only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art’ (p. 188). Here, she refers to the Poetics, where tragedy is defined as a type of mimesis whose object is action and whose mode is drama. It ‘is the only art whose sole subject is man in his relationship to others’. Thanks to its dynamism, says the philosopher, the theatre is the best-suited type of mimesis to ‘reify’, that is, turn into an object, into a work, ‘the living flux of acting and speaking’ (p. 188).
Aristotle defines poetic mimesis – repetition of events from the human world in the imagination, in words, and on the stage – as an evolution of a pre-poetic or natural mimesis. Natural mimesis is a device that allows us to feel pleasure about that which in its original version was painful or repugnant. The reason for this pleasure is a certain ‘learning’ which (and this is important) pleases ‘not only philosophers but men in general, whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited’. In other words, all men, even the most vulgar, can indulge ‘in looking at images’, even when they are of horrible things, because ‘in watching, they learn from them and reason about the meaning of things’ (trans. 1932, 1448b). Mimesis has three characteristics: first, it enables us to look at what we could not otherwise look at, as it would be too horrible; second, it permits us to understand what we would not otherwise understand, that is, it allows us to learn something about the meaning of the thing; and, finally, it is a way of learning that involves pleasure and is accessible to everybody, or rather concerns all human beings.
According to Aristotle, tragedy is a particular type of poetic mimesis. Its object is not only actions, but specifically great actions, and its outcome is adversity, failure or misfortune. As for the character of its protagonists, tragedy does not involve either the extraordinary virtue of the hero, whose fall from grace in such a case would cause us revulsion, or the hero's extreme depravity, which would simply put the hero at fault for the misfortune that ensues. Both the sheer revulsion at injustice and the sheer pleasure at just punishment for the unjust undo the tragic conflict; they are closed endings, happy or unhappy, but not tragic. The tragic protagonist, however, is a hero who is neither a ‘pre-eminently virtuous and just’ nor a ‘wicked person’ (Aristotle, trans. 1932, 1453a), and this middle ground has nothing to do with the ‘golden mean’ but with the fact, as Arendt emphasizes, that the protagonist's character is less important than the action, which is the real object of the mimesis. This is Arendt's concept of the hero in The Human Condition (1998), where she defines it with the following generic formulation: ‘each free man who participated in the Trojan enterprise and about whom a story could be told’ (p. 186). Thus, she separates it from modern connotations, which conceive the hero in terms of individual exceptionality and dismiss the characteristics of action itself. She also stresses that tragic mimesis, despite some inconsistencies in the use of the term in Aristotle,
does not deal with the qualities of men, their poiotes, but with whatever happened with respect to them, with their actions and life and good or ill fortune (1450al5–18). The content of tragedy, therefore, is not what we would call character but action or the plot. (p. 187).
The difficult and unfortunate events that the hero must face do not befall him or her as inexplicable injustice, nor as inevitable justice. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the conflicts trapping the protagonist stem from ‘some great error or frailty’ on his or her part (trans. 1932, 1453b).
Arendt's reading of revolutionary tragedy preserves the idea that tragedy involves the recognition of greatness. Let us recall the words she uses in her response to Jaspers’ letter: what was at stake were ‘such great and simple things’. It is this greatness that generates a certain pleasure. We can find an important indication about what this pleasure is in an essay in which Arendt examines a writer who, while not a spectator of the French Revolution (he died some years earlier), was a spectator of the time in which this historical experience was forged: Lessing. Lessing realized that ‘not even the knowledge that man may be destroyed by the world detracts from the “tragic pleasure”’ (1983, p. 16), the pleasure derived from finding greatness in failure, or rather in spite of failure.
Let us return to On Revolution. The mode in which we have presented a tragic core at play seems prima facie to oppose world and action, or, better said, action against itself: that which humans are capable of initiating and that which they are able to preserve among them. In other words, it seems to oppose durability and beginning, in an irresolvable conflict that could, as Lessing said, destroy even humanity in its entirety. The ‘misfortune’ that befell French revolutionary heroes was that ‘the revolution devoured its own children’. But this outcome did not result from an inexplicable fatality, but rather, it could be said, forcing the expression, from ‘a great error on their part’. In other words, it was a process initiated by the revolutionary heroes themselves that led to the annihilation of the liberating sense of their action. In the case of the American revolutionaries, as stated earlier, it was a peculiar result of their own creation, the constitution, which smothered the potential of revolutionary action.
Even though this is correct, it is important to note that explaining the defeat of both the French and the American revolutions, as well as any other revolutionary defeat, by means of a common root written upon the heart of revolutionary action itself, involves a risk that should be avoided. The risk lies in the supposition that revolutionary failures are historical variations of one and the same ontological aporia against which the actors cannot do anything but face it helplessly (in this way, misfortune would arrive as an inexplicable calamity or as an unappealable injustice: in any case, as something that exceeds the concrete possibilities of praxis). This perspective is at the basis of some interpretations of politics that tend to underline the disruptive moment of action (i.e. they consider that what defines action is the fact of inaugurating something new which comes to threaten the status quo) to the detriment of its constructive dimension (i.e. its capacity to establish a durable state of things). From this point of view, the tragedy of politics – which is, in short, the conflict between beginning and duration – does not really look like a historical problem linked to concrete historical experiences, but more like an ahistorical constant. In other words, since political action is identified with the disruptive movement, the foundation of a lasting political body – insofar as it implies a determinate crystallization of possibilities, some kind of closure – is a limit, an ending where action must begin again.
From Arendt's perspective, by contrast, the problem of foundation is a concrete historical problem. Her analysis examines the particular conditions that have, each time, blocked the possibility of action being able to inaugurate a stable public space within which novelty could continuously be reborn. Thus, the aporia of durability beginning is, rather than ontological, a result of the particularity of the modern conditions in which men and women must act (as stated, the Greek case was different). For the same reason, the historical expressions of this conflict are not irrelevant variations of the same thing. The different resolutions that actors gave to action's durability problem shape the most intimate fibre of the historical plot. It is in his or her attempt, historical and singular, to resolve this problem that the revolutionary makes the greatness of his or her action evident, as it is in the way in which the tragic hero faces adversity that his or her value comes to light.
Because it is possible to find greatness in those singular attempts to ‘found a beginning’, the impossibility of resolving the tragic conflict – that is to say, of escaping its sad outcome – does not lead to an infinite regret, to a pathetic consideration of the events, to mere conformity or escapism. On the contrary, it produces a kind of pleasure: a tragic pleasure. The pleasure that, despite everything, we experience as spectators of tragedy comes from the fact that this spectating is not restricted to finding the limits of action or the way it turns against itself. Rather, the spectator of revolutions uncovers a certain grandeur that, in times of darkness, takes the value of a treasure: a treasure that ‘that warms and lightens the heart’.
If the tragedy of the history of revolutions is that the actors have been unable to preserve the spaces of freedom they briefly created, its treasure – that is, its greatness – which must not be lost from view and which is revealed by the tragic vision, is constituted precisely by these spaces of freedom which did briefly exist. Arendt refers to certain episodes that, without neglecting all the terrible and unjustifiable violence that revolutions caused, we cannot ignore and must recognize as their product too: the councils. These episodes might be forgotten because of the ending that the revolutions, especially the French, ultimately had, and for this reason, Arendt fears, their treasure could be lost (1961, pp. 4–6). At the end of On Revolution, she evokes two poets who can ‘preserve us from this loss’: Char and Sophocles. In a few verses, René Char recovers an experience that his involvement in the French resistance gave him: the experience that purely private life lacks a certain depth that only confrontation with others in the public space can provide. Sophocles, more radical than Char, tells us in his verses that only public space gives meaning to a life that would otherwise be unbearable and from which we should want to escape (1990, pp. 281–282). The tragic pleasure that some revolutionary experiences arouse is linked to this double discovery, historical and not speculative, concerning the meaning of spaces of freedom. In this sense, says Arendt, tragic pleasure ‘springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it’ (1983, p. 16). The pleasure in contemplating revolution is that its failure does not have the last word, that beyond it, there is a reason to believe that it is still possible to create a place in the world where being with others makes life worth living.
A tragic hermeneutics
Tragedy as a hermeneutic key to history is a way of looking at the past in the spirit of Cato, who, unlike the Gods, finds pleasure in the cause of the defeated.1 It is on the side of the defeated that history provides us with ‘learning’. This learning, like the one that Aristotle attributes to mimesis, concerns all humans, and not only the philosopher. Historical failures concern, as does the tragic mimesis, common people who can involve themselves in action and not only those who have a contemplative way of life. The true tragic spectator is not someone who contemplates the storm from the coast, where it is safe, but someone who is engaged in finding orientations for praxis. In the case of Arendt, spectator of modern revolutions, this means finding in the successive failed revolutionary episodes a particular (as Arendt would say later on, recovering Kant, a particular with exemplary validity; see 1989, p. 84) that illuminates the aporias and contradictions of the modern conditions of action. Arendt does not extract from revolution's history a tragic politics, that is, a statement of the ontologically necessary failure of action in modernity. She reads the history of revolutions tragically, to extract from them their highest political value – despite their outcomes and against the grain of their defeat.
This ‘tragic hermeneutics’ accounts for a certain ambiguity in On Revolution: it is not a programmatic or normative text because it does not show how it is possible to bridge the gaps of revolutionary action, that is to say, it does not offer the final synthesis of the exposed contradictions. But it is not merely descriptive either, since it presents a strong appreciative, critical thrust that precisely avoids ‘leaving us despairing’. At issue is what Robert Fine, in his paper in this volume, describes as a phenomenology of the experience of the revolutionary tradition's contradictions. That is, a realism able to expose the contradictions and understand them in their non-resolution, but which does not give up on thinking from the perspective of the renewal of the revolutionary spirit in present action.
To conclude this section, let us add a few words about a feature of tragedy that Arendt recovers from Aristotle and that has been left aside in this essay: catharsis. We shall not dwell here on the significance of this feature of tragedy in Aristotle's thought, but simply emphasize that interpreters agree in granting it an educational, ethical and political function, which Arendt preserves in her own interpretation, although she does not recover the role played by fear and compassion, both anti-political passions from her point of view. Arendt reinterprets catharsis as reconciliation (see Arendt, 1961, p. 45). Reconciliation does not mean passive acceptance. It is the flipside of the recognition of greatness, for it is what allows us to appreciate greatness in the human, finite and tragic medium in which it emerges. Catharsis is the result of a historical understanding that makes it possible to accept that we live in a world where greatness tragically coexists with the human capacity to produce horror. But in order to face horror Arendt had another strategy: laughter.
History and comedy
Let us turn, then, to the laughter that, for Arendt, sinister individuals like Eichmann or certain Soviet revolutionaries provoke. The laughter in which we are interested in this context has in common with tragic pathos the fact that it belongs to the realm of passions that help face historical events.2 But it is not to Aristotle that we must look for the source of the meaning of the comic in Arendt, but rather to modern writers who have made laughter an element in the stories they created: Isak Dinesen, Gotthold Lessing and Bertolt Brecht, among others.
For Arendt, Isak Dinesen is a vital example of the close link between narration and understanding. Dinesen seems to evoke the Aristotelian notion of mimesis when she says that ‘all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them’ (quoted in Arendt 1998, p. 175). A story, though painful, will always be more bearable than a mere sequence of events that, devoid of the meaning that narrative articulation confers, cannot but appear as a ‘senseless mixture of error and violence’ (Goethe, quoted in Arendt 1961, p. 82). It is also Dinesen whom Arendt invokes to meditate on the fact that the exercise of narration gives intensity to existence. In her essay on the writer, she says: ‘without repeating life [through story] in imagination you can never be fully alive, lack of imagination prevents people from existence’ (1983, p. 97). And it was also Dinesen who discovered similar virtues in humour. The male pseudonym under which Dinesen chose to write means ‘the one who laughs’, probably, says the philosopher, because the writer understood that laughter could ‘take care of several rather troublesome problems’ that bothered her.
Arendt seems to create a dialogue between Lessing and Dinesen when, in her essay on Lessing, she recalls that for him ‘all passions, even the most unpleasant, are as passions pleasant’ because ‘they make us … more conscious of our existence, they make us feel more real’. Laughter in particular fulfils this function for Lessing, since, says Arendt, ‘it seeks to bring about reconciliation with the world. Such laughter helps one to find a place in the world’ (1983, p. 16). As reconciliation, laughter could be considered another form of catharsis. Not by accident does the author highlight a fundamental affinity between Lessing and Aristotle concerning aesthetic theory: their reflection on the effect on the viewer. For Lessing, what defines a work of art is not perfection, its shape (Goethe) or force (Herder), but its intrinsic reference to ‘that worldly space which has come into being between the artist or writer and his fellow men as a world common to them’ (Arendt, 1983, p. 17). In Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1955), Lessing defines comedy as a type of work that uses laughter ‘to exercise our ability to notice the ridiculous’. But this laughter should not be seen as a mockery that would allow those who are virtuous to look down on and make fun of the baseness of those marked by vice. The vice that is the object of laughter does not occur in pure form but rather in combinations. It is embedded in a complex reality, and laughter's art is to detect it amid this complexity. So, the ridiculous only appears ‘under all pretenses of passion and fashion, … in all combinations with even worse defects or with good qualities, and even in the wrinkles of ceremonious gravity’. Comedy is not a moral or cautionary corrective for the spectator's vices; rather, it is a cultivation of the critical ability needed to address the complexity of the actions and characters of those ‘with whom we might enter into conflict’.
But while Dinesen and Lessing are for Arendt exemplary cases of laughter, it is Brecht to whom Arendt turns to account for her own ‘thinking laughter’. Probably it was Benjamin who indicated to Arendt the critical potential of the comic in Brecht. In The Author as Producer (1970), Benjamin said: ‘there is no better trigger for thinking than laughter. In particular, convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul. Epic Theater is lavish only in occasions for laughter’ (2008, p. 91).
The object of Arendt's laughter is, as mentioned, two characters whose actions take place in situations that might well be considered tragic. As already noted with Dinesen and Lessing, for Arendt, the object of laughter is not different from the object of tragedy; comedy makes its appearance at the point where ‘the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny’ (1964, p. 27). Brecht himself makes an observation along the same lines when, referring to his play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui which represents Hitler's rise to power, he vindicates for comedy a capacity of discernment – even more acute than that of tragedy – for especially horrifying turns of events.
In Notes on ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ of 1967, Brecht says that the goal of the work was ‘to destroy the habitual and dangerous respect for the great murderers’ (p. 1179). In effect, the destruction occurs via comic elements that create an estrangement from historical characters, or rather, from the common forms of representing them: Hitler and his cohorts are played by a group of Chicago gangsters who, in addition, speak in verse. In an interview in 1974, Arendt invokes this brief text by Brecht to account for her work in Eichmann in Jerusalem:
One of the main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force, to take away from people the admiration they have for the great evildoers like Richard III … Now I found in Brecht the following remark: ‘The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who committed great political crimes, which is something entirely different … the whole category of greatness has no application’. (Errera, 1999, p. 28)
If tragedy can show the greatness hidden in the ruins of the past, laughter can destroy a false greatness – or satanic greatness, in Jaspers’ words (Arendt & Jaspers, 1995, p. 62) – that, born of its confusion with the enormity of the crimes committed, prevents an understanding of the true meaning of what happened. Brecht does this, as stated, through estrangement devices; Arendt, who is not a playwright but a narrator of an event, needs only to look closely to find in Eichmann's own performance unequivocal signs of the ridiculous.
The comic effect occurs when one of Eichmann's most decisive character traits becomes manifest: his ‘total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow's point of view’. Arendt points out: ‘some of the comedy … lies in Eichmann's heroic fight with German language, which invariably defeats him’ (1964, p. 27). Eichmann struggles ‘heroically’ against the thing that most elementally connects him with others. He fails because he cannot use language other than through cliché, through empty and resonant phrases he has invented, and through bureaucratic expressions. The comic aspect appears when his own language prevents him from understanding his surroundings. One of the darkly comic scenes is his execution, where he (self-confessed atheist) said: ‘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’. On these last words, Arendt comments: ‘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 forgot that this was his own funeral’ (1964, p. 119). Similarly, it is ‘funny’, in the words of Arendt, that Eichmann pretends to play the role of a ‘normal human’ person in a context in which ‘normal’ and ‘human’ had lost all meaning. It is laughable – ‘funny’ in Arendt's terms – that Eichmann seeks in his Jewish interrogator the sympathy and understanding that anyone who has a sad story to tell, full of personal frustrations, attempts to find in his or her interlocutor. His ‘sad story’ introduces comedy where it is in flagrant contradiction with the meaning of what was happening. Eichmann is a buffoon because the paltry drama with which he interprets his situation contrasts with the terrible events to which this interpretation of his life gave rise.3
In this way, Eichmann's inability to see from someone else's point of view – which for Arendt indicates a striking lack of imagination and thoughtlessness (1964, p. 134) – crystallizes in a particular historical narrative about himself. Eichmann understood himself as a passive spectator of events, hence his insistence on explaining his own acts in terms of obedience, hence the famous metaphor of the ‘small cog’ of a big machinery for which he could not be held accountable. Eichmann's self-interpretation is anti-tragic since, in the story he tells, there is really no action. Arendt rebels against that reading, not to affirm that Eichmann undertook some action – this is why she does not consider him a tragic character – but to point out that Eichmann must be judged as an actor who refused to act and, instead, obeyed with the same eagerness he would have obeyed any other system of authority. Her hypothesis is that this choice of obedience was possible because of his inability to think. This is how the comic device discovers what lies behind the particular leading role that he assumed in the historical drama: it reveals the banality of Eichmann's thoughtlessness at the place where he pretended to put the imperative force of an impersonal system. This contrast is radical and therefore laughable as well as revealing.
Probably, this comic perspective has irritated some of Arendt's readers because it dismantles not only Eichmann's narrative but also prosecutor Hausner's – who, in the author's view, represents the intentions of Ben Gurion's government with regard to the trial. Arendt emphatically criticizes Hausner's attempt to present Eichmann as the ultimate expression of a historical destiny, a destiny that would be the true accused at that trial.
For it was History that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood in the centre of the trial. ‘It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial, and not the Nazi regime alone, but anti-Semitism throughout History.’ … it was clearly at cross-purposes with putting Eichmann on trial, suggesting that perhaps he was only an innocent executor of some mysteriously foreordained destiny, or, for that matter, even of anti-Semitism, which perhaps was necessary to blaze the trail of the ‘bloodstained road travelled by this people’ to fulfil its destiny. (1989, p. 15)
The problem with this point of view is that it denies the possibility of judging a specific actor. Arendt's laughter about Eichmann's banality is irritating for those who reject the change of focus it intends to produce – that is, to discover the simple (but no less terrible) inability of the bureaucrat to think where Hausner pretended to find a monstrous representative of a historical fatality.4
In the case of the Russian revolutionaries discussed at the end of the first chapter of On Revolution, Arendt does not give explicit indications to clarify the sense of their ridiculousness and the importance of discovering it. Nevertheless, it is possible to assume that the idea here is also to destroy a reverential respect for false grandeur, the false grandeur of history.
There is some grandiose ludicrousness in the spectacle of these men – who had dared to defy all powers that be and to challenge all authorities on earth … – submitting, often from one day to the other, humbly and without so much as a cry of outrage, to the call of historical necessity. … They were fooled, not because the words of Danton and Vergniaud, Robespierre and Saint-Just and of all the others still rang in their ears; they were fooled by history and they have become the fools of history. (1990, p. 58)
Resonating in Arendt's words is Marx's dictum that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce (2003, p. 12), or as could be said in this case, then as comedy or buffoonery. The difference from the French revolutionaries is that, if for them the belief in the inevitability of history was derived from an unforeseen historical experience, for the Russians, this belief was a lesson learnt in ‘the school of revolution’. The revolutionaries applied the maxims of a manual to which they were subjected through the rigour of terror and ideology. The contrast between the core of revolution as the production of something new and the self-institution of revolutionaries as actors who had to play a role in a piece written in advance is what makes them ridiculous and arouses laughter.
Finding humour in the most terrible things allows us to see something that we otherwise would not and is fundamental for the apprehension of the drama in which the comic episode takes place. Here, Argentine philosopher Rinesi's (2009) observation about Shakespearean tragedies rings true: comical passages contain clues to understanding the entire piece. Understanding Eichmann's thoughtlessness, or more precisely his inability to think in the place of others, in a world in which not only politics, but the preservation of what makes life humanly bearable, depends on this, is fundamental for a correct interpretation of the history of Nazism. Understanding the confusion of the force of action with the force of historical necessity is fundamental to understanding the Russian revolution and its failure. Neither the revolutionaries’ ambition to be the embodiment of historical necessity, nor Eichmann's banality are misfortunes we can simply mock. Both go to the heart of the great dramas of modernity and, more important, are not things of the past. Just as the tragic understanding of history does not imply a fall into pure desperation, the comic outlook does not offer the spectator a plain and simple release from the heavy burden of what has been.
Brecht noted that ‘the fact that he [Hitler-Arturo Ui] failed did not indicate that he was an idiot’ (1967, p. 1177). Arendt's laughter is intelligent enough not to believe that her reality was safe from Eichmann's lack of imagination or from the historic delusion of the revolutionaries. The laughter of the person who believes him- or herself safe from the evil that is the object of laughter, the laughter that sees in the fool an incarnation of misfortunes against which he or she is immune, is an anti-tragic laughter. The comedy here is tragic and only takes effect as a historical hermeneutics, because it involves the recognition that ‘now and then, the comedy breaks into the horror itself, and results in stories presumably true enough, whose macabre humour easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention’ (1964, p. 28). Furthermore, Arendt's laughter could not resemble that of the pariahs Heine and Chaplin either. As Arendt sees it, they can laugh not because they feel superior and safe but because they enjoy the relative calmness of a life away from the demands of ‘the world of political realities’, that is, they enjoy the ‘freedom and untouchability of outcasts’. This laughter, typical of a sunny lack of concern, is not possible any more, since in contemporary society ‘isolation is no longer possible. You cannot stand aloof from society, whether as a schlemihl or as a lord of dreams. The old escape mechanisms have broken down’ (1944, p. 121). Arendt's laughter is not an individual's dismissal of the shared world; it resounds, like Lessing's laughter, on a stage with spectators who are able to gain understanding through the critical operation of finding the ridiculous under the layers of ‘ceremonious gravity’.
Concluding remarks
The perspective about history reconstructed here anticipates some insights that Arendt would develop in the last period of her intellectual production. In fact, it is possible to find here an answer to a question that troubled Arendt until the end of her life, particularly in the posthumously published Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy: what is it to think politically? This question implies: how can a spectator, on the one hand, think about history in political terms and, on the other hand, turn history into a field of reference for orientation in politics? An answer to both questions lies in the autonomy that Arendt claims against the modern ‘pseudo-divinity’ of History:
Either we can say with Hegel: Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, leaving the ultimate judgment to Success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the minds of men and their possible independence of things as they are or as they have come into being. (Arendt 1978, p. 216)
Autonomy vis-à-vis History (in the quotation, Hegelian History, but we may include history as some Russian revolutionaries imagined it, or as Eichmann or Hausner did) can be understood from two points of view. First, from the perspective of what is being judged: it must be understood in its singularity; its meaning should not be reduced to a superior process or force. If actors are understood in this way, history becomes politicized – that is, history becomes a consequence of humans’ ability to act (which by no means implies that history is a free product of their will). Second, autonomy is asserted from the perspective of the one who judges: he or she cannot submit his or her judgement about past greatness to the verdict of a historical law or necessity. On the contrary, he or she must judge from his or her particular circumstances, from the point of view of a legitimate interest in relation to the present conditions. This not only introduces a political perspective in history but also makes history a field of reference for politics. One of Arendt's strategies is to turn to poetics to achieve autonomy in this sense.
As mentioned above, there is a point where Arendt's modern concerns no longer fit into the Aristotelian framework. Aristotle would not have accepted the intersection between history and poetics that allows Arendt to propose a tragic and comic historical hermeneutics. In the Poetics (trans. 1932), Aristotle says that history and poetry differ in that the former (merely) relates ‘what has happened’, while the latter speaks of ‘what may happen, what is possible’. This ‘possibility’ which is presented by the poetic is more ‘dignified’ than the factual reality because it differs from the mere historical contingency of what could have been otherwise. Rather, this possibility is a poetic glimpse of ‘universality’ in the special sense of revealing to an audience what it means to live, or to fail, as a human being. On this basis, Aristotle concludes that poetry ‘is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular’ (trans. 1932, 1451b). Arendt, by contrast, understands that it is precisely the singular and contingent field of history, of the particular qua particular, that is the privileged source of those orientations for action that Aristotle finds in the poetical artifice. Understanding crucial historical events through the poetic keys that we have outlined gives history – that is, the story of what was – the additional dimension of an understanding in terms of what might have been (this is the dimension from which Arendt develops the perspective of treasures) and in terms of what the events, despite their unyielding particularity, have yet to tell us today. History gains some of the ‘dignity’ of poetry when it is interpreted with its help. In this manner, it can speak to us, we would not say in a universal key, but in a way that can still relate to all human beings, that is, to politics.
Acknowledgements
This paper is part of a degree thesis directed by Paula Hunziker, to whom I am indebted, not only for her invaluable supervision but also for her great teaching.
Notes
For an analysis of Arendt's recovery of Lucretius’ expression Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni and its relationship with a tragic view of history, see Tassin (2012).
Arendt develops a comic perspective using a family of words whose nuances and differences she never explicitly clarifies: laugh (Arendt says that she actually laughs about Eichmann's thoughtlessness: 1994, p. 16), funny (this adjective is used to describe some scenes of the trial: 1964, p. 27, p. 28, p. 135), irony (predominantly ironic is the tone of the book according to Arendt herself: 2000, p. 393; 1994, p. 16), buffoon (Eichmann would be one: 1994, p. 16), comedy (again, some situations that occurred during the trial are designated with this word: 1964, p. 17, pp. 27–28, p. 95; 2000, p. 151), ridiculous (so were some of Eichmann's boasts: 1964, p. 79), clown (the word is applied to the type of character Eichmann is: 1964, p. 30), fool (used with reference to Russian revolutionaries and Hitler: 1990, p. 58; 1964, p. 51), ludicrousness (as quoted below, the word characterizes the ‘spectacle of the Russian revolutionaries’: 1990, p. 58), laughter (as quoted below, that is Arendt's translation of the Lächerlichkeit of Brecht's writings: Errera, 1999, p. 28). These words do not form a conceptually precise vocabulary, which is linked to the fact that Arendt does not develop a systematic theory on the subject. We give the terms as they appear in their original contexts without attempting to draw distinctions that are absent in the perspective of the author. This section just intends to characterize the general spirit that inspires the narrative linked to these words, more precisely the manner in which this narrative in a comic key is a way of thinking events politically.
For a more detailed analysis of the comic features of Eichmann's inability to put himself in the place of another, see Horsman (2011).
For a more detailed analysis of Arendt's criticism of the anti-tragic narrative of the trial, see Hunziker (2014).