NTU Studies in Language and Literature 57

Number 21 (June 2009), 57-80

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 Žižekian
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

58 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

以快感為名之激進／陳腐邪惡：
以精神分析倫理學重讀鄂蘭

黃涵榆
國立臺灣師範大學英語文系副教授

摘 要
漢娜鄂蘭在其政治與道德理論中一直都關注著邪惡的問題，她所提出的極權
體制中的「激進邪惡」與「惡之陳腐」的概念，引發諸多關於道德思考、判斷與
責任的論爭。本文透過拉崗精神分析倫理學與紀傑克意識形態批判理論，闡述看
似矛盾的「激進邪惡」與「惡之陳腐」兩個概念之間的同一性。本文所援引的政
治與道德分析理論架構特別重視慾望、幻想與快感，觀照超我、道德與邪惡之間
錯綜複雜的關聯。文末將論證「以快感為名之激進／陳腐邪惡」何以在極權體制
之後繼續在當前時代中陰魂不散。

關鍵詞：快感、邪惡、變態、超我、極權主義
 The Banality of Radical Evil 59

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, Arendt’s 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 Arendt—namely, that
Arendt’s works make sense only in the particular political, historical
situations under which they were written—and 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)
60 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

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
Rancière, 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 Agamben’s 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 Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s 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) evil”—mainly developed in her Origin of Totalitarianism
(1951) and other works around 1950s—and “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
(Matuštik 95; Young-Bruenl 2), but later replaces it with “banality of evil.”
This involves not merely a terminological revision but also her break with
Kant’s formalistic moral philosophy1: for example, Kant posits subjective

1
For Kant, morality has no need of material, empirical determining grounds; it is separated from
 The Banality of Radical Evil 61

freedom as a priori, as manifested even in the case of radical evil, while

Arendt posits the possibility of its destruction (Matuštik 95). The latter part of
this paper will present the conceptual consistency of “radical evil” and
“banality of evil”—more accurately put, the two sides of one single
concept—and the persistent concerns of Arendt’s moral thinking on evil in
more details. At this moment, we only need to recapitulate the theme of Clint
Eastwood’s 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 administration’s 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, Žižek and Copjec, and in a number of psychoanalytically-
informed 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 Freud’s and Lacan’s clinical assessments and
theoretical conceptualizations of the superego and perversion. After his rather
sketchy reference to Richard Bernstein’s proposal in Hannah Arendt and the
Jewish Question (1996) that we observe the compatibility, rather than the
contradiction of Arendt’s notions of radical evil and banality of evil, Žižek
does touch upon the pervert’s 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 subject’s conformity to the
law, which testifies the subject’s 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 subject’s consciousness. The roots of radical evil, accordingly, do not lie in any
natural impulses or objects but in the subject’s 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).
2
The abbreviation of The Plague of Fantasies. Other books by Žižek 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
Žižek Reader). For data of publications, see Works Cited.
62 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

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). Arendt’s
lack, or silence, at issue here has its counterpart in Kant’s moral philosophy,
to which Lacan himself and Lacanian theorists add the supplement of the
superego.
In light of Lacanian psychoanalytic ethics and Žižekian 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/Žižekian 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 façade, 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.
 The Banality of Radical Evil 63

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
destructiveness—hence, radical evil—perpetrated 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 system—put 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.
64 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

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 Arendt’s 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, Villa’s 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. Arendt’s 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
 The Banality of Radical Evil 65

Žižekian 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
identification―in 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 Villa’s 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 pervert’s 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 Žižek also explicates, “The pervert
does not pursue his activity for his own pleasure, but for the enjoyment of the
66 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

Other―he 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 Žižek’s 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 Other’s call, he submits to jouissance
qua the obscene Law more than ever. Such obedience to the Law does not
testify the subject’s 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 Other’s 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 rules―wars, massacre, slavery and, of course,
concentration camps―can 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 pervert’s position in question will be explored in more detail later in this essay through a
critical survey of the nature of superego.
 The Banality of Radical Evil 67

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 Arendt’s 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 categories―not to mention common sense―to 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
nothingness―a lack of Being or the Good” (82). To this point, we must avoid

6
These ideas demonstrate how banality is always germane to Arendt’s 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.
68 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

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 community―hence, Lacanian extimacy―that 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
Eichmann’s 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 Eichmann’s “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 Arendt’s
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
 The Banality of Radical Evil 69

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, Arendt’s 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
Arendt’s 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,
Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s earlier works, it also pertains to the banality of evil
70 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

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 man―quite 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 Other’s jouissance” as
conceptualized above.
The transmutation in question also returns us to Eichmann’s
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 clichés, 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
Eichmann’s conscience during the cross-examination, they unexceptionally
meet his elated clichés 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 won’t do it
voluntarily and no one will be able to force me. (EJ 54-55)
 The Banality of Radical Evil 71

Eichmann does not relinquish his elated, grandiose style; he draws on the
cliché 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). Eichmann’s enslavement
by clichés 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 Other’s 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.
Eichmann’s 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.
Eichmann’s conscience, like the clichés 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 pervert’s
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 Führer, 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 men’s heart:
“Thou shalt kill” (EJ 148), purely the listener’s own creation to fill the empty
voice of conscience with contents. Eichmann’s claim that he strives to live up
72 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

to Kant’s 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 knowledge”—in Lacanian terms, the University Discourse—which
reduces the population to disposable bare life (Young-Bruehl 5; Žižek, 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 pervert’s position,
superego’s 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
 The Banality of Radical Evil 73

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 Arendt’s 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 subject’s 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 anxiety―namely, the
bad conscience which is likely to lead to “bad” behaviors as long as they are
not caught―but 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
74 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

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 superego’s paradoxical, split nature: the moral conscience
speaks “No!” to the subject, while the obscene, perverted underside of the
superego knows the subject’s 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 (Žižek, DSST 100, FA 141,
ME 68, PV 90). The subject’s psychical balance is thus always intruded,
disturbed and persecuted by the superego’s voice that is loaded with excessive
contents: the will and desires of the Führer 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; Zupančič 164). The moral law, as well as the
Other’s 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 superego’s 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
 The Banality of Radical Evil 75

subject, now identifying with the objet a or the instrument of the Other’s
jouissance, also sacrifices the possibility of desiring. More accurately, the
pervert desires to be fully acknowledged by the Other’s jouissance that is
elevated to the status of the Law, and, as Žižek 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 pervert’s position to interpassivity. In actively responding to
the Other’s demands―be they calls of History, Nation, or People―the
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 rid―and transpose onto the other―the
inner passivity which contains the density of my substantial being” (Žižek,
“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 Arendt’s 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
76 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

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 Žižek’s 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 Father’s 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; Žižek, 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, today’s consumer-subject never ceases
to feel anxiety toward not being sufficiently exposed to and getting too close
to the Other’s 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 (Žižek, PF 154). Such difficulty
brings us back to the paradoxical, split nature of superego discussed above. In
the final analysis, the superego’s excessive imperatives to enjoy hinder the
subject’s access to enjoyment and, hence, triggers castration anxiety with too
much enjoyment much more efficiently than downright prohibitions (Žižek,
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?
 The Banality of Radical Evil 77

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[Received 9 February, 2009;

Accepted 1 May, 2009]
80 NTU Studies in Language and Literature