On Intellectual Labour, and Its Delusions
What a 1964 interview reminds me, with great frequency, about the failings of prose
Last week, I tried to write a Rewind Wednesday that talked about Cambodia.
But how does one “talk” about Cambodia?
How does one “talk” about so much of what we’ve witnessed in the world since then?
Oh, I’ve done it before, and I’m sure I’ll do it again. But sometimes the horror of “talk” takes precedence over anything else, and one just needs to sit with how shameful a thing it is, to be stuck trying to “talk” at all about situations that simply need greater moral action—and that have needed greater moral action for a while.
A year after Russia’s invasion, to the day, I wrote a poem reflecting on what Adorno actually said after the Holocaust. I wrote this piece in light of the horrific war crimes we had seen in places like Bucha since the start of the war.
Here’s how it reads:
February 24, 2023 Everything I've learned of war through poetry attests to what Adorno really said—not that, after Auschwitz, writing poetry was impossible: just barbaric, a destruction of civilization by a thousand literary cuts. Consider the causality: the work, acclaimed and maybe fine, can only ever follow—the brutality, the loss. In what world might we then give praise to, and elevate, some exquisite turn of phrase, the craft with which the vision of a war crime was executed on the page, without that we are really saying "God, yes, but war is terrible and yet...?" Perhaps it were better said that writing poetry after Auschwitz is possible, and that this fact should shame us all.
Last Wednesday, after focusing on a few other work tasks and while trying to figure out how to fix my draft post “on Cambodia”—and the Kent State Massacre; and surrounding protests sparked by the Cambodian invasion; and the erasure of such histories to pathologize antiwar protest today—I opened my inbox for the first time in hours. In it, I found a long line of unread messages, including some 40 newsletters and professional mailouts. Almost all were trying to offer a useful take about a pressing issue of relevance to US electoral politics, foreign policy, the environment under climate change, the dangers of disinformation and so-called artificial intelligence… with the rest whipping up tempests in teapots around literary concerns and other fripperies of mainstream media culture.
And a switch flipped.
Forget “writing poetry” after atrocity.
Here we all are—myself included—trying to write anything that might beat against the cage of some other hurting human, to do… what? To help? To soothe? To inform?
Or because this is simply part of how many of us make our livelihoods?
Because we have no other means at our disposal to do more?
So, no—I’ve been trying to write for two weeks “on Cambodia”; to mitigate the shock I’ve been seeing from so many this last while, when confronted by the spectacle of Western leaders complicit in such brazen acts of expanding war, and when trying to square it with their sense of themselves, their countries, their social contracts, and “basic human decency”, whatever that phrase even means anymore.
But I just can’t do it. It feels right now like a cheap and sickening thing, after reviewing all the nightmares that unravelled fifty years ago as a direct consequence of US intervention, to throw one human slaughter at another in the pursuit of a way to talk meaningfully about slaughter at all.
Later today, I’ll write more about war derangement instead, in a piece that highlights how little humans are ever prepared to grasp the immensity of our atrocities.
But first, I want to call attention to an interview that hit hard the first time I viewed it, and which has hit hard every time I’ve viewed it since.
This 1964 TV interview with Hannah Arendt, on Zur Person (The Person), is not something I raise to discuss the full, complex array of Arendt’s contributions and controversies—but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention at least one of them, before we look at this segment. She was a person who sparked both criticism and also near-hagiographic adoration for her bodies of commentary around totalitarianism, the nature of “evil”, and the human condition as it is both enhanced and diminished by various levels of personal, political, and technological agency.
Some of the most heated controversies around her stem from Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)—and in the process, highlight how different the culture of public discourse was at the time. If I’ve been emphatic in the last year in my defence of pluralism in Jewish thought, it’s because I know my history, and I know how much has been flattened in recent years by people and movements who still want to speak of demographics as hiveminds—and who don’t seem to realize how racist, xenophobic, and/or antisemitic that always is.
But take, for instance, this excerpt from Eichmann, in which Arendt introduces the main prosecutor and the context in which the whole trial was staged. This might be a dizzying read for an outsider, because today it’s easy to gloss over the trial of Eichmann in 1961 in Israel as being more or less the same as the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which were held through an International Military Tribunal—but these judicial proceedings most certainly were not.
Arendt, in reporting on the Eichmann trial first for The New Yorker, was writing predominantly for an audience of Jewish persons in diaspora who had no difficulty recognizing that Israel, as a state, was a political project as much as it was a project based on religious heritage—and thus, was fully capable of pulling political stunts to serve specific party ends, rather than in service to some grand, lofty ideal of “justice” that can never truly exist within the confines of human law and its offices.
Her cynicism around the trial speaks for itself here:
Clearly, this courtroom is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnaped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the “final solution of the Jewish question.” And Ben-Gurion, rightly called the “architect of the state,” remains the invisible stage manager of the proceedings. Not once does he attend a session; in the courtroom he speaks with the voice of Gideon Hausner, the Attorney General, who, representing the government, does his best, his very best, to obey his master. And if, fortunately, his best often turns out not to be good enough, the reason is that the trial is presided over by someone who serves Justice as faithfully as Mr. Hausner serves the State of Israel. Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that all the other questions of seemingly greater import—of “How could it happen?” and “Why did it happen?,” of “Why the Jews?” and “Why the Germans?,” of “What was the role of other nations?” and “What was the extent of coresponsibility on the side of the Allies?,” of “How could the Jews through their own leaders cooperate in their own destruction?” and “Why did they go to their death like lambs to the slaughter?”—be left in abeyance. Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann, son of Karl Adolf Eichmann, the man in the glass booth built for his protection: medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench (not once does he face the audience), and who desperately and for the most part successfully maintains his self-control despite the nervous tic to which his mouth must have become subject long before this trial started. On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism. And Justice, though perhaps an “abstraction” for those of Mr. Ben-Gurion's turn of mind, proves to be a much sterner master than the Prime Minister with all his power. The latter’s rule, as Mr. Hausner is not slow in demonstrating, is permissive; it permits the prosecutor to give press conferences and interviews for television during the trial (the American program, sponsored by the Glickman Corporation, is constantly interrupted—business as usual—by real-estate advertising), and even “spontaneous” outbursts to reporters in the court building—he is sick of cross-examining Eichmann, who answers all questions with lies; it permits frequent side glances into the audience, and the theatrics characteristic of a more than ordinary vanity, which finally achieves its triumph in the White House with a compliment on “a job well done” by the President of the United States. Justice does not permit anything of the sort; it demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight. Judge Landau’s visit to this country shortly after the trial was not publicized, except among the Jewish organizations for which it was undertaken. Yet no matter how consistently the judges shunned the limelight, there they were, seated at the top of the raised platform, facing the audience as from the stage in a play. The audience was supposed to represent the whole world, and in the first few weeks it indeed consisted chiefly of newspapermen and magazine writers who had flocked to Jerusalem from the four corners of the earth. They were to watch a spectacle as sensational as the Nuremberg Trials, only this time “the tragedy of Jewry as a whole was to be the central concern.” For “if we shall charge [Eichmann] also with crimes against non-Jews, . . . this is” not because he committed them, but, surprisingly, “because we make no ethnic distinctions.” Certainly a remarkable sentence for a prosecutor to utter in his opening speech; it proved to be the key sentence in the case for the prosecution. For this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done. And, according to Mr. Hausner, this distinction would be immaterial, because “there was only one man who had been concerned almost entirely with the Jews, whose business had been their destruction, whose role in the establishment of the iniquitous regime had been limited to them. That was Adolf Eichmann.” Was it not logical to bring before the court all the facts of Jewish suffering (which, of course, were never in dispute) and then look for evidence which in one way or another would connect Eichmann with what had happened? The Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants had been “indicted for crimes against the members of various nations,” had left the Jewish tragedy out of account for the simple reason that Eichmann had not been there.
Did Mr. Hausner really believe the Nuremberg Trials would have paid greater attention to the fate of the Jews if Eichmann had been in the dock? Hardly. Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies. Hence the almost universal hostility in Israel to the mere mention of an international court which would have indicted Eichmann, not for crimes “against the Jewish people,” but for crimes against mankind committed on the body of the Jewish people. Hence the strange boast: “We make no ethnic distinctions,” which sounded less strange in Israel, where rabbinical law rules the personal status of Jewish citizens, with the result that no Jew can marry a non-Jew; marriages concluded abroad are recognized, but children of mixed marriages are legally bastards (children of Jewish parentage born out of wedlock are legitimate), and if one happens to have a non-Jewish mother he can neither be married nor buried. The outrage in this state of affairs has become more acute since 1953, when a sizable portion of jurisdiction in matters of family law was handed over to the secular courts. Women can now inherit property and in general enjoy equal status with men. Hence it is hardly respect for the faith or the power of the fanatically religious minority that prevents the government of Israel from substituting secular jurisdiction for rabbinical law in matters of marriage and divorce. Israeli citizens, religious and nonreligious, seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage, and it is chiefly for this reason—as Israeli officials outside the courtroom were willing to admit—that they are also agreed upon the undesirability of a written constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelled out. (“The argument against civil marriage is that it would split the House of Israel, and would also separate Jews of this country from Jews of the Diaspora,” as Philip Gillon recently put it in Jewish Frontier.) Whatever the reasons, there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans. The better informed among the correspondents were well aware of the irony, but they did not mention it in their reports. This, they figured, was not the time to tell the Jews what was wrong with the laws and institutions of their own country. If the audience at the trial was to be the world and the play the huge panorama of Jewish sufferings, the reality was falling short of expectations and purposes. The journalists remained faithful for not much more than two weeks, after which the audience changed drastically. It was now supposed to consist of Israelis, of those who were too young to know the story or, as in the case of Oriental Jews, had never been told it. The trial was supposed to show them what it meant to live among non-Jews, to convince them that only in Israel could a Jew be safe and live an honorable life.
In sum, Arendt is engaging in a multifaceted conversation, very much alive in her communities at the time, about the nature of justice as it relates to Holocaust, and about the challenges of national and ethnic distinction as they come to bear on the pursuit of formal criminal proceedings. Can “justice” ever be achieved in an international court, or by a specific national one? Can the crimes against a multitude ever be reckoned with responsibly through the trial of one man? Can a country with strongly ethnic laws simultaneously claim that it alone has the right to adjudicate crimes against its ethnicity, and also that it does not differentiate between the crimes done across ethnicities? Can any country pull off such a major public spectacle of a trial without promoting a specific government’s political agenda?
You can see, then, why Arendt was deeply divisive in her time (and thereafter). While the trial sought to foreground the horrors of the Holocaust as a distinct nightmare visited upon Jewish demographics by the Nazi regime, Arendt’s writing refused a larger-than-life representation of Eichmann as evil incarnate, by depicting him instead as banal, buffoonish, a spectacle of mediocrity. This approach resonated with some who knew full well that many of their neighbours had been just as mediocre in their turns toward Nazism, but it most certainly alarmed many who felt that this depiction of Eichmann was easily weaponized to recuperate Nazism as “not that bad”.
Passages like the above also earned Arendt criticism in the 1960s from people whose views echoed those of the other trial correspondents she described: people acutely aware, that is, of Israel’s ongoing legal and ideological problems, but also strongly of the opinion that even during a show trial by the Israeli government was not the time or place in which to highlight such sociopolitical flaws. The fear was that mentioning ongoing issues in Israel might diminish discourse around the Holocaust, and give the impression that Jewish persons and Nazis could ever be spoken about in the same breath, with respect to human rights violations and overall complicity in atrocity.
This is one of many questions posed by her writing that I will not discuss further today, but it’s an important one to keep in mind as we look at this interview, which took place not long after the book-length publication of her original trial reporting.
As this interview outlines, the Eichmann trial wasn’t the first time Arendt had such a cynical reaction to facets of her immediate community; and hopefully even folks who would later come to criticize her work for its cynical treatment of Israel’s political project in relation to a trial presenting the Holocaust to the world can hold a little grace for the terrible sense of betrayal she first experienced as a Jew in 1930s Germany.
Three segments are necessary to get the full weight of her argument. The first involves her differentiation between philosophy and political theory, as Arendt saw it at the time of this interview:
HA: I don’t belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can speak of it at all, is political theory. I neither feel like a philosopher nor do I believe I’ve been accepted in the circle of philosophers. … I’ve said good-bye to philosophy once and for all. As you know, I studied philosophy. But that doesn’t mean I stayed with it.
Gunter Gaus: I’d like to hear from you more precisely the difference between political philosophy and the work that you do as a professor of political theory. Where do you see the difference, exactly? When I think of some of your works then I’d like to categorize you as a philosopher, until you’re kind enough to give a clear definition of the difference as you see it.
HA: The difference lies in the material itself. The expression “political philosophy”, one I avoid, is one that is deeply troubled by tradition. When I talk about these things, be it academically or non-academically, I always mention that there is tension between philosophy and politics, between man as a thinking being and man as an acting being. There’s a tension that does not exist in natural philosophy. Just like everyone else, the philosopher can be objective with regard to nature when he says that he thinks he speaks for all mankind, but he can’t be neutral with regard to politics. Not since Plato.
GG: I understand.
HA: There is a kind of enmity against all politics in philosophy. With few exceptions. Kant is an exception. This enmity is important for the whole problem. It’s not a personal question. It lies in the nature of the subject.
GG: You want no part in this enmity because it could interfere with your work?
HA: I want no part in this enmity. I want to look at politics with an eye unclouded by philosophy.
Now, one might wonder if she’s splitting hairs—theory, philosophy, politics: what’s the difference? But two later examples clarify the personal experience that led her to turn from certain manifestations of philosophy toward a much more rigorous application of political action. Here’s the first, in which she reflects on the “personal”:
GG: Your interest in political theory, action, and behaviour is at the centre of your work today. In that light I found your correspondence with Israeli Professor Scholem particularly interesting. You wrote that as a youth neither politics nor history interested you. You emigrated as a Jew from Germany in 1933. You were 26 years old at the time. Is your interest in politics, the cessation of your indifference, connected directly to that event?
HA: Yes, of course. We could discuss this at length. Indifference was no longer possible in 1933. It was impossible even before that.
GG: For you, too?
HA: Yes, of course. I read the newspapers intently. I had opinions. I did not belong to a party. I didn’t need to. By 1931 I was finally convinced the Nazis would come to power. I was always arguing with other people about it. But I didn’t really concern myself with these things systematically until after I had emigrated.
GG: I have another question about this: If you were convinced by 1931 the Nazis could not be prevented from seizing power didn’t you feel the need to do something to prevent this? Join a party? Or was there no longer any sense in it?
HA: Personally, I did not think it made sense. If I had thought so… it’s hard to say in retrospect… perhaps I’d have done something. I thought it was hopeless.
GG: Is there a definite event in your memory that dates your turn to political events?
HA: I would say February 27, 1933. The burning of the Reichstag and the illegal arrests that followed the same night. The so-called protective custody. People were taken to Gestapo cellars or concentration camps. What began then was monstrous. But it has since been overshadowed by later events. It was an immediate shock for me. From that moment on I felt responsible. I was no longer of the opinion one can be a bystander. I tried to help in different ways. The event which made me decide to leave Germany, I’ve never mentioned it, it was so trivial… The event that forced me to leave Germany… I intended to emigrate anyway. I thought immediately: Jews could not stay. I did not intend to run around Germany as a second-class citizen, in whatever form. I also thought things would keep getting worse. In the end, I did not leave in a peaceful way. In a way, it was gratifying. I was arrested and had to leave illegally. … That was instant gratification for me. I thought at least I’ve done something. At least I’m not innocent! Nobody could say that! The Zionist organization gave me the chance to leave. I was close friends with some of its leading members—above all, the then president Kurt Blumenfeld. But I was not a Zionist. Nor did they try to convert me. In a certain way I was influenced by them. Especially by the self-criticism the Zionists spread among the Jewish people. I was influenced and impressed. But politically, I had nothing to do with Zionism.
The above, I highlight because it shows an exhilaration to have acted, even if Arendt considers the way she left thereafter to have been “trivial”—probably because it was so personal, in the end: driven by an arrest, rather than anything more conscientious, proactive, and collaborative. I also highlight here the existence of Zionists as a political entity, not only because this is true to the pluralistic state of Jewish discourse (it contained and contains multitudes!), but because this group exists on a spectrum that takes as its other extreme our main point of concern today: the intellectuals.
This is what Arendt says later about the intellectuals, and how many comported themselves amid Hitler’s initial rise:
HA: I had an entirely academic background. In that respect the year 1933 left a very lasting impression on me. First a positive one, then a negative one. Perhaps I’d better say first a negative one… Today people often think German Jews were shocked in 1933 due to the fact that Hitler seized power. As far as I and my generation are concerned, I can say that is a strange misunderstanding. Naturally, Hitler’s rise to power was terrible. But it was political, not personal. For goodness’ sake, we didn’t need Hitler’s rise to power to know the Nazis were our enemies! Anyone who was not a complete fool had known that for at least 4 years. We also knew a large number of Germans were behind him. That could not shock or surprise us in 1933.
GG: You mean the shock was that events became more personal?
HA: No, not even that. Or that, too. Firstly, it became a personal fate when one emigrated. Secondly, friends coordinated, or to put it in other words they got in line. The personal problem did not lie in what our enemies did, but in what our friends did. In the wave of coordination, which was voluntary then, or at least not yet under the pressure of terror, it was as if a vacuum formed around one. I lived in an intellectual milieu. But I also knew other people. Among intellectuals, co-ordination was the rule. Not among the others. I never forgot that. Dominated by that idea, I left Germany—somewhat exaggerated, of course. Never again! I’ll never be involved with intellectual matters ever again. I want nothing more to do with intellectuals. I didn’t believe Jewish and German Jewish intellectuals would have acted any differently had their own circumstances been different. That wasn’t my opinion. I thought that it had to do with this profession. Today, I know more.
GG: Do you still believe that?
HA: No longer to the same degree. But I still think it belongs to the essence of being an intellectual that one fabricates ideas about everything. Nobody ever blamed somebody for being coordinated because he had a family to take care of. The worst thing was some people believed in Hitler. For a short time, many for a very short time. They invented ideas about Hitler. In part, very interesting things. Totally fantastic, interesting, complicated things. Things far above the ordinary level. I found that grotesque. Today I’d say they were trapped by their own ideas. That is what happened. Back then I didn’t see it so clearly.
Arendt goes on to explain how, in the wake of her emigration and revulsion with intellectual labour, she dove into field work with Jewish children and community, in partnership with Zionist groups in France, before moving to the US and taking up a position as a professor of political theory, married to a professor of philosophy. But the fact that she moved back to academia doesn’t undermine the revulsion she felt for intellectuals at the time, and which she speaks about so frankly, thirty years later.
If anything, it speaks to how limited our options are, as human beings naturalized to certain forms of work in our communities. Arendt worked with Zionists for a stretch in the 1930s, but still differentiated herself from their party politics before and after, and retained a significant amount of cynicism toward specific political leaders and party movements throughout the creation of Israel and its early years.
Likewise, Arendt worked as an intellectual in her early career and later on, and also made the aforementioned damning remarks about intellectuals—about the fundamental danger, perhaps, of all intellectual labour—based on experiences during the rise of Hitler’s reign of terror that drove her from the field in disgust.
This was the set of valences that shaped her life, which to me makes clear sense of her cynical comments when reporting on the trial of Eichmann in 1961: there is no room for the abstraction of philosophy, or grand disembodied treatments of “evil” and “justice”, for one who has seen the all-too-material ways in which both intellectual and political labours act upon the human host under atrocity.
(And also, I appreciate the concerns held by those who regard her attitude as inviting others to treat harm as a quotidian affair, simply because complicity can manifest in so quotidian a manner. I don’t think that one follows from the other at all, but I’m often charged with similar “aiding and abetting” for my refusal to play into gamified treatments of human beings. I strongly feel that we cannot defend from violent movements like Nazism when we indulge in caricature and deny the material conditions that lead so many humans down such awful paths.)
The first time I saw this interview, I recognized exactly the type of “intellectual” Arendt was talking about: the people who could and would find a way to write a paper or deliver a professional talk about a nightmare scenario happening in their community—and mistake that action for activism. When Arendt describes people coming up with grand intellectual arguments for the nature of Hitler, we could easily map that academic effort onto ever so many articles written today about politicians in power or on the campaign trail, both in news media and for university contexts.
Do any of these character studies and speculative exercises help in a broader sense, or do they primarily serve to pad out an intellectual’s portfolio? If the latter, at what cost?
Now, there are many comments in the above interview that might make a person shake their head, but her observation around how intellectuals coped with the rise of a dictator shook me to the core on first viewing, and haunts me from time to time now.
It’s what shook me last week, when I went to my inbox and saw those 40-some newsletters and related mailouts waiting for me, while I was trying to craft a post that would sit confidently among them all soon enough. I was hit by this visual representation of so many people trying to explain, to connect the dots, to make what’s happening now in the world—with war, with nationalism, with climate change, with technological excess and political manipulation—make sense within the greater continuum of human transgression… and I shuddered.
Then I deleted my draft post “on Cambodia”, and called it a week.
My life has a distinct set of affinities, as Arendt’s life had—and as yours does, dear reader. We all have communities of labour, identity, and interest in which we can more readily bind ourselves, and from which we might also need to detach ourselves, if not altogether run from screaming, from time to time.
Mine happens to involve a lot of literary activity: stories, essays, reviews, editing, tutoring, translation. I have others—I sit with people in need, and try to be a good neighbour, friend, and support within my immediate community—but when it comes to economic capacity, there are always limits to how I can contribute effectively.
And that’s fine, unto itself. We all have our aptitudes, and our roles.
But the danger comes, for folks with valences like mine, from getting so caught up in the transmission of ideas that we lose track of the realities they’re meant to serve.
I’m sure we can all write reams of text reflecting on the ideological implications of everything currently transpiring around the world. We’re doing it all the time!
But if we’re spinning our “intellectual” wheels in a vacuum of genuine worldly agency, we should at least own up to that fact on a routine basis, to keep our integrity in check (if not our sanity: that, I fear, is long gone). So, for the record—
What I say and do here is not action.
Action, if fortunate, is what we do around the activity of visiting our precious news sites and inboxes for the latest “hit” of political commentary for the day.
It’s what you and I choose to do next, for ourselves and our respective communities, now that this exhausting bit of self-flagellation is finally at its end.
May we all choose as well as we can—given our limits, and the limits of our times.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML