Eichmann a Gerusalemme. Il processo, le polemiche, il perpetratore, la banalità del male:

Abstract

Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Trial, the Controversy, the Perpetrator, the Banality of Evil - The book Eichmann in Jerusalem - a Report on the Banality of Evil was the result of Hannah Arendt's coverage of the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for the The New Yorker. Arendt identified three motives that led her to concern herself with the Eichmann trial: she wanted to know who Eichmann really was “in the flesh”; she wanted to assess the possibility of a new kind of crime and criminal in their juridical aspects; she was concerned about the nature of evil. Starting from these Arendtian motivations, this article analyzes the juridical implications of the Eichmann trial; the controversy over the Jewish question; the concept of the "banality of evil" and its importance in Arendt´s thinking. Although Arendt asserted the failure of traditional thought to grasp the phenomenon of evil in her analysis of radical evil in The Origins of Totalitarianism, only after the Eichmann book and the "banality of evil" did she cultivate this interest in a new move toward ethics. What Arendt detected in Eichmann was not stupidity; in her words, he displayed something entirely negative: thoughtlessness. Eichmann’s ordinariness manifested itself in an incapacity for independent thought. Eichmann became the protagonist of an apparently unexceptional experience: the absence of the critical thought.

Keywords

• Hannah Arendt
• Adolf Eichmann´s Trial
• Banality of Evil
• Morality
• Faculty of Thinking