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133 Arendt and Kertész on the Banality of Evil Mihály Szilágyi-Gál In his novel Fatelessness, Imre Kertész shares a fundamental idea elaborated by Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt defined a particular moral phenomenon as the "banality of evil," which she illustrated with Eichmann's own words and deeds during World War II. Kertész created a fictional character in a novel of autofiction and had his protagonist, as well as other characters in the novel, talk and act in a ways similar to those described by Arendt about Eichmann. Arendt's text is a mixture of journalistic report and philosophical essay. Kertész's text is a novel, yet a highly philosophical work, and links to some of his existentialist forerunners, such as Arendt, as intellectual sources of inspiration. I postulate that Arendt and Kertész share a thesis of moral philosophy. Despite the difference of genre between the two texts, both rely on the reconstruction of lexical clichés and schematic attitudes they identify as illustrations of the thoughtlessness of unconditional conformism, the incapacity to distinguish right from wrong, as the moral fault of both the guilty and the victim. In her attempt to identify philosophically and politically viable links between existence and consciousness, Arendt elaborated thoughts that partly linked her to existentialism. In her essay, "What Is Existential Philosophy," she defines the meaning of existentialism as follows: "The 'existence' denotes simply the Being ("Sein") of man, independent of all the qualities and capabilities that any individual may possess and that are accessible to psychological investigation" (163). In another essay on French existentialism, she claims that the one of the two main features of existentialism is the rejection of the identification of the individual with the social role he or she fulfils, that is to say, the pleading to detach the essentially human and individual character from the surface identity society assigns to each of us. The other feature she describes consists of the idea of "the angry refusal to accept the world as it is as the natural, predestined milieu of man" ("French Existentialism" 189-90). It is mainly this second aspect of what she identifies as one of the defining features 134 Mihály Szilágyi-Gál of existentialism that I think she shares with Kertész. Kertész makes explicit his existential indebtedness when he mentions Albert Camus's L'Etranger as one of the defining texts of his intellectual development. He also mentions Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mots as one of the sources of his quest for his own literary language (K. dosszié 190-193). These are two sourcesArendt also relies on in her understanding of French existentialism. In his illustrations of the uncritical acceptance of the latent criminality of everyday conformism, Kertész demonstrates his existentialist inspiration; his existentialism not only manifests itself in his moral stance against said conformism, but also is manifest in the language of his characters: it is this particular aspect that displays strong similarities between his art and that of Camus (Vasvári 259). In mentioning his personal intellectual experiences, Kertész does not rely on the word existentialism, like Camus, who rejected the label existentialist. Beyond her personal experiences with nazism, Arendt remained for the rest of her life puzzled—also as a philosopher—by the question of how nazism was possible morally (Augstein 181). Constructing this as a personal and theoretical question , Arendt reached her final considerations on the nature of thinking, willing, and judging in a moral and epistemological analysis of the mind and that she had begun with her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Nordmann 108-23). The book was first in a series of articles in the New Yorker and then as a volume in 1965. The text was the summary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the executioner of the Final Solution in the last years of the war in Hungary. In the introduction of The Life of the Mind, which can be considered as an attempt at a final synthesis of what she had been elaborating in her previous works on the relationship between thinking, judging, and acting, Arendt recalls her book on the Eichmann trial (qtd. in Beiner vii-viii). Arendt's approach to the problematics of judgment is based mainly on her idea of plurality, which she derives from the epistemological and moral twofoldness of the...

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