The Political Theory of the Cliché: Hannah Arendt Reading Adolf Eichmann

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt studies Adolf Eichmann through his words: she notes what he says during cross-examinations at the trial, she reviews transcripts from police interrogations, and she reads extracts from the memoirs he began to write in Argentina. The character sketch that builds on these materials famously identifies Eichmann as a "déclassé son of a solid middle-class family" (1964, 31) whose severely limited verbal repertoire and robotic delivery made him a figure of "undeniable ludicrousness" (54). But how does Arendt arrive at these judgments, or what method of reading does she rely on to draw her conclusions? Her inferences about Eichmann are informed by an understanding of class and social types in European society.¹ And her observations about Eichmann's manners of speech—his blend of stock phrases, Nazi jargon, and officialese—indicate a sensitivity to degrees of verbal aptitude. But while Arendt's characterization of Eichmann as disturbingly ordinary has shaped and even defined his public image, and influenced the way that modern genocide is conceptualized, it remains difficult to identify Arendt's mode of analysis.² Reluctant to identify herself with any school of thought or discipline, she seems to employ no particular body of interpretive techniques that would allow her to move from single observations to a global judgment of Eichmann's person.

To many of the first readers and reviewers of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt's approach—or her lack of one—was part of the problem with the book. Originally reporting for the magazine the New Yorker, Arendt seemed to speak as a member of an urbane literary elite who aimed to dazzle rather than to analyze, and her report was criticized as impressionistic, perversely concerned with its own brilliance, and attuned to aesthetic rather than moral values.³ Later scholarship has done much to correct this damning view of Arendt's commitments and motivations. According to numerous commentators, Arendt is able to demonstrate how Eichmann's immersion in Nazi ideology and his implementation of genocidal policies stemmed from his failure to understand himself as a responsible political agent, who in fact lent the apparatus of mass murder his active support in every act of unquestioning obedience.⁴ Eichmann's character is judged corrupt from the standpoint of an appreciation of human agency, according to which people are at all times obliged to assume full responsibility for their actions and words rather than abdicate autonomy with reference to their apparently minor positions in complex and overpowering organizations.⁵ Beyond noting how the portrait of Eichmann featured remarks on his rigidified speech, however, recent secondary literature has said almost nothing about Arendt's method.

While Arendt's general statements have been positively reevaluated, then, her interest in Eichmann's clichéd speech has not been accorded much scrutiny.⁶ One would have to assume from this that her notes on his patterns of speech do not conform or amount to a worked-out procedure of assessment and interpretation. Judging by the literature, Eichmann in Jerusalem can be treated as a reflection on the Holocaust as an unprecedented crime, as a tract on evil, or as a critical portrait of the Israeli state, but not as an exercise in reading.⁷

To remedy this lacuna in the discussion of the book, we must ask a series of questions. What is involved in the recognition of clichéd speech, or what type of attention does it require? And what does the detection of frozen patterns of speech possibly allow one to say about the person who has uttered them? We must in other words focus on Arendt's consideration of Eichmann's verbal tics and near-clownish delivery of stale expressions, and trace her path to certain judgments of his character. Rather than deny or downplay this dimension of the Jerusalem report, one must understand its fundamental contribution to its overall statement.

The Political Theory of the Cliché

The central fact about Eichmann, the observation to which Arendt returns again and again, is that his speech consists...