Hannah Arendt – Margarethe von Trotta

Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta – Germany/Luxembourg/France/Israel) 113 minutes

Margarethe von Trotta’s latest portrayal of female German historical figures features the political theorist Hannah Arendt, or more precisely, the few months in 1961 surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, about which Arendt wrote her famous articles for the New Yorker (subsequently published as Eichmann in Jerusalem). Barbara Sukowa, a regular in von Trotta’s films, in which she has already played Rosa Luxemburg, Hildegard von Bingen and a fictionalised Gudrun Esslin, is Arendt, a role you suspect she has been waiting her whole life to fill. Other figures in the film include Arendt’s husband, the Marxist Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg), her friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) and New Yorker editor William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson). It is very much a talky affair, with the capture and trial of Eichmann discussed at length by Arendt’s largely German emigré circle, a colloquy that becomes more fractious after Arendt shocks the Jewish community with the publication of her first article.

The film is particularly strong on the development of Arendt’s famous concept of the banality of evil, which it suggests came to her as she sat watching the live relay of the trial in the Jerusalem press room. We see the actual archive footage of Eichmann in the dock, in which he berates the prosecution for their inaccuracies and selective interpretation of the bureaucratic evidence that he is only too familiar with. What causes the shit-storm back in New York though is her assertion that the number of Jewish deaths might have been less had there not been a Jewish leadership to co-operate with the Nazis. Viewed today, it is not an incredibly contentious argument but it inflamed Jewish opinion in both New York and Israel (where some of those leaders, such as Rudolf Kastner, assassinated in 1957, had taken refuge). Arendt received hate mail, was reviled as a self-hating Jew, many of her friends turned against her, Mossad turned up on her doorstep to issue veiled threats, and she was subject to academic intimidation, of the sort US critics of Israel today would recognise.

Arendt, despite the personal hurt caused her by her friends’ desertion, was unwavering – knowing most of her critics to be as intellectually mediocre as she found Eichmann to be – and Sukowa captures very well the imperious, at times overly-dispassionate, side to her character. Unfortunately she hams it up a little in the more dramatic scenes, particularly her defence in front of her students at the New School – while the intention is to convey impassioned argumentation, it reminds you a little too much of Lili von Stupp in Blazing Saddles. The film also protrays in flashback her romantic relationship with Martin Heidegger, her one-time teacher and mentor. While it makes perfect sense to evoke what would have been an undoubtedly seismic effect on Arendt's life – particularly given Heidegger's later collaboration with the Nazis – seeing the author of Being and Time playing hanky-panky with Hannah Arendt moves the film into the realm of the risible. Von Trotta’s direction is also overly academic – the film resembles a TV movie, or mini-series even, which is not surprising as her career in recent years has alternated between projects for TV and the big screen. Still, that hasn’t hampered its fortunes in Germany, where it has been a big hit at the box office. While the film may have the commendable effect of making Arendt known to a general audience, it really is a work that is far from approaching the stature of its subject, despite the best efforts of all involved.

Sartre and the Galway Dentist

I recently renewed my subscription to the London Review of Books having let it lapse, rather stupidly, for a couple of years. Most of the articles do end up on the website but reading the print edition is a lot more fun and a helluva lot less of a strain on the eye, considering the normal article length is 3000-5000 words.

In the latest edition, which annoyingly, I got almost a week after much of it was posted online, there is an interesting piece by Elif Batuman, a Stanford academic, which reviews Elisabeth Roudinesco's Philosophy in Turbulent Times, which has just been published in English. I'm not terribly equipped to assess Batuman's largely negative view of Roudinesco's book though I do agree with his view on the victim complex of Louis Althusser, following his murder of his wife, being familiar with much of Althusser's work, including his memoir The Future Lasts a Long Time. Even more disturbing than Althusser's crime, which was committed when he had slipped irrevocably into insanity was the way his friends closed ranks around him and even managed to recast him rather than his dead wife Hélène as the victim. If Irish readers of this blog find Aosdána members' unqualified support of Cathal Ó Searcaigh's recent shennanigans unseemly, well that was pretty tame stuff compared to the flurry of philosophes rushing to relativize their friend and colleague's crime.

But it is elsewhere in Batuman's article that my attention was snagged, in an amusing passage on Jean-Paul Sartre's visit to John Huston in Galway in 1959 to hammer out a screenplay on Freud. The project came to nothing because of a mounting animosity between the two men but Batuman's description of the visit merits quotation at length:

The Huston-Sartre collaboration fell apart in 1959, when Sartre
travelled to Huston’s home in Ireland to work on the script. The two
didn’t work well together. ‘There was no such thing as a conversation
with him,’ Huston later recalled. ‘He talked incessantly, and there was
no interrupting him. You’d wait for him to catch his breath, but he
wouldn’t.’ Meanwhile Sartre, in his letters to Simone de Beauvoir,
described Huston as ‘perfectly vacant, literally incapable of speaking
to those whom he has invited’. Evidently he didn’t realise that Huston
was waiting for him to catch his breath. The philosopher went on to
compare Huston’s ‘inner landscape’ to ‘heaps of ruins, abandoned
houses, plots of wasteland, swamps’: ‘He is empty,’ Sartre concluded,
‘except in his moments of infantile vanity, when he dons a red tuxedo,
or goes horseback riding (not very well).’ (Huston, of the infantile
red tuxedo, was equally bemused by Sartre’s wardrobe, its stark
invariance: ‘I never knew if he owned one grey suit or several
identical grey suits.’)

Who can fail to be entertained by this
picture of Sartre criticising somebody for being a bad rider? Or by the
anecdote about how he once had toothache and refused to go to Dublin,
as Huston suggested, to get it treated? Huston didn’t know any local
dentists, but Sartre found one, from whose surgery he emerged in a
matter of minutes, having had his tooth extracted. Huston – who,
despite his scepticism about America, had evidently not totally
renounced the ‘hygienism’ of his native country – wondered at Sartre’s
casual attitude to his teeth, but concluded that ‘a tooth more or less
made no difference in Sartre’s cosmos.’ Here you see the entire charm
of the existentialist way of life.

The A-list bitchiness is amusing enough, if to be hardly exceptional, but the vision of Sartre stumbling out of a West of Ireland dentist's surgery is one that needs to cherished for all eternity. It's the sketch that Monty Python never wrote.

LRB · Elif Batuman: On Complaining

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The Death of Jean Baudrillard Will Not Take Place

Jean Baudrillard passed away this week, or, as many wags - not least himself - would put it, his simulacrum did. Baudrillard was a brilliant, if sometimes fatuous and wayward thinker whose infamy in the English-speaking world owed mainly to an over-literal reading - or, as in many cases, no reading at all - of one of his most famous texts The Gulf War Will Not Take Place. This famously posited that the First Gulf War, being an event that had already been enacted in the Western media and to be consumed through the media alone, would not take place. Note that Baudrillard did not say 'will not exist', and part of the failure of some Anglophone literalists to detect morality implicit in his text was due to its ignorance of Jean Giraudoux's war satire, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, from which it drew its title. While Baudrillard's lofty anti-ideologising fed into a lot of the post-political posturing of postmodern thought, in this work, and in many others that continued until his death, he was far from being amoral. If anything it was a critique of Western complacency and apathy rather than an endorsement of it. Those that pointed out that the casualties in Iraq were real were not telling Baudrillard anything he didn't know.

Baudrillard is also famous for The Matrix, that silly, pretentious mishmash of post-modern thought and shopworn spiritualism, in which a hollowed-out copy of his book Simulacra and Simulations concealed clandestine software. I remember Gilbert Adair remarking in a review of the film at the time that 'I'm quite willing to suspend disbelief to imagine that Keanu has read a book, but Simulacra and Simulations? Puhleaase...' But much of Baudrillard's disciples were à la carte theorists, lifting what they pleased and discarding anything that was either more difficult or troubling.

Like most critical theory Baudrillard's work was despised by many of those who followed in the line of both Anglo-Saxon empiricism and French duality. And yes, there were times when he overreached himself, like many of his peers, in making statements about science that were either beyond his ken or just plain wrong. But he also introduced, with Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and others an important element of imagination into philosophical thinking (and philosophy has never been as empirical or rigorous as many Anglo-Saxon pedants claim) and opened it up once again to a broad political and cultural field. He was also a talented photographer and his photo/text books about his travels in America are stimulating meditations on travel, disorientation and everyday life.

Some of his best work came, as with Beckett, in short texts published in the years before his death, such as The Spirit of Terrorism, his response to 9/11, and a later post-tsunami piece In Search of Absolute Evil. Apologies for those links being in French but they should be found easily enough in English elsewhere on the web. I would take the likes of Baudrillard, Derrida, and Bourdieu any day above the younger nouveaux philosophes such as the self-righteous pedant Bernard-Henri Lévy or former leftists André Gluckmann and Alain Finkielkraut, both of whom have morphed into pre-election cheerleaders for Nicolas Sarkozy.