Search results

In this essay the author creates and discusses an interplay of two incommensurable concepts of evil: Hannah Arendt's radical evil from The Origins of Totalitarianism, and David Lynch's evil presented artistically as "the bad electricity" in Ronnie Rocket. The first concept is related to Hell which Arendt uses in a few essays and in The Origins... In her opinion the first step towards the pure hell of Auschwitz was made in internment camps for stateless refugees. Giorgio Agamben revisits this idea and shows the link between statelessness and superfluousness. For Arendt the road which started with the inability to solve the refugee problem in Europe ended up in a Hell on Earth created in extermination camps. Agamben believes that spaces of extermination which reappeared on the European continent during the wars in former Yugoslavia demonstrate the grim possibility of recreating Hell in Europe. In his extraordinary script for the unmade film Ronnie Rocket, David Lynch creates a fictional hellhole of a city in which the rulers torture the population with bad electricity. The author discusses these two dramatically different visions of hell in order to show how Arendt's radical evil when compared to "the bad electricity" can be understood as a production of Hell, and how Lynch's switching from the bad to good electricity represents a revolutionary change which is simultaneously political and cosmological.

In this essay the author creates and discusses an interplay of two incommensurable concepts of evil: Hannah Arendt's radical evil from The Origins of Totalitarianism, and David Lynch's evil presented artistically as "the bad electricity" in Ronnie Rocket. The first concept is related to Hell which Arendt uses in a few essays and in The Origins. In her opinion the first step towards the pure hell of Auschwitz was made in internment camps for stateless refugees. Giorgio Agamben revisits this idea and shows the link between statelessness and superfluousness. For Arendt the road which started with the inability to solve the refugee problem in Europe ended up in a Hell on Earth created in extermination camps. Agamben believes that spaces of extermination which reappeared on the European continent during the wars in former Yugoslavia demonstrate the grim possibility of recreating Hell in Europe. In his extraordinary script for the unmade film Ronnie Rocket, David Lynch creates a fictional hellhole of a city in which the rulers torture the population with bad electricity. The author discusses these two dramatically different visions of hell in order to show how Arendt's radical evil when compared to "the bad electricity" can be understood as a production of Hell, and how Lynch's switching from the bad to good electricity represents a revolutionary change which is simultaneously political and cosmological.

In his study, the author analyses two different views of nationalism: Arendt's and Kedourie's. Hannah Arendt focuses on the link between racism, nationalism, and imperialism. According to her, nationalism differs from totalitarianism, which represents a more recent development. Kedourie sets out from Acton's critique of the French revolution and concludes that radical nationalism is a product of Franco-German national tensions. Finally, the author offers both concepts as his contribution to an easier understanding of the antagonisms which brought about the war on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. (SOI : PM: S. 151)

Hannah Arendt presented her understanding of totalitarianism in the book "The Origins of totalitarianism", but she realized that the word origin does not really fit into her narrative and started talking about the elements of totalitarianism; the elements which crystallized into totalitarian regimes. Unfortunately that does not solve the problem because Nazism and Stalinism do not share a set of elements. The author presents and discusses the logic of Arendt's narrative which wants to connect two disparate processes - the birth of Nazism and the birth of Stalinism. He shows how Arendt tried to solve the problem by using two methodologically different and irreconcilable understandings of totalitarianism. (SOI : PM: S. 86)