The totalitarian conviction that there are no limits to what can be done to people, underlying the claim that everything is permitted.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Totalitarian cynicism takes Ivan Karamazov literally: if God is dead, "everything is permitted." That rests on a deeper conviction that "everything is possible," and the camps are laboratories verifying it.
Put simply Arendt: totalitarian cynics take Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov literally: if God is dead, "everything is permitted." Behind it lies a deeper belief that "everything is possible," and the camps were laboratories for proving it.
Arendt ends Origins on absolute evil: once the impossible became possible, a crime appeared that no ordinary wicked motive, greed, resentment, cowardice, could explain, beyond both punishment and forgiveness.
Put simply Arendt ends her book on totalitarianism with "absolute evil": once the impossible became possible, a crime appeared that no ordinary bad motive, like greed or cowardice, could explain. It could be neither punished nor forgiven.
Shore finds deconstruction thrilling and provoking, but it ultimately leaves us hanging as the avant-garde was: the leap opens every possibility and offers no handhold.
Put simply Shore finds deconstruction thrilling and provocative, but in the end it leaves us dangling, as the avant-garde artists were: once you jump, anything is possible, but there is nothing to hold on to.
1 link between claims that both use the term. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
ArendtTotalitarian cynicism takes Ivan Karamazov literally: if God is dead, "everything is permitted." That rests on a deeper conviction that "everything is possible," and the camps are laboratories verifying it. L15 · 43:03
ArendtArendt ends Origins on absolute evil: once the impossible became possible, a crime appeared that no ordinary wicked motive, greed, resentment, cowardice, could explain, beyond both punishment and forgiveness. L15 · 43:49
Reverse direction (arendt-L15-20 -> arendt-L15-19): making the impossible possible yields unpunishable, unforgivable evil.
Throughlines that pass through one of these claims.
Terms that appear in the same claims.