Musings. Ex Libris

  In  Eichmann in Jerusalem  (1963), Hannah Arendt attributes the criminal mind of Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann to a “sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity…”  A Report on the Banality of Evil , which is the book’s subtitle, introduces a kind of evil - the worst conceivable kind in human history - that departs from the “radical evil” that is at the heart of Arendt’s  The Origins of Totalitarianism  (1951). Shortly after the publication of  Eichmann , Arendt wrote to philosopher Gershom Scholem:         […] I changed my opinion and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” […] It is        indeed my opinion now that now that evil is never “radical”, that it is only        extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension […]        It is “thought-defying”, as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth,        to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated       because there is nothing. That is

  In search of what he called an “astral America” in the early 1980s, Jean Baudrillard came upon its ultimate symbol - the desert: “ Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.” This initial ecstasy soon gave way to sobering contemplation - of technology, the ravages of modernity, the vacuity of the American dream, the mindless luxury of civilisation…”All societies end up wearing masks,” Baudrillard pronounces, tying his observation in with the premise of his seminal work,  Simulacra and Simulation , published just a few years back, that “artifice is at the very heart of reality.”   Baudrillard’s Delphic prose, which comprises the book  America , is echoed in the strange, banal imagery of  3 Women  (1977). The locales were Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs - arid plains where spirit decayed and hopes foundered. As is frequently the case, the drab physical landscape triggers an inverse response from the psychological: like James Stewart’s