Reviews

I planted blind hope in their hearts

in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol 15, No 1 (2025)

I am grateful to Sruti Chaganti and Bhrigupati Singh for the invitation to participate in this discussion of Mayur Suresh’s book Terror trials. It is a great book and very readable. The title of my remarks is based on a line from the epigraph to the book by Anne Carson in her poem Red Doc: “I planted blind hope in their hearts” (Carson 2013). Terror trials is the rare book about law—especially one about trials against suspected terrorists—that finds hope in the law’s ability to do justice.

Terror trials is about the importance of legal technicalities. We could say the thesis of the book is: “technicalities matter;” further, that the technicalities that comprise legal process are what lead law along its path to justice. The hope that Suresh finds in law comes from his belief in the power of process to bind law to justice.

The Ground on Which We Stand: Hannah Arendt on Powerless, Necessary Truth

in Los Angeles Review of Books (2022)

“The truth will set you free.” The Bible says so, and even non-believers today insist on it. They are prone to saying: If the media just told people the truth about global warming, about Russia, about Trump, then the people would understand; if we only knew the truth, we would do the right thing.

But what if truth is powerless? What if truth has little or even no impact? That is the question Hannah Arendt raises in her essay “Truth and Politics,” asking: “Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent?”

Book Review: Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, by Kathryn T. Gines

in Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy (2018)

Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting The Origins of Totalitarianism

in Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)

THE ASTONISHING STATEMENT Donald Trump made at a January 2016 campaign rally in Iowa seems like the essential moment in his unexpected rise to power: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” he said, “and I wouldn’t lose voters.” In saying that he could kill in broad daylight and remain popular, Trump did more than draw a logical conclusion from polls showing that his supporters demonstrated unprecedented loyalty. He understood that he was not running a political campaign but was the leader of a mass movement. Most importantly, he understood something that his critics still fail to understand: the essential nature of loyalty in mass movements.

Mass movements, writes Hannah Arendt in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, are one of the core elements of totalitarianism. Arendt does not say that all mass movements are totalitarian; to take seriously President Trump’s claim to be the mouthpiece of a movement is not to claim that he is a totalitarian leader or that he is leading a totalitarian movement. He has not mobilized terror, concentration camps, arbitrary arrests, a secret police, and a party apparatus that rises above the state — all of which were essential parts of Arendt’s description of totalitarianism in power. Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — disgusting as it is — is not the same thing as de-naturalization, imprisonment, and deportation of citizens. Common sense insists that we not abandon reality and imagine that the United States is experiencing totalitarianism.

Instituting freedom: Steve Buckler and Hannah Arendt on an Engaged Political Theory

in European Journal of Political Theory (2014)

Steve Buckler’s Hannah Arendt and Political Theory is most revealing in the final chapter, ‘‘The Role of the Theorist.’’ I did not know Buckler, but this final chapter of his last book must stand as his apologia, his attempt—mediated through Arendt—to offer an account of a lifelong pursuit of an engaged politics.

Misreading 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'

in The New York Times (2013)

In The Stone in The New York Times, I argue that a new critical consensus is emerging around Hannah Arendt's thesis about the "fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil."  This new consensus holds that Arendt was right in her general claim that many evildoers are normal people but was wrong about Eichmann in particular. As Christopher R. Browning summed it up recently in The New York Review of Books, “Arendt grasped an important concept but not the right example.” Behind this consensus is new scholarship on Eichmann’s writings and reflections from the 1950s, when he was living among a fraternity of former Nazis in Argentina, before Israeli agents captured him and spirited him out of the country and to Israel. In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Sassen interviews show that Arendt was simply wrong in her judgment of Eichmann because she did not have all the facts. But this new consensus is wrong.

Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film

in The Paris Review Daily (2013)

In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among New York intellectuals. While some reviews cursed Arendt as a self-hating Jew and Nazi lover, the Jewish Daily Forward accusing her of “polemical vulgarity,” Robert Lowell termed her portrayal of Eichmann a “masterpiece,” and Bruno Bettelheim said it was the best protection against “dehumanizing totalitarianism.” Across the city, Arendt’s friends chose sides. When Dissent sponsored a meeting at the Hotel Diplomat, a crowd gathered to shout down Alfred Kazin and Raul Hilberg—then the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholar—for defending Arendt, while in The Partisan Review Lionel Abel opined that Eichmann “comes off so much better in [Arendt’s] book than do his victims.”

On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred by Paul Reitter

in Bookforum (2012)

From Sigmund Freud to Theodor Herzl, from Alexander Portnoy to Alvy Singer, the stereotypical self-hating Jew is someone who despises his difference and yearns to assimilate. Today, the label has an added political connotation, as Jews who criticize Israel are frequently branded as self-hating. The California-based radical-Zionist website masada2000 offers a list of more than 8,000 “Self-Hating Israel-Threatening” Jews—or “S.H.I.T. Jews” as it labels them. Masada2000 names Rabbi Michael Lerner, Woody Allen, and Noam Chomsky as Jews who “know the Truth but hate their heritage to such a degree that nothing else matters to them except bashing Israel right out of existence.” It is rare for a Jewish intellectual to escape accusations of self-hatred.

The Wonders of Man in the Age of Simulations

in The Fortnightly Review (2010)

A Fortnightly Review of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier, and Simulation and Its Discontents by Sherry Turkle.

IN “THE ODE TO MAN” from Antigone, Sophocles conjures “Man” as the wondrous being who wears out the “imperishable earth” with his ploughs. This man “overpowers the rough-maned horses with his devices” and tames the “unbending mountain bull.” He flees the “stormy darts” of winter’s frost and he escapes “needful illness.” Such a man who tames nature is a wonder, according to the Ode’s opening line:

Manifold the wonders
And nothing towers more wondrous than man.

The Greek word for “wonder” is Deinon, which connotes both greatness and horror, that which is so extraordinary as to be at once terrifying and beautiful. This is how Sophocles understands man. As an inventor and maker of his world, man can remake and master the earth. This wonder terrifyingly carries the seeds of his destruction. Man, Sophocles imagines, threatens to so fully control his own way of life that he might no longer be man. As the chorus sings: “Always overcoming all ways, man loses his way and comes to nothing.” If man so tames the earth as to free himself from uncertainty, what then is left of human being?

Liberating the Animal

in Theory & Event (2010). Review of Vanessa Lemm's Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy

The animality of humans has been a basic axiom of philosophical thinking at least since Aristotle characterized the human being as the animal having logos. Logos is sometimes translated as speech, so that humanity is distinguished as the animal having language. Others, building upon Kant, translate logos as reason, itself a multi-faceted idea that alternates between the sense of calculative rationality and logic on the one side and a higher and less-well-defined sense of freedom and knowing on the other. Ambiguous as it remains, the appeal to man’s logos has for millennia named a hierarchical relationship, one in which human beings stand above irrational animals lacking logos.

The Aristotelian-Kantian elevation of the human as the animal who reasons is under attack. In part, the dissent results from our changing views of animals. At a conservation camp for the endangered Thai elephants in northern Thailand, elephants have been taught to paint. You can watch these amazing animals carefully administering brush strokes on internet videos. Elsewhere, scientific studies on mirror neurons in both humans and animals suggest that animals—especially elephants who are regularly observed in acts of empathy and grief—share the same neurological basis of the human moral faculty. The painting elephants and the grieving elephants—to take just two examples—raise questions about the traditional hierarchy of man over animal as the rational animal.

Book Review: Harsh Justice, by James Whitman

in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2005)

Punishment, James Whitman argues in Harsh Justice, implies degradation. The act of punishment puts criminals in their place. It de-grades. Punishment is justified, Whitman writes, insofar as it brings about proportional degradation.

Book Review: Nietzche's Love, by Laurence Lampert

in Journal of Politics, v. 65 (2003). Review of Laurence Lampert's Nietzsche's Task

Nietzsche prophesied that “people may be able to read [Beyond Good and Evil] around the year 2000” (301). In Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil, Laurence Lampert seeks to make good on Nietzsche’s prophecy.

Lampert’s fifth book dedicated to Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s Task, should serve as one important model for future Nietzsche scholarship. Nietzsche’s Task proceeds chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph (with the exception of the aphorisms in (chapter four), offering a systematic and pathbreaking way through one of Nietzsche’s most challenging texts. No other secondary source I know of has successfully given such a coherent and meaningful reading of one of Nietzsche’s books. We need more books that seek a way through the labyrinth of Nietzsche’s thought through close readings of his texts.

Other Kinds of Conversations

in Rechtshistorisches Journal, v. 20 (2001). Review essay on Uday Mehta's Liberalism and Empire.

Some Prefatory Remarks on Positive Law (Gesetz)

in Rechtshistorisches Journal, v. 19 (2000). Review of A. Sebok's Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence.

Crossing the Warrior Path

in Rechtshistorisches Journal, Volume 16, 1998. Review essay on Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

“‘It goes back,’” Thomas Pynchon invites us to imagine, “‘ to the second Day of Creation, when ‘G-d made the Firmament, and divided the Waters which were under the Firmament, from the waters which were above the Frimament,’ -- thus the first boundary Line. All else after that, in all History, is but Sub-Division.’”

In the beginning was sub-division, which is to say: In the beginning was the lawsuit. And how different is that from the Word? Are not theology and jurisprudence sister sciences, dedicated to the proper -- or must we today say authoritative? -- interpretation of manifested truths -- or must we say desires? If theology endeavors to rightly discipline the expression of desire, the functional essence of the lawsuit is instead the authoritative resolution of conflicting desires.

Highlighting the Unknowable

in Rechtshistorisches Journal, Volume 14, 1995. Review of Questions of Evidence, ed. J. Chandler, A. Davidson and H. Harootunian

Risk of the Self: Drucilla Cornell's Transformative Philosophy

Berkeley Women's Law Journal, v. 9 (1994). Review Essay on Drucilla Cornell's work.

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