Holokaust i fenomenologija gađenja
The Holocaust and the Phenomenology of Disgust

Author(s): Dragan Prole
Subject(s): Philosophy, History of the Holocaust, History of Antisemitism
Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Keywords: Holocaust; Disgust; Hannah Arendt; modern evil; banality of evil
Summary/Abstract: With the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt started the current discussion about the nature of modern evil. Her thesis on the banality of evil disrupted standard notions of evil as something that destroys man's horizons of expectation and transcends the ordinary course of conscious life. In contrast, according to Hannah Arendt, evil primarily inhabits the mundane, ordinary and everyday side of life. Metaphorically speaking, Hannah Arendt's diagnosis caused an uproar because she brought evil down from heaven to earth. Evil no longer resides in transcendent, distant and inaccessible spheres of existence, it is rather a "betrayal of transcendence" (Zafranski 2005: 43). Instead of the former epithets, which on a descriptive level associated evil with the demonic, monstrous, supernatural, with something that goes beyond human measures and is therefore inaccessible to human understanding, now evil has become something well-known, close, mundane.

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