Abstract

Why must the humanities be defended? What is to be said in their name? This inquiry does not seek to make a case for the humanities. It is rather concerned with what happens in contemporary advocacy that contends for the value of the humanities, the myriad arguments that take on the responsibility of speaking for the humanities and expressing the good for which the humanities are thought responsible. In all of this work, in so many efforts to argue the humanities, what remains uncomprehended, and indeed what is regularly set aside as simply incomprehensible, is the work of rhetorical-argument itself, the contingent conditions, dynamics and power of a response, the response-ability on which a comprehension of the humanities may yet depend.

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the last pages of the Epilogue of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, but it concerns a question that runs through Arendt’s work practically in its entirety, which can be put as follows: How can we judge when we can no longer rely on the certainties of tradition, when – with the emergence of totalitarianism – the categories and concepts with which we used to judge no longer help us to account for the horrifying reality of crimes of an unknown nature and of criminals who do not comply with the notion of criminals that we used to consider? The text aims to dwell on these somewhat strange final pages of Arendt’s chronicle of Eichmann’s trial to try to see how they nourish our reflection on how to confront an unknown evil of a new kind.

‘Qu’on ne s’étonne donc pas si un crime insondable
appelle en quelque sorte une méditation inépuisable.’
Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’imprescriptible

‘When the incomprehensible is presented as routine,
sensitivity mercifully diminishes.’
Yosal Rogat, The Eichmann Trial and the Rule of Law

Abstract

In his pioneering essays on the role of rhetoric in political discourse in South Africa, and in particular within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Philippe-Joseph Salazar has emphasised the ‘postmodernist’ overtones of these debates. But he has clearly distinguished an Aristotelian line in the use of rhetoric in politics, according to which it ought to promote truth in order to convince, and a Protagorean line, according to which truth is relative and useless. Some commentators on these issues, such as Barbara Cassin, have – without a blink – espoused the postmodernist and Protagorean line. I take their view to be incomprehensible and incoherent. Rhetoric should not be used as a tool to bury truth, but to praise it. So, I prefer to see Salazar more as an Aristotelian than as a Protagorean.