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PARTISAN REVIEW
as primary means of action had ceased to possess inherent and reliable
boundaries consistent with human survival.
Jay's imprecise reading of two of Arendt's passages on Marx and
the question of violence calls for a closer textual review of his paper
and his interpretation of Arendt. Although Jay starts out by repeating
the oft-remarked enigmatic character of Arendt's thought with regard
to traditional categories of left and right, he quickly demonstrates a
rhetorical habit of shading Arendt's views with a conservative slant
through the use of key phrases. He speaks of her "relentless equation"
of Communism and Nazism in the
Origins.
In
fact her equation was
with Stalinism, even though the maintenance of a distinction between
Stalinism and Communism has not always been fashionable . Further–
more her equation, never a "relentless" one, was not in terms of
ideology, but rather in terms of political organization and the practice
of terror and coercion. Furthermore, the
Origins
does not make a broad
based claim about the "inexorable logic" of communism per se, as Jay
goes on to assert.
Such shaded readings crop up often in Jay's analysis. For example
he laconically repeats the claim that Arendt alleges "compli city" on
the part of the Jews in her Eichmann book. Suffice it to say that such a
claim remains , at best, controversial. Arendt's book can be read without
the impression that she accused the Jews of responsibility for the
Holocaust, despite her effort, present already in her
Origins,
to
understand the dynamics between victims and perpetrators, and despite
discussion of instances of Jewish coll aborative work.
In
my opinion, it
is to misread her text and her intent to see the issue of the Eichmann
book as an "all egation of Jewish complicity." The subtitle of the book
and its explicit relation to her posthumous works on "Thinking" and
"Willing" hint more accurately at the book as a powerful work of
ethical-historical reinterpretation of the Holocaust, not as an exercise
in the specific reassignment of historical responsi bility onto the Jews.
When Jay presents the 1946
Partisan Review
essay, he once again
engages in a slanted reading, taking quotes significantly out of context.
Arendt does not avoid reference to political implications of
Existenz–
philosophie
as Jay asserts. She contrasts Jaspers with Heidegger and
concludes her essay with praise for the fact that
Existenzphilosophie
has "left its period of egoism" and has recognized that man is more
"than any of his thoughts"; that man's nature demands that he "will
more than himself." This, in the context of her concern for a new
concept of humanity, is in Arendt's terms, a political claim.
In
the 1946 essay Jay thinks he has discovered an Arendtian
"ploy," borrowed from Heidegger: reliance with "persistence" on the
