the poeisis of thinking

My last post tried to show why the cigarette in Hannah Arendt does not function like a cinematic or literary metaphor for her often times rather intimate moments of thinking. I carried further my thoughts on what the metaphor is, or rather can be to stress the point that even when the metaphor’s complexity is not placated, the cigarette does not necessarily hold a metaphorical connection with the images of Hannah Arendt’s engrossed, immersed, submerged in the acts of thinking.

Thinking enters the realm of praxis where the dramatization of thinking, be it Hannah Arendt’s or that of anyone less eminent, falls under the burden of poeisis. How cinema cogently, evocatively or emotively represents the weighty moments of a philosopher’s thought production requires other than mere realistic representation? By other than mere realistic representation I refer to the balance that the creation of such scenes requires. These scenes need to reconcile the probable realism of how thinking might have been experienced by the historical Hannah Arendt and how the director, von Trotta, imagines that someone like Hannah Arendt must have engaged with thinking. The balance situates itself in the recreation of scenes that promise to be appealing rather than isolating to the viewer. The acts of Hannah Arendt’s thinking need to be as compelling as seductive as her ideas.

It is perhaps in the ways that such scenes are configured that a committed sympathy for Hannah Arendt’s intellectual (and ethical) positions can be gleaned from von Trotta’s direction. Rather than the scenes in which Hannah Arendt exposits her ideas with vigor, it is the scenes showing her alone in the faithful company of her cigarettes, quietly, calmly toiling with thought that suggest undeniable affinity between the filmmaker and the philosopher. Von Trotta’s treatment of these challenging scenes, which she’s handles with quiet elegance, reminds us that there is no naturalist way of portraying the act of thinking. For Hannah Arendt, thinking cannot be dislodged from pathos, even agony at times. Thinking cannot be practiced with levity, particularly the thinking of such matters.

According to Ancient Greek thought, poeisis relates to truth as praxis relates more closely to will. Even though the publication of Hannah Arendt’s report of the trial in Jerusalem and her response to the aggressive attacks to her and her analysis of Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust, shows the presence of her unmovable and determined will, her moments of thinking in the film appear as the dramatization less of energetic will than the relentless yet serene desire for truth.

The cigarette (in Hannah Arendt) as metaphor?

I would like to comment further on an observation I made in the previous post. In “The banality of evil” I traced a connection between how the presence of the cigarette is deployed in the movie and the act of thinking that engulfs Hannah Arendt in many of the film’s scenes. I claimed that the changing presence of the cigarette in the scenes materializes, namely grants sensuous texture to act of thinking, which is, arguably, a challenge for evocative representation, let alone dramatization.

I stressed the point that von Trotta decides against cinematic shortcuts such as the reliance on narrative (dialogue or voiceover) or suggestions or allusions for the representation of her thinking process. Both the camera’s gaze and montage choices do not undercut the integrity of the numerous shots in which Hannah Arendt is situated thinking, enveloped in silence, solitude, and cigarette smoke.

In the few paragraphs that address this point, I made a conscious effort to avoid associating metaphorically the cinematic use of the cigarettes with the dramatization of her thinking. The cigarette is not deployed, I interpret, to stand as a metaphor of HA’s acts of thinking. The former does not stand particularly for the universality of the latter; the former does not pull down to concrete reality the bodiless abstraction of the latter. Because metaphors recreate a parallel relation of assumed equality. The viability of the assumed equality between the parts of the metaphor hinges on content superseding form. The form of the metaphor never changes so that the contents or substances of the metaphor assume center stage. On the other hand, and bearing a bit of a circular logic, it is precisely the effacement of form that permits the assumption of equality between the parts of the metaphor that enables the metaphor to function as such.

At the same time, it is the flattened two-part form of the metaphor that concedes that the content be compressed into an inseparable two-part one. The metaphor is a tricky rhetorical operation, whose inner makings deserve more carefully and rigorously laid out thoughts than the ones I am assembling here. For now, I end with the following brief reflections:

I am usually skeptical of the unduly trusted explicative prowess of the metaphors as they too quickly satisfy, at least in appearance, the need for clarity and concreteness. It seems to me that the metaphor succeeds more intrepidly when it fails, precisely when the two parts of the metaphor cannot be collapsed or the two parts surrender to the unshackling that inhabits the metaphor’s structure. Upon the failure of the metaphor to operate conventionally, a gap or opening emerges whereby the differences between the two parts remain not only evident but also relevant. The parts engage in inexact relations of similarity and dissimilarity, and in that inexactitude a balance rises that allows for the metaphor to remain an irreducible rhetorical operation. To think of the metaphor as the rhetorical way to ground abstract concepts in concrete reality means to hardly think of the metaphor at all.

Having said this, I still do not interpret the presence of the cigarette in the film as a metaphor for Hannah Arendt’s thinking. What, then?

 

The Banality of Evil

Before I say more about Hannah Arendt’s thesis, which emerged from her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), I would like to describe my and J’s response to Margarethe Von Trotta’s eponymous film.

The film makes the director’s deep admiration for Hannah Arendt clear early on. The first scenes show AH moving from one room to another in her warmly lit, intellectually furnished apartment on the Upper West Side where books coexist with wood color furniture, and silence accentuates the steady staccato of the typewriter. Far from being a hagiography, the film expresses great sympathy for the thinker without necessarily simplifying the many tensions that made her a complex, and at times difficult, person. It does present her like an intellectual heroine too ahead of her peers, who failed to understand both her critical perspective and intellectual project because, perhaps, only temporal distance could afford such peers the ability to see the Holocaust in the way HA was approaching the subject. The temporality of her book on Eichmann and the emergence of her theory of the banality of evil is at once unfortunate and inevitable (or fortunate and contingent) and from that impossible confluence emerge the reasons for her intellectual heroism: to write that which her contemporaries are not yet prepared to read or hear.

In most scenes we see her with a cigarette that gently shifts positions from her mouth to her fingers. The cigarette moves almost like an added appendage to HA’s hand. To her, smoking occurs as naturally as does thinking. Cigarettes will remain ubiquitous in the film, filling the shots with mild smoke-trails whose fragrance and warmth become almost tangible for the viewer at times. Rather than a distraction, cigarettes decorate every scene as a way to materialize the act of thinking. But the ideas that are forming prior to their typing on paper probably don’t move as gently and aimlessly as the smoke that lingers from the burning tip of her cigarette. If von Trotta faced a central conundrum at the start of the film, it may have been how film can dramatize the act of thinking.

In Hannah Arendt, the production of thought is not merely suggested, narrated, described, alluded to, or textualized. It happens, many times throughout the film. We see HA thinking while lying down and smoking. We see her sitting against the window somewhere in upstate NY, thinking while smoking. More thinking while walking and, yes, smoking. Etc. The movies does not only thematize the thoughts a brave woman living in tumultuous times, produced; but the film also takes seriously the task of dramatizing the moments in which such thoughts are generated, produced, had. Thinking is engrossing and isolating and solitary, as a briefly appearing Martin Heidegger says in the film: “Thinking is a solitary endeavor.”

Solitary, yes, but never just abstract or immaterial. The universe of eidos in which Hannah the character —and at times also the film— resides is a richly sensuous world and constantly nears a textured existence that the ever shortening presence of the cigarette illustrates so eloquently. Just as the cigarette morphs into various material permutations, the thoughts of HA move from amorphous existence to intelligible and tactile presence on the manuscript.

On a final note, for now, is that the film is far from perfect, but no less worth the viewer’s time for that reason. J felt that the acting proved inconsistent. The actress who plays HA, Barbara Sukowa, is wonderful, but the acting of the secondary characters can be less nuanced and even jarring at times. In future posts I will include a closer analysis of the film’s aesthetic composition and camera use, but to close the present post, I would like to address briefly yet another angle of how the film tackles HA’s theory of the banality of evil.

J felt that, at least insofar as the way in which the film portrays the subject matter and its context, the banality of evil does not make explicit that many historical atrocities legitimate themselves through social mechanisms deeply entrenched in basic tribalism. For him, the banality of evil, a theory ever so abstract and universal, fails to explicate that social atrocities driven by racial, cultural, and religious causes, require that one group pits itself against the dehumanized or animalized other. While I concur with some parts of his objections, I disagree with the presupposition that for being too abstract and universal, the idea of the banality of evil fails to explain concretely how so-called collective evil deeds happen in history. Universality does inherently or structurally preclude, exclude or contradict, let alone negate, historical concreteness.