Eros und Freundschaft: Notes on the Hannah Arendt-Martin Heidegger-Walter Benjamin Triangle

Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

 

 

I.

 

At a 6/20 talk the other day on Walter Benjamin [1], some clever clogs in the audience posed the following thought experiment:

Imagine that Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin were both hanging perilously from a cliff edge and she could save the life of only one man; whose hand would Hannah Arendt reach for? 

 

This raised a few knowing laughs in the room, but it is, as a matter of fact, a perfectly serious question; one which obliges us to ponder where her ultimate loyalty lay: to her lover, or to a friend to whose cousin she was married?

 

Without guaranteeing that we'll arrive at a definitive answer, I thought it might be instructive nevertheless to examine the relationships between these three fascinating figures ...

 

 

II. 

 

Let's begin with a few remarks on the woman at the centre of this philosophical threesome and her relationship with Heidegger, who was not only a married man seventeen years her senior, but also her university tutor.

 

Born in Germany in 1906, Hannah was a pretty and brilliantly precocious Jewish child raised in a secular and progressive family, mostly by her mother, Martha (her father having died from syphilis when she was just seven years old) along strict Goethean lines.

 

Fiercely independent, Hannah studied classical literature and founded a philosophy circle whilst still at school, having read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason before her fourteenth birthday. After completing her secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under newly appointed professor Heidegger, with whom she formed a romantic as well as a close intellectual relationship exchanging love letters and philosophical ideas.

 

Indeed, despite everything that was to happen, Heidegger remained one of the most profound influences on her own work and Arendt continued to acknowledge him as the secret king ruling over the realm of thought (just as he would later confess that she had been the inspiration for his work on thinking as a form of passion) [2]. 

 

They remaind friends until his death in 1976. 

 

III.   

 

In September 1929, Arendt married Günther Siegmund Stern (aka Günther Anders), who, like her, had been a student of Heidegger's (they had first met in 1925, although she took little notice of him at the time). 

 

As mentioned, he also happened to be Benjamin's cousin and, during Arendt's exile in Paris from Hitler's Germany during the 1930s, she and Benjamin became close friends (but not, as far as I'm aware, lovers).  

 

Walter Benjamin is something of an odd duck: as Arendt recognised in the long introduction she wrote in 1955 to a collection of essays by Benjamin known in English as Illuminations [3]. 

 

In this text, she attempts to explain Benjamin's fate as a posthumous individual - i.e. one who, as Nietzsche says, only comes into their own after they die - by referencing his incomparable genius and the fact that this made it difficult to classify his writing. 

 

Not quite this and not quite that, Benjamin was someone who thought both poetically and philosophically, but without being either a poet or a philosopher. 

 

But Benjamin was also, according to Arendt, cursed with bad luck; he himself used to speak of the 'little hunchback' [bucklicht Männlein] who bedeviled him from earliest childhood and caused him to appear as a bit of a bungler (or what our American friends refer to as a screw-up). 

 

Who knows, perhaps this was one of the things Arendt found so attractive about him; hugely gifted, but, like Proust, unable to change a lightbulb, let alone the circumstances of his life; even when the latter threatened to crush him. Some women love winners; some women love losers.           

 

At any rate, Arendt and Benjamin - shared a certain vision of modernity (and, indeed, an angelic concept of history) and they loved to converse and exchange ideas, or play chess together. She admired the older man's "gestures and the way he held his head when listening and talking; the way he moved, his manners, but especially his style of speaking, down to his choice of words and the shape of his syntax; finally, his downright idiosyncratic tastes" [4]. 

 

But did she care for Benjamin (her friend) with the same intensity and devotion with which she cared for Heidegger (her former lover)? 

 

I doubt it. 

 

In fact, I doubt she even cared for her husband with the same passion (whom she divorced in 1937) and it's arguable that what she liked about the cousins was that they each reminded her in some way of Heidegger (whom Benjamin always regarded as his nemesis) [5]. 

 

Thus, despite the 6/20 speaker, Anja Steinbauer, expressing her hope that it would be Benjamin's hand Arendt would grab in the imaginary clifftop scenario set out above, I strongly suspect it would in fact be the latter's. 

 

Notes

 

[1] The paper, by Dr. Anja Steinbauer on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (1927-1940), was given at the 6/20 Club (London) on Sunday 20 October, 2024, hosted (as always) by Christian Michel, a French polymath who has graciously organised twice-monthly events at his west London home for twenty-odd years, during which time an impressive assortment of speakers have presented papers on a huge number of topics.  

 

[2] As might be imagined, Arendt faced a good deal of criticism for her continued admiration of Heidegger due to his involvement with (and support for) the Nazi Party after his election as rector at Freiburg University in 1933. But good on her, I say; isn't this evidence that love ultimately triumphs over ideology?

      For Arendt's description of Heidegger as the hidden king, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), p. 44. It was this work that first revealed their love affair, although it wasn't until 1995 that Elżbieta Ettinger published her controversial work on the relationship having gained access to their correspondence. 

      In 1998, all the letters between Hannah and Heidegger were finally published. See the English translation by Andrew Shields; Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters, 1925-1975, ed. Ursula Ludz (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004).

 

[3] Originally published in German as Schriften, this collection of essays, edited by Arendt, was translated into English by Harry Zorn and published as Illuminations by Jonathan Cape in 1970. 

 

[4] Hannah Arendt, Introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (The Bodley Head, 2015), pp. 24-25. 

 

[5] See Andrew Benjamin and Dimitris Vardoulakis (eds.), Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (SUNY Press, 2015), a collection of essays which considers points of affinity and friction between these two thinkers. 

      It's interesting that, despite being contemporaries, neither man directly engaged with the work of the other, even though Arendt was keen to point out that Benjamin actually shared more common philosophical ground with Heidegger than he did with his Marxist friends; see her introduction to Illuminations, p. 50.

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part Three)

Cover of the Portuguese edition 

(Relógio D'Água, 2022) [a]

 

 

I.

The ethics of inactivity rests, according to Byung-Chul Han, on timidity. For it is timidity which increases our attentiveness (our ability to listen) to others and to the world. 

 

I'm not sure about this, however, and wonder if the German word Scheu might better have been translated as shy. For shyness, it seems to me, is not quite the same as timidity; it lacks the nervousness or fearful aspect of the latter and is more about instinctive reserve [b].

 

But maybe I'm mistaken: I'll leave it to any passing etymologists to decide the matter ...  

 

 

II.

 

"The root of the current crisis is the disintegration of everything that gives life meaning and orientation. Life is no longer borne by anything that supports it, and that we can support." [48]

 

In other words - words first uttered by a madman 150 years ago - God is dead. One might have hoped that we'd moved on from here and realised that nihilism needn't be dressed in the gloomy dark colours of the late 19th-century. Personally, the last thing I want to do is give life meaning and point it in the right direction. 

 

Nor am I interested in ideas of immortality and the imperishable - when Han uses these words I think of D. H. Lawrence mocking those who desire to witness the unfading flowers of heaven [c]. 

 

I'm sorry, but I like the impermanence of things and the fact that all things pass. What Han calls temporal structures - annual rituals and festivals - may provide the passage of time with a certain architecture or narrative, but they don't, thankfully, make time stand still. I'm all for preserving the rhythym of life and allowing being to linger, but that doesn't mean stopping the clocks.    

 

Nor do I want incontrovertible truths - even if they are said to make happy (there's more to life than happiness and there's also more than one type of happiness). And I'm sick of being weighed down by powerful symbols. 

 

The latter may very well influence our behaviour and thinking "at the pre-reflexive, emotional, aesthetic level" [50] - and symbols may be excellent at creating the shared experience that enables the formation of a socially cohesive community - but that doesn't always result in compassion, does it? Just ask those who lived under the swastika, or hammer and sickle.      

 

"A community is a symbolically mediated totality." [51] That's Han. But it could be Heidegger. Or might be Hitler. And if my failure to long for a "wholesome, healing totality" [51] makes me a splinter or fragment lacking in being, that's fine. Liberal society has many downsides - it isolates the individual and forces them to compete - but living in some kind of people's community that promises fullness of being and salvation is not something I desire.  

 

Although, having said that, I do understand the attraction of what Lawrence terms a democracy of touch [d] and I suspect that's the sort of community Han is thinking of when he talks about creating ties between people invested with libidinal energy (though I'm not sure that Eros is the answer to everything).  

 

 

III.

 

Having got roughly half way into (and thus also half way out of) Han's book, let us remind ourselves of his central argument: "the highest happiness is owed to contemplation" [53] - not action. It's an argument we can trace all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. 

 

Ultimately, we act in the world so that we might one day be afforded the time to sit and wonder at the world. Being free to gaze in silence and stillness is the reward for all our efforts. If, as Heidegger says, Denken ist Danken, then to gaze in awe with eyes opened by love is also to express gratitude - and, more, to give praise:   

 

"The ultimate purpose of language is praise. Praise gives language a festive radiance. Praise restores being; it sings about and invokes the fullness of being." [55]  

 

To which we can only add: Hallelujah! - and quickly turn the page ...

 

What Han basically wants is to have at least one day of holy inactivity per week: to reinstate the idea of the Sabbath in which time is suspended and man is released "from the transient world into the world to come" [60]. 

 

I've no objection to that (even if I remember keenly the boredom I felt as a child each and every Sunday). But I do tire of his religious language (as I do when listening to Jordan Peterson, for example).

 

 

IV.

 

Han spends a good deal of time in the chapter entitled 'The Pathos of Action' critiquing Hannah Arendt's political thinking. But that wasn't what interested me. Rather, it was the material on Socrates and his daimon that caught my attention ...

 

It seems that the latter does not encourage Socrates to speak, rather it prevents him from acting, as he makes clear in this passage from the Apology:

   

"Perhaps it may seem strange that I go about and interfere in other people's affairs [...] but do not venture to come before your assembly and advise the state. But the reason for this [...] is that something divine and spiritual comes to me [...] a sort of voice [...] and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward." [e]

 

This strikes a chord with me because I also have a daimon of non-commitment holding me back in this manner; one who persuades me to turn away from every door that is opened and decline to accept any opportunity offered. People think it's perversity on my part - or a lack of self-confidence combined with a lack of ambition - but it's not; it's this mysterious demon which Han terms the genius of inactivity.  

 

According to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben - quoted here by Han - this demon is both what is closest to us and what is most impersonal about us; that which is beyond ego and individual consciousness; that which shatters the conceit that we are fully in control and free-willing; that which "'prevents us from enclosing ourselves within a substantial identity'" [79][f].  

 

Han follows this up with the following fascinating passage:

 

"The properties that make us someone are not genialis; that is, they do not accord with the genius. We meet with the genius when we cast off our properties, the mask we wear on the acting stage. The genius reveals the propertyless face that lies behind the mask." [79]

 

This countenance without properties is what we might also call the faceless face; or perhaps even (borrowing a term from Deleuze and Guattari) the probe-head [g]. To be inspired, says Han, is to lose face and cease being someone "encapsulated in an ego" [79]; i.e., to be enthused is to become self-detached. 

 

However, as Larry David teaches, it's vital to curb enthusiasm. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, caution is the golden rule when dismantling the face and/or building a body without organs; "you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality" [h].

 

This, arguably, is the most important - and most often overlooked - point in A Thousand Plateaus.  

 

V.

 

The crisis of religion, says Han, is a crisis of attention: "It is the soul's hyperactivity that accounts for the demise of religious experience" [86-87] - and, indeed, the destruction of the natural world. 

 

I don't agree with Han that a Romantic [i] and religious understanding of the world is necessary, but it might help to just slow down a bit and appreciate not just one another, not just birds, beasts and flowers, but even inanimate objects (each one of which vibrates and radiates at the centre of its own paradise). 

 

This doesn't mean uniting with the infinity of nature, it means rather living cheerfully in the material realm on a flat ontological surface, or what Lawrence calls (after Whitman) the Open Road. The goal is not a community of the living, but a democracy of objects wherein all things can interact in a vaguely friendly manner but outside of any transcendent system of meaning.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Although this is the cover of the Portuguese edition - featuring some of Cézanne's nude bathers - please note that page numbers given in this post refer to the English translation of Byung-Chul Han's work by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024), entitled Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity.

 

[b] I have written in praise of shyness in a post published on 27 May 2014: click here.

 

[c] Referring to the kingdom of heaven established after the material universe is destroyed, Lawrence writes: "How beastly their new Jerusalem, where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness. How terribly bourgeois to have unfading flowers!" 

      See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 144.

 

[d] See Stephen Alexander, 'Towards a Democracy of Touch', chapter 13 of Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 262-275, wherein I examine and develop Lawrence's idea introduced in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). There are also several posts published on Torpedo the Ark that discuss the idea: click here for example.

 

[e] Plato Apology, trans. Harold North Fowler, (The Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 115. Han quotes this section (31 c-d) from a different edition; Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, (Hackett Publishing Co., 1997).

 

[f] Han is quoting Giorgio Agamben writing in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, (Zone Books, 2007), p. 12. 

 

[g] According to Deleuze and Guattari, beyond the face "lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of probe-heads [...]"

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 190.

 

[h] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 160.

 

[i] Han seems to see himself as a disciple of Novalis, the 18th-century German poet, novelist, philosopher, and mystic. He certainly subscribes to a similar model of Romanticism, writing, for example, that the Romantic idea of freedom is a corrective to our liberal-bourgeois notion of individual freedom, just as the Romantic conception of nature "provides an effective corrective to our instrumental understanding of nature" [92]. 

      He also argues that to Romanticise the world is to give it back "its magic, its mystery, even its dignity" [94] and that it is a mistake to describe "the Romantic longing for a connection with the whole" [96] as reactionary or regressive. It is, rather, a fundamental human longing. Obviously, I don't share Han's Romantic idealism or fervour and don't think I want to live in a promiscuous future world in which things don't only touch but permeate each other and there are no boundaries.     

 

 

To read part one of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here. 

 

To read part two of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here. 

 

Reflections on The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1: From Neuronal Power to Vita Activa)

Stanford University Press (2015)

 

 

I. 

 

Many years ago, I wrote a short novel that dealt with existential themes of boredom, fatigue, world-weariness, etc. It was called Exhaustion and the first line read:  'Ours is essentially a fagged-out age, so ... Oh fuck it, who cares? I can't be bothered to write any more.' 

 

As a matter of fact, that was also the last line.    

 

Anyway, this is only coincidently relevant to Byung-Chul Han's essay The Burnout Society [a] and it's his work which I would like to discuss here ... 

II.

 

Neuronal Power

 

"Every age has its signature afflictions." [1] 

 

That's a great opening line, I think. Unfortunately, what follows now seems amusingly naive and dated: 

 

"Despite fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind. From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons." [1]

 

I suppose, writing in 2010, Han wasn't to know what 2019 would bring; although some might say that as a theorist and commentator who draws on literature, philosophy, and both the social and natural sciences, it's his job to anticipate possibilities in the foreseeable future and not just rehash ideas from the past.

 

That seems a bit harsh, however, so let's just overlook the above and concede that neurological conditions - including depression, personality disorder, and burnout syndrome - also play a significant role in life today. 

 

These are not viral infections, but infarctions, says Han, that result from "an excess of positivity" [1]. He continues: "The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts."

 

We have, if you like, been sent mad with fatigue by our own 24/7 lifestyles (lived increasingly online), in which all Otherness is exorcised. And because Otherness is disappearing, "we live in a time that is poor in negativity" [4] - even if rich in difference (the form by which the Same likes to disguise itself).    

Beyond Disciplinary Society

Like Baudrillard, Han wants us to forget Foucault - or, at any rate, agree that today's society is no longer the one that Foucault described fifty-years ago. The prisons, asylums, and workhouses, of old have been replaced by fitness studios, fast-food outlets, and shopping malls:

 

"Twenty-first century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also its inhabitants are no longer 'obedience-subjects' but 'achievement-subjects'. They are entrepreneurs of themselves." [8]    

Foucault's theory of power simply cannot account for how things are now, says Han. 

 

However, whilst I agree that the world has changed, it's simply mistaken to say that Foucault's cratology is tied to a negative (or repressive) model of power; the power to prohibit and say No. Foucault explicitly rejects this model and challenges traditional representations in which power is characterised in an exclusively restrictive manner; "poor in resources, sparing of its methods, monotonous in the tactics it utilizes, incapable of invention, and seemingly doomed always to repeat itself" [b]. 

 

Contrary to the above, Foucault offers us a gay, energy-based model of power outside of accepted values and beyond the "negative and emaciated form of prohibition" [c]. This model allows power to produce things - including forms of knowledge - as well as induce pleasures. And so, it explains very well why - as Han later notes - despite there being a paradigm shift from disciplinary society to achievement society, there has been a level of continuity and no real break exists between the modal verbs Should and Can. 

 

In other words, achievement society still has the same network of power running through it as disciplinary society. It's just that whereas the latter required our obedience to authority, the former requires us to show some initiative and be self-motivated and self-expressive - and, above all, achieve - to the point of exhaustion and depression [d].   

 

The contemporary subject is voluntarily self-exploitative; the perfect worker, determined to have a nice day and always wear that happy face (until the crack-up and break down comes due to excessive positivity and compulsive freedom).  

 

 

Profound Boredom

 

"Excessive positivity also expresses iself as an excess of stimuli, information, and impulses. It radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered." [12]

 

Perhaps this is why Han chooses to publish his work in essay form and to favour short sentences; he's making a somewhat patronising assumption about his reader's ability to concentrate and follow complex arguments at length. 

 

Of course, he might have a point: I know that my own ability to think has flattened over recent years, even as it has broadened and, indeed, accelerated. For Han, this shows regression to animality. For wild animals, he says, are "incapable of contemplative immersion" [12]; they are always alert to what's going on around them and easily distracted [e].               

  

For Han, human regression of this nature is a bad thing. Why? Because we owe the cultural achievements of humanity "to deep, contemplative attention" [13]. Scatty individuals may by good at multitasking and playing video games (not things Han approves of), but they'll never produce great works of art or philosophy. Having a low boredom threshold, makes one incapable of "the profound idleness that benefits the creative process" [13].

Unfortunately, this simply sounds like bourgeois snobbery (even when you call upon Walter Benjamin and Nietzsche for support).

And so, whilst I can certainly see the attractions of the vita contemplativa, I'm not going to knock those for whom such a life would be intolerable, nor denigrate the cognitive abilities (and dancing skills) of animals.      

 

 

Vita Activa

 

One philosopher who wasn't prepared to simply dismiss the via activa as mere restless stupidity, was Hannah Arendt [f]. Particularly if action results in the birth of something new. 

 

Unfortunately, Arendt thinks that modern society - as a society of perfected slavery - "nullifies any possibility for action when it degrades the human being into an animal laborans, a beast of burden" [17], subsumed within the herd. 

 

Byung-Chul Han doesn't buy into this argument, however, and doesn't think Arendt has much to tell us about today's world:

"Arendt's descriptions of the modern animal laborans do not correspond to what we can observe in today's achievement society. The late-modern animal laborans does not give up its individuality or ego in order to merge, through the work it performs, with the anonymous life of the species. Rather, contemporary labour society [...] fosters individuality ... The late-modern animal laborans is equipped with an ego just short of bursting. And it is anything but passive [...] It is hyperactive and hyperneurotic." [17-18]  

 

I suppose that's why Frank Costanza's cry of Serenity now! continues to resonate so powerfully; we all desire a little peace and quiet in our lives [g]. And that perhaps requires learning how to live a little more slowly; Han argues that everything seems sped up and transient today:   

 

"The general denarrativization of the world [following the death of God] is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness. It makes life bare." [18]

 

Indeed, it makes life so bare, that it's even barer "than the life of homo sacer" [18] [h] - which is really bare! Almost unbearable in its bareness: and yet we seek to preserve ourselves and keep going as long as possible. Han says we are like the Muselmänner, "albeit well fed and probably obese" [19]. 

 

An unpleasant remark on which to close the first part of this post, but Byung-Chul said it, not me ...

Notes

 

[a] I'm reading the English translation by Erik Butler, published by Stanford University Press in 2015, and all page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

      The original German work, entitled Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, was published in Berlin by Matthes & Seitz Verlag, in 2010. Readers will note that the title literally translates as 'Fatigue Society', but I suppose the term burnout - coined in 1970 by the German-born American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger - has greater contemporary resonance. Freudenberger defined burnout as a state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by overwork amongst professionals. See his book Burn Out: The High Cost of High Achievement (1980). 

 

[b] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998), p. 85.

 

[c] Ibid., p. 86.

 

[d] It should be noted that unlike French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, Han doesn't think that depression is simply the pathological expression of an individual's failure to become themselves. He also thinks that it also arises from a lack of attachment [Bindungsarmut] to others within an increasingly fragmented and atomised society: 

      "Ehrenberg lends no attention to this aspect of depression. He also overlooks the systemic violence inhabiting achievement society, which provokes psychic infarctions. It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhausted self so much as the exhausted, burnt-out soul. According to Ehrenberg, depression spreads when the commandments and prohibitions of disciplinary society yield to self-responsibility and initiative. In reality, it is not the excess of responsibility and initiative that makes one sick, but the imperative to achieve: the new commandment of late-modern labour society." [10]

      To be fair, I've not read Ehrenberg's work, so can't say if Han's criticism is justified. Readers who wish to make up their own minds should see The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, trans. Enrico Caouette et al, (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010).   

[e] I'm not sure about this. It's true, perhaps, that monkey's don't meditate, but I've watched my cat sit for hours staring at the same spot having heard a sound that suggests to her the presence of a small rodent and it seems to me that this might legitimately be described as a form of contemplative immersion. One suspects that Han is guilty of anthropocentric conceit to suggest otherwise and it's worth noting that later in this chapter he writes: "Only human beings can dance" [14], which seems palpably untrue. However, it's also worth noting that - somewhat paradoxically - in the chapter Vita Activa Han refers to the serenity [Gelassenheit] of animals [18], which, he argues, man has lost. 

[f] See The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998). This work was first published in 1958, so the fact that parts of its sociological analysis are dated is hardly surprising. 

 

[g] I have written on this desire for serenity in an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

[h] Homo sacer, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, refers to an accursed figure, excluded from society because of some trespass, whom any citizen may kill without incurring punishment. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben developed the term within his work, using it to stand for an absolutely expendable life (such as the life of a Jewish inmate in a Nazi concentration camp, for example). See Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford University Press, 1998). 

 

 

To read part two of this post on The Burnout Society, click here. 

The Case of Leopold and Loeb

The shocking case of Leopold and Loeb continues to haunt the cultural (and criminal) imagination - not least of all when one has just re-watched Hitchcock's 1948 film, Rope, which was an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's 1929 play of the same title, inspired by their sorry tale.
    
For those unfamiliar with the case, the salient facts are these: Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were highly gifted students at the University of Chicago, from extremely privileged backgrounds. In an attempt to demonstrate their intellectual and moral superiority, they set out to commit the perfect crime. This involved the kidnap and murder of fourteen year-old Bobby Franks in May 1924. 

Leopold, born in 1904, was the son of a wealthy Jewish family who had emigrated from Germany. A child prodigy with an outrageous IQ who spoke several languages fluently, he had by the time of the murder already completed his undergraduate degree at Chicago with honours and was planning to study law at Harvard. His partner in crime - and lover - Richard Loeb, born in 1905, was also exceptionally bright. Despite this, he was regarded by his tutors as lazy and overly interested in pulp fiction. 

Although the two boys knew each other whilst growing up in the same affluent neighbourhood, their relationship only really blossomed at the University of Chicago; particularly after discovering that they shared a mutual love of crime stories and an interest in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Leopold was particularly fascinated by the latter's concept of the Übermensch and imagined himself as someone destined to pass beyond good and evil. In a letter to Loeb, he wrote that superior individuals are, on account of certain inherent qualities, exempted from the laws which govern the lives of ordinary men.

Putting theory into practice, the two friends engaged in a series of petty crimes in order to demonstrate their contempt for and rejection of bourgeois society. Emboldened by their success at evading capture, they progressed to ever more serious acts, including arson. Disappointed, however, with the lack of media coverage they felt their crimes deserved, they decided to up the stakes in order to capture public attention and confirm their status as superior individuals: thus the killing of Bobby Franks, a second cousin of Loeb's described by Leopold as a 'cocky little son of a bitch'.

Unfortunately, the so-called crime of the century was solved by police in just a matter of days. Leopold and Loeb were arrested and both confessed during interrogation (although each blamed the other for delivering the fatal blows to the head of the young victim with a chisel). Both men also declared that they were motivated by a sense of philosophical investigation; this was murder as an intellectual exercise or moral-aesthetic experiment - as justifiable, said Leopold to his lawyer, as the killing of a beetle by an entomologist.

At the end of their month long trial, both were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, plus an additional 99 years for the kidnapping. The two maintained their intimate relationship behind bars until Loeb was brutally slashed with a razor in the showers by another inmate, James Day, in January 1936. Although taken directly to the prison hospital, his life couldn't be saved. Leopold was allowed to wash his friend's body as a final act of affection.     

Following this incident, Leopold went on to become a model prisoner and he made many significant contributions to improving conditions at Stateville Penitentiary before his release in 1958. He then went on to become a model citizen, working in healthcare and social services and studying bird-life as he searched for a halo in Puerto Rico. He died in 1971, aged 66.

The Franks murder has since inspired many works of fiction, film, and theatre. I think what really interests about the case of Leopold and Loeb is also what most depresses: when you strip away the lavender trappings and philosophical pretension all you are left with is a rather squalid act that demonstrates what Hannah Arendt famously termed the banality of evil. In other words, for all the sensational and transgressive aspects of murder, it results finally in a feeling of numbness and terminal boredom.

One might have hoped and expected something else, something more, from such gifted young men. Why do so many self-confessed Nietzscheans disappoint?