19
no accident. On the contrary, the creation of such a being is part and parcel of the
totalitarian worldview. “No ideology which aims at the explanation of all historical
events of the past and at mapping out the course of all events of the future can bear the
unpredictability which springs from the fact that men are creative, that they can bring
forward something so new that nobody ever foresaw it.”
26
And, of course, just as Levi
suggests that the drowned embody “all the evil of our time,”
27
Arendt argues that “radical
evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally
superfluous.”
28
In this way, Arendt expands upon and enhances our understanding of many of the
themes Levi explores. However, on the crucial issue of what it means to be human she
conveys a kind of certainty that Levi willfully resists. It is perhaps the task of every
political philosopher to resolve in their own way the question of what it means to be
human. Arendt’s attempt is one of the most remarkable and, in part because she is so
attentive to violence, her claims often echo Levi’s concerns.
Yet the conviction with which Arendt proclaims that those who suffer and create
the Lager are no longer human is startling. What the Lager establishes is that “the psyche
can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man; that, indeed, psyche,
character, and individuality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only
through the rapidity or slowness with which they disintegrate.”
29
The Lager successfully
creates “inanimate men” whose “return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly
26
Origins, 458.
27
Survival, 90.
28
Origins, 459.
29
Origins, 441.
Convention