Judgment in Extremis

Inspired by the Fiftieth Anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on a series of articles written for the New Yorker, was published in 1963. An account of the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, it was also a contribution to the early historiography and interpretation of the Holocaust. Above all, Arendt sought to respond to the problem of unprecedented crimes against humanity, and to offer a diagnosis of the dangers posed by the bureaucratic personality in modernity. A meeting point between philosophy and journalism, the text defined the voice, role and task of the public intellectual, and was a declaration of affiliations for a thinker in exile, addressing the legacies of the past from which her own theoretical preoccupations emerged. The gathering explores the legacy of Arendt’s essay: its status as exemplar for philosophical intervention in the world, its style of dealing with the unthinkable, and its relationship to ongoing controversies in historiography and jurisprudence.Judgment in Extremis, conference, ICI Berlin, 16–17 May 2013