Auschwitz is the maximum demonstration of the fact that one can live without thinking (thinking is here, according to Arendt, meant as being different from knowledge or from carrying out rational activities. Auschwitz is in fact the product of an extreme and lucid rationality, of the application of clear and robust knowledge): i.e. nullifying every capacity or symbolic awareness and every appeal to an aptitude for symbolization. All this is accompanied by the fact that in the Third Reich the use of perverted symbols (emptied, produced ad hoc) is pervasive and catastrophic.
Lecture by Matteo Cavalleri, “A monument to the possible”, Research week, 30.10.2010
Perhaps Auschwitz is the place in history around which the maximum of loss – the absolute and irremediable – of this capacity and awareness occurred. But it is sufficient to think of the totalitarian regimes which came afterwards, up until the democratic populism of today, to verify mechanisms of the same dynamic. It’s sufficient to think of the practice of beating, of annihilating an immigrant or someone “DIFFERENT” (which being without symbolic awareness I don’t recognize) justified simply because “I felt like it” or “I was bored”.
Lecture by Matteo Cavalleri, “A monument to the possible”, Research week, 30.10.2010