Here is her article Monday August 29, 2011 JB asks what did Arendt mean by the term “banality of evil”? JB takes up Arendt’s interpretation of the Eichmann trial. Butler insists that what Arendt meant by this statement was not intended to convey any notion that what the Nazis did was nothing to be noted, boring etc. On the contrary, the crimes of the holocaust is proof that what went on was a prohibition of thinking, a non-thinking instead of a thinking. Essentially JB is making the case for philosophy, for a new way of thinking, a critical thinking. JB states:
“If the “I” who thinks is part of a “we” and if the “I” who thinks is committed to sustaining that “we”, how do we understand the relation between “I” and “we” and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?”
Again this is touches upon the themes dear to JB’s theoretical project; that proper thinking implicates more than the individual, a thinking is necessarily ‘beyond the self’ addressing a wider community. This is what of course, Arendt points out that Eichmann’s failure.
JB also makes the point that Arendt’s critical defense of Kant’s philosophy against Eichmann’s attempted exploitation of it for his explanation for his actions, shows that Arendt was committed to bringing together the seeds of German classical philosophical thought and Jewish politics, “In many ways, Arendt’s approach is itself quite astonishing, since she is, among other things, trying to defend the relation between Jews and German philosophy against those who would find in German culture and thought the seeds of national socialism.”
From a May 2007 article on Arendt in LRB
“A polity requires the capacity to live with others precisely when there is no obvious mode of belonging. This is the vanquishing of self-love – the movement away from narcissism and nationalism – which forms the basis for a just politics that would oppose both nationalism and those forms of state violence that reproduce statelessness and its sufferings.”