Resumo

BARAJAS CHAVEZ, Roberto. Wieder and Eichmann. Two Comments on the Banality of Evil in Roberto Bolaño and Hannah Arendt. Rev. filos. Univ. Iberoam. [online]. 2022, vol.54, n.153, pp.76-97.  Epub 17-Maio-2024. ISSN 2954-4602.  https://doi.org/10.48102/rdf.v54i153.141.

The text presents a comparative study based on Hannah Arendt’s theory called “the banality of evil”, considering two characters defined, one by literature and the other by moral philosophy. On the one hand, the character of the poet and Air Force pilot in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Carlos Wieder, who appears in the novel Estrella distante, 1996, by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, and on the other, the political conflict that generated the criminal trial to the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, after his capture in a suburb of the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1960. In this way, I will set a dialogue between both characters; a literature based on historical and fictitious events, and the criticism made by the German philosopher Hannah Arendt based on hints of Political Philosophy and moral to the accused, for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes during the Nazi regime in World War II. Reflections made by the philosopher, once she is invited to make a “factual account” about the case, for the American magazine The New Yorker during the trial period, and of which she would later publish the text: Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil, in 1963.

Palavras-chave : Literature; politic; art; poetry; dictatorship; moral; categorical imperative.