Thinking for oneself: Realism and defiance in Arendt (Hannah Arendt)

Terada's paper proposes that the emotions reside at the heart of the rational by exploring the way feeling and thinking overlap in Arendt's reading of Eichmann. Both Arendt and Eichmann rely on thinking at the expense of thinking through feeling, Eichmann because he refused to think through the implications of Nazi horror in terms of his own emotional state and Arendt because her euphoric delight in understanding Eichmann's imaginative world privileges her own thought patterns as against emotionally-driven action. Terada is clear that there is a difference between disavowal (Eichmann) and defiance (Arendt), but more broadly suggests that feeling is only ever identified through the act of thinking, even as feeling depends on the nature of thought.