Incidents of Life as Orientations: On Thought, Experience, and the Banality of Evil

Abstract

This article revisits Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil by situating it within the contemporary digital condition and its transnational infrastructures of governance. In an era shaped by automated systems that operate across political, cultural, and territorial borders, the question of responsibility can no longer be addressed within the framework of bounded communities or national public spheres alone.

Departing from Arendt’s understanding of thinking as interruption, judgment, and world-building, the article argues that what is at stake today marks the disappearance of the world itself, rather than merely an erosion of morality—the collapse of the space of appearance in which action, responsibility, and plurality can take place across shared political spaces.

Through a dialogue with Arendt, Katerina Kolozova, and Ernst Bloch, the text examines how automation and algorithmic rationality radicalize the logic of thoughtlessness by rendering thinking structurally unnecessary. The continuity between totalitarian administration and contemporary digital governance is traced not through ideology, but through forms of functional coordination that displace judgment and accountability.

Against this background, the article conceptualizes thinking as a fragile political practice capable of reopening a shared world precisely where collaborations, translations, and responsibilities must take place beyond established borders. Thinking, in this sense, becomes the minimal condition for political cooperation, judgment, and amor mundi in an age of seamless systems and automated perception.