Reflections on the nobody in the work of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

In her work The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt asserts that totalitarian regimes have shown that it is possible to transform persons into superfluous beings, i.e., replaceable and disposable elements. In her late writings, like those in the compilation Responsibility and judgment, the thinker refers to the nobody, a human being who is no longer a person. Thus, although under different designations, the nobody appears at various points in her work. In this article I try to understand that figure, establishing counterpoints with the figure of the somebody, or the who, and with that of the ‘egoist’. Arendt herself does not use the term ‘egoist’, but I think that the distinction between him and the nobody helps to characterize the latter more clearly, as a typical phenomenon of mass society, especially of totalitarian regimes. I hope to show how the extreme figures of the nobody and the somebody and, at some point between the extremes, that of the egoist become useful not only to understand some experiences analyzed by Arendt, but also to think about ours.