Journey into the banality of evil. Thus Hannah Arendt embodied pure thought

“Hannah Arendt is considered today the most significant philosopher of the twentieth century.” With this irrefutable assertion, the essay of Donatella Di Cesare accompanying Arendt’s short intense 1943 paper We refugees, now re-proposed with Einaudi. It is definitely the right time to return to reflect on the great theme it faces: who they are, what the homeless represent who – today as yesterday – flee from unsustainable situations, made up of misery, wars, persecutions, violence, and who seek refuge elsewhere, seeing themselves more often than not rejected or isolated in non-places, unlivable transit stations, deprived of all rights except to survive. Uncomfortable and poorly tolerated ghosts, first of all relegated to a plural that cancels their personality, individual events, feelings, intelligence, pain. An anonymous plural that makes the rejection easier for those who could welcome them and instead removes them from their own concerns as from their own territory with hatred or just carelessness.