Loneliness as the main experience of Totalitarianism in Hannah Arendt's thinking

Abstract

In Arendtian thinking, the experience of loneliness is one of the most radical ways of moving away the human being from its own humanity. According to Arendt, there are ways that may point out and lead to loneliness, ways that must be watched over and avoided. She understands that such a radical experience reaches its summit in the context of Totalitarianism, especially in regards to concentration camps. Thus, loneliness becomes structural and is continually manufactured inside the totalitarian context. Being one experience where is lost to the world, to others, and to themselves, loneliness as used by the totalitarian regime as an anticipation to final annihilation, where one becomes merely a vital cluster, non-living, without any expression of the being, until nothing is left but decimation in the camps.