Obedience, Control and Docile Subjects Production. Reflections on the Banality and the Normality of Evil

Obedience as a production of subjectivity regime makes the external instances of control supplemented with porous forms in the configuration of docile subjects. We attempt to analyze the relation between obedience and these new forms of control by showing that perhaps the most pressing problem in politics today is no longer disobedi-ence, as modern political philosophy feared, but rather blind obedience. In this sense, we consider that the Arendtian thesis of the banality of evil allows us to understand that total control and obedience do not necessarily require terror and iron institutions –whose max-imum exponent would be the concentration and extermination camps. Conformism and docility operate as equally harmful control mechanisms that spread in democratic societies. We will thus carry out a rereading of the banality of evil tending to show that it constitutes a widespread political phenomenon that transcends totalitarian regimes, penetrating the contemporary world from the second half of the 20th century until to our present.