Hannah Arendt

This chapter narrates the author's fascination with the intriguing and elusive face and image of Hannah Arendt—as well as her life story. Experience and world events transformed her inner and outer appearance, etching her life story on her face. Her life story was that of an intellectual Jewish woman who experienced the European turmoil of the 20th century and tried to understand the sources of human evil and violence. The author traced her portrait from a very young woman to her (...) old age. The source materials included unfamiliar photos of Arendt at different stages of her life. (shrink)

This article draws from Hannah Arendt's theory of "inter-est" to formulate a model of coalition discourse that can coarticulate difference and commonality and approach them as mutually nourishing conditions rather than as polarities. By disrupting the normative fantasies of unified, a priori subjectivity and universal truth, interest-based discourse facilitates political interactions that neither rely on sameness nor reify difference to the exclusion of connection.

: This article draws from Hannah Arendt's theory of "inter-est" to formulate a model of coalition discourse that can coarticulate difference and commonality and approach them as mutually nourishing conditions rather than as polarities. By disrupting the normative fantasies of unified, a priori subjectivity and universal truth, interest-based discourse facilitates political interactions that neither rely on sameness nor reify difference to the exclusion of connection.

O artigo investiga a concepção do poder em Hannah Arendt. O pano de fundo dessa reflexão, na autora, é o mal inerente às práticas de extermínio dos governos totalitários. A nossa exposição ressalta a dimensão constituinte do poder, na qual o poder está associado à capacidade de iniciar e de fundar ações com os outros. Nesse sentido, distancia-se da dimensão constituída do poder: Estado, governo e soberania. Em Arendt, poder diferencia-se de dominação. Os termos que compõem nossa abordagem são: mundo (...) comum, condição humana, ação, espaço público, desobediência civil e potência. (shrink)

Approaches the social question inside the rise of social realm in the modernity and the implications of that in the constitution and decadence of the public realm in contemporary world.Aborda a questão social no interior do surgimento da esfera social na modernidade e suas implicações na constituição e derrocada da esfera pública no mundo contemporâneo.

Aborda a questão social no interior do surgimento da esfera social na modernidade e suas implicações na constituição e derrocada da esfera pública no mundo contemporâneo.

Nossa intenção é explicitar a noção de juízo em Hannah Arendt, partindo da legitimidade como contexto de problematização e tomando a finitude humana como horizonte de tematização. Nosso principal argumento é o de que em Arendt o juízo é concebido como político e o gosto é o modelo do seu modus operandi. Essa concepção é fruto da recepção arendtiana da Terceira Crítica, a Crítica da Faculdade do Juízo, de Kant. Assim, a partir da ligação de juízo a gosto, apresentaremos as (...) seguintes dimensões do juízo: intersubjetiva, autônoma e compreensiva. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for bringing the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt into dialogue with respect to the links between power, subjectivity, and agency. Although one might assume that Foucault and Arendt come from such radically different philosophical starting points that such a dialogue would be impossible, I argue that there is actually a good deal of common ground to be found between these two thinkers. Moreover, I suggest that Foucault's and Arendt's divergent views about the role (...) that power plays in the constitution of subjectivity and agency should be seen as complementary rather than opposed. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, and (...) the Arendtian account of solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus, Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity politics feminist theory in good stead. (shrink)

If we understand Arendt’s work on totalitarianism as the beginning of her philosophizing, then we can better appreciate her concern with human nature and better judge her Existenz philosophy. Certifying Arendt as an existentialist allows those who would label her to recast her ideas into the language of modernity and thereby abolish the nature that stalks modem theorizing. Eliminating nature as a reckoning also obliterates history as an anchor and offers modems unlimited will for shaping the future. But Arendt is (...) decisively anti-modem in her formulation ofImagination, which she uses to connect men to the past, to the deeds and the speech that set limits to human action. Imagination allows her to break through the thought-systems that now substitute for a God who is no-more and for a rationalist potential that is not-yet. This in-between forms a space of existence for thinkers who want to be at home in the world. (shrink)

This paper has three purposes: first, to explicate the ex istential basis of Arendt's theory of action. This will be done by first tracing the intellectual derivation of Arendt's existentialism and the modifications she made to fit it in to her public realm. Second, I will demonstrate the con nection between Arendt's existentialism and her formula tion of political freedom. Third, I will illustrate throughout that Arendt's political ideas, if they are to be properly understood, must be subsumed under her (...) existentialism .\nPart I treats Arendt's effort to find a home for the in dividual Human Being by attacking the modern tendency to make freedom an inner domain of the mind and refuge from the outside world. We will see how she uses the ideas of Heidegger and Jaspers to counter the Being of Kant and the philosophy of Mill and Augustine. Part II demonstrates her effort to make freedom a world reality and counter to the forces of totalitarianism: the modern enchantment with totality and an inexorable history. She attacks the Will, consciousness, Being, and the historical process itself.\nFinding no suitable conceptualization of freedom which makes it political by giving it a public space, Arendt turns finally to Jaspers' communicative existentialism and Duns Scotus' emphasis on contingency. (shrink)

Despite Hannah Arendt’s scepticism about psychoanalysis, this essay shows the relevance of Freud’s psychoanalytic notions of love and sublimation for Arendt. In her rejection of a political relevance of love, Arendt does not take into consideration the libidinal aspects of collective bonds, nor does she give an account of the passionate aspect of being together despite the crucial role of amor mundi in her work. Following Freud, I demonstrate that love and sublimation are fundamental to worldliness, central to our understanding (...) of forgiveness and the making of promises, all of which is pivotal to understanding Hannah Arendt's political thought. In Freud’s writing love and sublimation expand knowledge and creativity and enable community building. By negotiating between Arendt’s and Freud’s writings on love and politics, this article demonstrates that sublimated love mediates between the private and public spheres. The ultimate question I ask concerns the relation between love of the world and its negation by radical evil. (shrink)

Many claim that Hannah Arendt’s political thought was developed through various stages, and that this development took place through various confrontations with topics such as ideology, totalitarianism and her concerns with the so-called “Jewish question”. Arendt’s political thought is usually characterized by an early emphasis on the priority of the political over that of the mind. In other words, her work is usually read as emphasizing the priority of the mode of living-with-others; action, over the solitary activity of thinking. This (...) ‘early’ emphasis on the priority of politics goes hand in hand with her rejection of all transcendent standards or truths in the sphere of politics. Arendt’s later writings, which were devoted mainly to the life of the mind, are usually read as a reversal of thought: a priority of thinking over action. Arendt’s alleged reversal of thought took place through her witnessing the trial of the war criminal Adolph Eichmann whose crime, Arendt suggested, sprang from the fact of thoughtlessness. Arendt’s new emphasis on the priority of thinking is supposedly something for which her early works made no provision. Almost contradicting everything she believed in before, Arendt’s new ‘political thinking’ allows the introduction of truth and transcendental standards into the political realm. I believe that the above interpretation does not do justice to Arendt’s political thought. To introduce the distinction between ‘early’ and ‘late’ into her works obscures above all the continuity of her thought. I believe that there is a unifying thread that runs through Arendt’s main works whether ‘early’ or ‘late.’ I call this unifying thread ‘political thinking.’ Careful analysis of Arendt’s ‘early’ thoughts on politics shows a considerable emphasis on the importance of thinking in relation to politics or action. It is this specific kind of thinking, political thinking, that does justice to both, the demands of the mind on one hand, and the demands of experience on the other. I explore the development of ‘political thinking’ in Arendt’s major writings beginning from her doctoral dissertation on Rahel Varnhagen to her final thoughts on The Life of the Mind. (shrink)

The Ethics of Uncertainty asks what it means to live, act, decide, and respond responsibly, in the aporia of freedom itself - a freedom which on one hand opens us to the open space of possible possibilities, and on the other, leaves us no stable ground or measure for pre/determined decision making. The aporia of freedom is conditioned by the indeterminate space of knowing we must make decisions, and yet, at the same time, we cannot call on an absolute authority (...) or measure as a guide. Aporias open us to freedom, the place where, as Derrida has taught us, an ethical decision may occur. Allowing indeterminacy to exist in our becoming allows a continuous coming to be with others - a becoming always open to the "to come" (Derrida) of the future. Always drawing us toward the possibility of making a decision within the fabric of indecision, aporias give us the possibility of ethical becoming. Overall, this text points us to the possibility of living an ethical life in a world without absolute measure - an ethics, in other words, of uncertainty. (shrink)

The paper highlights the importance of the kantian sources of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy. The peculiar way Arendt confronts Kant is not only a significant manifestation of a critical detachment from her former mentor Martin Heidegger and, more in general, from every attempt to restore some kind of ontology as a necessary theoretical frame for political thought. Arendt’s subscription of a kantian cosmopolitical approach supports her critical attitude towards Modernity as well, in terms that cannot be fully grasped by an over-simplified (...) reading of the famous modern alienation from the world’s thesis. (shrink)

This essay retraces the implications tied to the question of life in a ‘disenchanted’ world by analysing some features of the bioethical and philosophical-political debate. The author discusses the dicothomy between sanctity-of-life and quality-of-life doctrines, in order to show that the opposition between the two perspectives is not altogether convincing. Seen in the light of the metamorphosis of the notion of life , this opposition proves to be the superficial manifestation of a deeper issue, which amounts to social reproduction’s imperatives.

The Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust has granted permission to Social Research to publish for the first time a lecture given by Arendt in 1953, the provenance of which is her so-called Marx manuscripts. The lecture here entitled "The Great Tradition" has been divided into two parts, the first of which, subtitled "Law and Power," appears in the current issue, and the second, subtitled "Ruling and Being Ruled," will appear in the next issue. The Marx manuscripts, as they go on, (...) have less and less to do with Karl Marx, but even when, as here, he is not named or his thought directly addressed, he remains, in one important respect, in the background. In the first part of "The Great Tradition" the relation between law and power, and in the second part the conception of government as ruling and being ruled, are analyzed by Arendt as fundamental elements in the tradition of political thought; what the reader needs to be aware of , is that the lasting importance of Marx to Arendt is his having brought the tradition to its end by returning it to its beginning. The tradition began when Plato replaced action with philosophy, and ended when Marx transformed philosophy into action. In both its beginning and its end—and this is why Marx himself remains within the tradition—the pre-philosophic and perhaps antiphilosophic experience of freedom in action, Arendt's primary political concern, is missing. (shrink)

Each of the books that Hannah Arendt published in her lifetime was unique, and to this day each continues to provoke fresh thought and interpretations. This was never more true than for Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she first used the phrase “the banality of evil.” Her consternation over how a man who was neither a monster nor a demon could nevertheless be an agent of the most extreme evil evoked derision, outrage, and (...) misunderstanding. The firestorm of controversy prompted Arendt to readdress fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt’s life, as she struggled to explicate the meaning of Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the heart of this book is a profound ethical investigation, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy”; in it Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral “truths” as standards to judge what we are capable of doing, and she examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil and right from wrong. We see how Arendt comes to understand that alongside the radical evil she had addressed in earlier analyses of totalitarianism, there exists a more pernicious evil, independent of political ideology, whose execution is limitless when the perpetrator feels no remorse and can forget his acts as soon as they are committed. Responsibility and Judgment is an essential work for understanding Arendt’s conception of morality; it is also an indispensable investigation into some of the most troubling and important issues of our time. (shrink)

Although Hannah Arendt is considered one of the major contributors to social and political thought in the twentieth century, this is the first general anthology ...