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Amor Mundi 2/15/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The New York Times this week ran an important series of five articles (and a summary) on the increasing use of shell corporations in high-end real estate. The shell corporations and other practices allow political criminals and international businessmen to avoid taxes and launder money. The practice has accelerated swiftly: "In 2003, one-third of the units sold in Time Warner were purchased by shell companies. By 2014, that figure was over 80 percent." Now "nearly half of the most expensive residential properties in the United States are purchased anonymously through shell companies." These shell corporations are complex: It took the NY Times over one year to "unravel the ownership of shell companies with condos in the Time Warner Center, by searching business and court records from more than 20 countries, interviewing dozens of people with close knowledge of the complex, examining hundreds of property records and connecting the dots from lawyers or relatives named on deeds to the actual buyers." Aside from facilitating money laundering and tax evasion, the turn towards complex anonymity raises serious questions in a democracy. "Public records, dating back to at least the 1800s in New York, set real estate apart as more transparent than bank accounts or stock portfolios. 'There's a whole Jeffersonian rhetoric about land ownership,' said Hendrik Hartog, a professor of the history of American law at Princeton. 'There was a goal to make land transparent, and it was justified by civic values and a whole range of moral judgments like not hiding ownership.'" For Hannah Arendt, "everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance - something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves - constitutes reality." To be part of a public realm means to be visible. And while Arendt also insisted that we had a need and a right to hide ourselves behind the four walls of our private property, there is an important need to be able to identify where the boundary of the public and private realms are. That government and business leaders are vanishing from public sight, hiding their money, property, and public lives behind a endless series of fake corporations and legal smokescreens, means that they are increasingly divorced from our public and shared existence. While privacy inside one's home is important, public invisibility can be dangerous for democracy.
Mark Greif once spent over a month in the Yale Library reading through the entirety of the print run of Partisan Review from 1934 into the 1950s. During this time Partisan Review offered the highest quality essays and fiction by the leading public intellectuals of the 20th century. Greif was struck by the fact that Partisan Review "was impossibly good. It was better than I expected or could have imagined, maybe the best American journal of the century, or ever." Why, he asked himself, was public intellectual writing then so much better than it is today? The answer, Greif suggests, is that Partisan Review and its writers aspired to a dreamlike public sphere that was engaged, serious, and relevant. The public world of the public intellectual in the mid-twentieth century"conjectured a province that had supposedly been called into being by the desires, and demands, of 'the real world.' And this conceit, or illusion, was needed and ultimately embraced on all sides--by the writers, by the readers, by the subsidizers--even, in fact, by parts of that 'real world' itself, meaning bits of commerce, derivative media, politics, and even 'official' institutions of government and civil society. The collective conceit called that space, in some way, into being. But the additional philosophical element that made this complicated arrangement work, and the profound belief that sustained the fiction, on all sides, and made it 'real' (for we are speaking of the realm of ideas, where shared belief often just is reality), was an aspirational estimation of 'the public.' Aspiration in this sense isn't altogether virtuous or noble. Nor is it grasping and commercial, as we use 'aspirational' now, mostly about the branding of luxury goods. It's something like a neutral idea or expectation that you could, or should, be better than you are--and that naturally you want to be better than you are, and will spend some effort to become capable of growing--and that every worthy person does. My sense of the true writing of the 'public intellectuals' of the Partisan Review era is that it was always addressed just slightly over the head of an imagined public--at a height where they must reach up to grasp it. But the writing seemed, also, always just slightly above the Partisan Review writers themselves. They, the intellectuals, had stretched themselves to attention, gone up on tiptoe, balancing, to become worthy of the more thoughtful, more electric tenor of intellect they wanted to join. They, too, were of 'the public,' but a public that wanted to be better, and higher. They distinguished themselves from it momentarily, by pursuing difficulty, in a challenge to the public and themselves--thus becoming equals who could earn the right to address this public." Greif sees that the professors and intellectuals who now write for the public aim lower, seeking to be funny, trendy, and simple. Public writing by intellectuals is a "talking down to readers in a colorless fashion-magazine argot [that] is such second nature that any alternative seems out of place." The public that public intellectuals write for today is, Greif suggests, a public for which they have contempt. He counsels a re-imagining a meaningful public sphere, one that appeals to our higher aspirations. But that assumes, without argument, that intellectuals today have escaped the mass-culture desire for edutainment.
Andrew Sullivan stopped blogging last week and had a few parting words about the form: "Everything is true, so long as it is not taken to be anything more than it is. And I just want to ask that future readers understand this--so they do not mistake one form of writing for another, so they do not engage in an ignoratio elenchi. What I have written here should not be regarded as interchangeable with more considered columns or essays or reviews. Blogging is a different animal. It requires letting go; it demands writing something that you may soon revise or regret or be proud of. It's more like a performance in a broadcast than a writer in a book or newspaper or magazine (which is why, of course, it can also be so exhausting). I have therefore made mistakes along the way that I may not have made in other, more considered forms of writing; I have hurt the feelings of some people I deeply care about; I have said some things I should never have said, as well as things that gain extra force because they were true in the very moment that they happened. All this is part of life--and blogging comes as close to simply living, with all its errors and joys, misunderstandings and emotions, as writing ever will."
Building on a post by Nolen Gertz, Josh Jones explores G.W.F. Hegel's often overlooked influence on Martin Luther King Jr. "We are generally well aware of King's debt to Gandhi and the Satyagraha movement that won Indian independence in 1947, yet we know little of his debt to the same thinker who inspired Marx and his contemporaries--G.W.F. Hegel. As philosopher and 'Ethicist for Hire' Nolen Gertz has recently demonstrated on his blog, King was highly influenced by Hegelianism, as much as, or perhaps even more so, than he was by Gandhi's movement. Marx may have turned Hegel's system on its head, but King, writes Gertz, 'fought White America... by turning the ideas of dead white men against the oppressive practices of living white men.' King read and wrote on Hegel as a graduate student at Boston University and Harvard in the mid-50s, where he studied theology and the history of philosophy and religion. He took a yearlong seminar on Hegel with his advisor at BU, Edgar Brightman (see King's diagram notes of Hegel's system above), and found a great deal to admire in the 'dead white' philosopher's logical system, as well as a good deal to critique. The two-semester class, King wrote in his autobiography, was 'both rewarding and stimulating': 'Although the course was mainly a study of Hegel's monumental work, Phenomenology of Mind, I spent my spare time reading his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. There were points in Hegel's philosophy that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, his absolute idealism was rationally unsound to me because it tended to swallow up the many in the one. But there were other aspects of his thinking that I found stimulating. His contention that "truth is the whole" led me to a philosophical method of rational coherence. His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.' While King may have disagreed with Hegel's idealism, he found support for his own philosophy of nonviolence in Hegel's dialectical method, a mode of analysis that seems particularly well suited to socially revolutionary thought. In Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote, 'The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites--acquiescence and violence--while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.'"
Jon Ronson looks into the phenomenon of public shaming on the internet and suggests a reason why the archaic practice has made a comeback online: "Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco's own--a bid for the attention of strangers--as she milled about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn't see."
Jacob Silverman wonders why we don't care that our devices are snitching on us: 'Always-on data collection, combined with porous privacy policies and insecure devices, are changing our expectations for security and privacy. What matters now is not just what our devices and apps collect but also why, for whom, when, and how. It may not concern you that your carmaker is collecting location information in order to improve its navigation system. But what if that information is being sold to marketers, who might be curious to learn when you go to your psychologist, or divorce lawyer? Or what if that information is also stored in an unencrypted, hackable system? As Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous, there has been little discussion about the extent to which it's even necessary. Adding 4G to your car or TV is presented as a simple upgrade--an added convenience, should you ever care to use it. There may be a place for always-on, information-rich devices. But without better security, public education, and proper consumer protections, we risk seeding our environments with machines whose utility is far outweighed by the costs of their inevitable leaks." Over and again, we are choosing to sacrifice privacy for convenience, so much so that concerns over privacy appear nostalgic. Does privacy even matter today? This is the question being asked at the 8th annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference on October 15-16th. Save the Date.
Writing In The Age of Digital Reproduction
Matthew Kirschenbaum wonders what it means to be an author in a digital age: "There is also a new kind of archive taking shape. Today you cannot write seriously about contemporary literature without taking into account myriad channels and venues for online exchange. That in and of itself may seem uncontroversial, but I submit we have not yet fully grasped all of the ramifications. We might start by examining the extent to which social media and writers' online presences or platforms are reinscribing the authority of authorship. The mere profusion of images of the celebrity author visually cohabitating the same embodied space as us, the abundance of first-person audio/visual documentation, the pressure on authors to self-mediate and self-promote their work through their individual online identities, and the impact of the kind of online interactions described above (those Woody Allenesque 'wobbles') have all changed the nature of authorial presence. Authorship, in short, has become a kind of media, algorithmically tractable and traceable and disseminated and distributed across the same networks and infrastructure carrying other kinds of previously differentiated cultural production."
Megan Garber discusses the importance of the chalky, talky Valentines Day conversation heart as a cultural artifact: "All of that--the ebb and flow of sentiment, romantic and otherwise--says something about what it means to be an American in 2015. And it says something about what it's meant to be an American in previous years, as well. Arthur Miller said that a newspaper is a nation talking to itself; but--SWEET TALK, literally--you could say the same about candy hearts. Taken together, over time, stamped out in a mixture of sugar, corn syrup, and gelatin, the candies record where we've been, and hint at where we're going."
The Hannah Arendt Center announces three post-doctoral fellowships for the 2015-2016 academic year.
To learn more about the fellowships, including how to apply, click here.
Application Deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2015
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Eyal Press
The Courage To Refuse
Monday, February 9, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Screening of The Decent One and Q&A with Director Vanessa Lapa and Sound Designer Tomer Eliav
The film is based on the newly discovered diaries of Heinrich Himmler. Watch a trailer here.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Charles Snyder, a Hannah Arendt Center Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Natality and its Vicissitudes"
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:00 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #5
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, March 6, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Angela Maione, our Klemens Von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Figuring Rights: Wollstonecraft and the Right to Political Community
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 6:00 - 7:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Ari-Elmeri Hyvonen, a Hannah Arendt Center Visiting Fellow
"Arendt's Critique of Modern Society as an Analysis of Process Imaginary"
Date and Time TBD
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Monday, March 30, 2015
Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Richard A. Barrett discusses how political lies not only skew history but also undermine a political actor's ability to engage with reality in the Quote of the Week. Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate the influence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on Hannah Arendt's writings in our Library feature.
We are pleased to announce that Michiel Bot, one of our post-doctoral fellows, has received the Witteveen Memorial Fellowship in Law and Humanities at Tilburg University for the summer of 2015! Congratulations, Michiel!
More information about the fellowship can be found here.
Arendt and Ricoeur on Ideology and Authority
We at the Hannah Arendt Center are pleased to share "Arendt and Ricœur on Ideology and Authority." The article is written by Carlos Alfonso Garduño Comparán, a former HAC fellow.
Hannah Arendt's work is an important reference for Paul Ricœur. Her definition of power as the free action in concert of individuals within a community of equals, guaranteed by institutions, allows Ricœur to ground his reflection on the political dimension of recognition and justice. However, as the author will show in their paper, such a definition is problematic, particularly because of the relation that Arendt establishes between power and authority, her decision to separate the social and the political, and her understanding of ideology, philosophy, and common sense in politics.
After describing Arendt's account of the relation between power and authority, the author argues that, without rejecting the spirit of her political thought or her basic concepts, Ricœur's reflections on the functions of ideology in his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia offer a broader but complementary vision that allows us to understand the issues that remain obscure in Arendt's approach.
Please access the full text of "Arendt and Ricœur on Ideology and Authority" here.
Amor Mundi 1/18/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Abdelkader Benali has a revealing first person account of his own brush with Islamic extremism. For Benali, Islamic rage may be misplaced and horrific, but it is understandable. He is right: there are many horrific things in the world that we must nevertheless try to understand. As Hannah Arendt writes, we must strive to face up to, and also to resist, reality, whatever it may be. Benali's essay is one good place to begin our process of facing and resisting Islamic radicalism: "What happened last week is not about lack of humor, or a failure to understand caricature. Nor is it about hatred of the West. It's about anger taking a wrong turn. What makes us human and creative is our doubt. But doubt on its own can turn into anger and fundamentalism. As the French writer Michel Houellebecq said in an interview: 'People cannot live without God. Life becomes unbearable.' The terrorists found their God in a godless society. Charlie Hebdo mocked their God by declaring him nothing more than a cartoon. They came back to rescue their God and left 12 dead behind. They fell prey to a powerful delusion. It was the same delusion I felt as a teenager: that by attacking the messenger your anger will disappear and you will be victorious. But the only way to conquer your anger is to understand where its roots lie. For me the freedom to doubt, to not choose sides and to feel empathy for characters and people with whom I disagree, was liberating. Today I still embrace my Islamic background, but without the dogma, repression and strict adherence to ritual."
Zygmunt Bauman has important insights about the meaning of the Charlie Hedbo attacks and what they say about political violence in the 21st century. "There were two aspects of the Charlie Hebdo murders that set them apart from the two previous cases: First: on 7th January 2015 political assassins fixed a highly media-visible specimen of mass media. Knowingly or not, by design or by default, the murderers endorsed--whether explicitly or obliquely--the widespread and fast gathering public sense of effective power moving away from political rulers and towards the centres viewed as responsible for public mind-setting and opinion-making. It was the people engaged in such activities that the assault was meant to point out as culprits to be punished for causing the assassins' bitterness, rancour and urge of vengeance. And second: alongside shifting the target to another institutional realm, that of public opinion, the armed assault against Charlie Hebdo was also an act of personalized vendetta (going back to the pattern set by Ayatollah Khomeini in his 1989 Fatva imposed on Salman Rushdie). If the 11 September atrocity chimed in with the then tendency to 'depersonalise' political violence (following the pour ainsi dire 'democratisation' of violence by mass-media publicity that divided its attention according to the quantity of its--mostly anonymous and incidental--victims, and the volume of spilt blood), the 7th January barbarity crowns the lengthy process of deregulation--indeed the 'de-institutionalisation', individualization and privatisation of the human condition, as well as the perception of public affairs shifting away from the management of established aggregated bodies to the sphere of individual 'life politics'. And away from social to individual responsibility. In our media-dominated information society people employed in constructing and distributing information moved or have been moved to the centre of the scene on which the drama of human coexistence is staged and seen to be played." The attacks, Bauman argues, are neither traditional political assassinations of political leaders nor the depersonalized terrorism of 9/11. They are, instead, opening sallies in a general revolt of plebians of many ideological views from established democratic systems that are losing their legitimacy and support. In short, Bauman sees these attacks as moving hand-in-hand with the anti-democratic National Front movement in France as well as increasing radicalism around the world.
In the wake of last week's shootings in Paris and the subsequent rallies that revolved around the need to protect "freedom of speech," Teju Cole considers the state of that freedom and of Western civil religion on the whole: "Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech--as so many commentators have done--it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.'s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo. The killings in Paris were an appalling offense to human life and dignity. The enormity of these crimes will shock us all for a long time. But the suggestion that violence by self-proclaimed Jihadists is the only threat to liberty in Western societies ignores other, often more immediate and intimate, dangers."
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay has caused a controversy with her film Selma. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew writes: "By distorting an essential truth about the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King over the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Selma has opened a very large and overdue debate over whether and how much truth the movie industry owes to the public. The film suggests that there was a struggle between King and Johnson over whether such a bill should be pushed following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, signed into law in July of that year. The clear implication is that Johnson was opposed to a voting rights bill, period, and that he had to be persuaded by King. This story has now been propagated to millions of viewers, to the point where young people in movie houses boo Johnson's name. But there was no struggle. This is pure fiction." As movies and YouTube videos replace books as the way people acquire history, how much artistic license should they have? I was asked this question often when Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt came out last year. The film took liberties, turning Arendt's good friend into her secretary and putting the words of Gershom Scholem into the mouth of Kurt Blumenfeld. These struck me as legitimate examples of artistic license. But when the film made up an encounter with a threatening group of Israeli Mossad agents who spring upon Arendt and demand she stop the publication of her book, that struck me as too much. Such a fabrication suggests an official Israeli response to the controversy that did not exist and creates a false image of Israel, one that fits with and confirms many uninformed narratives. Similarly, it does seem that Selma goes too far in its efforts to lionize Martin Luther King Jr (who needs no lionization). On Twitter, DuVernay has responded to the criticism: "Bottom line is folks should interrogate history. Don't take my word for it or LBJ rep's word for it. Let it come alive for yourself. #Selma." Well yes, folks should interrogate history, but history also has facts. When those who gather and present those facts as historical narrative change the facts, it poisons the world. Politics does mean having different opinions about facts, but when we all have our own facts, politics becomes impossible. In our age of technological reproduction, facts are easily manipulated, and untruths are widely dispersed as truth.
Reading has traditionally been a solitary experience. Francine Prose wonders how the practice of reading is changing in the world of ebooks and big data. "Solitude is and has always been an essential component of reading; many children become readers in part to enjoy the privacy it offers. And in an age in which our email messages can be perused by the NSA and our Facebook posts are scanned for clues to our habits and our desires, what joy and a relief it is, to escape into a book and know that no one is watching. But now it turns out that someone or something may have been reading over my shoulder, that I haven't been quite so alone as I'd imagined, that Becky and I and her circle may have had some silent, unsuspected, uninvited company. Largely because I've been traveling, and because my volume of Thackeray weighs several pounds and is printed in a typeface that borders on the microscopic, I've been reading the novel on my e-reader. According to a recent article in The Guardian, e-book retailers are now able to tell which books we've finished or not finished, how fast we have read them, and precisely where we snapped shut the cover of our e-books and moved on to something else. Only 44.4 percent of British readers who use a Kobo eReader made it all the way through Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, while a mere 28.2 percent reached the end of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave. Yet both these books appeared--and remained for some time--on the British bestseller lists." There are few more frustrating experiences than reading a book and being told by Amazon that 67% of readers have underlined the following sentence. Does the rise of hive-reading mean the loss of another private space? That is one of the questions we'll be asking at the Hannah Arendt Center 2015 Fall Conference: "Privacy: Why Does it Matter?"
Ed Levine dives into the ontology of the American diner: "People talk about Starbucks reintroducing the notion of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the 'third place' in American life: spaces where we gather besides home and work to form real, not virtual, communities. Starbucks and more high-minded cafes that followed in its wake have surely succeeded on this point, but long before 1971, when the first Starbucks opened in Pike Place Market in Seattle, diners were already serving that invaluable function for us, along with the corner tavern. And that's why we need to cherish our local diners, whether it's a mom and pop or a Waffle House or a Greek coffee shop. They're some of the few cheap, all-inclusive places to eat and hang out and laugh and cry and stay viscerally connected with other folks. A few days ago I asked my server at a diner if I could order a patty melt, even though it wasn't on the menu. 'Sure,' she replied with a half smile. 'Just tell us what you want and if we have the fixin's we'll make it for you.'"
Jeet Heer considers John Updike's affection for comic strips: "tingling prose, where every idea and emotion is rooted in sensory experience, owes much to such modern masters as Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov, but it was also sparked by the cartoon images he saw in childhood, which trained his eyes to see visual forms as aesthetically pleasing. Indeed, the comparison with Nabokov is instructive since the Russian-born author of Lolita was also a cartoon fan. The critic Clarence Brown has coined the term bedesque (roughly translated as 'comic strip-influenced') to describe the cartoony quality of Nabokov's fiction, including its antic loopiness, its quicksilver movement from scene to scene, and its visual intensity. I think one reason Updike felt an affinity for Nabokov is because they both wrote bedesque prose."
From A to Z, In Ones and Zeroes
In a long ode to Merriam Webster's ongoing attempt to update its Unabridged dictionary, Stefan Fatsis considers the future of the dictionary: "But while the Internet has upended a publishing model that dates to Robert Cawdrey's 1604 A Table Alphabeticall, it also has strengthened the feeling among lexicographers that the public cares deeply about language--and that there is still a place for the dictionary. For Merriam specifically, the potential of digital lexicography, a belief that people crave guidance and trust authority, and its own historical place in American letters have combined to convince it of the wisdom of rolling the dice and redoing the Third. 'Creating a new Unabridged Dictionary gives us the opportunity to revisit the biggest questions of all,' Morse says. 'What is it that ought to be said and shown about the words in the dictionary? What should we talk about when we talk about words? The Unabridged provides the platform to present the fullest explication of words and hence the opportunity to say what it is that ought to be said. And the answer shifts from generation to generation.'" The pleasures for word nerds abound here, though, bleeding into the dictionary's history and into the nature of the way it updates itself. Pair it with David Foster Wallace's "Authority and American Usage" for a different perspective on a different kind of dictionary.
Now Accepting Applications for Post-Doctoral Fellowships!
The Hannah Arendt Center announces three post-doctoral fellowships for the 2015-2016 academic year.
To learn more about the fellowships, including how to apply, click here.
Application Deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2015
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Eyal Press
The Courage To Refuse
Monday, February 9, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Jeanne van Heeswijk
Monday, February 16, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Monday, March 30, 2015
Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, Time TBA
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015!
This week on the Blog, Thomas Wild and Anne Posten discuss how we need to read Hannah Arendt in the plurality of her languages in the Quote of the Week. Bertrand Russell provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate Arendt's interest in the Gnostics in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 1/4/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Yuval Levin argues that our basic understanding of liberty today is wrong. Both liberals and libertarians see liberty as the absence of constraint, the liberty to do and to choose as one wants. He suggests that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the 1992 abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey encapsulates the modern bi-partisan version of liberty: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Opposed to what Levin calls this thin version of liberty (what is usually referred to as negative liberty) is a thicker liberty bound up in institutions that demands that individuals not only be free to choose, but that they be free to choose well. This, what is usually called positive liberty, assumes that we humans are not simply willful beings but that we are also rational, and that rationality means something. It contains standards and truths. For Levin, one element of this rational liberty of limitation is the family: "The long way to liberty begins unavoidably with marriage and the family, and the case for the short way begins as a case against their necessity. The family is above all the nursery of the next generation, which enters the world incapable of exercising liberty and plainly in need of both protection and moral formation. The family is proof against the notion that all human relations can be turned into matters of choice." Another is work: "Work is another crucial element of the long way to liberty. Like the family, it, too, has an obvious economic utility, enabling us to support ourselves and our families financially. But work also buttresses dignity, inculcates responsibility, encourages energy and industry, and rewards reliability. It can help form us into better human beings and better liberal citizens. To see only its material utility is to imagine that work, like family, could be replaced by more efficient forms of distribution." In other words, liberty requires we embrace not only our free will but also the common truths made palpable by our rational reflection upon the institutions and the world we live in. The real difference between liberals and conservatives today is that liberals see all claims to rational or institutional truths as a threat to freedom, whereas conservatives see all attacks on institutional truths as a threat to morality and authority. Both are correct. At times, in a liberal mood, we reject convention in the name of progress. At other times, in a conservative mood, we insist on common truths and traditions that give meaning to our lives. Liberals and conservatives both make essential contributions, but in making their arguments in absolute terms that insist either on progress or tradition, they risk undermining both freedom and authority.
Jeddediah Purdy writes that Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-first Century was only partially helpful. It helped put hard numbers on the inequality of our times and on the historical connection between capitalism and inequality. But, writes Purdy, Piketty "does not say where economic inequality comes from: uneven bargaining power, political corruption, globalized labor and capital markets, the ineluctable progress of technology, or what? Piketty only waves his hands around the all-important question of whether economic inequality undermines democracy. He has nothing to say about how much inequality is too much, or which kinds of inequality are worst--in access to education, for instance, or health care, or political power? Without answers to these questions, Piketty's work illuminated a vast landscape but left his readers with no compass to navigate it." In response, Purdy gathered students from Duke University to read the classics of liberal political economy and philosophy from the 18th and 19th centuries--Smith, Marx, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche. What he learned: "For all of these figures--meaning for serious people across the time when they wrote--economic and political life were the two great and inseparable problems. Each was a frontier of new human powers--technological mastery and growing wealth on the one hand; collective mobilization, self-government, and equal citizenship on the other. These powers could come into conflict: politics could dampen the economy, as Smith argued, or economic inequality could override the possibility of real democracy, as Marx insisted. The question they all asked, in different versions at different times, was how these great domains of change could be knitted together--and, the other side of the same coin, how they most gravely threatened each other. The second lesson is that no one writing before the twentieth century holds a key to our problems. Our time is so vastly different in its particulars that the parallels work only in broad strokes. Neither Smith nor Marx can carry us far into the guts of globalized financial capitalism. Neither de Tocqueville nor Mill can sort out the prospects of democracy--or even the proper meaning of the term--in North Africa and the Middle East, China, or the European Union and the United States. How could they? When we can barely illuminate our own world, it would be superstitious to imagine that dead men could do it for us. But these old works do invite us to live questions that they lived, which many of us had complacently forgotten, and which Pikettymania was an effort to remember. These are the inescapable questions of a world where the economy, including global ecology, does not take care of itself, and where it may come into conflict with democracy. They are questions for a world where we need to get clearer on what we mean by democracy, and what we lose when we neglect or betray it."
Fritz Schwarz, who once served as chief counsel for the U.S. Senate's Church Committee's investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies under six presidents--Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon--argues that the Senate's recently released torture report made a mistake in placing all the blame on the CIA. "[P]lacing blame almost exclusively on the CIA is neither accurate nor fair. The Church Committee initially risked going down the same path in its investigation of CIA assassination plots. Senator Frank Church speculated to the press that the CIA may have acted like a 'rogue elephant on a rampage.' Other senators, also speculating, opined the CIA 'took orders from the top.' But, after extensive investigation and when the committee released its Interim Report on Assassinations, it declined to adopt either theory. Instead, the Church Committee presented substantial evidence for both views, saying the conflicting evidence made it impossible to be certain whether or not Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy authorized the assassination plots. Then, in its final reports issued six months later, based on facts from six administrations and review of many more programs and many more agencies, the Church Committee was ready to fix responsibility at the top. Yes, some agency programs were concealed from higher authority, but more frequently it was senior officials themselves who through pressure for results created a climate for abuse, failed to assure compliance with the law, and demanded action without carefully providing for future oversight. In the case of torture, the Bush-Cheney White House was clearly involved. It pushed for and approved the program; it was complicit in obtaining the deeply flawed legal opinions that redefined the ban on torture to meaningless nothings. White House officials forgot that both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln barred torture in perilous times when Americans were hard pressed in their fight to create the nation or to save it. They also forgot that after World War II the United States led the way in drafting the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit torture and other forms of inhumane treatment. They locked out voices of experience from the State Department and the military who would have warned of harm to America's reputation and risks to American captives. They failed to listen to FBI experts on interrogation who could have explained we were getting important intelligence through interrogation techniques other than torture. And they forgot, or nobody told them, that after World War II we had prosecuted Japanese officials as war criminals for using on American soldiers the same torture techniques the White House authorized and the CIA implemented after 9/11." Schwarz's Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy will appear this year, and Schwarz himself will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center's 2015 fall conference on privacy.
David Bromwich sees important connections between the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA and the Staten Island grand jury that chose not to return an indictment for the police killing of Eric Garner. They both, Bromwich suggests, begin with Dick Cheney and the war on terror: "Cheney worked hard to eradicate from the minds of Americans the idea that there can be such a thing as a 'suspect'. Due process of law rests on the acknowledged possibility that a suspect may be innocent; but, for Cheney, a person interrogated on suspicion of terrorism is a terrorist. To elaborate a view beyond that point, as he sees it, only involves government in a wasteful tangle of doubts." The continuation of the Cheney doctrine into the Obama Presidency means that aside from a more humane face, there remains no effort to hold responsible those who break our laws: "The promise of impunity that has greeted the lawless conduct of government officials obeys the ancient maxim fac et excusa. The deeds in fact are free to recur because the excuses are potentially limitless. We are all patriots--Obama's word for CIA interrogators--and under enemy attack, we respond as patriots do. The truth of course is that we know nothing about the motives of the torturers or the motives of those who wrote up the exculpating rationale for torture before the fact. Selfless patriotism may be part of it. Sadistic self-indulgence may also be part of it. Who can say in what proportions they were mixed? A principle such as an unconditional ban on torture is tested precisely by its observance in a fear-engendering crisis. If your belief in the principle gradually disintegrates, it was never a solid belief." And it is the disintegration of our strong convictions against torture and police violence that Bromwich worries is undermining our democracy: "The object of torture is a slave as long as the infliction lasts; a slave has no recourse against torture so long as the master chooses to inflict it. To suppose that slavery is a matter of ownership is a half-truth that misses the political basis of the oppression. The evil consists in the ability to dominate other persons without check, the ability to do with them what you will, armed with assurance of impunity. Such a custom of acquittal or habit of non-accountability may have broad consequences in the treatment by the state of its own people--the treatment, for example, of a large black man on the streets of New York by a huddle of police who are determined to subdue him. The suspect becomes a rightless subject and not a person who bears the inalienable rights of a citizen."
The New York Public Library recently discovered a box of reference questions from before the invention of the search engine. Our favorite? "Is it possible to keep an octopus in a private home?"
Roland Kelts talks to graphic designer Chip Kidd about how the latter illustrated Haruki Murakami's novella The Strange Library: "Kidd's visual accompaniment is a sheaf of blowups--insect motifs collide with origami paper and the face of a geisha; a spectral half-moon is completed by one half of a donut (the only graphic that didn't come from his collection of Japanese ephemera; he purchased it from a food card in front of the Knopf offices and 'stuck it into a scanner.') Kidd wasn't trying to graphically tell the story. Instead, he said, his goal was to 'graphically play around with form and content so it surprises you.'"
Knit Together in This Work By a Fabric Made of Ballot Boxes
Etgat Keret hopes that the upcoming elections in Israel will force alienated Israelis back to the ballot boxes and, in turn, will bring the country closer together: "There's no better time than a new election campaign to bring my left-wing neighbor and his dog down to earth again. Instead of burying his head in a good book, he will be forced to look reality in the eye and drop a ballot into the box in what might be the most important elections in Israel's history. And if he chooses not to, he will be partly responsible for any injustices that follow. Deep down, every citizen in this country knows that the coming elections will determine not only our political and economic future, but first and foremost, the social and moral future of this country. Do we aspire to be, as the original formulators of the Jewish State bill demand, a country that is first of all Jewish and only then democratic, or will we seek to be an egalitarian society that while keeping its Jewish identity does not distinguish between and discriminate against citizens who hold different religious beliefs? Some will say that if we don't choose the Third Temple we will find ourselves in Sodom and Gomorrah. Others will claim that if we don't hold onto the Western model, we'll end up in Iran."
The forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are made possible by the radical disjunction between those who authorize the wars and those who fight them. James Fallows points to how the average Americans citizen's estrangement from the military makes it easier for us to go to war: "If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness."
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #3
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, January 9, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Eyal Press
The Courage To Refuse
Monday, February 9, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Jeanne van Heeswijk
Monday, February 16, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Angela Maione, our Klemens Von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellow
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 6:00 - 7:00 pm
Now Accepting Applications for Post-Doctoral Fellowships!
The Hannah Arendt Center announces three post-doctoral fellowships for the 2015-2016 academic year.
To learn more about the fellowships, including how to apply, click here.
Application Deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2015
Lunchtime Talk with Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen, a Hannah Arendt Center Doctoral Fellow
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 1:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Monday, March 30, 2015
Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, Time TBA
The Life of Roman Republicanism with Joy Connolly
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Aspinwall Room 302, Bard College, 6:00 pm
Translating the Holocaust: H. G. Adler as Writer and Scholar
Monday, May 4, 2015
Location and Time TBA
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015!
This holiday week on the Blog, Kazue Koishikawa reflects on Arendt's observation that thinking acquires political significance when we think beyond our own limitations in the Quote of the Week. Edgar Allan Poe provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate Arendt's possession of one of J. E. Erdmann's investigations into the history of philosophy in our Library feature.
This coming Friday, January 9th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the third session of its new Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing Chapter Two, Sections 4, 5, and 6 of The Human Condition.
The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!
To Transform the Human Species
By Jeffrey Champlin
In Chapter 13 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government," Arendt connects the universal claim of totalitarianism to its project of completely transforming humanity:
The law of Nature or the law of History, if properly executed, is expected to produce mankind as its end product; and this expectation lies behind the claim to global rule of all totalitarian governments. Totalitarian policy claims to transform the human species into an active unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise would only passively and reluctantly be subjected (Origins, 462).
Arendt's interchangeable reference to "the law of Nature or the law of History" indicates one of the most controversial claims of her study: that the racist Nazi government and Soviet communist government both followed a deeper underlying idea. To some liberals of the day, the "or" marked an outrageous equivalence since they held the Soviet Union to be qualitatively different due to its stated goals of equality. For Arendt though, the parallel works because both governments have the same understanding of the law. Arendt argues that traditionally the law functions as an imperfect mediator between a higher, stable source of authority and the changeable nature of human beings. For Nazi and Soviet governments, however, the law itself takes on a transcendent and unquestionable status. Law no longer represents authority but announces it immediately.
Obedience and Political Affairs
"[T]here is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters."
– Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship" (1964)
How could Arendt reject obedience as a factor in political and moral affairs? Was her basic point about totalitarianism not that it had reduced people to thoughtless puppets of the regime? Did she not describe Adolf Eichmann, chief organizer of transports to the Nazi death camps, as someone who had simply exchanged "one system of values for another" in order to serve his new masters? This was certainly how many people read Arendt. The individual, she seemed to be saying, had disappeared into a mass movement. But if this was not obedience, then what could possibly deserve the name?
Amor Mundi 9/14/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
A.O. Scott reflects on the juvenile nature of American culture in "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture:" "[T]he journalist and critic Ruth Graham published a polemical essay in Slate lamenting the popularity of young-adult fiction among fully adult readers. Noting that nearly a third of Y.A. books were purchased by readers ages 30 to 44 (most of them presumably without teenage children of their own), Graham insisted that such grown-ups 'should feel embarrassed about reading literature for children.' Instead, these readers were furious. The sentiment on Twitter could be summarized as 'Don't tell me what to do!' as if Graham were a bossy, uncomprehending parent warning the kids away from sugary snacks toward more nutritious, chewier stuff. It was not an argument she was in a position to win, however persuasive her points. To oppose the juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers is to assume, wittingly or not, the role of scold, snob or curmudgeon. Full disclosure: The shoe fits. I will admit to feeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers clutching a volume of 'Harry Potter' or 'The Hunger Games.'" Scott captures something essential in American culture, that in their solidarity with children, Adults enact a "refusal of maturity [that] also invites some critical reflection about just what adulthood is supposed to mean." He is right that, increasingly in public, "nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable." Yet Scott is too much part of the culture of immaturity to be willing to judge it. "A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what's going on, where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers; little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our attention with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight." The crisis of authority will not be overcome by calls for renewed authority; that said, we do suffer from the lack of adult judgment in public. Read more on the Arendt Center blog.
Betsy Huete suggests something counterintuitive about making art: "art is not a creative endeavor. It is an athletic one. If any artist still sits in her studio waiting to be struck with genius inspiration, she is playing an artist, not being one. Artists don't wait, they practice. And fail. And try again, and so on until they get it right, until their work is resolved. Just like their counterparts, athletes spend hours per day training, failing, trying, not quitting. To be either means one must have an enormous amount of resolve and resiliency, and the courage to constantly face the possibility of rejection. Whether it means getting benched, getting cut from the team, losing the championship game, getting a proposal rejected, losing grant money, not getting accepted into a residency: both sides are filled with victories and losses both large and small. Both must work extremely hard to achieve whatever goals they have set for themselves. It is no coincidence that some of the most successful contemporary artists of our day, like Bruce Nauman and Matthew Barney, were former athletes."
In a long essay that amounts, more or less, to a eulogy, writer and eminent professor Marina Warner describes why she loved the University of Essex, and why she left it: "What is happening at Essex reflects on the one hand the general distortions required to turn a university into a for-profit business - one advantageous to administrators and punitive to teachers and scholars - and on the other reveals a particular, local interpretation of the national policy. The Senate and councils of a university like Essex, and most of the academics who are elected by colleagues to govern, have been caught unawares by their new masters, their methods and their assertion of power. Perhaps they/we are culpable of doziness. But there is a central contradiction in the government's business model for higher education: you can't inspire the citizenry, open their eyes and ears, achieve international standing, fill the intellectual granary of the country and replenish it, attract students from this country and beyond, keep up the reputation of the universities, expect your educators and scholars to be public citizens and serve on all kinds of bodies, if you pin them down to one-size-fits-all contracts, inflexible timetables, overflowing workloads, overcrowded classes."
Jack Goldsmith wonders aloud at President Obama's "Breathtaking Expansion of a President's Power to Make War:" "Future historians will ask why George W. Bush sought and received express congressional authorization for his wars (against al Qaeda and Iraq) and his successor did not. They will puzzle over how Barack Obama the prudent war-powers constitutionalist transformed into a matchless war-powers unilateralist. And they will wonder why he claimed to 'welcome congressional support' for his new military initiative against the Islamic State but did not insist on it in order to ensure clear political and legal legitimacy for the tough battle that promised to consume his last two years in office and define his presidency. 'History has shown us time and again . . . that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch,' candidate Barack Obama told the Boston Globe in 2007. 'It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action.' President Obama has discarded these precepts. His announcement that he will expand the use of military force against the Islamic State without the need for new congressional consent marks his latest adventure in unilateralism and cements an astonishing legacy of expanding presidential war powers." Worries about the Imperial Presidency are now common and for good reason. But as Jeffrey Tulis argues in the latest version of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, the real issue is a feckless legislature: "I want to suggest something different - that the presidency is very strong, but not imperial. This executive strength may indeed pose problems for democratic governance, but the source of those problems does not lie in the presidency. The presidency looks somewhat imperial today because of the failure of the Congress. In other words, the problem of presidential power today is actually not the exercise of presidential power; it's the gross abdication of responsibility by the legislative branch, the Congress of the United States."
Aaron Gilbreath considers the past and the present of the mechanized restaurant: "In Japan, where restaurant mechanization has been constant for decades, something in the culture or the economy has ensured that human interaction remains prominent. At Matsuya, shokkenki have freed staff from having to push register keys, make change, chit-chat, and stand idly by while customers decide what to order. But whenever I entered one, people were still on hand to cook, deliver, and clean. The machines seemed to me like a supplement to human service, a way to remove one task from the chain of production and lower costs, rather than a step toward eliminating everyone. The corporate rhetoric, at least, is that tabletop devices and self-serve kiosks will function the same way in the United States. We already use ATMs instead of bank tellers, place takeout orders by phone, check ourselves out at some grocery stores, and check ourselves in at the airport. We require technicians and programmers to keep the machines running, as well as staff to stand nearby and tell us to place our groceries back down on the scanner before placing them in the bag. The ideal, in this telling, is that technology and automation give us more time for human interactions with our friends and family. The reality, of course, is that they often just give us more time with our other tech."
The Provocation of Understanding What Is
Gal Beckerman speaks with Bettina Stangneth and asks, "Why do you think Arendt was so taken in by Eichmann's performance on the stand? Does it tell us something about her?" Stangneth, author of the newly translated Eichmann Before Jerusalem, responds: "If it tells us something about her, it tells us something about nearly every spectator of the trial in 1961. It is a legend that only she was misled by Eichmann. But we have forgotten the other reports about the trial. Example? Alfred Wolfmann, the correspondent from Germany's most important Jewish newspaper, Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, described him as a 'pathetic weakling.' Joachim Schwelien wrote in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Eichmann was nothing more than a 'Hanswurst' [a buffoonish character from German folklore]. And everybody agreed. Some years later, Arendt only repeated these words, and people were shocked. In 1961 the astonishment about Eichmann was that he seemed to be a man without his own thoughts and convictions. This was common sense. When Arendt restated this common experience in 1963, it provoked a scandal. This tells us something about Hannah Arendt: She was not willing to deny the public astonishment of the year 1961 - she wanted to understand it."
Hannah Arendt and the American Constitution
In honor of Constitution Day, or "Citizenship Day."
Wednesday, September 17h, 2014
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, 5:00 pm
As a Fellow at Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry, in Munich, Mr. Mantell replicated the Milgram experiment.
Monday, October 6, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 3:00 pm
Resolved: "The fate of the world depends upon the success or failure of America's model of democratic self-government."
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014
Campus Center Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Want to know more about the schedule of the conference? Please click for details here!
Learn more about the conference here.
This week on the Blog, Hans Teerds discusses the importance of work and how it helps produce a sharable world in the Quote of the Week. Helen Keller provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a discussion with Roger Berkowitz, Walter Russell Mead, Jay Rosen, and Megan Garber on the state of journalism today in our Video Archives. We appreciate a note of gratitude written to Arendt in our Library feature. And Roger Berkowitz reflects on the crisis of authority and adulthood in American society in the Weekend Read.
Walter Benjamin and "Drilling" for Pearls
"Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by the citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of 'peace of mind,' the mindless peace of complacency."
–Hannah Arendt, "Introduction" to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations
Hannah Arendt was a capacious thinker. She tackled topics such as totalitarianism in Fascist and Stalinist forms, the tradition of Western political philosophy, the human condition, international law and human rights, and the destruction of the world in an atomic age. Moreover, as her former students and current readers can attest, her range of knowledge is daunting as she moves with ease among languages, time periods, historical detail, and philosophical abstraction. Yet Arendt was also invested in fragments, moments, poetry, and individuals as a way to remember the past and speak to present political needs. One place where this is well-represented is in her introduction to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations.
The Crisis of Authority
It is a little over year since the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott praised the movie "Hannah Arendt" for answering a "hunger for engagement with the life of an extraordinary mind." "Arendt," Scott wrote, "was a writer of long books and a maker of complex arguments." She was possessed with the "glamour, charisma and difficulty of a certain kind of German thought." The only problem with the movie by Margarethe von Trotta, Scott suggested, was that it wasn't long enough. He clearly relished the existence of a serious movie for adults, one that was also engaging and watchable.
Did Eichmann Think?
Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer is the new English translation of Bettina Stangneth's exhaustive history of the life of Adolf Eichmann. Her book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to try to understand Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi lieutenant colonel who was responsible for the logistics of the Holocaust.
Stangneth has pieced together the scattered transcripts of the interviews Eichmann gave with the Dutch Nazi Willem Sassen in multiple archives, she has tracked down full essays and fragments of Eichmann's own writing in mislabeled files that have never been considered before, and above all she has pieced together the written record of Eichmann's life with a diligence and obsessiveness that is uncanny and likely never to be repeated. Stangneth knows more about Adolf Eichmann than any other person alive and probably more than any person in history, past or future.
Jacques Ranciere and Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics
**This post was originally published March 9, 2012**
Politics today is democratic politics. While history has not ended and democracy is not universal, there is no doubt that the spirit of our age is democratic. From France and the United States in the 18th century; to the European revolutions of 1848; to decolonialization in the 20th century, the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, and the Arab Spring of 2011 one cannot mistake the fact that politics in the modern world tends toward democracy.
The Essay Form
"Like all collections of essays, this book of exercises [is] a sequence of movements which, like in a musical suite, are written in the same or related keys."
– Hannah Arendt, Preface to Between Past and Future, 1961
Hannah Arendt called Between Past and Future her most important book. The essay collection deals with fundamental political-philosophical terms such as freedom, authority, power and reason. Its subtitle—"Exercises in Political Thought"—points towards the genre of the book, essay, which of course comes from the French essayer, meaning something like to try, to experiment and, in this sense, to exercise. It was from Michel de Montaigne's Essais—the wonderfully experimental, experience-based reflections on topics both philosophical and mundane, first published in 1580—that the genre got its name. Arendt read Montaigne both in the original French and in English translation, and the two respective versions of Essais in her library prove that she read them carefully, and with a pencil at the ready. Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin developed and expanded the possibilities of this genre in their own unique ways, and both thinkers count among Arendt's key interlocutors. It is however less well known that Arendt's work in the genre of "essay" also have another starting point: in American literature, from the writings of Emerson and Melville, both of whom she grew to know through the writings of the literary critic Alfred Kazin.
Arendt and Kazin became close friends in the late 1940's. Their conversation in letters began with Kafka and continued through literature, friendship, and genuine interest in each other's work. Kazin helped Arendt find a publisher for her first American book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," and also played a central role in editing that groundbreaking study. At the same time Arendt was reading Kazin's essay collection "On Native Grounds,"—she read it "every day at breakfast," in fact, as she wrote to him. For Arendt, who had arrived in the USA only a few years earlier, Kazin's book was an introduction to the literature and history of her new homeland—as well as a paradigm of the "essay" genre. At the highpoint of their friendship, in the summer of 1956, Arendt told Kazin in a letter that she had written him into her will as "literary executor for all things in English." In the very same letter that links their literary legacies in such a meaningful way, Arendt comes back to "On Native Grounds," and to the "essay:" Harcourt Brace, who published both authors, had suggested to Arendt "that I prepare also a volume of essays," yet she "shuddered at the thought of it," since she understood the great challenges posed by the genre that in her eyes Kazin was mastering. It took five more years for Arendt to set aside her "shudder," and to publish Between Past and Future.
In the meantime, Arendt and Kazin sent other writings to each other, among which two texts in particular continued their conversation about the "essay." The first is a preface written by Kazin to a new edition of Moby Dick. The novel, Kazin writes, "is not so much a book about Captain Ahab's quest for the whale as it is an experience of that quest." To understand writing as an invitation to experience something—an invitation to a process of thinking, to an exercise—echoes the project of Arendt's Exercises in Political Thought. "This is only to say, what we can say of any true poem," Kazin continues, "that we cannot reduce its essential substance to a subject, that we should not intellectualize and summarize it, but that we should recognize that its very force and beauty lie in the way it is conceived and written." "The Introduction is wunderbar," Arendt wrote Kazin enthusiastically, using the German word both as a sign of intimacy and because the German "wunderbar" more strongly connotes the spirit of "wonder" than the English "wonderful."
Soon thereafter Alfred Kazin published a large anthology of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings. Many of Arendt's American readers rightfully wonder why Emerson does not appear more frequently in her writing. There seems to be such an intriguing correspondence between both writers' style of thinking and care for language. But Arendt's copy of Kazin's anthology shows just how attentively she read Emerson: the volume is heavily underlined. The markings begin in the introduction and revolve — perhaps not so surprisingly, since Emerson was one of the founding figures of American essay writing—around his writing style. "He is a writer who lives entirely by ideas, but who really lives them," Kazin writes at the very beginning. "He is not a philosopher, not a maker of systems or a prover of systems or a justifier of them. He starts from a conviction about man's central importance in the world which he never really elaborates, but which he accepts as necessary and evident and profoundly human – he could almost have said, the only human account of the world in modern, 'scientific' times." It is a description that strikingly resembles the fundamental concept of love for the world —amor mundi—which Arendt was writing in The Human Condition at the very same time. Her books moved and excited him, Kazin later wrote to Arendt, "in a way that no 'technical philosophy' ever could. What a visionary you are, as my most beloved poets are!"
As visionary as a poet? Or is this more a view of poetic thinking? Hannah Arendt coined the term "poetic thinking" in her essay on Walter Benjamin. Her catchy formulation is explained in a series of negative characterizations. To fundamentally comprehend Benjamin, according to Arendt, one must understand that he was "very scholarly, but in no way a scholar; that his major subject was text and the interpretation of texts, but that he was no philologist; […] that he was a writer whose greatest ambition was to build a text entirely comprised of quotes from other texts—that is, to override his own role as writer; […] he published countless book reviews and many conventional essays on dead and contemporary writers and poets, but he was no literary critic." The list is much longer in the original, but it continues in the same vein: Benjamin doesn't belong to any discipline nor profession; readers need to understand that he "thought poetically."
Arendt's remarks on Benjamin find an astounding echo in Kazin's efforts to answer his own question about Emerson: "What kind of writer shall we call him?" "He is not, of course, a novelist or a dramatist," Kazin writes, "in fact, he could hardly read novels or wholly enjoy great plays for their own sake. Although he was a remarkable and inventive poet, no one can claim that poetry is the major side of his work. As we have said, he is not a philosopher – not even a philosopher like Nietzsche, who so much admired him." What, then, could a suitable description look like? Kazin finds a surprising turn of phrase: "And though one falls back on the term 'essayist,' the term hardly explains why the essay form, as Emerson developed it, attains a free form that is profoundly musical and fugal, a series of variations starting from a set theme."
"The essay form," are the three words of the quote that Arendt underlined in her copy. They echo the passage from Between Past and Future quoted here at the beginning: "Like all collections of essays, this book of exercises [is] a sequence of movements which, like in a musical suite, are written in the same or related keys." On the same page of this preface, Arendt expands the resonance and meaning of these "related keys" in a highly intriguing way. Her investigations between past and future seek to discover the "spirit" which has "so sadly evaporated from the very key words of political language," such as freedom and justice, responsibility and virtue. In order to trace the "wunderbaren" spirits that Arendt roused from the key words of our political language, we need to listen to the keys in which these exercises and essays in political and poetic thinking were composed and written.
-Thomas Wild
-Translated from German by Anne Posten
Teaching Arendtian Thinking
"The teacher's qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world. Vis-à-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world."
-Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education"
Nearly midway through my first year as a high school teacher, my mind returns to these lines from Arendt's "The Crisis in Education" quite often. These sentences strike me as containing some of Arendt's plainest explanations of what teachers actually do. Teachers need to have both a broad and deep knowledge of the world to be able to lead newcomers into it. They also need a particular attitude toward the world in order to lead with authority, an attitude which Arendt defines here as "assum[ing] responsibility" for the world and elsewhere in her essay as loving the world. A teacher, Arendt suggests, is someone who stands between her students and the broader world into which we were all thrown at birth, and a good teacher is someone who is able to lead them into an understanding of the world that inspires a renewed commitment to it. Teachers, in other words, seek to help young people feel at home in the world by accomplishing their transition from their beginning as "strangers and newcomers" in an already existing world to their maturity as people ready and willing to assume responsibility for the world through their freedom to act and change it.
While I find this a helpful and inspiring framework for understanding the role of teachers in a society, this vision of teaching is also frustratingly (and perhaps intentionally) ambiguous. While Arendt is clear what she means by "world" as an aspect of the human condition, she gives no indication what the "this" might be specifically when she imagines the teacher saying, "This is our world." The question is: what should teachers point to when they teach their students about the world?
The problem is that Arendt's analysis of the modern crisis in education suggests that this question is in some sense unanswerable in today's world. Arendt is clear that the crisis in education is a crisis of authority and tradition: in a world no longer structured by the past, it is difficult to say for sure what "the world" is and what newcomers need to know about it in order to do more than simply make a living to stay alive (and even this is difficult when educators recognize that many of the jobs today's students will have don't exist yet). But while it may be difficult to tell what the world is when it is changing so rapidly, Arendt is clear that education does work when teachers show that they love the world despite its complexity or, I believe in the best cases - because of its complexity. Teachers regain authority by assuming responsibility for this world in crisis and showing that they love it.
I have caught only glimpses of what it might mean to really lead my students into the world in the way I think Arendt describes. I think particularly of my ninth grade "World Literature" class which challenges me to think about how to present the entire world - including its historical dimension - to my students through diverse but finite number of literary representations of human experience. Last September, I saw an opportunity to connect our discussion of nationalism in Lord of the Flies and E.B. White's essay "Intimations" to the debate regarding military response to Syria's use of chemical weapons. While I didn't manage to integrate this connection fully into my lesson plans, I had several conversations with my classes in which we the themes and concerns presented in the novel and essay helped illuminate underlying political tensions of the issue that were not obvious from the news coverage alone. It may be that glimpses of this kind of engaged teaching and learning about the world are all that we can expect in a complex world, but I hold onto them and strive for them as I design my lessons.
Perhaps another source of inspiration for teaching in a complex and rapidly changing world is a historical figure that Arendt does not discuss in her essay on education, but who she discuses elsewhere as a profound teacher. Thanks largely to Plato's allegory of the cave, Socrates has a profound if implicit influence on many of our metaphors for teaching and learning.
In "Thinking and Moral Considerations" Arendt paraphrases what happens when Socrates introduces people to a more true understanding of the world: "you will see that you have nothing in your hand but perplexities, and the most we can do with them is share them with each other." As I read it, if Arendt's ultimate goal is to get people to "think what we are doing," then her discussion of Socrates as someone who could get people to think serves as a model for education. In a world so obviously full of perplexities, the most important thing to do is share them and discuss them, especially with newcomers.
In Socrates' time and for much of western history since, the activity of thinking (philosophy) was seen as inimical to politics, but as Arendt's work testifies, there are times of crisis, times "when the chips are down," in which thinking becomes politically necessary. In the preface to Between Past and Future she suggests that in a world oriented toward the future rather than structured by the tradition of the past, the need to think "became a tangible reality and perplexity for all; that is it became a fact of political relevance." Teachers today must teach critical thinking by first loving and caring about the perplexity of our current global, political, environmental, political, and technological situation. Arendt believes that when teachers assume responsibility for the world through this committed critical engagement with the world, they also "save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable." Therefore we must seize every opportunity to share the perplexities of our times with young people, for doing so might inspire them to take up the task of thinking about and re-making the world for themselves.
-Steven Tatum
Hannah Arendt, Quote Unquote
"To interpret, to quote – yet only to have witnesses, also friends."
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, vol. 2, p. 756 (November 1969), my translation.
When we quote someone, we often seem to do so in order to appeal to some kind of authority. We use a statement of Arendt, for instance, in order to shed light on a contemporary event or phenomenon that calls for our attention. We consider her as a "theorist" who supposedly has "relevant" things to say that may help us "solve" a contemporary problem of understanding. We ask ourselves: "What would Hannah Arendt say?"
For several reasons, however, this practice is problematic. Firstly, as Arendt herself repeatedly insisted, thinking, understood as the never-ending attempt to make sense of events, experiences, and phenomena that occur, is an activity that we can only perform for and by ourselves. Secondly, by "applying" an authoritative "theory" to concrete events, we run the risk of explaining them away, rather than to "save the phenomena" in their concrete particularity. Finally, we run the risk of doing injustice to the "authority" in question. Arendt's work is much too multi-vocal and perspectival for it to be reduced to a bag of "relevant" propositions that we can use at will. Much of what she says is more complicated and puzzling than it may seem, and requires a serious and sustained effort of interpretation. "Results" are by no means guaranteed. In this sense, the self-evident practice of quoting her every week entails the risk that she becomes all-too-familiar to us, that she is turned into someone whose "convictions" we no longer question, but complacently apply.
The use of Arendt as an authority becomes especially problematic when she is read in what could be called a "pessimistic" or "nostalgic" way, as if the most important thing that we can learn from her consists in a "diagnosis" of "our time", which entails the claim that politics has been "lost", that culture and education are in "crisis", etc. By reading her this way, we run the risk of reinforcing an "objectifying" picture of our contemporary situation, as if the terms "loss" and "crisis" refer to objective facts that are "out there", rather than to conceptual interventions that may (and perhaps should) invite our own counter-interventions. What is more, we run the risk of placing ourselves on the side of the few who really "got it", against the many who still do not get it and will perhaps never get it, lest they start reading – and quoting – Arendt.
This is not to say that there is no basis at all in her work for reading her like this, but it is at odds with what may be considered as a more promising and liberating reading – a reading which invites us to begin something new, both in thinking and by acting, however difficult this may seem to be. Invoking Arendt as an authority, by contrast, may precisely serve as a substitute for thinking, rather than as its starting point.
By taking as our starting point a quote about quoting, we hope to make the practice of quoting Arendt into something uncommon, something unfamiliar. The quote in question, cited above, is a singular entry from Arendt's Denktagebuch, the "thinking diary" that she kept from the early fifties until a few years before her death, and which she never intended for publication. The sentence is from November 1969, when she was working on what would become the first volume of The Life of the Mind, called Thinking, in which she addresses the question, what are we "doing" when we do nothing but think.
The meaning of the sentence – perhaps "meditation" is a better term – is by no means easy to grasp. It appears as a moment of self-reflection, a moment in which she stops, steps back, and thinks about the very thing she has been doing in her notebook: to interpret, to quote. It almost reads as a warning: make sure you consider these interpretations and quotations only as witnesses [Zeugen], also friends [Freunde], rather than as – we are tempted to add – authoritative statements, or – to borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own – nuggets of pure truth to keep between the pages of your notebook and keep on the mantelpiece forever.
What does it mean to consider the practice of "interpreting, quoting" as a means to have "witnesses, also friends"? In the entry that immediately follows, Arendt uses the word "friend" twice: "Thought speaks with itself (as with a friend)…" and "In thought, the self is a friend…" Only two entries earlier, she had written that critical thinking consists in a giving-of-account [Rechenschaft geben] in a dialogue with oneself. She cites Kant as the genuine representative of this form of thinking, who had distinguished the quaestio facti – how one comes in possession of a specific concept, or what the origin of a specific term is – from the quaestio juris – with what right one possesses and makes use of a specific concept.
The process of a giving-of-account in this latter sense requires that you are friends with yourself. If there is too much distance, you do no longer talk with yourself, and the inner dialogue comes to an end. Yet the activity of talking something through also comes to an end when there is not enough distance, when you do no longer disagree with yourself at all. As Arendt writes earlier in her notebook: "Only because I can speak with others, can I also speak with myself, i.e., think. Ergo: Aristotle is not right: A friend is not "another self", rather, the self is another friend."
Perhaps it is here that we should bring the notion of a "witness" into play. The figure of a witness may be described as someone who testifies to an event that is beyond our own immediate experience, something we were not there to see with our own eyes, perhaps something unheard of. In the entry on critical thinking mentioned above, Arendt notes that our conscience finds its origin in our activity of thinking in the sense of a giving-of-account of something, in a dialogue with ourselves. In another Denktagebuch-entry, written in December 1969, so one month later, she uses the notion of a witness precisely in the context of explaining the workings of our conscience. When our conscience speaks, it serves as our inner witness by reminding us of something we did, and in calling us to account for it. Obviously, the point here is not that we were not present at the actual event, but that we do not want to hear about it anymore.
In the context of our quotation, we may say that a witness confronts us with a certain perspective on our conception of a certain event or experience, perhaps a strange or unsuspected one. Thereby, he or she invites us to give account of our own convictions and interpretations. However, the addition "also friends" is required: only if we approach a witness as a friend – a friendly interlocutor – will the thinking dialogue actually come to pass, will we start thinking something through.
By quoting, we may now suggest, we invoke a testimony by someone who calls us into thinking. By interpreting a quotation, we may add, we gain the opportunity to think something through by and for ourselves, rather than to use it as a means of adding authority to our already existing convictions and interpretations or to use the "answers" it contains in order to "solve" our problems for us. Or, in the words of Walter Benjamin, as quoted by Arendt in her essay on him: "Quotations … are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieves an idler of his convictions."
-Wout Cornelissen
Arendt on the Declaration of Independence
"Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic"
Bonnie Honig
The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 97-113
Arendt often emphasizes the ramifications of the modern loss of authority for politics. Without faith in traditions or gods, humanity now continually faces the problem of legitimacy in government. To put it more concretely, in the modern age: "[t]hose who get together to constitute a new government are themselves unconstitutional, that is, they have no authority to do what they set out to achieve" (Arendt, On Revolution, quoted in Honig 98). In this article Bonnie Honig, professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, argues that in her work on the American Revolution Arendt goes beyond pessimism to recast the question of founding the state by distancing it from higher powers.
Arendt points out that the Enlightenment thinkers of the American Revolution were surprised by the novelty of their actions, which quickly outstripped their conception of political reform as restoration (the classical definition of revolution). As they sought to theoretically ground their deeds, they faltered at the ramifications of their radically secular act and inserted references to essentialist elements such as "self evidence" and a higher power. Arendt regrets this because she sees the true advance of the American Revolution as the insight into the role of argument and persuasion between people in the absence of a higher standard of truth.
Using the terminology of speech act theorist J.L. Austin, Honig argues that for Arendt the Declaration of Independence succeeds as a "performative" act that creates a new institution that does not rely on the "constative" truths of gods or tradition. In the text of the Declaration, Honig places particular emphasis on Arendt analysis of the phrase "we hold these truths to be self-evident." Using the term "we hold" indicates a creative moment very different from a simple statement of fact along the lines of "these truths are self-evident." Through this creative priority, the American Revolution changes the very conception of revolution. It does not simply seek to refound authority in the classical sense, which would be impossible in this age. Indeed, trying to go back to tradition at gods is in Arendt's view the cause of the failure of so many 19th and 20th century revolutions. Honig writes that:
Only the modern conception of authority is viable for modernity because it requires for its sustenance not a shared belief in particular deities or myths but a common subscription to the authoritative linguistic practice of promising (102).
People choose to accept the promise of the new social contract when writing the constitution and this shared orientation alone grounds the government. Honig notes though that Arendt does not sufficiently discuss the hidden commonalities that allow people to make such promises. In other words: the promise is a structure, even a ritual, that one must be trained to rely on. She turns to Derrida's article "Declarations of Independence" to look at this precondition of the promise. While Arendt focuses on the "we hold," Derrida focuses on the "we" of "we the people. Rather than accepting the promise as an answer to the problem of founding, he sees it as a moment of a leap in which the community of the "we" itself first comes into being. In its rhetorical form though, this "we" also seems like it must have already been there and therefore creates an undecidable moment between the constative and performative.
From the point of view of Derrida's analysis, Honig sees Arendt as unjustifiably longing for a "pure performative" that would start the new state. Her point is complex and surprising, since Honig in effect accuses Arendt of going too far away from reality and reference. Derrida, who is more often associated with the supposedly relativistic meme "there is nothing outside the text" actually insists in this essay that there has to be an obscure moment in which the "we" both preexisists the Declaration and comes into being with it.
As strict as Honig's opposition between Derrida and Arendt is at this point, at the end of the article she notes that Arendt's "we hold" also has a constative moment that should be acknowledged. In this context, and in the broader scope of Arendt's challenge to metaphysical ideas such as God, natural law, etc., she proposes the concept of "resistibility" as an Arendtian way of approaching Derrida's concept of "intervention." For Honig, both thinkers work within a challenge to authority rather than simply seeking to escape it.
While Honig stays with the difficult structure of the founding moment of modern politics, from a narrative perspective her article also suggests that the confusing undecidability of the "we" might also offer a way to perceive a change in the status of "the people" over the course of the founding of the state. To this extent, the "we hold" that Arendt discusses could actually work just as well, since it indicates a new subjective orientation of the framers: with this formulation they virtualize, in other words put some distance, between themselves and truth. This distance, perhaps no less mysterious than God or truth, but more open to debate, 'grounds' the modern state.
-Jeffrey Champlin


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Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola (2013)
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Set in the rustic surroundings of a village in Haryana in India, "Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola" is a comedy-drama about Harry Mandola (PANKAJ KAPUR), a wealthy industrialist who loves his drink, his daughter Bijlee (ANUSHKA SHARMA) and the unusual bond they both share with Harry's man friday, Matru (IMRAN KHAN). Much to her father's delight, Bijlee is all set to marry Baadal (ARYA BABBAR), the son of a powerful politician Chaudhari Devi (SHABANA AZMI). This alliance which is far from just being a simple union of two young people becomes the seed for a story that brings twists and turns in the lives of Matru, Bijlee and Mandola. (c) Fox International … More
|Comedy, Romance
|Directed By:
|Vishal Bhardwaj
|Written By:
|Vishal Bhardwaj, Abhishek Chaubey
|In Theaters:
|Jan 11, 2013 Limited
|On DVD:
|Feb 25, 2013
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Critic Reviews for Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola
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Save for a couple of visually engaging dance numbers, mostly shot with hand-held digital cameras, MKBKM is dishearteningly banal.
Judicious editing could have helped consolidate the joyfulness at the expense of occasionally repetitive narrative flab, but for the most part "Matru" is neatly energetic, a mix of screwball whimsy and softball seriousness.
A mix of gently outraged populism and low-powered romantic comedy, Vishal Bhardwaj's "Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola" might have been better with a chunk lopped off its two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
A technically proficient widescreen opus that shifts, jarringly, between a generic love-triangle rom-com, a farcical political black comedy and a preachy message-movie. Some fragmented images and well-played moments leave an impact; most don't.
Scattershot romantic comedy about an arranged marriage between an heiress and a politician's son that will ruin several rural farms.
A zany satire that will leave you either mesmerised by its brilliance or just a little dazed by it's lunacy.
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