On Bad Weather

2017

This essay analyses how Arendt transforms Heidegger’s critique of the anyone (das Man) in Being and Time into the philosophical concept of power as acting in concert in The Human Condition. The essay highlights the similarities as well as the differences of both concepts by focusing on their inherent ambivalences. In Heidegger’s critique of das Man, this ambivalence derives from the combination of an existential and a historical perspective, which turn social life into both a condition for and a fallenness from authentic existence. Arendt aims to overcome this ambiguity with her concept of Acting in Concert as a condition for political empowerment, freedom and new beginning. In her Denktagebuch, the emphasis on beginning as an event is inspired by a heterodox reading of Heidegger’s mature thought. But despite Arendt’s attempt to overcome the negative aspects of das Man as a form of conventionalism by stressing instead the elements of plurality and freedom, the ambivalence of Heidegg...

Constellations , 2020

The work of Hannah Arendt is situated around the abyssal aporia of beginning. By beginning, I mean the inaugural moment in which a community is established and remembered as something new. For Arendt the capacity to act and create something new is foundational to human freedom. In order to truly be a new beginning, it must be radically distinct from what came before the deed, but in order to act at all, we must somehow also be furnished with a ground on which to begin. The problem of beginning confronts the question of the "abyss of nothingness"; the paradoxical need to account for both the act of beginning that is distinct from the past, and the ground of the beginning that comes from the past and provides it with a lasting support (Arendt, 1978, p. 207). Arendt leads us to inquire into the foundation of what she calls the "world," the space of appearances grounded in common sense that ensuresnatality, the condition of possibility for beginning. While Arendt is read as perhaps the political theorist of beginnings, there are other resources that may help us think otherwise about this abyss. I turn to the Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant. To the extent that scholars engage with Glissant, it is primarily as a theorist of marronage (Roberts, 2015; Shilliam, 2011). Glissant's work is often divided into three periods: his early work, which includes Poetic Intention, his middle period, defined by his magnum opus, Caribbean Discourse, and his late period, which encompasses Poetics of Relation. For some, the political preoccupations of Glissant's early writings on self-determination give way to an apolitical poetics that prioritizes banal universality over anti-colonial difference (Hallward, 1998). I argue that this division is unsustainable and that Glissant's work is political through and through. But instead of focusing on marronage, I argue that the aporia of this article gives consistency to Glissant's thought. Glissant's spiral retelling is a working around the question of how to begin after a world is lost. In this space between past and future, Glissant confronts what John Drabinski calls the "abyssal beginning" (Drabinski, 2010, p. 301). Glissant dwells within this question, turning it over, reposing its terms, without ever resolving it. Framing Glissant's work in this way makes beginning a central concept for Glissant and places him into conversation with Arendt. 1 But despite their mutual commitments to interrogate this abyss persistently, Arendt and Glissant come to radically different conclusions. Arendt secures her world that ensures the capacity for beginning with the originary, nonviolent act of promising that is meant to keep the public life of the polis safe and sheltered from the suffering of pre-political life. Glissant, on the other hand, folds suffering into natality itself. For Glissant, to be born is to already be in relation to the original violence of the Middle Passage. I argue that these diametrically opposed confrontations with the abyss of beginning lead to two radically different politics: Arendt's flirts dangerously with colonial logic and Glissant is avowedly anti-colonial.

This article looks for God in Hannah Arendt’s political thought. If for Arendt, sovereignty is a theological problematic of the singular, then I posit that the sovereign limits of her theory of natality must be sought in the theological. By tracing the various temporal structures that the logic of natality necessitates, I argue that present in Arendt’s thought are both a Messianic Benjaminian conception of time as rupture, and a Christian Augustinian understanding of linear and continuous time. Each structure on its own terms leads us to a logic of sovereignty. Against the literature that tends to read Arendt within one or the other temporal framework, I devise that a simultaneous and oscillating movement between the two temporalities is necessary and possible through the Nietzschean idea of “the eternal return”: a cyclical time which in rendering apparent the repetition of rupture and continuity, affirms, pluralizes, and overcomes the theological temporalities inherited by politics as natality.

Theoria

Although Hannah Arendt is often described as a radical thinker, this article argues that such a characterization has occluded the question of what ‘radicality’ means within the particular horizon of Arendt’s political thought. While the battle over Arendt’s legacy is often fought on terms that oppose the radical to the conservative, Arendt herself is engaged in a different struggle, namely the opposition of the radical and the banal as it emerges in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), where banality is understood precisely as the problem that unradicality poses to thought. This article will investigate this tension and Arendt’s response to its emergence. Beginning with an account of radicality in relation to Arendt’s work on crisis in The Human Condition (1958) and Between Past and Future (1961), among other texts, this article will draw out an account of what it means to 'think politically' in a radical sense on Arendt's terms, first by considering the spatial logics that allow us to describe the location of the thinker who hopes to think responsively, to avoid both thoughtlessness and withdrawal in times of crisis. The article will then turn towards the particular interruption of Eichmann and ‘the banality of evil' into this project, and it will consider the stakes of this interruption. The manifest crisis of evil was accompanied for Arendt, as this article will go on to argue, by a correlative and immanent crisis of unthinkability, of “shallowness” and “rootlessness,” that threw into question in a precise way the ability of thinking to respond to the present on the terms of Arendt’s earlier work. From this perspective, the article will end by articulating a trajectory towards The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s unfinished attempt, demanded by the particular crisis of Eichmann, to think unradicality radically. It will conclude by reflecting on the form of the unfinished work - that The Life of the Mind itself is - as a way of understanding Arendt's final teaching about judgment and the possibility of a truly 'political thought.' This article is adapted from my Amherst College senior honors thesis in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, titled "A Form of Thinking Called Arendt" (2014).

European Journal of Political Theory, 2009

The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy Volume 11, 2001 Social and Political Philosophy Pages 219-232 , 2000

's aesthetic approach to politics is regarded as frequently reflecting the anti-political substitution of nonpolitical concerns for political ones characteristic of the German tradition from Schiller to Heidegger and beyond. Arendt's relationship to this tradition can be understood as squarely calling into question her central claim to have rehabilitated the political. This paper examines the relationship between Arendt's and Heidegger's political thought in light of the distinction between an aestheticism and an aesthetic approach. Two issues are at stake: can such a distinction help distance Arendt's aesthetic approach from those elements we find so troubling in Heidegger's thinking and his relation to politics? Can this help us to recuperate a certain aspect of German political thought which is reflected in Arendt's work?

2024

This dissertation raises the question of the political world, and pursues it as central theme in the political thought of Hannah Arendt and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Within the phenomenological tradition, world refers to a referential context of relations between beings, within which those beings appear as meaningful. Since Heidegger, the concept of world has been inextricably linked with that of understanding, the disclosedness that guides any interpretation of beings and allows them to appear as what they are. In what sense is the world political? In what sense does the political constitute a world? For Arendt, the political concerns human beings in their plurality. It concerns the relations between members of a polis, who are related to each other by the world that they share in common in action and speech. The polis is not simply a city or a political entity, but a space within which both things and human beings appear according to a distinctively political mode of disclosedness, a plural understanding. In this, Arendt operates within a hermeneutical ontology, though it is often unthematized or underdeveloped within her work. Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy makes it possible to explicate and develop this ontology, illuminating the complex reciprocal relationship Arendt develops between the worldliness of human beings and the space of appearance that arises out of the exchange of interpretive judgments: the political world. The central theme of the political world serves to uncover the hermeneutical underpinnings of Arendt’s political thought, as well as the political implications of Gadamer’s philosophy. Part I shows how an embryonic and unthematized concept of the political world arises from the analysis of being-with [Mitsein] in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Part II proposes a novel systematic interpretation of The Human Condition, situating the conceptual distinctions of the vita activa within a hermeneutical ontology, with particular emphasis on Arendt’s appropriation and development of the concept of world. Part III turns to Gadamer’s treatment of tradition and historically-effected consciousness [wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein] in Truth and Method, arguing that the handing-down of tradition describes an historical activity of plural understanding, from which the political world emerges. Part IV traces the development of Arendt’s theory of judgment in tandem with her account of δόξα, the discursive mode proper to plural understanding, and proposes a revisionist interpretation of her mature theory of judgment. Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, rather than a Kantian extended mentality, emerges as an apt description of the space of appearance that emerges within plural interpretive discourse.

For Hannah Arendt, a crisis occurs when we can no longer rely on the prejudices that ordinarily guide us through the world. Every crisis is, therefore, an occasion to reflect upon tradition. By pointing to the erosion of our shared background beliefs, however, the crisis also reveals our weakened ability to communicate and cooperate with each other. The crisis simultaneously releases us from our prejudices and alienates us from others. Due to its double nature, the moment of crisis confronts us with the question of what community is possible when we do not have anything in common. Arendt's answer is found in the community of judgment. The paper argues that Arendt formulated her well-known political theory of reflective judgment to address the paradoxes of crisis.

The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, 2000

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, composed during the seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma.