Associety

Abstract

This essay elaborates the entanglements among various manifestations of collaboration, friendship, gender, comedy, and language(s) as they are addressed and complicated by Hannah Arendt in a television interview with Günter Gaus from 1964. After having witnessed her German intellectual friends’ collaboration with the Nazi regime, Arendt deliberately broke with the academic milieu that these friends had been associated with. She describes these friends as elitist collaborators who fell in line with Hitler out of conviction rather than necessity. What emerges from her account is a feminist conceptualization of intellectual work as a sociopolitical rather than a solitary praxis. In light of the monologic of Gleichschaltung (cooperation with Nazism), Arendt counter- drafts dialogical, plurilinguistic intellectual practices: working together as working across differences. As I will trace through the analysis of narrative, phonetic, and etymological movements, she gestures toward a reinvention of the intellectual milieu through associetal collaborations, with associety understood as the communal refusal to replicate societal structures of oppression.