Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden Charlotte Taylor Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 301. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). A renaissance of interest in Hannah Arendt's political philosophy has been going on for close to ten years, and more recently literary scholars have been turning their attention to her work with particular intensity. A book-length consideration of Arendt together with a literary figure had become a logical next step. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb has taken that step with her new book, Regions of Sorrow, which reads Arendt's work alongside the poetry of W. H. Auden. That Gottlieb has chosen a poet is striking, as most recent scholarship that has addressed linguistic practice in Arendt's work—including Seyla Benhabib's The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (2000) and Julia Kristeva's Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative (2001)—has been guided by Arendt's assertion that the human community is constituted by a "web" of stories, and has primarily discussed narrative.1 Gottlieb, instead, focuses on anxiety and messianism as two closely related attitudes of speech that are most fully realized in poetry. Arendt and Auden, she shows, shared the belief that speech could become a vehicle of redemption after World War II; that within poetry's capacity to give order and bestow praise (Auden) or the speaker's ability to grant forgiveness (Arendt) lies a fragile, temporary possibility of renewal. Gottlieb names this belief "weak messianism": "messianism" because it consists of the desire to put an end to history and begin anew, "weak" because the messianic promise will not be fulfilled once and for all through the intervention of a transcendent power, but must be repeatedly, fleetingly realized through the agency of human beings. The uncertainty of this hope produces anxiety. Regions of Sorrow begins by explicating, through readings of Arendt's 1951 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, the various ways in which imperialism and totalitarianism seek to eliminate the common public world in which doxa, or individual opinions, exist. In the camps the Nazis created an "abyss"—a key term for Gottlieb—where humans inhabit a space between life and death and experience cannot be expressed in speech. Speech about the abyss is thus always anxious; the speaker tentatively refuses to accept silence but at the same time is plagued by an awareness that in speaking one erases or overwrites an unrepresentable reality. Gottlieb turns to Auden's Age of Anxiety to elaborate her account of anxious speech. The characters in this "baroque eclogue" advance different fantasies of ideal communities in which the dread of individuation is overcome in favor of the unity of all. Gottlieb attends carefully to the poem's overtly artificial form, which tends to absorb the differences among the speakers' voices into one dominant style. As its characters pursue the desire for an ideal order, the poem raises the possibility that a utopia in which difference has been eradicated might more closely resemble a totalitarian hell than a heaven. Crucially for Auden, and for Gottlieb, poetry must never attempt to describe paradise, only itself embody an analogous order. Poetic speech, therefore, anxiously gestures toward paradise without promising its realization. This account of "anxious hope" sets the stage for Gottlieb's discussion of "weak messianism." Her central text here is Arendt's The Human Condition, in which Arendt divides all human activities into the categories of labor, work, and action. In action, humans fulfill the promise of a new beginning that is contained in every birth, for action is dictated neither by need (as labor is), nor by a predetermined end (as work is). Forgiveness makes action possible because it allows the actor to trust that she will be released from the unpredictable and irreversible consequences of the action she initiates. Gottlieb emphasizes that action, in Arendt's thought, conforms to an "abyssal" structure. No new action could be undertaken without the expectation of [End Page 614] forgiveness—but forgiveness is itself an action, and as such it relies on an expectation...