Arendt's Work Research Articles

In‐Between Child and World: Educational Responsibility with and against Arendt

AbstractA key aspect of the educator's responsibility as understood by Hannah Arendt is its dual character. Educators are responsible for both the life and development of the child and the continuance of the world, as Arendt puts it in “The Crisis in Education.” Moreover, these aspects of responsibility are in tension with each other. Arendt's own accounts of responsibility in her political writings are, in a similar way, riddled with tension. What should we conclude from this about the nature of educational responsibility? To address this question, Julien Kloeg and Liesbeth Noordegraaf‐Eelens first reconstruct the meaning of responsibility in Arendt's political writings. They find a broad distinction between political responsibility and personal responsibility: the former consists in contributing to a community (by extension, the world), and the latter in the “two‐in‐one” of silent self‐dialogue. While political responsibility is close to Arendt's description of the responsibility of the educator (for the continuance of the world), personal responsibility does not find an obvious home in her educational thought. From this ambiguous situation of education and Arendt's own theme of the “in‐between” arises the possibility of introducing a concept of educational responsibility that further develops Arendt's position. Kloeg and Noordegraaf‐Eelens's concept of educational responsibility suggests a theory and practice of navigating tensions between conflicting commitments. In their view, this is both an appropriate extension and reform of Arendt's educational work and an insight that does justice to the practical situation of educators in the modern world.

The Outdoor Condition: Reading Arendt on a Warming Planet

Abstract Is Hannah Arendt's political thought relevant to the contemporary planetary situation? This article draws on The Human Condition and some of Arendt's ancient and modern sources to answer this question, using a phenomenological distinction between outdoors and indoors to make sense of three likely types of artificial adaptation to a warming planet. Arendt's account of the importance of the “body-bound senses” of an “earth-bound creature” need not result in the problematic fetishization of immediate rather than mediated knowledge, or of an “earthly nature” supposedly prior to and independent of the human artifice, but can draw attention to the narrowing of human beings’ “angle of receptivity” to a surprising and unpredictable reality. This perspective, however, also discloses the limits of Arendt's work in the face of ecological transformations that are simultaneously planetary in scale and highly unequal in their consequences.

Antiquity, Tradition, and Anti-Blackness in Hannah Arendt's Public Sphere

summary: Scholarship on Hannah Arendt's receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity has largely neglected debates about anti-Blackness in her writing. To begin to fill this gap, this article focuses on Arendt's concept of the public ( The Human Condition ) and her condemnations of Black student movements ( On Violence ). Her account of how texts confer immortality on people in the public sphere clarifies the connections between an exclusive ideal of the public, an exclusive textual tradition, and an exclusive view of humanity. Arendt's work raises a challenge for classicists: can commitment to the immortality of a textual tradition be disentangled from anti-Blackness?

Die phänomenologischen Wurzeln der Gesprächsanalyse und das Politische bei Hannah Arendt: Ein Kombinationsvorschlag zur Analyse sprachlicher Interaktionen

Abstract Hannah Arendt's political theory remains influential in both the Humanities and the Social Sciences, including in sociology, educational sciences and political education. Arendt's works are utilized in different ways in these contexts. Within sociolinguistics and conversational linguistics, however, this does not seem to be the case. The present article aims to overcome this shortcoming by exploring opportunities for analytically integrating Arendt's understanding of the political and the conversation analysis point of view. Combining these two perspectives results in the added value of expanding the interpretive framework to include Arendt's dimensions of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and access to the world. In line with this goal, the respective phenomenological influences of both approaches, Arendt’s political theory and the phenomenological precursors of conversation analysis, are considered separately. After providing an overview of the phenomenological roots for socio- and conversation analysis (Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schütz, Harold Garfinkel), Arendt's concept of the political is discussed. Subsequently, the analytical nexus of the approaches are elaborated on in the form of three theses. It is argued that Arendt developed an innovative phenomenological concept of plurality which has the potential of forming the basis for an interpretive tool for the analysis of oral interaction (in line with Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology).

Transformative Learning and Experience

This paper explores experience that is both misconstrued and under theorized in adult education. Human experience is expressed in the public sphere as the motivation for social and political change. The connections among experience, the public sphere, and democracy are identified. The allies in exploring the role of experience in education are John Dewey and Jack Mezirow's transformation theory and their understanding is a basis for outlining a more critical theory-inspired understanding of education as the reconstruction of experience. The work of Oskar Negt on experience will be the starting point for engaging in re-thinking the role of experience in education. This will be the basis for exploring the transformation of experience as a way of better understanding aspects of Mezirow's theory of transformative learning. The author concludes with a brief presentation of sociological imagination as the key to developing a pedagogy of imagination and a pedagogy of the transformation of experience. Hannah Arendt's work provides a thread woven through the paper.

For my friend Richard J. Bernstein

For my friend Richard J. Bernstein

Edmund Burke and Hannah Arendt: Decolonization, Resentment, and the Social Question

Abstract Hannah Arendt's work On Revolution brings into contact two temporalities: the decade of its composition (the 1960s), alongside its understanding of revolution in conjunction with “Enlightenment.” A reader of Edmund Burke who turns to this work will be startled at the degree to which he plays a central role. His ideas and even his temperament seem to guide her profound praise for “the men who made the American Revolution” alongside her shock centered around Robespierre but mingled with her discussion of Rousseau and the French Revolution. This connection between Burke and Arendt is worth tracing because it allows readers to understand her response to the post-WWII age, which witnessed the emergence of manifold diverse “revolutions” in the social and political realm brought by decolonization, both in the European and non-European (i.e., Asian, African, postcolonial) contexts. It also allows readers to question Arendt's view of the role that suffering and poverty ought to play in moments of revolution and to scrutinize her thesis that wherever a solution to the “social” question was sought by “political” means it has led to terror and violence, with the notion of resentment playing a crucial role.

Hannah Arendt and Marxist Theories of Totalitarianism

This article offers a new reading of the place of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism in the history of totalitarianism theory. Building on a novel genealogy of Marxist theories of totalitarianism, the article traces this inheritance into Arendt's early work on the subject, demonstrating that her “languages” (in the Pocockian sense) were basically continuous with those of interwar Marxism. The article proceeds in three stages. First, it reconstructs two core languages of interwar Marxism (imperialism and Bonapartism). Second, it shows how these languages underpinned a central controversy in Marxist theories of totalitarianism during World War II, a debate conducted in the languages of imperialism and Bonapartism and turning on the relationship between the political and the economic. Third, it shows that Arendt wrote in these languages and contributed to the same debate. In conclusion, this striking affinity with Marxism in Arendt's early work is contrasted with the emergence of classical totalitarianism theory—a project with which Arendt was soon eager to associate herself and which makes a unified and consistent reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism so difficult.

The Value of the Surface

AbstractThrough an unorthodox reading of Hannah Arendt, this article argues that her political thought contains unacknowledged resources for conceptualizing embodiment in politics, and in relation to the economy, physical needs, and appearance. In contrast to the way she is typically read, this essay develops an affirmative account of embodiment in Arendt's work. Arendt not only recognizes the role of the appearing body in action but also underscores the importance of labor and necessity for a human sense of reality. Throughout her oeuvre, she presents a historical analysis of the rise of a functionalist, processual understanding of life under capitalist modernity. She also develops an alternative, nonfunctionalist framing of living bodies, highlighting a gratitude for “given” aspects of existence and the value of the bodily surface as a sentient interface between embodied needs and the common world. The article tracks the development of these reflections in Arendt's engagements with Karl Marx, Simone Weil, and Adolf Portmann.

A Discourse Analysis of South Park’s PC Principal

This research aims to expose how South Park, a polemical entertainment program, deals with some of the most socially divisive topics from 2015 onward, thus establishing a new type of criticism that had been, for a long time, specific to news media only. The methodology used for analyzing the reflection of the political correctness paradigm is scientific narration. The actions of an autocratic persona, PC Principal, are interpreted during three relevant episodes (#1, #5, and #8) of the 19th season. The personification of censorship through the naïve Butters, an obedient schoolboy turned into a humble clerk serving PC Principal's overzealous fight for his idea of equal rights, can remind one of Hanna Arendt's work "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil." Thus, people who blindly follow orders without questioning the imposed regime might have a more significant negative influence than dictators themselves. As tolerance is becoming a feature of selfishness rather than a noble human attribute due to increased competitiveness, abnormally creating the circumstances to make one more socially visible, South Park often sanctions the excessive flaws of the liberal doctrine, exposing the various absurdities can arise from such biased behaviors. Even though the show depicts thoroughly grotesque images, the authors seem to balance them with moral teachings. The present study intends to highlight the need for an alternative to formal debates regarding social issues to avoid ideological bias.

Arendt in the refugee camp: The political agency of world-building

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or ‘bare’ life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of ‘the jungle’ in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activities – from the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of action – and their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.

A Putative (Private) Life of Hannah Arendt: Bio-portraiture as performance in the work of Miriam Shenitzer

The paper uses tropes culled from several of Hannah Arendt's works, as well as Rebecca Schneider's performance-theoretical considerations on "reenactment", to analyze the work of artist Miriam Shenitzer, specifically a show of drawings, captions, and objects called "A Putative Life of Hannah Arendt." The essay probes this "putative life" as construed from the artist's own memory fragments (including the memories of others that have become the artist's own), as well as from faux-artifacts that constitute a "collection" (à la Benjamin) without claim to representing an actual past. With access to history denied and a heritage claimed "without testament," the artist opens a space "between past and future," a moment of contemplation on the borders between private and public lives.

Las huellas de Heidegger en La condición humana. Una disputa soterrada en torno de la praxis aristotélica

El artículo muestra que La condición humana de Hannah Arendt puede leerse como una disputa soterrada con Martin Heidegger en torno de la praxis aristotélica. Por una parte, se reconstruyen las huellas de la lectura heideggeriana de Aristóteles en la obra de Arendt, para esclarecer esta presencia invisibilizada en la que se cifra uno de los puntos nodales de discusión con quien fuera su maestro. Por otra, se analiza la reconceptualización de la praxis que Arendt lleva a cabo, lo que supone una crítica a la interpretación de Heidegger y el despliegue de un marco conceptual propio que va más allá de la perspectiva aristotélica.

Deconstructing ISIS: Philippe-Joseph Salazar's Aesthetics of Terror

ABSTRACT Philippe-Joseph Salazar's 2017 masterpiece Words Are Weapons poses a fundamental question: Should we read al-Qaeda? Can we teach the aesthetics that made ISIS infamous? Or in studying the phenomenon do we perpetuate its influence? Government and media campaigns to counter falsehoods, take down propaganda, or superimpose interpretation seek to silence the enemy while preserving the presumed sensibilities of their intended audience. Yet such strategy leaves the door open to the infinitely more seductive power of mystery. Like Arendt's work on Eichmann, Salazar's book challenges us to confront the extreme violence of ISIS in its absolute form. What he finds is a mirror onto Western society—a culture of paralysis in the face of danger and indifference in the face of zealotry. The book is arguably the single indispensable work to date for understanding the psychological and communicative complexities of the war formerly known as the “Global War on Terrorism.”

Hannah Arendt on the evil of not being a person

AbstractThis article presents Hannah Arendt's novel conception of evil, arguing that what animates and undergirds this conception is an understanding of human agency, of what it means to be a person at all. The banality of evil that Arendt theorizes is exactly the failure to become a person in the first place—it is, in short, the evil of being a nobody. For Arendt, this evil becomes extreme when a mass of such nobodies becomes organized by totalitarianism. This article focuses on the connection between Arendt's understanding of personhood and her conception of evil, showing how Arendt falls into a Kantian tradition of prioritizing apperception—thinking—as central for human agency. In this way, the article shows that thinking—being a person—is central to Arendt's work, thereby prioritizing and making sense of her claim in The Human Condition that one is never “more active” than when thinking.

Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography

The confluence of Jews and Communism has long been noted by scholars. However, most historiography has treated European contexts, with the addition of some work on the Americas and the Yishuv, but neglected the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Works that do purport to survey and compare the phenomenon across contexts have typically given the MENA short shrift. Further, most discussion of leftist Jewish politics halts after World War II, just when the story is gaining momentum in the MENA, particularly within anticolonial movements. In this article, I draw on Hannah Arendt's work on the so-called conscious pariah to bridge historiographies and link leftist Jews in the MENA, the Americas, and Europe. Using archival sources, newspapers, oral histories, and novels, I present Jewish involvement in the Parti Communist Marocain as a case study to examine the complications of Jewish involvement in leftist politics in concentric geographic, temporal, and historiographic circles. In so doing, I seek to complicate the story of Jewish attraction to internationalism and universalism and the reconciliation of Jewish affiliations and identities with the nation-state and the colonial.

Acción e institución en el pensamiento político de Hannah Arendt: lecturas de Sobre la Revolución

***Ação e instituição no pensamento político de Hannah Arendt: leituras de Sobre a Revolução***Como diz Margaret Canovan, On Revolution é um dos livros menos estudados y menos compreendidos de Hannah Arendt e os nossos países não são uma exceção à regra. No entanto, o texto é de grande importância para explorar algumas questões em Arendt que, apesar de ter continuidade, são menos desenvolvidos em seus outros livros. Nele, Arendt enfoca a dimensão instituinte da ação política revolucionária. Esse é um elemento essencial para temos uma visão mais completa do pensamento político da Hannah Arendt e pensamos as nossas realidades políticas da América Latina. Neste trabalho, então, oferecemos certos elementos de análise do pensamento político de Hannah Arendt como eles aparecem na sua obra Sobre a Revolução. Vamos enquadrar a nossa leitura entre duas interpretações que, na nossa opinião, são igualmente interessantes, muito influentes no contexto da América Latina, e que são referências essenciais para a compreensão da obra de Arendt, mas diferem quanto à interpretação dada ao seu pensamento político e, em particular, quanto ao local que as instituições políticas ocupam nele. Essas são as interpretações de Étienne Tassin sobre os paradoxos da revolução na obra de Arendt e de Margaret Canovan sobre o novo republicanismo arendtiano. Em seguida, vamos desenvolver algumas chaves para uma leitura própria de On Revolution entre as duas posições. Finalmente, vamos oferecer uma conclusão e trazer os pontos mais importantes do nosso argumento.

The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking

The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking

Reconciling ourselves to reality: Arendt, education and the challenge of being at home in the world

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I explore the educational significance of the work of Hannah Arendt through reflections on four papers that constitute this special issue. I focus on the challenge of reconciling ourselves to reality, that is, of being at home in the world. Although Arendt's idea of being at home in the world is connected to her explorations of understanding, such understanding should not be approached as a matter of sense making, but in terms of ‘eccentric judgement’. For judgement to be eccentric, we must expose ourselves to otherness, which has to do with friendship if we understand friendship as a public rather than an entirely private matter. While political judgement requires a ‘being in the presence of others’ Arendt's views on thinking and its role in moral judgement indicate the necessity of solitude, of being alone with oneself. Rather than seeing this a process through which one calls oneself into question, I highlight the importance of the experience of being called into question, which I understand as the experience of ‘being taught’. I conclude that the educational significance of Arendt's work particularly lies in this link with teaching, and less so in notions of learning, reflection and sense making.

Hannah Arendt and the ‘freedom’ to think

ABSTRACTDissatisfied with the Western tradition of political philosophy, Arendt maintained a tension between the political, which she associates primarily with the freedom to act, and the philosophical, which she associates principally with the activity of thinking, throughout her works. Whilst Arendt's work is underpinned by a focus on political action, her work on the thinking/non-thinking dichotomy is of significant educational value. Taking a broadly phenomenological approach, and reading Arendt through an educational lens, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the thinking/non-thinking dichotomy and the perils of ‘non-thinking’ reveal the wider dangers of instrumentalism and the performative models of education that accompanies it. It is suggested here that Arendt's work exposes ‘non-thinking’ as a form of instrumental thinking, which is not only a threat to the development of the capacity for critical thought but also to the development autonomy and the capacity for moral judgement.