Hannah Arendt and Her World

Catalog description

This seminar will explore key concerns and paradigms in 20th-century intellectual history via a critical consideration of the thinking of Hannah Arendt (1906-75). In recent years, Arendt's work has earned renewed attention for its multidisciplinary, multicontinental importance as well as for its uncanny currency to the present political and academic moment. Her thinking is thus in many ways "migratory thinking." Migratory thinking involves first the diaspora and exchange of thinkers, most specifically through political exile and emigration during the Nazi period and after. It thus involves both the experience and theorization of "worldliness": the Enlightenment value that remains a key principle for Arendt, with special reference to Lessing. Migratory thinking also involves discursive movement among disciplines and cultures, for example from German philosophy to American political theory/science, and the complications of intellectual and cultural subjectivity of émigré as well as German Jewish thinking. Finally, the history and historical contingency that support this style of thinking emphasize the drive to thinking, responsibility, and judgment at a moment of danger. Readings and seminar discussions will focus on Arendt's work, read in dialogue with the work of thinkers with whom she was in dialogue (Benjamin, Broch, Heidegger, Scholem) and with the later work of thinkers whose own subject positions might be considered comparable with the concerns in the paragraph above (G. Rose, S. Neiman, S. Aschheim, J. Derrida et al.). Themes will include cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and totalitarianism, the global politics of race, capitalism, and exchange, religious/secular tensions, and the relations of society and politics to art and the imagination.