Beware of Pity: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker - The Diigo Meta page

• 28 Dec 09
  

  Matthew Birt

  hannah arendt philosophy martin heidegger totalitarianism politics judaica history

• 23 Jul 09
  

  Mare BV

  arendt **

• 07 Mar 09
  

  Deborah Batterman
• 20 Feb 09
  

  Rob Pfeifer

  A dignified individual existence, she believes, requires distance from others, the “interspace” that she described in the Hamburg speech. Compassion is dangerous, in her view, because “not unlike love,” it “abolishes the distance, the in-between which alw

  quotes facebook solitude philosophy arendt InfiniteJest

• 30 Jan 09
  

  Todd Suomela

  philosophy about(HannahArendt) review

• 25 Jan 09
  

  Katie Day

  <<It is an ambiguous tribute to Arendt, then, that her scholarly and popular profile is higher today than at any time since she died, in 1975, at the age of sixty-nine.>>

  hannah_arendt philosophy politics jewish history

  • It is an ambiguous tribute to Arendt, then, that her scholarly and popular profile is higher today than at any time since she died, in 1975, at the age of sixty-nine.
  • Yet it is not just political theorists who find Arendt a source of fascination. The most intense curiosity about Arendt in the past few years has had less to do with her work than with her life.
  • 11 more annotations...
  • • Yet Arendt’s deeply ambivalent relationship with Heidegger—her lover, teacher, and friend—has a more than personal significance, since it casts light on the most vexed issue in her work: her tangled relationship with Jewishness and Germanness.
    • The most rewarding way to read Arendt, and the best way to make sense of both the strengths and the limitations of her work, is to approach her as Michelle-Irène Brudny does in “Hannah Arendt: An Essay in Intellectual Biography”: “I definitely take Hannah Arendt to be less a political philosopher or a political theorist . . . than an author in the strong sense of the word.” Kristeva, still more emphatically, considers Arendt’s writings “to be less a body of work than an action.”
    • Arendt acknowledged her deep affinity with Rahel Varnhagen, née Levin, calling her “my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now.” What they had in common was their predicament as highly gifted Jewish women in a culture that exacted a terrible psychic toll both on women and on Jews.
    • The correspondence, which is collected in “Letters 1925-1975,” is revealing, first of all, in its very incompleteness. Arendt kept all of Heidegger’s letters, from the very beginning; he kept few of hers, and none from the early years. As a result, Heidegger’s voice dominates the book, just as his personality and his decisions dominated the affair. As one would expect, Heidegger—an older male professor, who also happened to be one of Europe’s greatest philosophers—treats his teen-age lover with a combination of passion and condescension.
    • The private humiliation and political betrayal she suffered at the hands of Heidegger, the living embodiment of German intellect, only brought home to her the lessons she was already learning from her study of Rahel Varnhagen.
    • To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls “specificity,” the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community.
    • Reading “Eichmann in Jerusalem” today, however, in the light of all we have since learned from and about Arendt, it is clear that these local issues were only the occasions for resentment, not the whole cause. That cause, once again, can be traced back to the “laboratory of Arendt’s political thought,” and to her own experience as a Jewish woman in Germany. What raised Arendt’s Jewish consciousness was her recognition of Jewish helplessness, both psychological and political. But if she responded to that helplessness with an insistence on self-help, she found it hard to avoid condemning those Jews who, in her view, did not or could not help themselves.
    • Arendt’s need to distance herself from Jews, and especially from Jewish victims, accounts for the ironic tone that has always struck readers of “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Arendt’s attitude toward Eichmann himself is simply dismissive: her whole characterization of him as a banal bureaucrat, oblivious of the evil he does, is a way of asserting his human and intellectual inferiority.
    • Still more revealing than Arendt’s definition of politics is her explanation of why people are drawn to it in the first place. We do not enter the political world to pursue justice or to create a better world. No, human beings love politics because they love to excel, and a political career is the best way to win the world’s respect.
    • No one has argued more forcefully than Arendt that to deprive human beings of their public, political identity is to deprive them of their humanity—and not just metaphorically.
    • She reveals with remorseless logic why emotional appeals to “human rights” or “the international community” so often prove impotent in the face of a humanitarian crisis. “The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments,” she writes in “Origins,” “but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.” This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and what is happening now in Darfur. Genocide is a political problem, Arendt insists, and it can be solved only politically.
• 15 Jan 09
  

  snaggletooth

  Arrendt

• 13 Jan 09
  

  jillmarie khouri

  philosophy politics theory history jewish arendt

• 12 Jan 09
  

  Claudia Scholz

  theory arendt biography

• 

  Jeremy Price

  philosophy politics theory history jewish arendt

• 

  Mark Tracy
• 11 Jan 09
  

  beth gourley

  Arendt's description of a typical Nazi functionary who "does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity. Out of sheer passion he would never do harm to a fly. Part of the contradictions of her thinking.

  arendt politics philosophy

  • We do not enter the political world to pursue justice or to create a better world. No, human beings love politics because they love to excel, and a political career is the best way to win the world’s respect.
  • The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments
  • 3 more annotations...
  • • but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them
    • can be solved only politically
    • it is the desire to excel which makes men love the world,” then our love for the world actually makes it harder for us to love the people who inhabit it.
• 10 Jan 09
  

  triple_ t

  evil arendt genocide

• 07 Jan 09
  

  nytwm1

  us zionism gaza egypt

• 

  Ognjen Strpić

  arendt

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