Thinking and Friendship in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt for Now

This was a truly fascinating On Being listen. I’ve had some engagement with Hannah Arendt, but I was surprise how many places my mind went as I listening to this conversation and reflected on the world around me. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about totalitarianism, fascism, and imaginative communities of resistance, and to the work of what I call re-making. Stonebridge also offers some interesting perspectives on loneliness.

“Along with George Orwell, the 20th-century political theorist Hannah Arendt is a new bestseller. She famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil” and wrote towering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism. She was concerned with the human essence of events that we analyze as historical and political. Totalitarianism she described as “organized loneliness,” and loneliness as the “common ground for terror.” The historian, she said, always knows how vulnerable facts are. And thinking is not something for elites; it is the human power to keep possibility alive.”

You’ll find the conversation here.

For more on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein you’ll find one of Stonebridge’s essays in this collection Reading Melanie Klein. For more on Arendt try: The Human Condition, On Revolution, and The Origins of Totalitarianism (for more on this theme you might enjoy this article written in The Guardian in Feb. 2017). Also well worth watching is the 2012 film Hannah Arendt. Finally, for a collection of academic essay’s engaging Arendt’s thought, I’ve heard some good commentary about Cambridge University Press’ 2010 publication Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt

If anyone can e-mail me a copy of Stonebridge’s essay Thinking without Banisters I’d be very grateful.

Finally, the soundtrack accompanying me as I wrote this was Kiwi band The Nudge and their album Dark Arts.

Comments

[Paul F]

see also these three articles:

https://theoutline.com/post/980/misinterpreting-hannah-arendt

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/01/totalitarianism-in-age-donald-trump-lessons-from-hannah-arendt-protests

http://forward.com/culture/362036/how-hannah-arendt-is-being-used-and-misused-in-the-age-of-trump/