The political theorist George Kateb once remarked that her work is ‘offensive to a democratic soul’. She does not even believe in the soul, as she writes in one love letter to her husband. ![]() She rejects notions of progress, she is despairing of representative democracy, and she is not confident that freedom can be saved in the modern world. Throughout much of her work, she argues that hope is a dangerous barrier to acting courageously in dark times. Some people uphold hope as a form of liberal faith in progress, while for others still hope expresses faith in God and life after death.Īrendt breaks with these narratives. For some, discussions of hope are attached to notions of a radical political vision for the future, while for others hope is a political slogan used to motivate the masses. Even the most jaded observers of world affairs can find it difficult not to catch their breath at the moment of suspense, hoping for good to triumph over evil and deliver a happy ending. Many discussions of hope veer toward the saccharine, and speak to a desire for catharsis. (In Russian, nadezhda means hope.) Arendt called it ‘one of the real documents’ of the 20th century. Written by the wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, the devastating memoir details life under Stalin’s regime and the struggle to stay alive. After the war, in a letter to the American philosopher Glenn Gray, she wrote that the only book she recommends to all her students is Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam. And she turned away from any notion of messianism that might offer redemption in the future. She despised what she called ‘opportunistic politics’, which ‘leaves behind it a chaos of contradictory interests and apparently hopeless conflicts’. As early as 1929, she saw what was happening in Germany, and lost friendships because of it. ![]() What enabled Arendt to make a gift of time during such an anguishing experience?Īrendt was never given to hopeful thinking. Which is not how one might be inclined to act when their life is in peril. In the words of Helen Wolff: ‘Hannah, in her high-spirited way, made of this anguishing experience a kind of gift of time.’ It was ‘a hiatus within a life of work and duties’. They found bicycles and explored the beautiful French countryside during the day and delighted in the detective novels of Georges Simenon at night. As Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher waited in Montauban, France in the summer of 1940 to receive emergency exit papers they did not give into anxiety or despair.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |