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June 28 - July 5, 2024
History became a man-made process, the only all-comprehending process which owed its existence exclusively to the human race.[16]
counted among the crimes against humanity, she urged, and argued hard for a constitutional amendment that would confirm citizenship as an inalienable right.[17]
Stefan Zweig,
Walter Benjamin give a talk that would become one of his most famous essays, “The Author as Producer,” about how to rearrange the way the world looked so as not to succumb to fascist narratives.
Heinrich Blücher,
Herschel Grynszpan,
Chanan Klenbort,
Kant’s injunction to view everyone as an end in themselves, and to do so through political means. We are put on the earth to try to make things right for one another; that’s how we make a world.
Political theorists have since complained, with justification, that she was frustratingly vague on the type of political community that might best guarantee such a right to have rights. She had some models.
Georges Simenon.
In the library Arendt read Carl von Clausewitz’s classic political study of international relations, On War (1793), and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
Jacob Barosin, Eva Liebhold, and Karl Schwesig
Charlotte Salomon.
Lili Andrieux, who captured camp life in more
Hans Jonas,
Paul Tillich,
Hilde Fr...
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Charlotte Beradt,
Robert Gilbert.
Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Randall Jarrell, Lionel Trilling, Robert Lowell, ...
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(Alfred Copley),
Mary McCarthy.
W. H. Auden
Alexis de Tocqueville,
(In his eighth sermon on the first letter of John he did write: non enim amas in illo quod est; sed quod vis ut sis (you do not love what is in him, but what you want it to be).
There is only one mention of love in Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927),
Love is the infinitely precious apprehension of and pleasure in human otherness.
you can’t co-create rights and freedom with people who you cannot see.
But her “Little Rock” essay would not be the only occasion on which she would fail to comprehend American racism and Black resistance to it. Commentators
In his 1995 book, Archive Fever, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described how the passion to preserve the past is also a symptom of the drive to destroy what has made us.
Derrida also noted that the act of archiving confirms our commitment to survival and the future.
How do you tell the history of your own near disappearance?
The book’s status as a classic of Cold War thought has also obscured the extent to which it is, among other things, a study of modern racism. In fact, the bulk of the book is concerned with this history.
She planned to call it The Elements of Shame: Anti-Semitism-Imperialism-Racism.
Another, more Dante-esque early title was The Three Pillars of Hell: Anti-Semitism-Imperialism-Racism
It’s not just massively outsize propaganda, unspeakable terror, constant surveillance, fear, censorship, black flags, concentration camps, and public executions you need to watch out for. Racism, political and economic greed were all there at the beginning too.
Discourse on Colonialism,
Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization,
race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death (OT 209).
What is this somehow that, as it were, permits men to murder others like this? Indiscriminately, carelessly, methodically, drawing up kill lists in the morning and then going home to play cricket in the evening?
Elizabeth Eckford was the most visible member of the Little Rock Nine, the group of Black teenagers who dared to insist that the law mattered, that they mattered, and to take up their places at Central High in Little Rock.
As the new school year approached in 1957, Governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard “to keep the peace”—which turned out to mean keeping the nine newly enrolled Black children out of Central High.
Who are you? What do your actions and speech—your agency—tell us, who share the world with you, about you?
Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards?
The rise of Trumpism in America would not have surprised her. What scared her in 1957, as it scared many between 2016 and 2020, was the anti-political senselessness of that rage. Why risk triggering a mob mentality that threatened the wider project of political equality? she
Hannah Arendt, unsurprisingly, was the worst au pair and the most interesting of houseguests.
the paradox of American democracy in the back of her mind. Democracy gives people a singular and precious power, but the tyranny of the majority always threatens.
equality in misery and oppression—social slavery
democracy is no guarantee of political or personal freedom.
social liberty can also breed a dangerously oppressive conformity.
