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A Politics of Meaning
By Roger BerkowitzIn an essay on Arendt in this year’s Critique 13/13 Seminars, Seyla Benhabib asks whether it makes sense to read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as a core text in the somewhat arcane world of critical theory. For Benahabib, Arendt’s text is “critical” insofar as it “shares with the Marxist tradition a critique of the alienation of the homo faber from the products...
02-14-2020
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Woman as Witness, Beginner, Philosopher
By Jana Schmidt
In “Regarding the Cave” the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero offers a reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave that expands on an interpretation of that same narrative by Hannah Arendt. Cavarero is perhaps the first to notice how Arendt’s remarks in “Tradition and the Modern Age,” “What is Authority?,” and The Human Condition connect, how together they form a spirited critique of Western philosophy, and...
02-21-2020
Courage to Be Student Essay: On Nicole Dennis-Benn
By Isis PinheiroOn Monday, February 10th, Jamaican novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn visited Bard College as the first speaker of the 2020 Courage to Be lecture series. She is a public health researcher turned professional writer and the author of the acclaimed novel Patsy. Her work deals with issues of homophobia, sexualization of girls, socioeconomic disparities, and themes of identity and love.
02-19-2020
What We Are Reading: Academic Freedom and Twitter
By Roger BerkowitzAdam Steinbaugh reports on the decision by Babson College to fire an adjunct faculty member after complaints were made about social media posts he wrote in response to President Trump’s tweet threatening to bomb Iranian cultural sites. After Asheen Phansey suggested that Iran might offer a list of American cultural institutions to attack, Babson was criticized widely for supporting an anti-American professor who was calling for attacks on American cultural sites.
02-18-2020
What We Are Reading: Nonviolence
By Samantha HillMasha Gessen interviews Judith Butler for The New Yorker. Butler’s new book, “The Force of Nonviolence” tackles the way we can imagine “an entirely new way for humans to live together in the world.” In the interview, Butler addresses questions of nonviolence, equality, and the liberal notion of individualism.
02-18-2020
The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science
An essay in Arendt Studies by Roger Berkowitz (2018) written for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) was recently republished in The Abstract Elephant, a publicly available journal.02-14-2020
Discussion: MLK and the Legacy of Civil Disobedience in America
Kenyon Victor Adams; Amy Schiller; Thomas Chatterton WilliamsSince we are here concerned with citizenship, I want to preface my brief remarks by signaling the relationship between citizenship and national memory, and how the concept of race, as we see in various historical examples, necessarily replaces that of citizenship.
02-12-2020
What We're Reading: Justus Rosenberg
By Samantha HillBard College Professor Justus Rosenberg has written a book about his Time in the Pyenees: Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Mann, and More, working with the Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee.
02-12-2020
What We're Reading: George Steiner
By Samantha HillWhen Hannah Arendt went to study with Martin Heidegger, he was known as the “magician from Marbach,” because he made Plato and Aristotle come to life. As Arendt later reflected, people went to study with Heidegger to learn how to think. In an insightful and graceful essay, George Steiner takes on Hannah Arendt’s relationship with Martin Heidegger, in a review essay of their correspondence: “The Magician in Love.”
02-12-2020
Propaganda and Cynicism
By Roger BerkowitzMcKay Coppins created a fake Facebook account and dived head first into the world of Donald Trump’s propaganda machine. What he found surprised him. And yet, it is exactly what Hannah Arendt argued 70 years ago about the nature of modern propaganda. The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it.
02-12-2020