A Student's Personal Arendt Library

Julia Frakes, a student of political science and peace & justice studies, recently sent us this image of her personal Arendt library.

Here is what she has to say about the image:

I posted this photo on Instagram a few months ago, knee-deep in research and awestricken with how much our contemporary scholarship owes to Arendtian moral and action theories articulated in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Judith Butler’s conceptualization of terrorism and the movements that sweep up youthful sympathies owes much to Arendt’s most striking and novel insight—that there is an intrinsic link between our ability (or inability) to think and evil itself—especially as our society contends with pressing questions about civil rights, the normative value of capitalism, state-sponsored violence, crimes against humanity, the spectacle of the 27/7 media cycle, global revolutions, violent swings toward nationalism, an eerie “unthaw” of the Cold War, exercises of totalitarian power structures and surveillance, and racial and ethnic crises in inner-cities and the Middle East which challenge easy and en vogue applications of Arendt’s totalitarianism thesis and demand that we veer from disastrous impassivity. To properly honor Hannah Arendt’s genius and wisdom, we must honestly tackle the ties between (not) thinking and evil (Villa 2000: 279).

Wading through these books, I came to realize that Eichmann did not harbor a deep seeded hatred of the Jews; rather, he naturally adapted to the Nazi rules for reterming deportation “resettlement” and extermination “special treatment” (Kirsch & Galchen 2013). The net effect of these regime euphemisms, Arendt contended, was not to keep bureaucrats “ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, ‘normal’ knowledge of murder and lies” (Arendt 1963). Nowadays, with Frank Luntz-esque naming and corporate consent-manufacturing, terms like “solitary confinement” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” reveal our collective thoughtlessness, adherence to “standardized codes of expression,” and totalitarian tendencies as possible in ostensibly democratic nation-states. Perhaps that’s why I found this silly still-life so compelling (or, at least worth an Instagram post); the directness of the retro “Eat Krispy Kreme” swag struck me as somehow quaint: a relic of unambiguity, predating powerful conventions like native advertising that profoundly influence our social media age.

In The Human Condition, Arendt prioritized political action as oriented in Marxian notions of labor and couched in implications of property in accord with Lockean political edicts. Her influence is clearly discernable in the preconditions to totalitarianism she saw in loneliness (about which Habermas expanded, comparing Arendt’s emphases on the banality of bureaucracy with Max Weber’s sociology), and in her delineation of the newness of power that supports modern hierarchical structures—about which postmodern and poststructural thinkers explored further, notably Foucault (Habermas 1977: 10, Swift 2009: 41, 44-5). Arendtian political philosophy conceives the locus of human action in the realm of articulated deeds as unique because of our necessity for speech, considering that both labor and work may be asserted in silence (Hull 200: 127). Arendt often mused of the “harsh light” of the public realm, asserting in The Human Condition that “there are a great many things which cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene” (Arendt 1958: 57). In what I would hazard to guess was among Jean Baudrillard’s formative tomes, Arendt later adds, “Privacy was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm, and while the political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private space of one’s own self (like a slave) meant to be no longer human” and “A life spent entirely in the public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow” (1958: 64, 71). I couldn’t keep the insights to myself: I ended up giving the Arendt edition of pocket-sized Penguin “Great Ideas” series as a holiday gift to nearly all my friends. Every library could benefit from a little Arendt, in my book.

Want to share pictures of your own Arendt library? Please send them to David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at [email protected], and we might feature them on our blog!