Amor Mundi 12/1/13
12-02-2013
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
George Packer’s The Unwinding, just won the National Book Award for non-fiction. The award is deeply deserved; the book is as subtle as it is searing, a brilliantly told series of interlocking tales of the moral and institutional hollowing out of the American dream. Two new reviews get its importance. One is by Jim Sleeper: “The inward-looking force in [Packer’s] portraits of individual Americans in his book The Unwinding is strong enough to unsettle and even crack the thick crust of conformity to the "new normal" into which most of us have been baked, half-consciously, since around 1980. By "thick crust," I mean a regime, really, of casino-financing at work; of big-business' degradation of our daily and political choices using consumer marketing, self-marketing, and predatory marketing; and of Orwellian "national-security" violations of faith in authority that, taken together, comprise a system that few people anywhere on the political spectrum still feel is legitimate or sustainable but that no one knows how to escape, other than through "every man for himself" tactics that make matters worse.” A second review, by Thomas Franks, gets to the heart of Packer’s approach: “Until now, to write about the pauperization of America has always been a political deed. This is because what Packer calls “the unwinding” was not an act of nature; it was a work of ideology. It is something that has been done to us by public officials that a lot of us voted for. Draining out this aspect of the genre is Packer’s accomplishment, the move that separates his book from the thousand similar efforts that I mentioned above. It is, strictly speaking, what makes his contribution eligible for the National Book Award while an equally transcendent book like Deer Hunting with Jesus is ignored by bien-pensant critics and prize juries alike. Packer says what dozens of others have said before, but he does it in a way that everyone can see is “art”; in a way that avoids giving offense.”’
Margarethe von Trotta on Hannah Arendt
“The light that Hannah Arendt’s work brought into the world still shines. And because her work is invoked by an ever-increasing number of people, it becomes brighter every day. In a time when most felt obligated to adhere to a specific ideology, Arendt was a shining example of someone who remained true to her unique perspective on the world.” So begins Margarethe von Trotta’s essay on Hannah Arendt that introduces the special edition booklet that accompanies the just-released DVD and Blu-Ray Disks. You can get a copy of the DVD or Blu-Ray disks now for a limited time with your membership in the Hannah Arendt Center at the $100 level or higher.
In an essay about his own discovery of the perfect description of a thing for which there is no proper word, Brad Leithauser considers the excellence of a metaphor: "Back in college, in one of those roots-of-civilization survey courses that flourished in the days before the near-simultaneous birth of irony and multiculturalism, I was told that the greatest similes and metaphors belonged to Homer. It’s in Book 1 of the Iliad that we’re given our first taste of the “wine-dark sea,” and I don’t suppose anyone ever has better evoked the mesmerizing, inebriating thoughts that marine motion moves in us. In Book 8, we come upon the famous image where the Trojan campfires become constellations. And in a number of places, Achilles is likened to a lion. But as equations go (ocean equals wine, campfire equals constellation, leading warrior equals king of beasts), these don’t represent leaps of any sizable or significant distance. To my mind, the deeper pleasure in metaphor lies in creating unexpected equations, perceiving likeness in the land of unlikeness.” If you want to pursue the importance of metaphors in thinking, look at Arendt’s account of metaphors in chapters 11-12 of The Life of the Mind: “the function of metaphor as “turning the mind back to the sensory world in order to illuminate the mind’s non-sensory experiences for which there are no words in any language.”
“What is Politics?” is the question taken up by a conference co-sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center and the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles earlier this month. Hannah Arendt dedicated her work to the reinvention of the public realm and to freedom in political action. Today, as in the 1960s, her ideas inspire theoretical debates as well as civil political initiatives. The conference, with lectures by experts on Hannah Arendt’s work, focused on the influence of her European-American experience and the particular importance of transcultural exchange in Arendt’s theory of political action. Speakers included Marie Luise Knott, Anson Rabinbach; Princeton University, Peg Birmingham; DePaul University, Robert Harrison; Stanford University, Martín Plot; California Institute of the Arts, Wolfgang Heuer; Freie Universität Berlin, and Roger Berkowitz; Bard College. Most of the talks were videotaped and are now online. They are your weekend read. Happy Thanksgiving.
The Controversy of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Burning Strong Even 50 Years Later
This past week in the New York Times book review, two eminent journalists took their turn at describing why Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem remains controversial and meaningful. For Adam Kirsch, it's all about a difference in feeling, "It’s not hard to see that for Arendt, this stringency was a form of respect. By holding Jews to what she conceived to be the highest professional and personal standards, she was treating them as full moral persons." Rivka Galchin sees in Arendt’s critics a sometimes willful, misunderstanding: "Arendt does not argue that the Holocaust and its unspeakable horrors are banal. She does not endorse or believe Eichmann’s presentation of himself as a man beset by the tricky virtue of obedience. And she does not say that the evil she saw in Eichmann is the only kind of evil. Many of the objections to her work are based on arguments never made."
Rowland Manthorpe considers the future of the multimedia book, in the wake of a Device 6, a kind of literary video game: "As gamers and readers come together, and devices offer new possibilities for interactive texts, books may come to resemble games. Eventually, reading a novel could be like playing something like Device 6. Imagine Philip Glass writing a creepy-as-hell score for the new Stephen King, with music that comes in just at the right moment: Such a thing could be done, right now, because when a reader is reading on a smartphone, it is possible to know exactly where they are in a text. Or imagine a novel that takes over your phone and starts sending you text messages. Once writers and publishers start to engage seriously with tablet technology, the possibilities are vast."
You can read Roger Berkowitz’s Letter in the New York Review of Books, along with Lilla’s response. Berkowitz writes: “Lilla’s argument misleads when addressing Arendt’s view that Eichmann exemplified “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” Lilla accuses Arendt of calling Eichmann “a cog”; in fact, she argues otherwise, writing—in sections IV, VII, and the epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem—that he went beyond orders, enthusiastically supporting the Final Solution. Lilla writes that Arendt “made evil seem banal”; in fact, Arendt contrasts the horrific evil of the Holocaust with Eichmann’s inability to think from the perspective of others—banality not of what he did (evil), but of his person. That “evil violates a natural harmony” is, Arendt writes, the nonbanal and “supreme justification” for why Eichmann must be executed.” Lilla continues to enlist Bettina Stangneth and her excellent book, Eichmann vor Jerusalem, to discredit Arendt’s argument about the banality of evil. But Stangneth does nothing of the sort; on the contrary, she explicitly credits Arendt and refuses to say that her book disproves Arendt, precisely the claim Lilla makes.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Wolfgang Heuer examines the correlation between personality and human thought and action. The weekend read revisits the recent conference at Villa Aurora in LA on Hannah Arendt, "What is Politics?"