Amor Mundi 12/8/13
12-09-2013
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.
“If I were asked what was the greatest problem in the university I work in today, I would definitely say bureaucracy: in particular, the obsession with codifying, regulating, recording, reviewing, verifying, vetting, and chronicling, with assessing achievement, forecasting achievement, identifying weak points, then establishing commissions for planning strategies for regular encounters to propose solutions to weak points, and further commissions empowered to apply for funding to pay for means to implement these solutions, and so on.” I thank my lucky stars daily that I teach at a small college that prides itself on the minimization of bureaucracy and whose President—a student of Arendt’s—affirms that we will gladly sacrifice bureaucratic efficiency for innovation. That said, nowhere in the university—or outside it—is one immune from the mania for review, consulting, and assessment that displaces the angst of individual responsibility through the security of constant collective evaluation. To many who would defend the humanities, study of the human arts and literature are a respite to the bureaucratic “rule of nobody,” as Hannah Arendt called it. Yet in a fascinating essay in the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks teases out a surprising dependence connecting bureaucracy and literature: both relish control and thus flee the world of chance, individuality, and uniqueness. Literature shares with bureaucratic impersonality “the desire for a control that stands off from participation, and perhaps substitutes for it: the desire to turn the world into words, page numbers, segments.” Which raises the question: “Is all locution inevitably circumlocution (as Beckett tended to think), and will the West perhaps slowly and voluptuously choke itself in a mounting tangle of red tape, meantime entertaining itself to death with a mountain of literature that describes and charmingly castigates the whole scandalous process?"
Lelac Almagor gives the lie to character education: "Some of that is about strength of character — about being more independent, assertive, and persistent than kids who enter school with greater advantages. But some of it isn’t about character at all, only the appearance of it. When we teach a kid to give a firm formal handshake, we are not strengthening his character. We are teaching him how to translate his strength into a language that people in power will understand. The deficit in this case is theirs, not his.
In principle this liberationist approach to character education is appealing. The trouble is that, in practice, it loses a little of its clarity. We start out wanting our kids to be heroes and revolutionaries, to beat the system from the inside and then challenge its premises. But while they are with us, our school represents the system; if they assert their independence, we are the authority they defy."
It matters when you die. Everyone will talk about Nelson Mandela for the next month. As they should. But let’s also recall Andre Schiffrin, the extraordinary editor of Pantheon Books for 28 years. As Dennis Johnson writes, Schiffrin studied with Hannah Arendt, who apparently was a regular guest at his parent’s home (his father founded Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.) Johnson takes aim at the common wisdom that Schiffrin was fired from Pantheon because it was losing money. And he reminds us of what Schiffrin did do: “Nowhere does the [Times] article mention, for example, the story behind one of the biggest-selling books of the late twentieth century — Studs Terkel’s Working, which was entirely André’s idea, thought up after listening to Terkel’s radio show, and leading to a life-long partnership (André was one of those editors authors would never leave.) Nor does it tell the story behind one of his weirder hits, Wisconsin Death Trip, which André coaxed Michael Lesy into writing after he read Lesy’s PhD thesis. There’s no explanation of how André came to be the first publisher to translate Günter Grass, with The Tin Drum, nor of how he came to be the first American publisher of Foucault and so many others, nor of how he got Sartre away from Knopf. There’s nothing about André’s prescient interest in graphic fiction, evidenced by Pantheon’s acquisition, just before he left, of Matt Groening‘s first book of Bart Simpson cartoons, and of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (a mega-seller that itself puts the lie to the claim that André’s Pantheon books never made money). It doesn’t mention how he turned down an offer to head Knopf — an offer that came from Alfred Knopf himself — to take the job at Pantheon.”
In an interview, poet Fady Joudah discusses what it means to be a "hyphenated poet" working in America: "We fall into the old stuff of textuality, and almost everything becomes safe because nobody wants to talk about what is not safe in poetry. We fall back on the psychologic, the ethnic, the quota, and serve the perpetuation of the machine. So not much new is being examined or flayed open in the poetry world about a relationship between text and context, as it relates to a particular author. And this becomes even more pronounced, but by no means unique, in the case of the minority American. For example, a Palestinian American or an Arab American discussing ethics and morals becomes “political.” If a “bona fide,” non-minority American does, chances are it will be considered “moral,” “ethical,” “amazing spiritual vision,” and so forth, and barely the word “political” would get in."
In a Little Bit of Flour and Fat
Essayist Amy Butcher tells a story about her family's relationship to spaetzle: "The recipe for the dish is my grandmother’s, and it is simple: whisk together flour and egg, whisk until the dough sticks to the spoon and then, at last, snaps back against the bowl. It’s all about consistency, something you can’t put your finger on, something you just have to know. That is why there is no written recipe for this dish, this congealed mess of white that gets boiled in bits and drenched in sour cream and salt and pepper. There is no written recipe because how do you put your finger on dumpling elasticity?"
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog: Jeffrey Champlin reviews Kimberley Curtis's article "Hannah Arendt, Feminist Theorizing, and the Debate Over New Reproductive Technologies." Wout Cornelisson considers Arendt's relationship to quotation. And, with the death of Nelson Mandela, Roger Berkowitz looks at the confluence of Arendt and Mandela's thoughts regarding violence.