Amor Mundi 7/26/15

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.

Where Everything Is Possible

Hannah Arendt first argued that concentration and extermination camps were "the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power" and were "the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible [was] being verified." A new series of books exploring the Nazi camps has emerged offering what Richard J. Evans calls "An Anatomy of Hell." Writing in the New York Review of Books, Evans argues: "In the popular imagination, the Nazi concentration camp now features mainly as a place where Jews were taken to be gassed. In a recent German opinion poll, most respondents associated the camps with the persecution and murder of Jews; under 10 percent mentioned other categories of camp prisoners, such as Communists, criminals, or homosexuals. The power of the 'Holocaust' as a concept has all but obliterated other aspects of the crimes of the Nazis and the sufferings of their victims and driven the history of the camps from cultural memory. No crime in human history outdoes the genocidal extermination of six million European Jews on the orders of the leader of Germany's self-styled 'Third Reich.' Yet the majority of the Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder were not killed in the camps; they were shot, starved to death, or left to die of diseases that could easily have been prevented or treated but were not. The concentration camp was in no way synonymous with the Holocaust."

Selfie, Bound

Arianne Di Nardo writes about Mónika Sziládi's photography, which explores the way we express ourselves online: "Working by composite allows Sziládi to juxtapose multiple sharp moments in a single frame, to play with scale, and to create focal points that compete for our attention. She includes perturbing elements that, as she said in her speech, 'belong, and don't belong, at the same time.' The result is an uncanny, noisy circus, one with a dress code and that encourages visual transience. Take her rendition of the Three Graces, 'Untitled (Grapes and Graces)' (2010/2014). When photographed, the subjects posed for a 'selfie'; Sziládi took a spontaneous shot. She added the background four years later, after capturing the screen image of a Tuscan grapevine from inside a convention center. Nothing looks quite normal, but it feels okay. Not just because we relate to this innocuous gesture, but because the absurdity of the final image is offset by a cheeky wit...Despite its contemporaneity, Sziládi's work suggests a deep primordiality: connection. Displays of mimicry and repetition are not modern phenomena, and they appear frequently in Sziládi's work. People gesticulate, mirroring one other in posture and dress, and with devices omnipresent, scenes of surveillance--narcissistic and otherwise--are a reasonable afterthought. When asked if screens and devices are a part of her morning routine, Sziládi responded via email: 'Yes :(. But I try to check them at least half an hour after I wake up, and only briefly to make sure there are no emergencies. And then later attend to whatever needs to be done.' Whatever it is that needs doing, one hopes that in the constant and immediate culture of connectivity--that ever-expanding, immersive virtual web--Sziládi, as with the rest of us, can make greater space for the organic, breathing world."

Publicity and Shallowness

How does one find room for Arianne Di Nardo's organic world amidst the ever-growing intrusion of governmental, corporate, and social surveillance? Hannah Arendt saw the private realm as the essential refuge for human uniqueness. In daily life, she writes, we "return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four walls." These walls of the private "enclose a secure place, without which no living thing can thrive." For Arendt, "Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all." Privacy guards the dark recesses of the human heart. So what is lost when these chambers are exposed to the light of public censure? Love grows in secret and loyalty trumps formal rules of fairness. We all transgress taboos and even a few laws. Yet, when we are forced to police private urges and actions by public standards, our belief in public morality appears hypocritical. Distrusting ourselves, we trust no one, which is the source of cynicism of political life. It is amidst a sense that privacy is being lost and we are powerless to resist such loss that the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College will host our 8^th Annual Conference, "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?" Registration is now open.

The Privileges of Membership

Every year in July, we ask our Amor Mundi readership to join the Hannah Arendt Center community as part of our 100/10 Membership Challenge. It's worth remembering that the Hannah Arendt Center is a membership organization. As such, our members are an integral part of our mission: to be the world's most expansive home for bold and risky humanities thinking about our political world inspired by the spirit of Hannah Arendt, the leading thinker of politics and active citizenship in the modern era. Those who join receive free admission to our annual conferences, yearly subscriptions to HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, entry into our virtual reading group, and a Hannah Arendt Center tote bag, among other gifts. Membership dues support our fellowships, conferences, videos, and publications. They also go towards our National Endowment for the Humanities matching challenge grant, so all gifts are matched by the NEH. Please support us in our mission going forward. Please join the Arendt Center today and help us fulfill our 100/10 Membership Challenge.

I Am Sorry that I Cannot Make It Okay

Chris Lebron asks about Ta-Nehisi Coates's apology in his new book. Written as a letter to his son, Coates apologizes for not being able to make the world safe for him as a future black man. "In what really needs to be accepted as one of the book's most important passages, Coates says with respect to the unsatisfactory level of security he feels Samori is sure to inherit by way of his blackness: 'I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you--but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.' (107) One can only imagine the tough pill this is to swallow for a boy aging into manhood, which raises the question as to why Coates feeds it to Samori? To say that it is part of the widely relied upon ethic in the black community of tough love is too facile. It is one thing to ready a belt; it is another to tell a son that the most reliable signifier of his existence is the delicate nature of that existence. A welt from the whack of belt clears up in day or two. The inheritance of existential precariousness lasts a lifetime. To see just how dangerous this kind of message is we can turn directly to Baldwin's opening salvo to his nephew regarding Baldwin's own father: 'Well, [your grandfather] is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.' Baldwin is clear in his message. The only way to a black life of meaning is to be aware of one's vulnerabilities but to simultaneously resist being defined by them, to deny the insistence that one frame one's life in terms of those vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities at issue for both writers ought, for Baldwin, be taken as markers for resistance and personal radicalism broadly understood and not as reference points."

The Anti-Nostalgist

Jeet Heer eulogizes writer E. L. Doctorow, who died this week at 84: "Doctorow's fiction enjoyed its greatest vogue in the 1970s when his novel Ragtime (1975) was an enormous bestseller. It's tempting but wrong to see Doctorow as an example of the nostalgia boom that overtook America during the 1960s and '70s. This was a period when you could go see Grease on Broadway, American Graffiti in the movie theatre, and 'Happy Days' on television. Dismayed by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, Americans increasingly turned to pastoral celebrations of seemingly simpler times. Doctorow actually had a role to play in the rise of the nostalgia industry. In the early 1960s, as editor at The Dial Press, he commissioned the publication of Jules Feiffer's The Comic Book Heroes (1965), the first hardcover reprinting of such 1930s and 1940s caped crusaders as Superman, Batman, and The Spirit. The text of Feiffer's book indulged in no good-old-days falsifications: It was clear-eyed in linking superheroes to the trauma of the Depression and World War II. Still, the success of Feiffer's book inspired countless imitators, which robbed the artifacts of the past of their historical context. Despite his role in sparking the nostalgia boom, Doctorow was in fact an anti-nostalgist in a nostalgic period. His books never shirked from describing the primordial conflicts over race and class that were the very foundations of history. It's instructive to compare the movie The Sting (1973) with Ragtime. A sprightly caper film starting Paul Newman and Robert Redford, The Sting captures the look and feel of the Ragtime era, and helped spark a revival of popularity in the music of Scott Joplin, but has no ambitions to be more than entertainment. Everything that is forgotten in The Sting is remembered in Doctorow's Ragtime. Among other things, the roots of Ragtime music in African-American culture aren't forgotten in Doctorow's novel, which includes one of the most harrowing accounts of racist humiliation in American fiction in the form of the story of Coalhouse Walker."

Coming Up Bagel

Elizabeth Weil tries to get a good bagel in San Francisco: "The New York bagel, as everybody knows, is an institution. No bagel definition will satisfy all, but for starters, let's just say: A good one requires a chewy interior with blisters, called fisheyes, on a shiny, crispy crust. Making a bagel requires several steps: Hand-roll enriched dough; let it rise, or proof; retard the rising in a refrigerator; boil briefly in malted water; then bake. Mitchell Davis, the executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation--a man who is currently living in Milan and who almost came to tears one recent Sunday morning at the thought of his husband back home in Gramercy Park, reading the wedding announcements and eating an everything from Brooklyn Bagel--believes that the secret to a good bagel is technique, the length of time, say, for proofing and boiling, more than the type of water or flour. Achieving the right crust is foremost. 'That's the hardest thing, that outer crunch,' Davis told me. He recalled that his father described the bagel as 'a doughnut dipped in cement.' 'So he wasn't a fan?' I asked 'No!' Davis said. 'He loved them.' The obvious saviors in San Francisco's bagel situation should have been Evan Bloom and Leo Beckerman--occasional chefs at the Hillel chapter at the University of California, Berkeley, and the owners of San Francisco's relatively new and much beloved Jewish deli, Wise Sons, which opened in 2012. Many already believed Wise Sons made the best deli rye west of the Hudson River. The restaurant sold so much house-made pastrami that, after several years of Bloom's transporting the smoky, fatty meat to catering events, his girlfriend could no longer stand the smell and insisted he buy a new car. A disclaimer on the menu reads NOT A NEW YORK DELI. Bloom and Beckerman added the notice just a few months after opening because even though the place was packed, customers groused that Wise Sons' offerings didn't taste like the food they grew up eating on the East Coast. 'Our kugel is definitely not as good as your bubbe's kugel,' Beckerman told me, sitting on the bench where he used to sleep after working 20-hour shifts. 'The actual food we serve is better,' he said. 'I'm very proud of our food. But it's never going to match the memory of what your grandmother made you between the ages of 5 and 15.'"

Pity the Literary Immigrant

Johannes Lichtman notes that troubles with translation caused Milan Kundera to choose a new linguistic home, just as troubles with Czech politics caused him to move to France: "Early translations of his works tended to lose what made them most interesting. Foreign publishers wanted to market Kundera's biography rather than his style, and he has never quite been able to shed the early portrayal of himself as a dissident writer of protest novels. As the translation scholar and astute Kundera reader Michelle Woods pointed out, in the first British edition of The Joke, 'many of the experimental devices included by Kundera, such as the non-linear narrative and Jaroslav's discourse on polyphony, were seen as clouding the real message.' This resulted in 'a complete rearrangement of the novel into a semi-linear chronology and the removal of 300 sentences.' When he learned of this unauthorized editing, Kundera sent an angry letter to The Times Literary Supplement, in which he compared his editors and translators to communist censors, and said that he'd rather not publish at all than have his work rewritten without his consent. It was the first of many times he would assert his right to absolute control over his words--often to the detriment of his career. While the English translators of The Joke took a hatchet to the text, the French translator puffed up the style. The translator, Marcel Aymonin, had a very different aesthetic from Kundera, who has always written in language that's easy on the metaphors. As Caleb Crain noted, 'Where Kundera had written "The sky was blue," Aymonin had translated "Under a sky of periwinkle, October hoisted its showy shield."' Aymonin did not translate the book, but rather rewrote it: 'He found my style too simple!' Kundera told Jordan Elgrably. 'Into my manuscript he inserted hundreds (yes!) of embellishing metaphors; he used synonyms where I repeat the same word; he wanted to create a "beautiful style"!'... It was in part the horror of these experiences that led Kundera to embark on a linguistic emigration from Czech to French. Starting in the mid-1980s, he began writing first his essays, then his novels, in French, and he also rewrote his Czech novels into 'definitive' French versions from which his translators were to work. Notably, he did not feel the need to translate his new French texts into Czech, nor did he allow anyone else to do so. This perceived shunning of his Czech roots made him a target both in the Czech Republic and in France. Since the fall of communism, the Czech media has fostered an atmosphere where, as Crain put it, 'Any downturn in Kundera's post-Czech career is headline worthy.' While he is still a major figure in French literature, it's safe to say that he was more interesting to the French as a Czech exile than as a Parisian intellectual. After the release of Immortality (1990), Kundera's first novel more concerned with French characters than Czech characters, a French paper implored Kundera to return to Czech themes. The article ran under the headline: 'Kundera, Go Home!'"

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Roger Berkowitz discusses how the Nobel Prize celebrates those like Aung San Suu Kyi who dedicate their lives to the conviction that truth will win out over the holes of oblivion in the Quote of the Week. Abraham Lincoln provides his thoughts on thinking and speaking to people in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we come across a collection of books in Arendt's library that exemplifies her interest in trying to understand religion and its political influence in this week's Library feature.

On Wednesday of last week, we announced our 100/10 Membership Challenge, in which we work to gain 100 new members in 10 days. Our Challenge this year includes a number of exciting drawings and contests, the terms of which can be read here. Please support all of the activities the Hannah Arendt Center has planned over the next year and become a member today!