Amor Mundi - 8/11/13
08-12-2013
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.
Gary Shteyngart tries Google's new digital glasses and feels alternately estranged and powerful. Above all, Shteyngart comes to feel the emergence of a new human-technological symbiosis that he explains by referring to "Bloodchild," a science fiction story by Octavia Butler. "The story takes place on a faraway planet dominated by a large insect-like species called the Tlic. The humans who have fled oppression on their own planet live on a so-called Preserve, where their bodies are used as hosts for the Tlic's eggs, culminating in a horrifyingly graphic hatching procedure often resulting in the death of the human host.... Butler wrote that she thought of "Bloodchild" as "a love story between two very different beings." Although their relationship is unequal and often gruesome, Tlic and humans need each other to survive. Today, when I think of our relationship with technology, I cannot help but think of human and Tlic, the latter's insect limbs wrapped around the former's warm-blooded trunk, about to hatch something new."
Bearing False Witness Against Thy Self
We know that eyewitness evidence is notoriously unreliable, but confessions are still thought to be meaningful. Wrongly, it seems. Using a case study where a man admitted to a murder two others were already in prison for, Marc Bookman examines the false confessions of the innocent: "People have been admitting to things they haven't done for as long as they've been committing crimes. On the North American continent, prominent examples reach back to 1692 and the Salem witch trials. DNA exonerations over the past 24 years have established not only how error-prone our system of justice is, but how more than a quarter of those wrongly convicted have been inculpated by their own words. Now an entire body of scientific research is devoted to the phenomenon of the false confession."
Turkish photographer Cihad Caner recently traveled to Syria, where he took pictures of Syrians. He then asked his subjects to alter pictures of themselves; writing and drawing on the photos, his collaborators take the last word on the state of their home.
Poor Men Want to be Rich, Rich Men Want to be Kings
Chris Pomorski profiles Atlantic City, intermixing the narrative of one of the city's recent homicides with a short history of the area. What Pomorski finds is a place that was promised much, and that promises much, but that didn't get, and doesn't give, what it was hoping for.
Charles Hope writes a short history of the art forger: "It is often said that art forgery has existed as long as the demand for works of art, but this is not strictly true. There is no clear evidence that art forgeries as such existed in the ancient world. There were plenty of collectors, but they seem to have found copies just as desirable as originals. Even the presence of a signature was not necessarily taken as an indication that the object in question had been made by that artist. The notion of art forgery, as we understand it today, seems to require the idea that originals possess certain qualities not found even in the best copies. It also requires the presence of an expert with the ability to distinguish between the two; but such expertise does not seem to have existed in antiquity."
October 3-4, 2013
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast:The Crisis of the Educated Citizen"
Olin Hall, Bard College
Learn more here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Jeff Champlin investigates the relationship between Arendt and Feminist politics. Lance Strate delves into the human condition. Your weekend read looks at the splintering of culture in an intellectual world no longer governed by a unified aesthetic or a single dominant medium.