Arendt and Transformation

By Thomas Wild

“Let us assume I had an extraordinarily good memory, I would never have written anything down.”

– Hannah Arendt, 1964

“Let us assume I had an extraordinarily good memory, I would never have written anything down,” Hannah Arendt once said in an interview. We are lucky that Arendt actually did not have that kind of memory. Had she never written anything down, all her thoughts, in the moment she died, would have vanished from the world as though they had never existed.

[caption id="attachment_15525" align="alignleft" width="225"] Burial Coin from Athens c. 450 B.C.E. (Source: Education Portal)[/caption]

Thoughts, actions, spoken words – all these fleeting activities only persist if they are transformed into something material that can potentially outlast the life of the thinking, acting, speaking human being. Things that were created that way co-constitute the world we live in. They bear witness that we’re not merely a more or less unique plant that sprouts, blossoms, and decays.

Since the advent of modernity, this man-made world has been particularly at risk. Ever more machines take over what human brains, hands, and voices used to bring into the world. It’s been several decades now that our nuclear overkill capacity is ready to blow all human life off the earth. And even after the death of Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot, and also beyond Korea or Yemen, the desire of political regimes for total control over people’s actions, words, and even thoughts is not out of this world. The question of whose life and deeds will be remembered, and whose will be irretrievably erased, is still a pressing, politically relevant issue.

Hannah Arendt was concerned about the fragility and vulnerability of the world – out of love for the world, amor mundi, as her book title for The Human Condition was initially conceived. There, she writes: “The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things.” In other words, the “whole factual world” is based on plurality and on a particular mode of “transformation.” This transformation that Arendt, in the immediate context of the same passage, calls the “materialization” of “the intangible” into words that can be heard, or books that can be read, or paintings and films that can be viewed, comes with a high price: “always the ‘dead letter’ replaces something which grew out of and for a fleeting moment indeed existed as the ‘living spirit.’”

[caption id="attachment_15528" align="aligncenter" width="530"] Book Paintings by Mike Stilkey (Source: DeMilked)[/caption]

The living and writing spirit of Hannah Arendt exists in the plural. In The Human Condition, she calls the price that has to be paid the “materialization” of living activities; in Vita Activa, the German book version that she wrote two years after the English, she terms the same phenomenon of reification as “verwandelnde Vergegenständlichung,” which can be roughly translated as transforming reification or miraculous, (meta-)morphing reification, as the German word “Verwandlung” entails the notion of wonder and magic (Wunder, Zauber).

For Arendt, the experience of “magic” has also a place in the political world: she describes, for example, the experience of freedom in revolutions as a magical experience of beginning something completely new. This ineffable magic is at the core of Arendt’s understanding of political action as acting in concert; it is an experience and manifestation of freedom that, again and again, has to be revived and reconstituted.

[caption id="attachment_14740" align="alignright" width="300"] The Human Condition (Source: Amazon.com)[/caption]

The German word “Verwandlung” reappears in Arendt’s amor mundi literally at its center: in the 23^rd of The Human Condition/Vita Activa’s 45 chapters, specifically in the section dealing with “The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art.” This part marks the transition from the “Work” to the “Action” section in Arendt’s book(s). It is the structural as well as theoretical middle axis around which her project is organized.

Art works have a particular capacity to capture the fleeting vividness of thinking and acting, Arendt suggests: “In the case of art works, reification is more than mere transformation; it is transfiguration, a veritable metamorphosis” in which the laws of nature are reverted and “even dust can burst into flames.” This last image is taken from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called “Magie” (“Magic”), which in its first stanza proposes that art works would originate from an “unbeschreiblichen Verwandlung” – from an ineffable transformation.

In The Human Condition, Arendt provides the German poem by Rilke in a footnote on the same page, yet without any English translation. In Vita activa, she simply marks the “unbeschreibliche Verwandlung” with inverted commas, so that the quotation appears in the same fashion as those by Marx, Kant, or Nietzsche whom she is quoting in the same context.

Both gestures belong to one another. They interrupt the discursive text and open up our thinking for another language, for other modes of speaking and writing.

Neither the English nor the German, neither philosophy nor political theory nor poetry, gets to dominate the world that Arendt creates with her thinking. Her mode of writing opens up a space of and for co-existence. These pluralities of languages shape and constitute her work. We yet have to think through the political and theoretical dimension of this gesture. It has remained under our radar so far, i.e. under the radar of her readers – and understandably so, for practically all of her publications do exist in English or in German, both “originals” authored by Hannah Arendt.

I can’t come up with any comparable thinker who’d have written their entire work entirely in two languages. Kracauer, when he came to the U.S., decided to write only in English from that moment on; Adorno, on the contrary, always stayed with his hated and beloved German as the language he wrote in. These are the patterns of writing in exile we know.

Hannah Arendt, deliberately, wrote and rewrote her books and essays in English and in German. What a gesture: a daily practice of plurality in response to the persistent legacies of total domination.

Let us begin re-reading.

(Featured Image: "Transformation"; Source: Foto Community)