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Seeing What Is: “White Privilege,” “Antiracism,” The Police – Lessons from a Losing Culture on the Authority of Language at a time of Movement
Nikita Nelin“We got engaged, preparing for a summer wedding, and started talking about kids. Then the pandemic hit. My industry crumbled and hers pressurized. Social distancing left us sheltered in place in our new neighborhood, as we watched the world outside first shudder, and then take to the streets, while we tried to reconcile our place in it with the disappearance our own dream.”
08-13-2020
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Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century
By Roger BerkowitzThe German Museum of History prepared a wonderful new exhibition on Hannah Arendt that was supposed to have its opening this week.
03-28-2020
Corona Loneliness
By Samantha HillBefore the Corona pandemic we were already facing a loneliness epidemic. And now, with mandatory self-isolation, many are worried about what kind of impact this enforced aloneness will have for individuals. Hannah Arendt draws an important distinction between solitude and loneliness.
03-25-2020
Dialogue with One’s Self
Roger BerkowitzKate Bracht turns to Hannah Arendt to find a silver lining to our need to be by ourselves during the Corona Virus pandemic. We are all increasingly spending more time by ourselves. One answer is to reach out for companionship through on-line dinner parties and courses.
03-25-2020
Grimm Lecture 2020: Thinking Itself is Dangerous
Acting Assistant Director and Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Studies Samantha Rose Hill gave the annual Grimm Lecture, the premiere event of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, a research institute at the University of Waterloo. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, Dr. Hill livestreamed her lecture, entitled “Thinking Itself is Dangerous. Reading Hannah Arendt Now.”03-24-2020
A Time For Reading and Falling in Love With Hannah Arendt
By Roger BerkowitzIn the recent podcast on Arendt, Freedom, and Protest on the Political Theory Podcast, host Toby Buckle asks Roger Berkowitz why Hannah Arendt is so loved today. One answer comes from Jeremy Clarke who writes about his love affair with Hannah Arendt’s thinking, which he first encountered on a BBC radio show In Our Time.
03-24-2020
Arendt, Freedom, and Protest
Arendt Center Founder and Director Roger Berkowitz speaks with Toby Buckle in the Political Theory Podcast on Arendt’s idea of freedom and protest. The conversation includes discussions of constitutionalism, lottery-based citizen assemblies, the revitalization of democracy, and the basic question of “What we are fighting for?”
03-21-2020
Bare LIfe and the Animal Laborans
By Roger BerkowitzIn the last Amor Mundi Newsletter we linked to an essay by Giorgio Agamben where he embraced a rightly discredited theory that the Corona Virus was not worse than the flu, and that governments were hyping the dangers of the virus in order to justify repression and discipline. Agamben has since recognized his mistake and has now published a follow up called “Clarifications.”
03-21-2020
From Our Members:
A Necessary Element in the Solution of Our Existential Problems.
By Howard GoldsonI would like to share an ancient wisdom story still told by the indigenous peoples of North America as it has been for over a thousand years. It so happened that on a particular day, a day like most other days, the hunters returned to the village without a single deer for food. Not only were they unable to kill a deer, in fact they had not seen a single deer during the entire day.
03-18-2020
When Philosophers Are Blinded By Theory
By Roger BerkowitzThe European Journal of Psychoanalysis has published a symposium “Coronavirus and Philosophers.” It begins with an excerpt from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish about the quarantine of a town during the plague in the 17th century.
03-18-2020