Amor Mundi

There Are No Holes of Oblivion

Roger Berkowitz
No matter how fully a regime might seek to make people, facts, or inconvenient truths disappear, “there are no holes of oblivion.” Hannah Arendt found in the downfall of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks some hope, namely that totalitarian regimes will always fail when confronted with human freedom and the claim of reality. Aaron Sarin writes about the efforts in China to perfect the surveillance state–and why it is fated to fail. 

Is Alt-Right the New Black?

Roger Berkowitz
N.S. Lyons argues that if the youth of today rebel, "they’re likely to rebel in the only direction they now can: by becoming more traditionalist and conservative.” 

Hannah Arendt at Documenta 15

Roger Berkowitz
This was the 15th Documenta, and the most controversial. It was marred by charges of antisemitism which were returned with accusations of racism. I am not an artist and had never been to a Documenta. But I was particularly interested because I would be participating in Documenta 15 as part of the final installation by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and her Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR). The Arendt Center sponsored three talks throughout the week. 

Rage and Reason: The Absurdity of Reality

Roger Berkowitz
A few weeks ago I wrote about Wyatt Mason’s reflections on the Afghan American writer Jamil Jan Kochai and his new book The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. I’m thrilled now that Jamil Jan Kochai will be joining us to speak at the Hannah Arendt Center’s Rage and Reason conference on October 13 and 14th.

Nervous States

Roger Berkowitz
William Davies’ Nervous States is one of my favorite books published in recent years. In it, Davies argues that we are past the point of no return at which emotion has overwhelmed reason as the foundation of our public life.

Actuality Has Become Stupid

Roger Berkowitz
Wyatt Mason writes about the new book by the Afghan American writer Jamil Jan Kochai’s, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. The absurd incursions of the real into the intelligent life of the imagination are central to the Afghan American writer Jamil Jan Kochai’s fiction, a small body of work that has been charting a path not merely to how one might write about his native country, but also to how fiction might perform a reckoning with the idiotic now.

Rage and Reason: The Case for Rage

Roger Berkowitz
Myisha Cherry argues that anger and rage are, in certain circumstances, and for some people, appropriate responses to injustice. "Anger makes us attentive to wrongdoing and motivates us to pursue justice." Cherry, a philosopher at University of California at Riverside, turns to the thinker Audre Lorde who herself embraced rage that aims at change. For Cherry and Lorde, this "anti-racist rage can be used to engage in action that brings about such a change." 

Rage and Reason: The Age of Anger

According to Pankaj Mishra in his book The Age of Anger: A History of the Present, we "find ourselves in an age of anger, with authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of furious majorities." Mishra turns back to the German Romantics of the 19th century and their rebellion against enlightenment reason to argue that “we must return to the convulsions of that period in order to understand our own age of anger.” The holy wars of today recall the revolutionary messianism of the Italian nationalists who joined “political crusades in remote places, resolved on liberty or death.” As Mishra writes, “Then as now, the sense of being humiliated by arrogant and deceptive elites was widespread, cutting across national, religious and racial lines.” Hannah Arendt called this common feeling of humiliation and anger “negative solidarity” and Arendt’s insight is “rendered more claustrophobic by digital communications.” 

Taking Sex Seriously

Roger Berkowitz
When students at Bard first hatched the idea to bring unpopular speakers to campus under the auspices of the Arendt Center, one of the first speakers they chose was Suzanne Venker. Venker’s talk caused quite a stir. I was reminded of Venker’s arguments this week amid the hoopla around Louise Perry’s new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.