Amor Mundi

Responding to Our Culture of Complaint

Roger Berkowitz
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published a three-part reflection on her experiences of being insulted and attacked on social media by a former student and mentee, someone she had sought to help. For those who have experienced such attacks—and more and more of us have—it is shocking and disorienting to have people we consider friends or trusted colleagues join or even lead online attacks.

Loneliness and Politics

Roger Berkowitz
John Douglas Macready considers the importance of Arendt’s analysis of loneliness as the fertile ground for totalitarian and ideological politics. The widespread anxiety over the global eruption of right-wing populism, which was exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and the succeeding four years of his presidency, produced a renewed interest in the political theory of Hannah Arendt,

The New Hannah Arendt Papers Website

Roger Berkowitz
While her personal library is at Bard College, Hannah Arendt left her personal papers to the Library of Congress. For years those papers have been available in-person at the library and, in part, over the web via an outdated, clunky, and incomplete digital interface. This week the Library of Congress launched its new website for the Hannah Arendt Papers.

The Culture of Complaint

Roger Berkowitz
We are living at a time when any action that one disagrees with leads not to a discussion and engagement but to a complaint and a demand for punishment. This is especially true at the top universities in the country. Disagreements that should be fodder for intellectual growth are now opportunities to exert power and punish one’s perceived enemies.

The Deformed Appetites of Whiteness

If you want to understand why there is controversy around critical race theory, take a look at this abstract from a paper by Donald Moss that was published in the Journal of the American Pscyhoanalytic Association. 

The Foucauldian Paradox

Roger Berkowitz
Foucault was the most influential critical thinker and philosopher when I was in college in the 1980s. In the 1990s at Berkeley, the ghost of Foucalt loomed large at the cafes he was rumored to have frequented in the 1960s. For nearly half a century, Foucault’s thinking has been at the forefront of academic life in the humanities and social sciences. But that may be changing.

Responsibility, Victimhood, and Judgment

How does one think about the tragedy unfolding in Israel and Gaza? The soundbites fail to address the complexity of the situation. Claims of apartheid or genocide are morally satisfying, but do not reflect the reality of the situation. To insist that the Palestinians in Gaza are terrorists may be true but ignores the reality of power and disempowerment reflected in the generational and unjust suffering of the Palestinians. Both sides have suffered. Both are victims.

Race and Revolution: A Look Back

During the 2020-21 academic year, the Hannah Arendt Center brought a pluralist set of speakers and events to Bard to broaden our perspectives and challenge us to think beyond our comfort zones on the questions of what a revolution in civil rights would and should mean today, and how best to work for its success. Skye Carter, the student organizer of the series, recounts the meaning and implications of her experience.

The Conscious Pariahs

Roger Berkowitz
Philip Roth and Hannah Arendt are buried but two meters from each other in the Bard College Cemetery. Two of the greatest Jewish intellectuals and writers of the 20th century, Arendt fled Nazi Germany. Roth, as Corey Robin writes, “fled his parents and kept going home.” In an essay on Roth and Arendt, Robin begins on their shared propensity to challenge the Jewish consensus, to bring a critical eye to bear on their own people.