October 23rd, 2016

10-23-2016

Real Talk, Green Shoots

The Hannah Arendt Center had a spectacular Conference this week "Real Talk." Amazing lectures and talks and conversations with Mary Gaitskill, Janet Halley, Alexandra Brodsky, Greg Lukianoff, Angus Johnston, Erica Hunt, Chris Lebron, Deroy Murdock, Jennifer Doyle, Annie Seaton, Goran Adamson, Judith Shulevitz, Claudia Rankine, Ariana Stokas, Carolyn Lazard, Robert Boyers, Uday Mehta, Bill Deresiewiecz, Wyatt Mason, Dina Toubasi, Mark Williams Jr., Sam Reed, Ken Marcus, Ken Stern, Dima Khalidi, Peter Rosenblum, Leon Botstein and our incredible members and audience. Thank you all. Here is a transcript of Roger Berkowitz’s Introductory Talk. To read it in its entirety, view the piece on Medium here.

“Robert Gaudino was a professor at Williams College who developed an educational course in “uncomfortable learning.” Inspired by his experience in the Peace Corps, Gaudino would ship Williams students to live in villages and cities in India where they pursued independent projects with local communities. Above all, the students were encouraged to reflect about their work as an an experience that unsettled their worldviews. College, Gaudino argued, should “actively promote a range of experiences that have the creative potential to unsettle and disturb.” Gaudino died in 1974 but his legacy lives on. In 2014 a group of students founded the “Club for Uncomfortable Learning” in Gaudino’s spirit. On a liberal campus, the club has a lecture series that aspires to host speakers who challenge left-wing verities. Greg Lukianoff, who calls himself a liberal defender of free speech and will be speaking later today, was one of the inaugural speakers in Williams’ Uncomfortable Learning Series. Inspired by the Uncomfortable Learning lectures, the Arendt Center has started a new lecture series at Bard, “Tough Talks,” which picks up the challenge of inviting speakers whose views are bold, challenging, and uncomfortable. Bill Deresiewiecz, who will speak tomorrow, will inaugurate Bard’s Tough Talks Lecture Series on November 7^th. Camille Paglia will be speaking in the Spring. Paradoxically, the Williams club dedicated to uncomfortable learning last year disinvited two speakers. First, the club uninvited Suzanne Venker, the author of many books including “The War on Men” and “The Two-Income Trap.” Just months later, the “Club for Uncomfortable Learning” uninvited John Derbyshire, a mathematician and part-time columnist for The National Review. Derbyshire calls himself a “race realist,” which means he thinks statistics show the average black American to be more dangerous and less intelligent than whites. Students protested. This time, the Club held firm against protest. But when they refused to disinvite Derbyshire, William’s President Adam Falk stepped in and banned Derbyshire from campus. Falk wrote in a letter to the campus, “Today I am taking the extraordinary step of canceling a speech.” He wrote, “free speech is a value I hold in extremely high regard.” But he added, there is a line that cannot be crossed, and Derbyshire had crossed it.… How has this happened? How has the act of listening to somebody with an opinion foreign to one’s own now seen as dangerous? Is this Group Think? Political correctness? Neo-totalitarianism? Or something new? To answer that question, we must listen carefully to the disinviters.”

To read the rest of this talk, come on over and visit us on Medium. Or view the conference here.

Form more information visit: https://medium.com/amor-mundi/green-shoots-c181b7e73927#.jfni1mo4s

Ethical Loneliness

Leyla Vural went to Berlin and brought Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness, a “powerful book about the double abandonment and existential isolation that Holocaust survivors, black South Africans under Apartheid, and countless people worldwide have known, and still live with, because first we forsake them to tremendous harm and then give their stories no “just hearing.”” Claudia Rankine spoke about ethical loneliness at the Hannah Arendt Center Real Talk Conference this week, invoking the idea that black Americans and others are in danger of being cut off from American society, losing trust that binds that society together, and that they have to be heard and responded to if there is a hope that American society will be reconstituted as a just political and social world. In Berlin, Vural set out to find the monuments, places, and moments where she could hear the stories of those who have been rendered silent and worse. —RB

“Given Berlin’s history as capital of the Third Reich and then East Germany’s repressive regime, it felt like a fitting place for an oral historian to grapple with the limits, and the possibilities, of listening. But when I got to the city, it hit me: there are thousands of refugees in the city right now, and close to one million throughout Germany, whose very future depends on being heard. Stauffer’s argument for the fundamental importance of listening is as much about today as it is about the past. This is a must read for oral historians and everyone who thinks attentive listening matters deeply.”… Berlin is teeming with survivors’ stories. Some get a hearing. Public memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, like the stumbling stones embedded in the sidewalks, are all over Berlin today. For more than twenty years, the artist Gunter Demnig has been installing 10cm by 10cm markers—each a testament to an individual’s story and a reminder of the responsibility we all bear for the world we create—usually in front of the last voluntary address of people the Nazis persecuted. Each stone names a person, the year of their birth, the day they were taken, where they were sent, and what happened to them. I always stopped to read the stumbling stones I passed, a small act of bearing witness, and I noticed that many included Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp within walking distance from the last stop on an S-bahn line that goes through the heart of the city, where SS leaders met monthly to assess their evil progress. In April, Demnig installed the first five stones commemorating homeless men who were sent to their death at Sachsenhausen. With Ethical Loneliness on my mind, I went to see these stones, which sit in front of what was once a cheap restaurant where homeless Berliners often ate, and then to Sachsenhausen to pay my respects. There’s a wooded area with memorials near the entrance to the camp. Green speakers sit close to the ground, excerpts from interviews with survivors looping over and over. I sat and listened for a long time and eventually recorded a man’s story about the death march out of Sachsenhausen in April 1945. The audio tour includes other stories from survivors as well. Each is particular, specific. One survivor answers an imagined skeptic—“Was it really so bad?”—with something like, “It was a thousand times worse than I can say.” Stauffer wonders if Améry would feel that Germany has made a sufficient public reckoning with its past. I wonder, too, if the people who survived Sachsenhausen and whose stories are now part of the memorial there felt truly listened to. But their stories at least demand a hearing.”

Form more information visit: http://www.incontextjournal.com/vural-reading-in-berlin/

A View From Afar

[caption id="attachment_18434" align="alignleft" width="300"] Bert Verhoeff / Anefo - Nationaal Archief, CC BY-SA 3.0[/caption] Adam Kuper writes about the outsider position of Claude Lévi-Strauss in French intellectual circles.

“Like Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, who were often linked with him – to his displeasure – as fellow structuralists (the “Gang of Four”), Lévi-Strauss operated in the seminar room rather than in the cafés of Montparnasse. But Loyer emphasizes another difference: unlike his most notable contemporaries Lévi-Strauss was a cosmopolitan, impatient with the provincialism of Parisian intellectual life. Between 1934 and 1947 he was away from France, doing research in Brazil, and then as a wartime exile in New York. Both adventures were completely unplanned, but travel and cosmopolitanism were in any case necessary features of his chosen vocation. Lévi-Strauss argued that the very method of anthropology – “a technique of expatriation” – yields a “view from afar” that must put in question dogmas taken for granted in the West. During his wartime exile Lévi-Strauss discarded the socialism of his youth. Returning to Paris, he rejected the post-war cults of individualism and creativity that Sartre polished up as existentialism, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as phenomenology. More radically still, he repudiated the dogmas of progress, the civilizing mission, humanism, and universal human rights. He made his seminar group analyse Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason as a French myth. And he dreamt of “a return to the neolithic”, when life was lived in small collectivities, close to nature. Rather than the rights of man, he proposed “les droits du vivant”. Loyer describes him as a Zen monk, and he is quoted as saying that his dream would be to talk with a bird. Lévi-Strauss’s Jewishness was a further point of difference. Loyer invokes the anti-Semitism of mid-century France, and traces a family background that featured both rabbis and artists. Lévi-Strauss’s maternal grand­father was rabbi of Versailles. His father and his mother’s brother were painters, and both men hyphenated their names to celebrate their descent from a common grandfather, Isaac Strauss, the one artist in their ancestry. A composer and the conductor at the court orchestra of Louis-Philippe, “the Strauss of Paris” collaborated with Offenbach and was celebrated by Berlioz for “the new rhythm and airy grace” of his waltzes.”

Arendt too calls herself “a girl from afar, from a strange place” (das Mädchen aus der Fremde). It is another way of talking about Arendt’s understanding of herself as a “conscious pariah,” one who stands aloof from society and thus has a view of the complexity and richness of the plurality of human opinions in a way that advocates and partisans cannot. —RB

Form more information visit: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/philosopher-among-the-indians/