Book Release and Panel Discussion: Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt's "Denktagebuch"​

Hannah Arendt Center

This event occurred on:  Edited by Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey, Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt's "Denktagebuch" offers a path through Hannah Arendt's recently published Denktagebuch, or "Book of Thoughts." In this book a number of innovative Arendt scholars come together to ask how we should think about these remarkable writings in the context of Arendt's published writing and broader political thinking. Other contributors include: Jeffrey Champlin, Wout Cornelissen, Ursula Ludz, Anne O'Byrne, Tracy Strong, Tatjana Noemi Tömmel, and Thomas Wild. Unique in its form, the Denktagebuch offers brilliant insights into Arendt's practice of thinking and writing. Artifacts of Thinking provides an introduction to the Denktagebuch as well as a glimpse of these fascinating but untranslated fragments that reveal not only Arendt's understanding of "the life of the mind" but her true lived experience of it.

Panelist Include: 

Roger Berkowitz has been teaching political theory, legal thought, and human rights at Bard College since 2005. He is the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Professor Berkowitz is an interdisciplinary scholar, teacher, and writer. His interests stretch from Greek and German philosophy to legal history and from the history of science to images of justice in film and literature. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition; coeditor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics; editor of Revenge and Justice, a special issue of Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and a contributing editor to Rechtsgeschichte. His essays have appeared in numerous academic journals. Roger Berkowitz received his B.A. from Amherst College; J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley; and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.

Wout Cornelissen studied philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen and received his doctorate in philosophy from Leiden University. He was a visiting scholar at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. He taught political philosophy in Leiden and philosophy of law in Amsterdam. He was a Hannah Arendt Center Postdoctoral Fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bard College, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Utrecht University. His research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and literature. His first book project focuses on the relation between thought and action in the writing of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. At Vanderbilt University, he will work on a critical edition of Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, as part of a Kritische Gesamtausgabe.


Anne O'Byrne's field of research is 20th century and contemporary European philosophy. From her dissertation, "Who are we?": Plurality and the Questioning of Philosophy, to her present project of natality (the existential condition of having been born) and finitude, her work has been at the intersection of ontology and politics. In her articles she investigates the political and ontological questions that arise around embodiment ("The Politics of Intrusion" in The New Centennial Review), gender ("The Excess if Justice" in International Studies in Philosophy), labor ("Symbol, Exchange and Birth" in Philosophy and Social Criticism) and pedagogy ("Pedagogy without a Project" in Studies in Philosophy and Education) using the work of authors such as Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva. O'Byrne also maintains an interest in Irish Studies and has written philosophical work concerning the functioning of sovereignty in Northern Ireland and the inheritance of the Irish language. At Stony Brook and while on faculty at Hofstra University (1999-2007) she has taught courses in feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of art, philosophy and the Holocaust, modernity and post-modernity, existentialism, phenomenology, and Nietzsche.

Ian Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States.  He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards.  Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.

Dr. Thomas Wild studied German literature and culture as well as political science in Berlin, and Munich, where he received his Ph.D. He has taught at institutions of higher learning in Germany, at Vanderbilt University, and at Oberlin College.  Dr. Wild’s research and teaching focus on twentieth-century German literature and film, the political dimensions of culture, art and thought, as well as contemporary developments in German media and society after 1989. Among his many publications are a monograph on Hannah Arendt’s relationships with key postwar German writers such as Uwe Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hilde Domin, and Rolf Hochhuth; an “intellectual biography” of Hannah Arendt; and an edition of Thomas Brasch’s poetry. Most recently, he co-edited Arendt’s conversations and correspondence with the eminent German historian and political essayist Joachim Fest. Additionally, he is a literary critic and cultural correspondent for the major German dailies Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Tagesspiegel.

Time: 4:15 pm
Date: March, 31st
Location: OLIN 201 [map]

Free & Open to the Public
R.s.v.p. not required