Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen

Este artículo tiene como objetivo identificar en el libro de la temprana Hannah Arendt sobre la vida de Rahel Varnhagen — "Rahel Varnhagen: The life of a Jewess" — los primeros esbozos de los conceptos políticos que desarrollaría a lo largo de su vida dedicada a la teoría política, haciendo un seguimiento de su posterior aparición en diferentes obras. Se enfatiza el análisis aplicado de los conceptos de asimilación, paria y advenedizo. Se compara además las personas de Hannah Arendt y Rahel Varnhagen en cuanto a su origen judío y su condición de mujeres, tanto en la vida pública como en la privada y en la profundidad de su respectiva intimidad. Palabras clave: Espacio, Paria, Asimilación, Identidad judía, Identidad Femenina. This paper intends to identify in the early Hannah Arendt’s book on Rahel Varnhagen’s life the first sketches of some of the political concepts that were developed throughout her life as political theorist. It includes a follow-up of these concepts as they appear in Arendt’s different and later works and emphasizes the applied analysis of the concepts of assimilation, pariah and parvenu as well. Hannah Arendt and Rahel Varnhagen are personally compared regarding both their jewish and female identities in public and private life as well as their most intimate realm. Keywords: Space, Pariah, Assimilation, Jewish Identity, Female Identity

Literaturwissenschaft in Berlin, 2020

This piece is an extended review essay on the exhibition "Hannah Arendt and the Twentieth Century," which opened on May 11, 2020 at Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM). The irony was not lost on me that opening the exhibition in the midst of a pandemic entailed something of an Arendtian social experiment. The review explores Arendt's role as a public intellectual, in five parts: Her clash with feminism, her writings on colonialism and imperialism, her engagements with postwar Germany, the famous Eichmann affair, and her many close friendships. Arendt once said a defining feature of every “venture into the public realm” is that we throw ourselves into a network of social relations and can never know for certain what will come of it. Arendt’s life can be seen as a succession of such ventures. Hannah Arendt and the Twentieth Century succeeds by debunking the myth of the solitary philosophical talking head and setting Arendt back in the world and in conversation. It helps us see that Arendt remains so endlessly relevant—and disputed—not simply because of her brilliance, or the way she resisted orthodoxies and labels, but also because she sometimes had the courage to change her mind.

2010

German Studies Review, John Hopkins University Press, 2023

Hannah Arendt. By Samantha Rose Hill. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. Pp. 232. Paper £12.99. ISBN 978-1789143799. An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities. By D. N. Rodowick. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 182. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0226780214. Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity. By Kei Hiruta. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN 978-0691182261.

New Formations 2011

Contribution to a symposium hosted by University of Toronto's Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies marking the 50th anniversary of a Hannah Arendt conference held in November of 1972 at York University, Toronto. The proceedings of the 1972 conference (including wide-ranging exchanges with Hannah Arendt herself) were published in HANNAH ARENDT: THE RECOVERY OF THE PUBLIC WORLD, ed. Melvyn A. Hill.

Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), 2006

O]ur thinking is truly discursive, running, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world to another, through all kinds of conflicting views.