What Would Arendt Say?
In the inaugural conference of the Society for Women of Ideas, nine speakers were invited to discuss what Hannah Arendt might say about the most urgent issues of our own times.
Conference Program
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 19
9:00 - 10:00 AM: ELIZABETH MINNICH
On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking
Moderator: Antonio Calcagno, King’s University College at Western University
10:15 - 11:15 AM: ANDREW SCHAAP
On the Deportation of Black Britons
Moderator: Pritika Nehra, Indian Institute of Technology
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM: SERENA PAREKH
On Refugees, Climate Change and the Problem of Thinking Without Banisters
Moderator: Laila Khoshkar, University of Toronto
LUNCH BREAK
1:30 - 2:30 PM: LINDA ZERILLI
On Post-Truth
Moderator: Diane Enns, Toronto Metropolitan University
2:45-3:45 PM: HANNAH LAGRAND
In Defense of the Private
Moderator: Paula Schwebel, Toronto Metropolitan University
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20
10:00 - 11:00 AM: SHMUEL LEDERMAN
On the Crisis of Representative Democracy
Moderator: Jonathon Catlin, Princeton University
11:15 AM – 12:15 PM: MARIEKE BORREN
On Dignity Under the Conditions of Negative Solidarity
Moderator: Jeta Mulaj, Grinnell College
LUNCH BREAK
1:30 - 2:30 PM: SUSANNAH YOUNG-AH GOTTLIEB
Poetry and Who We Are
Moderator: Brian Phillips, Journal of Human Rights Practice
2:45 - 3:45 PM: JOSHUA LIVINGSTONE
On the Protean Universe of Social Media
Moderator: Andrew Woods, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, Western University
Meet the Speakers
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The current pandemic—an epidemic that literally affects all (pan) nations or people (demos)—and the climate crisis fit into an ever accelerating world and earth encompassing process of integration of human beings that Arendt diagnosed in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and onwards in her work. The twentieth-century political reality she confronted emerged from what we would call today the globalizing force of European imperialism, the consolidation of the territorial nation-state system worldwide and the globalization of armed conflict, migration, and the reach of weapons of mass destruction. These developments had increasingly integrated humankind, Arendt observed—and not in some rosy cosmopolitan sense, but in the factual historical sense that we are all in the same boat, bound by “negative solidarity”. The “inescapable fact” of “the emergence of mankind as one political entity” for Arendt clearly confronts us with new burdens and responsibilities that call for a “political principle… a new law on earth”.
Seen against this background, what could a “realistic” principle of human dignity mean? I will argue that Arendt’s implicit account of human dignity is informed by a proto-normative commitment, not so much to human beings, but to the world they share. -
Marieke Borren works as an assistant professor in philosophy at Open University Netherlands. Specializing in Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology, her research expertise lies at the intersection of continental political philosophy, philosophical anthropology and phenomenology. She is particularly interested in feminist and postcolonial perspectives. She has published widely on various aspects of Arendt’s work, and has forthcoming book chapters in Hannah Arendt: Challenges of Plurality (Springer), Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought (Rowman & Littlefield) and Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method/Key Thinkers (with V. Vasterling).
MARIEKE BORREN
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Throughout her work, Arendt draws a strict line between the public and the private – between what we display and what we hide. The severity of this distinction can often seem strange and impractical. However, when read in conjunction with her later work, particularly her work on thinking in The Life of the Mind, my belief is that this strong defense of the private may also offer valuable insight into the richness and depth that the hidden, overlooked, and unproductive parts of our life might offer. In a time of working from home and Instagram curation, in which every minute seems to hold the potential for productivity and the tools of publicity are always at hand, this call to pay attention to and safeguard the private feels especially salient and urgent. In my presentation I hope to explore these implications—allowing Arendt to expand our understanding of the private, and sharpen our awareness of its value.
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Hannah LaGrand is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at McMaster University, Canada. Her dissertation focuses on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the public and the private – both how it interacts with Arendt’s broader work, and how it might inform and enrich our discussions about privacy and publicity today. She is the author of "Hidden Depths: Thinking and the Richness of the Private in Hannah Arendt," published in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy.
HANNAH LAGRAND
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In this talk, I reflect on the widespread contemporary disillusionment with representative democracy, with the help of Hannah Arendt. I reconstruct Arendt's critique of representative democracy and the reasons she saw it as a form of oligarchy. I then explore her vision of a radically participatory council democracy that would replace the current parliamentarian system. I argue that this vision was of the utmost importance to Arendt and tightly connected to her very understanding of the meaning of "the political." In this sense, I maintain, Arendt anticipated the anxieties and hopes that have become the battle cry of some of the most important social movements of our time.
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Shmuel Lederman is a research fellow at the Weiss-Livnat Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa. He teaches at the Weiss-Livnat International MA Program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, and in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel. His first book, Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy: A People's Utopia, was published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan.
SHMUEL LEDERMAN
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With the rise of social media, well-established forms of media authority have largely been eroded. Though this loss has in some ways been liberating, it has also led to the opening of a kind of “Protean universe,” where information and misinformation abound, polarization and entrenchment are common, lying is rampant, and paranoid conspiracies are seen as viable political narratives. In “What is Authority?” Hannah Arendt gives us reason to believe that what is currently taking place is the most recent expression of a wider loss and warns that such instability may contribute to the rise of new totalitarian movements. Ironically, the loss of authority also threatens to undermine the possibility of freedom. With appeal to Arendt’s labour, work, action distinction, I consider what it might mean to return both freedom and authority to the practice of journalism in a digital age.
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Joshua Livingstone is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy Department at Queen's University, Canada, whose work is rooted in the continental tradition, specifically the areas of existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. He received a B.A. honours specialization in Philosophy from King’s University College, and an M.A. in Theory and Criticism from Western University. He is the author of a chapter on “Hannah Arendt and the Free Press” in the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists series at Springer. Joshua is currently interested in piecing together an Arendtian account of the imagination, exploring its role as an intermediary between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, and addressing both its creative and destructive political implications.
JOSHUA LIVINGSTONE
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Seeking to comprehend Eichmann, the Engineer of the Nazi’s genocidal “Final Solution,” Arendt asked, “Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call conscience coincide?” She also reflected on “the logicality of ideological thinking” she saw as the “principle of action” in totalitarianism (thus far). Later, she worried that “thoughtlessness” may even be a hallmark of the age following “the disasters of the 20th century.” Today, acts can have consequences that spread faster than ever before; public chatter equally spreads mind-numbing banalities; lying and denial of facts fracture the public space of appearance we need for speech and action. What is it that thinking—during which we turn inward, absenting ourselves—means and does for us that makes failures to “stop and think” so politically disastrous? Why are the worldly consequences of thoughtlessness so dangerous?
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Elizabeth Minnich’s work includes the award-winning Transforming Knowledge (under revision for its 3rd edition); The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking; Thought Work: Thinking, Action, and The Fate of The World; The Fox in The Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, as well as papers and chapters in anthologies, textbooks, journals. Special appointments have included Professor of Philosophy & The Humanities - the H.B. Alexander Chair, Scripps College; Visiting Scholar, Scholars & Seminars Program, Getty Institute for The History of Art and The Humanities; Whichard Visiting Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Women’s Studies, East Carolina University; Evans Chair, The Evergreen State College. While earning her Ph.D. in Philosophy, she served as Hannah Arendt’s Teaching Assistant. Far more recently, she has been appointed Distinguished Fellow with the Association of American Colleges & Universities.
ELIZABETH MINNICH
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We are currently experiencing multiple refugee crises (Afghanistan, Haiti, Northern Triangle, Myanmar, Syria, South Sudan) and despite them being very different in nature, politically we tend to look at them with the same eyes. Are they “genuine” refugees or not? Do we have an obligation to admit them or not? While important questions, I suggest that Arendt can help us to understand how to think without banisters, to appreciate what is genuinely new in each situation and not just apply the categories of old to new situations. I suggest that we are thinking with old categories when we discuss Afghan refugees, for understandable reasons, but also that it’s morally inadequate. Much of the displacement in Afghanistan is driven by climate change, something that Western states have causally contributed to, and this ought to shape how we see our responsibility for Afghan refugees. Arendtian concepts of natality and thinking can help us to appreciate this dimension of the global refugee crisis.
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Serena Parekh is a Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University in Boston, where she is the director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program and co-editor of the journal, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. She is the author of three books: No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis (Oxford 2020) (winner of the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award), Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement (Routledge 2017), and Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights (Routledge 2008) (translated into Chinese). She has also published numerous articles on social and political philosophy in Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Human Rights Quarterly.
SERENA PAREKH
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Hannah Arendt famously observed that the best way to judge if someone has been “forced outside the pale of the law” is to consider whether they would “benefit by committing a crime.” Arendt’s observation provides insights into the plight of the stateless person in interwar Europe. However, it does not adequately speak to contemporary experiences of Black Britons who have been deported to the Caribbean as ‘foreign criminals.’ While criminal justice is supposed to reintegrate the rights-bearing delinquent citizen into the polity, immigration control is supposed to exclude the “illegal migrant” from the polity. However, the boundaries between these two systems are increasingly blurred just as the mutual relation between processes of illegalization and criminalization are intensely racialized and racializing. Moreover, the ongoing deportation of Black Britons highlights how citizenship itself functions as a global regime through which racial inequality and colonial relations are maintained.
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Andrew Schaap is Associate Professor of political theory at the University of Exeter. His research interests include democratic theory, immigration politics, settler colonialism, indigenous rights and the politics of reconciliation. He has published articles on Arendt in Political Theory, the European Journal of Political Theory and Political Studies. He contributed an entry on democracy to the Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt and co-edited Power, Judgment and Political Evil: In Conversation with Hannah Arendt.
ANDREW SCHAAP
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“We Refugees” is an important and urgent document in Arendt’s chronicles of statelessness and forced migration. Despite its title, however, this essay is perhaps not the best place to turn for Arendt’s thoughts on questions of displacement and the lethal abrogation of rights that so occupied her thinking at the middle of the past century—and our own at the beginning of this one. Arendt’s most trenchant analysis of wide-scale statelessness—and the catastrophic hollowness of the efforts to respond to it—are most clearly delineated in The Origins of Totalitarianism in her analysis of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. What we find in “We Refugees” is, instead, an unclassifiable piece of writing. Despite the first person plural (“We”) that marks its title, this essay can hardly be described as an autobiographical or “representative” account of Jewish refugees at mid-century. Arendt’s level of identification with the “we” of “We Refugees” is neither stable nor certain. At the same time, this piece is neither a direct call to action nor a careful, scholarly analysis of the plight of refugees. And yet, it is an undeniably compelling—if totally unsettling—piece of writing: one in which the oddity of tone (its extreme swings from derision to desperation to melancholy) and the difficulty in fixing its significance (what is the point of this essay?) are crucial to illuminating a basic feature of Arendt’s work and the arc of her career as a whole.
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Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University and Director of the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium. She is the author of Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden (Stanford University Press, 2003), editor of Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2007), and founding editor of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Series (Northwestern University Press, 2012-). She recently completed a monograph on Auden and the Muse of History and is currently at work on a new project entitled, Constraining Voices: Arendt, Speech, Silence.
SUSANNAH YOUNG-AH GOTTLIEB
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What would Arendt say about the widely accepted claim that we live in an age of "post-truth"? As the fact-checkers never tire of reminding us, it is a truism that "post-truth" is our condition and perhaps our fate. According to this popular picture of contemporary democracy, democratic politics is in grave danger because it has lost its foundation in truth, specifically factual truth, and the basic agreement among citizens that such truth guarantees. Consequently, fact-checking has become an obsessive practice of those who believe that agreement on facts is what we now need to restore and, further, that the refusal to accept facts (be they of climate change or Covid or election fraud) is at the root of democratic erosion. Yet other critics warn that the restoration of factuality to its presumably unchallenged former status is bound to fail: the so-called deep disagreements which characterize contemporary liberal democracies are immune to appeal to facts. As societies characterized by widespread value pluralis m, recalcitrance to factuality is indeed liberal democracy’s fate. Only apparently antithetical, both positions, I suspect, are at home in the post-truth picture of our current predicament. Might "post truth" be a picture that holds democratic theory captive to inherited conceptions of politics which Arendt would have us question? If so, how might Arendt help loosen its grip on our thinking and acting? What might be a better picture of our political present for democratic thinkers and citizens?
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Linda Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and former Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. Zerilli's most recent book is A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago, 2016).