Home > Work > Unlearning with Hannah Arendt
1 " As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own. "
― , Unlearning with Hannah Arendt
2 " Literature destabilizes thought by breaking open language and smuggling in sound, rhythm, and image--an invasion of aesthetics. More easily than analytic writing, poetry can emancipate itself from the standard definitions of words, enabling a breakthrough to new (and perhaps wayward or even nonsensical) meaning, which can then develop after the fact--different at each new reading. Literary language is presumptuous. It dips into the unknown in order to get nearer to a truth different from that of the superficially visible. As the poet Franz Josef Czernin described it, it is as though one step after another into emptiness could become a ladder. Literary writing can take the writers themselves by surprise; it can disturb and disappoint them--for stirring up turmoil is inherent in metaphor. Thus with every flash of understanding that comes from hearing or reading a poem, the fundamental work of thinking is taken up anew. "
3 " Where certainty ceases, thinking begins; the knower sets off into uncertainty. Both traditional ideas and their inverse had to be abandoned as supports. As the life of Katznelson shows, to achieve such freedom there has to be first the ability to allow oneself to be confused by intrusive reality along with diagnostic and intellectual courage. "
4 " In an article titled "The Ex-Communists," she analyzed how these McCarthy loyalists had simply switched allegiances. Instead of demanding communism as they had earlier, they now called for unconditional loyalty and cooperation in denouncing others for the sake of freedom and democracy. They still had a cause, just a different one from before. The new cause, the right cause, she continued, had a totalitarian catch to it. By turning democracy "into a cause," something that would arrive in the future and to which the present must be devoted, the present became unfree. The idea of futurity destroyed the present moment. How could one escape this destruction of the present by fear of the future....? "
5 " Forgiveness, she continues, exists only between people who are qualitatively different from one another. Thus parents can forgive their children as long as the children are young, because the parents are their absolute superiors. Between equals, the gesture of forgiveness destroys the foundations of human interaction so radically that after such an act, there can basically no longer be a relationship. To forgive someone can mean only to forego taking revenge, to pass by in silence, and that is a fundamental leave-taking, "while revenge always remains close to the other person and does not sever the relationship." Revenge "remains close to the other person" because people manifest themselves to each other in speech and action. That is, even in their mistakes and misdeeds, people are people and form relationships. In the same entry, Arendt went even further to say that forgiveness between equals was a "sham event." The burden that someone has put on his own shoulders is apparently lifted, while the other, the forgiving person, must accept a burden and at the same time appear to be "unburdened," to rise above the other and his misdeed. Only thus can the wrongdoer be unburdened of his wrong action. No one, Arendt wrote, can be that unburdened. "
6 " Until then, fascism had been seen as conservative or reactionary, but in reality, he' [Katznelson] 'continued, it had long since proved to be a revolutionary force, ready to make a pact with anyone in order to further its own plans for world domination. Fascism was no longer an outlaw movement, he argued. It had moved center stage with the goal of replacing the humane ideal with a system based on lies, cruelty, and humiliation. "
7 " Arendt's laughter was the laughter of incongruence, the laughter that erupts when facing absurdity, a pause to catch one's breath. We happen upon something that makes no sense, we laugh, and respond with wit. For while laughter is a re-action, irony and wit are (spoken or written) actions. Irony expresses the unwillingness or the inability to put up with nonsense. Wit arises when people can easily and quickly see similarities between dissimilar things. "
8 " in about 1950, Arendt gave a lecture with the enigmatic title "The Eggs Speak Up," explained by the epigraph she chose from "A War" by Randall Jarrell:There set out, slowly, for a Different World,At four, on winter mornings, different legs...You can't break eggs without making an omelette-That's what they tell the eggs. Jarrell had read in Origins that totalitarianism forged a "chain of fatality" - a chain of logical arguments - which threatens to "suppress men from the history of the human race." Jarrell's poem reads like a response to this sentence since it is about the necessity of interrupting this chain. With this epigraph, Arendt introduces her listeners to what she has to say. "
