HANNAH ARENDT CONVERSATIONS
WHAT AND HOW WE LEARNED FROM HANNAH ARENDT: AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn
HANNAH ARENDT ON ACTION AND VIOLENCE
with reference to Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff on Homer’s Iliad
Jerome Kohn and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Background: On November 6-9, 2003, the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke College sponsored a conference called Artists, Intellectuals and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944. The conference celebrated both a pre-war meeting that took place in Pontigny, France, and the series of wartime meetings at Mount Holyoke that brought together Americans and émigrés from Europe to talk about the future of human civilization in a precarious world. The lives and work of Hannah Arendt, Rachel Bespaloff, Marc Chagall, Jacques Hadamard, Roman Jacobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, , Marianne Moore, Robert Motherwell, Wallace Stevens, Jean Wahl, and others who had gathered at Mt. Holyoke in 1942-44 were invoked by the conference participants. This text (slightly revised) and others were published in Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II (U. of Massachusetts Press, 2006)
TRUTH, LIES, AND POLITICS: A CONVERSATION
A conversation between Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn
Background: The exchange below is a revised version of a conversation that took place at a conference “On Truth, Lies, Politics, and Media in Dialogue with Hannah Arendt,” Goethe-Institut, Washington, D.C., November 28-29, 2006. It was published in the journal Social Research in 2007.
A CONVERSATION ON HANNAH ARENDT’S CONCEPTION OF SOVEREIGNTY
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn
Background: What follows is a revised version of a dialogue Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn conducted at a conference on Hannah Arendt: Crises de l’Etat-nation, convened at l’Université Paris VII–Denis-Diderot, November 16-18, 2006. The original dialogue was published in French in a volume entitled Hannah Arendt: Crises de l’Etat-nation (Sens&Tonka, 2007).
HANNAH ARENDT ARTICLES
Summary: The brief biography below was a written for a German language Hannah Arendt Handbuch, which will be published in 2010 by Metzler Verlag. It condenses my full-scale biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, published by Yale University Press in 1982, with a second edition in 2006.
The short article was published in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (Fordham University Press, 2010). It was earlier a presentation at a Bard College conference to celebrate Arendt’s centenary in 2006. You can visit the Bard College Hannah Arendt Center at its website, which is connected to the Bard College Library, housing the library Arendt left the College in her will.
HANNAH ARENDT IN AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE (2000)
Background: This article was commissioned by the Zurich-based magazine DU: Die Zeitschrift der Kujltur, and published there in October 2000 as part of a special issue called Hannah Arendt: Mut Zum Politischen!
ON THE ORIGINS OF A NEW TOTALITARIANISM (October, 2001)
This article below was published in the journal SOCIAL RESEARCH, Summer 2002.
It was prepared for a New School conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The conference took place a few weeks after the 9/11 attack, and it organizers agreed to have its concluding session consist of a discussion of the attack and what it might mean.
THE PROMISE OF HANNAH ARENDT’S POLITICS
This essay was originally delivered on April 10, 2008 as the J. Glenn Gray Memorial Lecture at Colorado College, where Gray taught Philosophy for many years.
Below are three statements about Venezuela. The first is an article that was published on August 17, 2007 in the online version of The Nation. It was the subject of a good deal of discussion in The Nation’s online pages, mostly by readers who thought it to be too anti-chavista. A Spanish translation by Oscar Reyes was published in Venezuala. In December, 2007, I sent another post to The Nation’s associate editor Richard Kim, commenting on the failed referendum in Venezuela, and that is second below. Third, on the request of my Spanish translator Oscar Reyes, I wrote a comment on the Venezuelan student movement and Hannah Arendt’s opinioins about the American student movement of 1968. Reyes translated my letter into Spanish, but it has not been published in English.
RECENT POLITICAL ARTICLES
Background: This article started out as a lecture for a celebration of Hannah Arendt’s centenary in Berlin, April, 2005. Later, it was issued, revised, in a journal called The Good Society, volume 16/2 in 2007.
THE BIGGER DEBATE: POLITICS VS. ANTI-POLITICS
Summary: This reflection was written in 2002, after 9/11 but before the invasion of Iraq, for an essay competition held by The Economist. Not surprisingly, it was not the winner. But it seems to me still pertinent. The argument is that the then current debate over “freedom vs. security,” which pitted s civil libertarians against proponents of emergency security measures, needed to be viewed in the context of a much bigger debate that was barely audible. Two crucial pillars of the American political tradition were being eroded in an emergency that focused so much attention on security. The Bush Administration was not respecting the separation of church and state, and felt no obligation to protect the political realm from corporate interests. The year after September 11th proved to be a year of assaults from within America upon not just particular freedoms but political life generally. I wondered it would become a year of debate about “politics vs. anti-politics.”
The answer, it can be said now, was that this debate never arose.
Background: Below is a paper that reflects on the opera La juive , which was staged last September in Amsterdam in connection with a Nexus Institute Conference on the “End of History.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Rabbi for the British Commonwealth) gave the keynote address, which is alluded to in this paper, as is the opera (and a summary of its arcane plot). My paper is a critique of the politics of sacrifice and the type of (to my mind quite false) universalism Rabbi Sacks invoked.
REFLECTING ON 9/11 AND THE PRESENT POLITICAL MOMENT
This is a contribution I made to an on-line psychoanalytic symposium, October 18, 2001. The topic of the symposium was what psychoanalysts might have to say in the wake of the 9/11 attack.
RECENT PSYCHOANALYTIC ARTICLES
This lecture was delivered at the annual meeting of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association in Chicago, April 23, 2010.
CIVILIZATION AND ITS DREAM OF CONTENTMENT:
REFLECTIONS ON THE UNITY OF HUMANKIND
Background: The editors of the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry asked me for a contribution to an issue they were preparing for 2010. They were asking a number of psychoanalysts to answer this question: If you were writing Civilization and Its Discontents today, what would you write? At first, I thought answering would require a book, or two –one about Freud’s 1930 text and one about what I think of “civilization” today, preceded by a long excursion on the many meanings of “civilization.” But finally I decided to go ahead, and just live with the fact that an essay –this essay—would leave so many things unsaid, so many domains unexplored, so many qualifications unspoken. Many of the roads not taken will be taken on this blog later.
WHY PSYCHOANALYSIS HAS NO HISTORY
March 18, 2008 Gardiner Lecture, Yale; September, British Psychoanalytical Society lecture
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Murray Schwartz
No one who is concerned with psychoanalysis as a theory, a practice, and a cluster of local, regional, and international educational and scientific institutions would dispute that psychoanalysis is, today, in a profound crisis. The most obvious symptom of this crisis is comparable to the symptom most studied by contemporary psychoanalytic investigators of trauma, that is, dissociative fragmentation, loss of identity. There are now many versions of psychoanalytic theory; practitioners with the most diverse sorts of training perform the “talking cure” in the most diverse ways; and many of psychoanalysis’s institutions are unable to integrate themselves or operate as communities even after intensely discussing everything about themselves, starting with “what is psychoanalysis?” Psychoanalysis is also in a critical relationship with the diverse societies and cultures world-wide where its work is performed and where it competes with other mental health specialties for patients, for resources, for scientific status and control of disciplinary boundaries, and for recognition of its particular qualities and appreciation of its illustrious past, when it grew from a marginal, revolutionary theory and treatment into a main source of all modern mental health specialties. As with individual traumatic experiences, working through the dilemmas of contemporary psychoanalysis is a slow and complex process, mixing advances, retreats, and iatrogenic effects as the doctors try self-doctoring and doctoring of their field.
THE TRAUMA OF LOST LOVE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
Background: This essay was requested for a forthcoming collection of essays on Freud’s text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (edited by M.K.O’Niell and S. Ahktar for New Library of Psychoanalysis, London, 2010). It continues a theme that I have written about a number of times since the 2000 publication of Cherishment A Psychology of the Heart (co-authored with Faith Bethelard), namely, that psychoanalysis after Freud developed without a concept Freud himself once formulated and then almost abandoned. That is the concept of “ego instincts,” instincts for satisfying basic provisioning needs and needs for love and relationship. It is the instinct for sociability and for living together with others in a polis recognized by Aristotle as the essential human instinct. Lacking this concept, it has been difficult for psychoanalysts to develop socio-political theories on any other grounds than those Freud bequeathed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
This essay was first delivered as a lecture to the Center for Modern Psychoanalysis in New York, December, 2008. It will be published in the Center’s journal Modern Psychoanalysis, Spring 2010. I first explore how women have been represented in psychoanalytic thought, then discuss the development of second- and third-wave feminism, considering how a plurality of women’s movements emerged, worldwide,which represent women quite differently. The essay concludes with some thoughts on how third-wave feminism’s representations of women might inform psychoanalysis.
Remarks for October 18, 2008 conference on Prejudice, William Alanson White/Sullivan Society, New York; adapted for Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine scientific session, November 2, 2010 and Chicago Psychoanalytic Society, November 22, 2010 ; published in a fuller version in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, vol. 45 (2009).
I’d like to share a bit of this work with you today to show you what can come from working with a hypothesis that there are three forms of prejudice against children, and that those forms are similar to the narcissistic, obsessional and hysterical forms that can be seen playing out in prejudices against adults in other target groups –women, Jews and other “middelman minority” groups embedded in others’ economies, people of color and of “lower class.”
