Theorising Political Action: The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt’s political theory is often understood to rest on a celebration of action, the memorable words and deeds of named individuals, over against the anonymous processes constitutive of ‘labor’ and ‘society’. Yet at key moments in The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt seems to signal a different relationship between political action and anonymity; and she does so in part via citations of the novels of William Faulkner. Using the apparently contradictory notion of ‘anonymous glory’ as a heuristic, this essay reconsiders Arendt’s political thought through readings of the novels she cites, A Fable and Intruder in the Dust. The essay argues that, for Arendt, a conception of action adequate to the scale of modern social power must somehow be both indelibly tied to individual deeds and immersed in a processual field that is indifferent to the needs for meaning or purpose or satisfaction that individuals bring to what they do; and that Arendt’s engagement with this problem both complicates the relation of action to its supposed opposites, and makes it more difficult to conceive of action’s recovery as a reliable source of theoretical or political redemption.

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Quién es quién en el espacio público: Política e identidad en H. Arendt

Revista de la Academia ◽

10.25074/0196318.0.49 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 20 ◽

pp. 103

Author(s):

María José López Merino

Keyword(s):

Public Space ◽

Political Action ◽

Human Condition ◽

Font Size ◽

The Public ◽

The Third ◽

The Human Condition

En lo que sigue presentamos el concepto de identidad del quién, que Arendt expone en su obra The Human Condition, ligado a la noción de acción política. Presentamos este concepto ligado a tres anomalías que registra la lectura de Arendt: la primera vinculada con la misma noción de política que explora la autora, la segunda vinculada a su posición como pensadora anti-metafísica, y la tercera relacionada ya no con sus ideas sino con su praxis como pensadora: las actividades que la sitúan en espacio público como un quién que tiene algo que decir. Específicamente, en dos momentos peculiares en su escritura: Los orígenes del Totalitarismo y Rahel Varnhagen. La vida de una judía.Palabras claves: identidad, quién, acción, narración, espacio público WHO IS WHO IN THE PUBLIC SPACE: POLICITY AND IDENTITY IN H. ARENDT This article presents the concept of the identity of the ‘who’, exposed by Arendt in her book The Human Condition, linked to the notion of political action. We introduce this concept related to three anomalies that appear in Arendt’s reading: the first associated to the very notion of politics that she explores, the second linked to her position as an antimetaphysical thinker, and the third related not with her ideas but with her praxis as thinker: her activities in the public space like a ‘who’ that has something to say, specifically, in two peculiar moments in her production: Origins of Totalitarianism and Rahel Varnghagen, the Life of a Jewess. Keyword: identity, who, action, narration, public space

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Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Phenomenology of the Body

Human Studies ◽

10.1007/s10746-021-09614-2 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Charles des Portes

Keyword(s):

Political Action ◽

Human Condition ◽

The Body ◽

German Version ◽

Phenomenology Of The Body ◽

Private Matter ◽

The Human Condition

AbstractAmongst the Arendtian scholars, there is almost a consensus on Arendt’s supposedly reluctance to the question of the body. The Arendtian body is said to belong to the unpolitical realm of necessity, in other words, the body is a private matter that should not appear in public. It is antipolitical. However, in this paper, I want to suggest that there is a possibility to outline a phenomenology of embodied political action in what I think to be Arendt’s hidden phenomenology of the body. To make my point, I will first show that what the scholars call the Arendtian body is in fact an Arendtian Body. Secondly, in the German version of The Human Condition, Arendt surprisingly used the Heideggerian term Befindlichkeit (disposition) that, I will argue, outline the basis of a political phenomenology of the body in Arendt’s work. More precisely, I will try to show that political action is embodied, that there is a hexis, a pathos and an ethos of action.

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Realism Could Rekindle Hope

10.5406/illinois/9780252040184.003.0021 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Kevin G. Barnhurst

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Social Media ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Action ◽

Human Condition ◽

News Organizations ◽

Big Picture ◽

The Human Condition

This chapter considers the question of whether there is hope for mainstream news. One source of optimism is that news practitioners have managed to hold on through a century of tough transitions, a tenacity that also makes news an apt case study of current transformations. Another is that news organizations have been creative. Despite the usual view that legacy media fail to innovate, concrete evidence shows their contributions to the digital boom. But the main cause for hope may spring from the contradictions of news, which seem to have stymied the lofty strain of twentieth-century modernism without rejecting the down-to-earth strain from nineteenth-century realism. The modernist focus on big-picture explanations from big-name practitioners at big-time media undermines the enduring cultural idea that news provides many small encounters with the human condition. The realist reporting of what happens to the little guy at places nearby has remained an attraction for audiences online and on mobile social media, and a factor pushing government and political action.

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Review of Mental Handicap and the Human Condition: New Approaches from the Tavistock.

Contemporary Psychology ◽

10.1037/034250 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 39 (11) ◽

pp. 1064-1064

Author(s):

Terri Gullickson

Keyword(s):

Human Condition ◽

Mental Handicap ◽

New Approaches ◽

The Human Condition

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An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474429443.003.0011 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Alistair Fox

Keyword(s):

New Zealand ◽

Adolescent Girl ◽

Emotional Problems ◽

Human Condition ◽

The Core ◽

Parental Neglect ◽

The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

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Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽

10.3366/para.2019.0289 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 76-90

Author(s):

Damiano Benvegnù

Keyword(s):

Short Story ◽

Killer Whale ◽

Human Condition ◽

Nonhuman Animal ◽

Western Philosophy ◽

Mise En Abyme ◽

The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

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THE UNMAKING OF WISDOM: How We Compromise Reason’s Capacity to Transform the Human Condition

Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism ◽

10.1558/eph.v18i2.63 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 63-88

Author(s):

Andy Norman

Keyword(s):

Human Condition ◽

The Human Condition

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Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

Studies in Social Justice ◽

10.26522/ssj.v14i2.2243 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

pp. 454-473

Author(s):

Rachel Zellars

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Indigenous Peoples ◽

Human Condition ◽

Wild Mushrooms ◽

Black Migration ◽

Black Freedom ◽

Indigenous Sovereignty ◽

Black Land ◽

The Human Condition

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.

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Das Internet der Tiere: Natur 4.0 und die conditio humana

Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung ◽

10.28937/1000107556 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 111-124

Author(s):

Alexander Pschera

Keyword(s):

Industry 4.0 ◽

Industrie 4.0 ◽

Human Condition ◽

Digital Culture ◽

The Internet ◽

Conditio Humana ◽

The Many ◽

The Human Condition

"Neben der Industrie hat die Digitalisierung auch die Natur ergriffen. Die Tatsache, dass Tausende von Tieren mit GPS-Sendern aus- gerüstet und überwacht werden, erlaubt, analog zur Industrie 4.0 auch von einer Natur 4.0 zu sprechen. Dieses Internet der Tiere verändert den Begriff, den der Mensch von der Natur hat. Er transformiert die Wahrnehmung vor allem der Natur als etwas fundamental An- deren. Neben den vielen kulturellen Problematisierungen, die das Internet der Tiere mit sich bringt, lassen sich aber auch die Umrisse einer neuen, ganz und gar nicht esoterischen planetarisch-post-digitalen Kultur aufzeigen, die die conditio humana verändert. In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition. "

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