scholarly journals Genealogy of Experiential Frames: Methodological Notes on Arendt

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Frame Analysis ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Process Thinking ◽  
The World ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The Human Condition

This article seeks to add a new theoretical voice to the tradition of genealogical inquiry in political theory and beyond by offering a re-reading of the thought of Hannah Arendt. Going beyond the letter of her thought, in this article I propose that placing Arendt in the genealogical tradition of inquiry (particularly its Foucauldian strand) helps to make sense of what she was “up to” when she turned to history in her work, especially in the analysis of totalitarianism and the account of modernity presented in The Human Condition. I will specifically highlight the historical emergence of “process-thinking” that Arendt traces across her writings. The article seeks to sketch a unique approach to genealogical inquiry that can be taken up by anyone interested in critical analysis of our present age and its politics. Towards the end of the essay, I elaborate this approach methodologically by making a reference to frame analysis. Thus, I articulate a “genealogical frame analysis”, an inquiry into historical emergence of various metaphors and frames that organize our experience of the world. I also highlight the centrality of events for Arendt’s genealogy, as well as its role in a broader set of world-building practices.

Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: The Public, the Private and Evil

1984 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiraz Dossa
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Human Condition

Since its publication,Eichmann in Jerusalemhas provoked a storm of controversy. With a few exceptions, critics reacted to the substance of Arendt's thesis with considerable bitterness and hostility. This article argues that her detractors badly misunderstood Arendt because they were insufficiently conversant with, or unaware of, her political theory. Fundamental to this theory, articulated at length in herThe Human Condition, is the crucial distinction between the public and the private. None of her critics, including those who sympathized with Arendt, have understood that her critical analysis of Eichmann's conduct and of the response of the Jewish leadership to the tragic fate that befell their people makes sense on the peculiar terrain of her political theory and particularly in terms of the public-private distinction which lies at the core of this theory.

And Worldlessness, Alas, is Always a Kind of Barbarism: Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Educating in Worldless Times

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 509-532
Author(s):  
Stephanie Mackler
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Specific Aspect ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Best Response ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Thinking Differently ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Human Condition

Background/Context In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote “The Crisis in Education,” arguing that schools should not be used for political purposes and should instead introduce children to what she calls “the world.” The world, for Arendt, comprises the artifacts, ideas, values, and interactions that connect people together. In that same year, she published The Human Condition, a damning analysis of the problem of what she calls “world alienation” in the modern era. By this, she means that we experience a radical sense of disconnection and alienation from the physical and social world we share with others. The tension between these two pieces is provocative, because one advocates giving children a world, while the other suggests that there is no longer a world to give. Purpose/Objective This article begins from the aforementioned point of tension to consider what Arendt might have said about education in 2008, particularly in light of the discussion of world alienation in The Human Condition and Arendt's later work on thinking in The Life of the Mind. Although Arendt's analysis of worldlessness is multifaceted, this article focuses on one specific aspect of her argument: the way our very approaches to thinking— including the way we conduct scholarly inquiry—contribute to the loss of the world. Research Design This work is philosophical in nature, focusing on several of Hannah Arendt's published works. Conclusions/Recommendations Drawing on Arendt's work on thinking, the author argues that the best response to worldlessness is a specific type of thinking. The article concludes by suggesting that educational researchers and practitioners consider the ways in which education is currently implicated in the problem of world alienation, as well as the ways that we can start thinking differently in response. “The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”1

Care and Concern: Arendt with Winnicott

Public Things ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Honig
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
Democratic Life ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter examines “things” in Hannah Arendt's work in relation to D. W. Winnicott's object relations. Hoping to generate a lexicon for a political theory of public things, it analyzes Arendt's The Human Condition together with Winnicott's work. It notes the convergence of Winnicott and Arendt on the value of care and concern for the world and for others and argues that there is a case to be made for seeing Arendt as a kind of object-relations theorist whose concepts, along with Winnicott's, call attention to the centrality of public things to democratic life. Read with Winnicott, Arendt emerges as a thinker who is committed to the power of thingness to stabilize the flux of nature and the contingency of action.

The Problem of Sovereignty: Reading Hobbes through the Eyes of Hannah Arendt

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-91
Author(s):  
Edgar Straehle
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

In this paper I examine how Hobbes’ philosophy can be read from an Arendtian perspective. I argue that Arendt provided two different interpretations of Hobbes: one set down in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where Hobbes is depicted as the spokesman of the emerging bourgeoisie; and another that she developed later, scattered among various texts such as The Human Condition and Between Past and Future. I focus on this second interpretation and on her analysis of concepts such as common sense, authority and sovereignty. Firstly, I examine how she changes the meaning of common sense, and how this shift is linked to what Arendt understands by the expression “estrangement from the world.” Secondly, I explain how Hobbes redefined the concept of authority and how his notion of sovereignty deliberately conflated the dual concepts of authority and power.

Los avatares del logos

2001 ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
Leticia Flores Farfán
Keyword(s):  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Mircea Eliade ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

Assuming with Georges Bataille that men is a being who is not in the world “like water within the water”, that is to say, in an immanent and lack of distinction state, but that its destiny is shaped in the permanent significant joint or logos to which its unfinished nature jeopardizes him, we analyze the form in which the mythical story, characterized like a sacred word with symbolic and ontological quality within the perspective of Mircea Eliade, gives account of the wound or the original tear that constitutes the human condition.

Getting Real?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Goodhart
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Norms

Chapter 3 engages with realist political theory throughcritical dialogues with leading realist theorists. It argues that realist political theories are much more susceptible to conservatism, distortion, and idealization than their proponents typically acknowledge. Realism is often not very realistic either in its descriptions of the world or in its political analysis. While realism enables the critical analysis of political norms (the analysis of power and unmasking of ideology), it cannot support substantive normative critique of existing social relations or enable prescriptive theorizing. These two types of critique must be integrated into a single theoretical framework to facilitate emancipatory social transformation.

With and Beyond Epistemologies from the South: Ontological Epistemology of Participation, Multi-topial Hermeneutics and the Calling of Planetary Realisations

2021 ◽  
pp. 003802292110146
Author(s):  
Ananta Kumar Giri
Keyword(s):  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The South ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Multiple Cultures ◽  
The World ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
Universe Of Discourse ◽  
The Human Condition

Our contemporary moment is a moment of crisis of epistemology as a part of the wider and deeper crisis of modernity and the human condition. The crisis of epistemology emerges from the limits of the epistemic as it is tied to epistemology of procedural certainty and closure. The crisis of epistemology also reflects the limits of epistemology closed within the Euro-American universe of discourse. It is in this context that the present essay discusses Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. It also discusses some of the limits of de Sousa Santos’ alternatives especially his lack of cultivation of the ontological in his exploration of epistemological alternatives beyond the Eurocentric canons. It then explores the pathways of ontological epistemology of participation which brings epistemic and ontological works and meditations together in transformative and cross-cultural ways. This helps us in going beyond both the limits of the primacy of epistemology in modernity as well as Eurocentrism. It also explores pathways of a new hermeneutics which involves walking and meditating across multiple topoi of cultures and traditions of thinking and reflections which is called multi- topial hermeneutics in this study. This involves foot-walking and foot-meditative interpretation across multiple cultures and traditions of the world which help us go beyond ethnocentrism and eurocentrism and cultivate conversations and realisations across borders what the essay calls planetary realisations.

On the Harm of Genocide

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Paul Kucharski
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Community Or ◽  
The World ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Individual Human ◽  
The Human Condition

My aim in this essay is to advance the state of scholarly discussion on the harms of genocide. The most obvious harms inflicted by every genocide are readily evident: the physical harm inflicted upon the victims of genocide and the moral harm that the perpetrators of genocide inflict upon themselves. Instead, I will focus on a kind of harm inflicted upon those who are neither victims nor perpetrators, on those who are outside observers, so to speak. My thesis will be that when a whole community or culture is eliminated, or even deeply wounded, the world loses an avenue for insight into the human condition. My argument is as follows. In order to understand human nature, and that which promotes its flourishing, we must certainly study individual human beings. But since human beings as rational and linguistic animals are in part constituted by the communities in which they live, the study of human nature should also involve the study of communities and cultures—both those that are well ordered and those that are not. No one community or culture has expressed all that can be said about the human way of existing and flourishing. And given that the unity and wholeness of human nature can only be glimpsed in a variety of communities and cultures, then part of the harm of genocide consists in the removal of a valuable avenue for human beings to better understand themselves.

The Time Machine; or, the Fourth Dimension as Prophecy

PMLA ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 530-535
Author(s):  
Robert M. Philmus
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Essential Aspect ◽  
Active Audience ◽  
Logical Conclusion ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Human Condition

Most of the early science fantasies of H. G. Wells are, as he defines the term, prophetic: the myths that they develop to a logical conclusion represent a critique of some historical or essential aspect of the human condition. The Time Machine, his first scientific romance, explores the premises of prophetic fantasy at the same time that it embodies a myth of its own. In it Wells envisions the future devolution of man, already outlined in previous essays of his, as the ultimate consequence of what he perceived as a present attitude of complacent optimism, an attitude he dramatizes in the reaction of the Active audience to the Time Traveller's account of the world of 802,701 and beyond. Although the Time Traveller accepts this vision as literally true, his own theories about that world make it clear that its significance pertains to it only as a metaphoric projection of tendencies existing in the present. Thus the structure of The Time Machine reveals the Time Traveller's point of view, like that of his audience, to be limited: his final disappearance into the fantasied world of the future vindicates the rigorous integrity of Wells s prophecy.

Camus and Tragedy in Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gibbons
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Apparent Absence ◽  
The World ◽  
Educational Imagination ◽  
The Human Condition

Tragedy is a central theme in the work of Albert Camus that speaks to his 46 years of life in “interesting times.” He develops a case for the tragic arts across a series of letters, articles, lectures, short stories, and novels. In arguing for the tragic arts, he reveals an epic understanding of the tensions between individual and world manifest in the momentum of liberalism, humanism, and modernism. The educational qualities of the tragic arts are most explicitly explored in his novel The Plague, in which the proposition that the plague is a teacher engages Camus in an exploration of the grand narratives of progress and freedom, and the intimate depths of ignorance and heroism. In the novel The Outsider Camus explores the tragedy of difference in a society obsessed with the production of a normal citizen. The tragedy manifests the absurdity of the world in which a stranger in this world is compelled to support the system that rejects their subjectivity. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus produces an essay on absurdity and suicide that toys with the illusion of Progress and the grounds for a well-lived life. Across these texts, and through his collection of letters, articles, and notes, Camus invites an educational imagination. His approach to study of the human condition in and through tragedy offers a narrative to challenge the apparent absence of imagination in educational systems and agendas. Following Camus, the tragic arts offer alternative narratives during the interesting times of viral and environment tragedy.

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