Hannah Arendt and the Humanities: On the Relevance of Her Work Beyond the Realm of Politics
In the wake of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror there has been in recent years an immense interest in Hannah Arendt's thought in a variety of disciplines ranging from Political Science through History to Cultural Criticism. While Arendt's political analysis, especially her insights into the nature of totalitarian ideologies and regimes has received much attention, relatively little has been said on the possible impact of her unique philosophical vocabulary in such works as The Human Condition, Between Past and Future or The Life of the Mind or on our understanding of literature and the arts as they address contemporary society and politics. Giorgio Agamben, as only one example, makes references to Origins of Totalitarianism, but leaves out The Human Condition or Hannah Arendt's writing on literature or culture. A recent collection of Arendt's writings on literature and culture provides a first opportunity to reflect on the status of literature and the arts in Arendt's work, and on the usefulness of her concepts for an understanding of contemporary society and culture (Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (ed.), Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford UP, 2007). But it is precisely Arendt's conviction that literature and the arts contribute indispensably to our understanding of politics and history that calls for an examination of how Arendt's work opens new perspectives and adds a critical vocabulary to address literature and the arts.
The relative dearth of attention to Arendt's possible relevance and impact on our thinking about literature and the arts is especially peculiar given Arendt's reliance on literary texts throughout her writing. The aim of the Stanford Workshop is to consider if Hannah Arendt's work offers a productive vocabulary for thinking about literature, the arts and culture at the intersection of history, politics, and ethics.
Our question is: what may be the usefulness of such concepts, terms, and figures of speech as "natality," or Arendt's conception of the "world," or of the distinction between the "public," the "private," and the "social"? We would like to consider together: what happens when one puts Arendt's thought in contact with the study of culture in its widest sense (and not exclusively within the discipline of political theory)? What may be the implications of Arendt's reliance on literature and culture, at key moments in her analysis of political and social reality, to our understanding of their possible significance to contemporary society and politics? The workshop aims to examine the relevance of Arendt's work for the humanities in the broadest sense, and to examine Arendt's work in light of some recent advances in critical thinking in turn.
CISAC Conference Room
Amir Eshel
Dept of German Studies
Building 260, Room 204
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030
Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.
Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).
Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.
Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.
Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Robert Harrison
121 Pigott Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Professor Harrison received his doctorate in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1984, with a dissertation on Dante's Vita Nuova. In 1985 he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. In 1986 he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992 and was promoted to full professor in 1995. In 1997 Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair. In 2002, he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian. In 2014 he was knighted "Chevalier" by the French Republic. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.
Professor Harrison's first book, The Body of Beatrice, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. It deals with medieval Italian lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Dante's early work La Vita Nuova. The Body of Beatrice was translated into Japanese in 1994. Over the next few years Professor Harrison worked on his next book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, which appeared in 1992 with University of Chicago Press. This book deals with the ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology. It offers a select history that begins in antiquity and ends in our own time. Forests appeared simultaneously in English, French, Italian, and German. It subsequently appeared in Japanese and Korean as well. In 1994 his book Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? appeared in France, Italy, and Germany. This book is written in the form of dialogues between two characters and deals with topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society.
Professor Harrison's next book, The Dominion of the Dead, published in 2003 by University of Chicago Press, examines the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms. This book was translated into German, French and Italian. Professor Harrison's book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition appeared in 2008 with the University of Chicago Press, in French with Le Pommier, and in Italian with Fazi Editori , and in German with Hanser Verlag (it subsequently appeared in Chinese translation). His most recent book Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age came out in 2014 with Chicago University Press. In 2005 Harrison started a literary talk show on KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions." The show features hour long conversations with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists. Robert Harrison is also the Director of Another Look, a Stanford-based book club.
