The chapter investigates the role the concept and experience of crisis play in Arendt's political thought. As the first paragraph substantiates, her analysis of crisis mainly consists in a radical 'critique of modernity' that aspires to detecting and exposing its logic without continuing to fall prey to it. If Arendt's diagnosis of crisis may thus be close to that of other scholars of her time, and it was influenced in a definitive way by the experience of, and reflection on, totalitarian domination, total war and the Holocaust, her prognosis is original and peculiar. As illustrated in the second and third paragraph, she in fact boldly departs from the traditional concept of political action as being the actualization of a doctrine or value, or consisting in a hierarchical, impersonal relationship, to identify the real opportunity for renewal offered by crisis in the recovery of a notion of an equal, spontaneous and boundless action, keeping to the particularities of reality and shaping history as continuously interrupted by unpredictable human actions. Crisis, Arendt tells us, signals a dissonance between reality and knowledge and challenges the ways in which we understand, signify and act upon this very same reality, but it is no excuse for not acting, for not judging and taking our part of responsibility towards the world. Indeed, it is the moment in which the meaning and nature of political action is to be recovered anew and embraced.
Crisis and Vulnerability in Hannah Arendt's Political Thought: Political Action, Judgment and the Figure of the 'Conscious Pariah'.
Furia Annalisa
2021
Abstract
The chapter investigates the role the concept and experience of crisis play in Arendt's political thought. As the first paragraph substantiates, her analysis of crisis mainly consists in a radical 'critique of modernity' that aspires to detecting and exposing its logic without continuing to fall prey to it. If Arendt's diagnosis of crisis may thus be close to that of other scholars of her time, and it was influenced in a definitive way by the experience of, and reflection on, totalitarian domination, total war and the Holocaust, her prognosis is original and peculiar. As illustrated in the second and third paragraph, she in fact boldly departs from the traditional concept of political action as being the actualization of a doctrine or value, or consisting in a hierarchical, impersonal relationship, to identify the real opportunity for renewal offered by crisis in the recovery of a notion of an equal, spontaneous and boundless action, keeping to the particularities of reality and shaping history as continuously interrupted by unpredictable human actions. Crisis, Arendt tells us, signals a dissonance between reality and knowledge and challenges the ways in which we understand, signify and act upon this very same reality, but it is no excuse for not acting, for not judging and taking our part of responsibility towards the world. Indeed, it is the moment in which the meaning and nature of political action is to be recovered anew and embraced.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
