{"id":25,"date":"2019-08-30T12:43:57","date_gmt":"2019-08-30T16:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/?page_id=25"},"modified":"2020-02-22T12:59:49","modified_gmt":"2020-02-22T17:59:49","slug":"9-13","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/9-13\/","title":{"rendered":"9\/13 | Hannah Arendt, <em>The Human Condition<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\"><\/h3>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4FG8Lynp6Ss\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/h3>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">Professors\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/seyla-benhabib\/\">Seyla Benhabib<\/a>\u00a0and <a href=\"https:\/\/cgt.columbia.edu\/about\/people\/committee-faculty\/bernard-e-harcourt\/\">Bernard E. Harcourt<\/a><\/h1>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\">read and discuss<\/h2>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-introduction-to-critique-9-13\/\"><em>The Human Condition<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Hannah Arendt<\/h2>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\">at the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/maisonfrancaise.org\/contact-and-directions\">Maison Fran\u00e7aise<\/a>, Columbia University<\/h2>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\">January 29, 2020<\/h2>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\">~~~<\/h2>\n<p>To think in crisis times: that is the heart of Arendt\u2019s work and life, and of her\u00a0magnum opus, <em>The Human Condition<\/em>, published in 1958. Those times in particular, the mid- to late-1950s, represented a unique historical conjuncture. They were of course, first, in the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich and of the Holocaust, and of the publication in 1951 of her book <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em>. Second, they followed also the human invention and use of the atomic bomb\u2014a historical marker that Arendt referenced on several occasions in her work. As she emphasized, \u201cpolitically, the modern world, in which we live today, was born with the first atomic explosions.\u201d Third, they came on the heels as well of the first launch of an outer-space satellite that orbited around Earth\u2014the first man-made object to be propelled into space to explore beyond our Earth, a technological development and instrument as unique and historically important as the invention of the telescope. Each of those historical dimensions shaped the writing of <em>The Human Condition. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>We live today in both similar and in different times. <em>Similar<\/em>, because the threat of authoritarianism and new forms of totalitarianism in this country and in Arendt\u2019s country of origin, Germany, have never been of greater salience than when she was writing her book\u2014not only the immediate aftermath of Fascism and Stalinism, but also, in the United States, at the tail end of McCarthyism (which was in decline by the mid- to late-1950s). <em>Different<\/em>, because the threat of nuclear annihilation, which was so present during the Cold War and so fundamentally shaped our consciousness then, has been replaced today by the looming catastrophe of global climate change.\u00a0But for all the similarities and differences, the overarching crises we face today are not so unlike the ones Arendt faced in 1958: \u201cForemost in our minds at this moment,\u201d she wrote, \u201cis of course the enormously increased human power of destruction, that we are able to destroy all organic life on earth and shall probably be able one day to destroy even the earth itself.\u201d (268-269) The dual admixture of rising political chaos and authoritarianism on the one hand, and of the threat of global climate change on the other hand, strike me as present instantiations of Arendt\u2019s dilemma from 1958.<\/p>\n<p>These present circumstances make <em>The Human Condition<\/em> a formative text for this seminar <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/\">Critique 13\/13<\/a>\u00a0and its relation to praxis, or for that matter its relation to last year\u2019s seminar, <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/\">Praxis 13\/13<\/a>. In this work, Arendt recounts precisely the historical movements of <em>theoria<\/em> and <em>praxis, <\/em>and\u00a0how <em>praxis<\/em> itself was transformed in the modern world in the process: how the disdain for labor in antiquity (associated with the work of slaves and women) gave place to a new privileging of life-reproducing labor, or what she refers to as \u201ca<em>nimal laborans<\/em>,\u201d the laboring animal.<\/p>\n<p>From the outset, Arendt puts aside thinking or thought in her analysis of the active life (5), and only returns to it at the end of <em>The Human Condition<\/em>. (324) Yet it is that form of activity, it seems, that ultimately remains the most important for Arendt. In her own words, in fact in her own last words of the book, it is only thinking that can or should or would \u201csurpass\u201d all the other forms of active life. Thinking through, for instance\u2014as she did in her earlier text, <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism\u2014<\/em>the different elements and political circumstances that produce political oppression. Thinking through, as Seyla Benhabib emphasizes, \u201cthose currents of thought, political events, and outlook, which form a particular <em>configuration <\/em>and <em>crystallization of elements<\/em>\u201d and that can help us understand and write a history of the present.<a href=\"applewebdata:\/\/058B8748-9ACE-4E0F-BE45-8ED3DE23E4BE#_edn1\" name=\"_ednref1\">[1]<\/a>\u00a0Thinking through, as Arendt would do there, the different paths forward, including, famously, the notion of \u201ca right to have rights,\u201d which would play such an important role in the decades to follow. (<em>OT, <\/em>376)<\/p>\n<p>How then can we actualize Arendt\u2019s thought, today, to help understand and address the political crises that we face?<\/p>\n<p>To help us explore this question and to reread <em>The Human Condition <\/em>in light of our present political circumstances, we are delighted to welcome the foremost authority on Hannah Arendt, Professor Seyla Benhabib, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and a dear friend and senior scholar at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. The recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize for 2009, the Leopold Lucas Prize from the University of Tubingen (2012), the Meister Eckhart Prize (2014), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-12), Professor Benhabib is a leading critical theorist and philosopher and scholar of international human rights law and politics. She is the author, among other works, of <em>The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt<\/em> (1996; reissued in 2002) and <em>Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin<\/em> (Princeton University Press, 2018).<\/p>\n<p>Welcome to Critique 9\/13!<\/p>\n<p>[Read <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-introduction-to-critique-9-13\/\">full Introduction here<\/a>. \u00a0\u00a9 Bernard E. Harcourt.]<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/9-13\/arendt\/#main\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-752\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-752\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/files\/2020\/01\/Arendt-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"543\" height=\"387\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/files\/2020\/01\/Arendt-300x214.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/files\/2020\/01\/Arendt.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 543px) 100vw, 543px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Professors\u00a0Seyla Benhabib\u00a0and Bernard E. Harcourt read and discuss The Human Condition\u00a0by Hannah Arendt at the\u00a0Maison Fran\u00e7aise, Columbia University January 29, 2020 ~~~ To think in crisis times: that is the heart of Arendt\u2019s work and life, and of her\u00a0magnum opus,&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/9-13\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue Reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1603,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-25","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1603"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}