Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen

Cutting-Gray, Joanne

doi:10.1353/phl.1991.0023

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…These postmodernists praise Arendt for challenging the demands of any predetermined natural group membership and other models of solidarity predicated upon naturalism, that is, upon allegedly non‐discursive, quasi‐immediate bonds. On the other hand, other feminist thinkers such as Seyla Benhabib, Adriana Cavarero, Julia Kristeva, Françoise Collin, and Norma Moruzzi consider Arendt a sophisticated humanist, even a post‐post‐humanist (Benhabib ; Bowen Moore ; Cutting‐Gray ; Cornell ; Weissberg ; Collin ; Schües ; Cavarero ; Moruzzi ; Kristeva ; Vacchiarelli Scott ; Birmingham ; Hahn ; ; Birmingham ; Hahn ; and others). They praise her for her thematization of natality, which they often interpret as a celebration of birth, motherhood, and embodiment; for her narrative and intersubjective notion of embodied identity, that is, the “who;” for her notion of plurality that some of them interpret as sexual difference or différance ; and for her attention to representative thinking, or, in her own words, erweiterte Denkungsart , which, according to these modernist feminists, advocates taking into account the perspectives of differently situated groups and persons.…”

Section: The Feminist Debate On Identity Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminism as Revolutionary Practice: From Justice and the Politics of Recognition to Freedom

Borren¹

2013

Hypatia

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In the 1980s extra‐parliamentary social movements and critical theories of race, class, and gender added a new sociocultural understanding of justice—recognition—to the much older socioeconomic one. The best‐known form of the struggle for recognition is the identity politics of disadvantaged groups. I argue that there is still another option to conceptualize their predicament, neglected in recent political philosophy, which understands exclusion not in terms of injustice, more particularly a lack of sociocultural recognition, but in terms of a lack of freedom. I draw my inspiration from Hannah Arendt's model of political action. Arendt diagnoses exclusion not solely as a mode of injustice, but as a lack of participation and public freedom. Consequently, she advocates a struggle for participation, political equality, and freedom as a strategy for emancipation or empowerment. Arendt could help feminists see that collective empowerment is made possible not by a shared identity (the target of poststructuralist critics) but by common action in the service of a particular worldly issue or common end. In other words, feminists would do well to appreciate the revolutionary quality and heritage of the feminist movement better, that is, its character as a set of practices of freedom.

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Section: The Feminist Debate On Identity Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminism as Revolutionary Practice: From Justice and the Politics of Recognition to Freedom

Borren¹

2013

Hypatia

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“…8 8 In “Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen” (Cutting‐Gray 1991), I explore the way Arendt problematizes subjectivity and the politics of biography. Writing about Varnhagen helped Arendt to understand and combat her own introspective self‐absorption, helped her to come to terms with Zionism and Nazism. …”

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“…18 18 I describe the transformation in detail in Cutting‐Gray (1991). Hertz (1988) takes issue with Arendt's sense of Rahel's “conversion”—the distinction is again concept versus content (see note 3 above). …”

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Hannah Arendt, Feminism, and the Politics of Alterity: “What Will We Lose If We Win?”

Cutting-Gray¹

1993

Hypatia

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Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth‐century German‐Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the “female condition” of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a “politics of alterity” with applications for feminist practice.

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The Law as Fragment

Maslin

2024

Laws

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When Hannah Arendt writes about the law, she does so as a political theorist, genocide survivor and critic of modernity. She also writes as a phenomenologist, which is to say, she is mindful not only that people create the law, but that law constitutes a people. In Origins, she calls attention to the importance of the rule of law in the emergence of totalitarianism. In On Revolution, she seeks a way of grounding political authority in something other than an Absolute. In the process, Arendt looks to another group of intellectuals who grappled with the nature of authority under conditions of modernity—the Early German Romantics. Romantic fragments are philosophical, poetic, even musical. For Arendt, the most highly valued fragments are historical because these fragments provide not only protection against totalitarianism but also a possible solution to the problem of authority. In this article, I explore Arendt’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as a historical fragment. She draws on a phenomenological approach to fragments, found primarily in the work of Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, to create a resilient yet malleable basis for authority, thereby grounding political authority in concrete historical events, rather than in human nature.

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Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

Feminism as Revolutionary Practice: From Justice and the Politics of Recognition to Freedom

Feminism as Revolutionary Practice: From Justice and the Politics of Recognition to Freedom

Hannah Arendt, Feminism, and the Politics of Alterity: “What Will We Lose If We Win?”

The Law as Fragment

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