Rahel Varnhagen: Arendt's Experiential Ontology

Maslin, Kimberly

doi:10.1215/0094033x-2077708

Cited by 4 publications

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“… Arendt characteristically disregards the gendered challenges women faced in this context. We may agree with Arendt's interpretation of Varnhagen's life, but the social and political mores of her time would have likely prevented her from undertaking a political project (Benhabib , 92; Maslin , 89). …”

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confidence: 73%

“…Toward the end of her life, Varnhagen did, however, get a taste for this alternative. Arendt contends that Varnhagen's friendship with a conscious pariah, the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, helped her realize that her predicament was not hers alone to bear: what plagued her life was less of an archaic destiny than a specifically political condition (Arendt , 258; Maslin , 93, 96) . Although Varnhagen may have come to this realization too late, following her journey, her vicissitudes, inner struggles, and even her failures was an occasion for Arendt to draw formative lessons about the meaning, dangers, and opportunities of identity, freedom, and politics…”

Section: Rahel Varnhagen: the Irresistibility Of Disaster?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

Yáñez¹

2018

Hypatia

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In this essay, I focus on two biographical works by Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir that I read as political texts: Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (Arendt 1957) and “Must We Burn Sade?” (Beauvoir 2012). Reading Arendt's Varnhagen and Beauvoir's “Sade” side by side illuminates their shared preoccupation with lived experience and their common political premises: the antagonism between freedom and sovereignty, and the centrality of action and constructive relations with others. My argument is that these texts constitute an original style of political thinking, which I call politico‐biographical hermeneutics, or reading the life of others as exercises in political theory. Politico‐biographical hermeneutics, as I take it, is not a systematic methodology, but an approach to interpreting sociopolitical forces as they come to bear and are embodied and inscribed in the lived experiences, struggles, and works of representative or exemplary individuals. This approach identifies the political lessons of lived experience and supports one of the central claims of feminist philosophy, namely, that the personal and the political are not antithetical, but relational.

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confidence: 73%

Section: Rahel Varnhagen: the Irresistibility Of Disaster?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

Yáñez¹

2018

Hypatia

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Strange Figures: The Female Founders at the Margins of Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Beginning

Frost

2024

Hypatia

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Without females included in the ranks of political founder, Hannah Arendt's theory of political beginning looks dangerously romanticized. Arendt's founder is someone who rises to the challenge of their times, diverting history and renewing public spirit in the process. But despite a methodology that called for recovering the “rich and strange” from the past Arendt does not address the female founders that populate the myths and traditions she cites as instructive. These figures exemplify the unsettling forces and relationality she associates with beginning, but they also signal the high cost of action for the marginalized, including the difficulty some actors face in being recognized at all. If, as she suggests, the founder's persona provides an avenue of recall for the perplexing experience of beginning, then female founders support this recall magnificently while adding a tragic and troubling note that Arendt omits. Their reintroduction into her theory of political beginning takes the shine off her otherwise heroized and happy account.

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A Rebel against the Volk

Sharvit

2023

Angelaki

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Rahel Varnhagen: Arendt's Experiential Ontology

Cited by 4 publications

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Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

Strange Figures: The Female Founders at the Margins of Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Beginning

A Rebel against the Volk

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