The Gender‐Neutral Feminism of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Though many have recently attempted either to locate Arendt within feminism or feminism within the great body of Arendt's work, these efforts have proven only modestly successful. Even a cursory examination of Arendt's work should suggest that these efforts would prove frustrating. None of her voluminous writings deal specifically with gender, though some of her work certainly deals with notable women. Her interest is not in gender as such, but in woman as assimilated Jew or woman as social and political revolutionary. In this paper, I argue that Arendt recognized that what frequently passes for a gender question is not essentially a matter of gender at all, but rather an idiosyncratic form of loneliness that typically affects, though is by no means limited to, women. In her work one finds the conceptual tools necessary to understand the “woman problem” rather than an explicit argument or a solution to it.

A Praxis of Facticity for Critical Phenomenology

“…Mitchell and Peter Trawny (2017). 12 See, for instance, Dana Villa (1995), Jacques Taminiaux (1997), Seyla Benhabib (2003, Peg Birmingham (2006), Roger Berkowitz (2018), Sophie Loidolt (2018), and Kimberly Maslin (2020). Arendt (1994) offers her most direct challenge to the political dangers that she perceives in Heidegger's project in "What is Existential Philosophy?"…”

Thinking, meaning, and truth: Arendt on Heidegger and the possibility of critique

“…Arendt's critical engagement with Heidegger in her later writings tends to be framed in terms of her concern for adding to thinking a worldly or political dimension that prepares the way for judgment. Kimberly Maslin (2020) offers such an interpretation, arguing that the “two‐in‐one” that Arendt associates with self‐reflection is fundamentally other oriented. It thus constitutes the condition under which it becomes possible to care ( fürsorge ) for the world and others in the right way (p. 125).…”

“…While recent commentators have highlighted this capacity for critique in Arendt's notion of thinking, it has yet to be developed in relation to her critical reception of Heidegger in The Life of the Mind (Minnich, 2017; Shuster, 2018; Snir, 2020). Arendt is typically portrayed in her later writings as distancing herself from Heidegger by adding to thinking a worldly or political dimension that prepares the way for judgment (Fine, 2008; Koishikawa, 2018; Maslin, 2020; Taylor, 2002; Zerilli, 2005). Yet, in his well‐known and largely unanswered criticism of Arendt, Richard Bernstein argues that this is not enough to show that she has distinguished adequately between the kinds of thinking that can prevent moral and political catastrophe and the kinds that cannot (Bernstein, 2000, p. 291).…”

“…1515Villa and Taminiaux offer the most classic interpretations of Arendt's critical reception of Heidegger in this respect. More recent interpretations include Tchir (2017), Yeatman (2018), and Maslin (2020). …”

An Arendtian geopolitics: Action, power and the deferral of work

“…There are many tensions. Arendt ‘never wrote systematically about feminism’ (Maslin, 2013: 586) and associated gender issues with the places of ‘private, domestic, intimate life’ (Frazer, 2009: 207). To politicise the private – a secluded realm of consumption and reproduction – would be to misread Arendt, who located politics in a distinct public sphere.…”