Traumatized Heroes
Living with wrongdoing
Hope for the future is only possible if we choose peace by stopping the killing and resist the temptation of avenging heroism....
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Gray is Beautiful Revisited
On the Politics of Sex and the Crisis of Democracy at Home and Abroad
This week I am returning to my appreciation of the color gray, a theme I promised to explore regularly here, which unfortunately I have only returned to occasionally, and not recently. I am returning to the theme on this the darkest of days -- I started writing this during the winter solstice ...
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The Tragic, Enduring Relevance of Arendt’s Work on Statelessness
While Hannah Arendt is most known for her reflections on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, eighteen years of statelessness (1933-1951) brought her philosophical questions of how one might be at home in the world into sharp relief. The fact that she was Jewish and German during the first half ...
No-Rule: Thinking about Obama v. Trump Through Hannah Arendt and C.L.R. James
Barack Obama delivered a rousing speech at the recent Democratic National Committee Convention in support of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Presidency. At the crescendo of the address, Obama exhorted: “We’re not a fragile people. We’re not a frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior ...
The Grand Ah-whoom: Reflections on Trump and Trumpism Informed by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle was my introduction to the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. As is characteristic of Vonnegut’s work, Cat’s Cradle is an uproariously funny novel about a human catastrophe – in this case, the end of the world. Vonnegut usually disarms you by portraying tragedy with a tearful shrug. Slaughterhouse Five ...
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The Two Faces of Post Modern Barbarism: A Response to the Massacre in Nice
This morning, after the latest terrorist atrocity in Nice, one of the loveliest of places, I was imagining embarking on a new book project entitled “The Two Faces of Post Modern Barbarism.” The book would draw on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism and her accounts of modern barbarism, tyranny and ...
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Hannah Arendt on American “Social Slavery”
A few years after fleeing the fascist tidal wave in Europe and finding refuge in New York City, Hannah Arendt penned a letter to her mentor and confidant Karl Jaspers, commenting briefly on the peculiarities of American politics and society. She remarked, “The fundamental contradiction of the country is political ...
The Thelma-and-Louise-Gambit
Your car is not working. In fact it is falling apart: it eats up gas, burns oil, grinds the transmission, and wobbles its wheels. You have been taking the car to a mechanic whom you have known for years. He charges a small fortune, and typically, within a week or ...
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The Promise and Logic of Federations, and The Problem of Their Stability
Historians are right to describe the 19th century as the age of nationalism. While many also depict the 20th as the triumph of the nation-state, with more justice it could be called the century of its failure, despite the vast proliferation of the form. If collapsing empires brought us the first World ...
I Want You To Know You Are Powerful: Commencement Address to Eugene Lang College
A Commencement Address to the Graduates of Eugene Lang College
It is an incredible honor to be here with you today and to be entrusted with the task of speaking to you in this moment. You are here with your friends and family to celebrate what is, so far, the culmination of the journey you have undertaken to educate yourselves ...
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We Refugees
In 1943 Hannah Arendt published a short essay in the Jewish periodical "The Menorah Journal" entitled We Refugees. She described in it a widespread refusal among Jews who had escaped the Nazis to call themselves “refugees." Having lost everything -- their occupation, their language, their family -- they ...
Hannah Arendt, “Standpoints” of History, and Epistemic Pitfalls
I enjoyed Franco Palazzi’s expansion and critical analysis of my earlier post, which had criticized Republican presidential nominees from an Arendtian perspective. I value and find analytically powerful his distinction between marginality and invisibility. Here, I would like to focus and reflect on his two other critiques: (1) a critique ...
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