Arendt's Aporetic Modernism

Adam Rosen Carole (Pratt Institute)

Although Arendt’s literary sensibilities incline toward classical German poetry, and although she explicitly eschews self-conscious self-presentation in her writings, a distinctly modernist writerly ethos surreptitiously courses through Arendt’s work. Stuttering between narration and citation, interrupting its categorical self-confidence by exposing its overdrawn distinctions to unavoidable complications (e.g., by shadowing its privileged normative terms with perverse  counterparts  and further pursuing a counter-fetishistic destabilization of its normative orientation by shading its fundamental terms into intermediary semantic zones and dialectical inversions), indulging in eccentricity and experimentation while struggling against the temptation for writing to close in on itself and presume to model redemption, such writing everywhere testifies to a constitutive disorientation. Such disorientation, I will suggest, is both materially-historically conditioned and an immanent necessity of Arendt’s work, and once understood as such, brings the significance and stakes of this work into view anew.