Political Reconciliation Schaap, Andrew
Political Reconciliation,
2005, 20041123, 2004-11-23, 2004-11-10, 20050101
eBook, Book
Open access
Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of reconciliation has emerged as a central term of political discourse within societies divided by a history of political violence. Reconciliation has been ...promoted as a way of reckoning with the legacy of past wrongs while opening the way for community in the future.This book examines the issues of transitional justice in the context of contemporary debates in political theory concerning the nature of 'the political'. Bringing together research on transitional justice and political theory, the author argues that if we are to talk of reconciliation in politics we need to think about it in a fundamentally different way than is commonly presupposed; as agonistic rather than restorative.
Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular founding has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, ...democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. This study shows why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of democracy's beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? Can a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders.
Visualizing Atrocitytakes Hannah Arendt's provocative and polarizing account of the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann as its point of departure for reassessing some of the serviceable myths ...that have come to shape and limit our understanding both of the Nazi genocide and totalitarianism's broader, constitutive, and recurrent features. These myths are inextricably tied to and reinforced viscerally by the atrocity imagery that emerged with the liberation of the concentration camps at the war's end and played an especially important, evidentiary role in the postwar trials of perpetrators. At the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, particular practices of looking and seeing were first established with respect to these images that were later reinforced and institutionalized through Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem as simply part of the fabric of historical fact. They have come to constitute a certain visual rhetoric that now circumscribes the moral and political fields and powerfully assists in contemporary mythmaking about how we know genocide and what is permitted to count as such. In contrast, Arendt's claims about the banality of evil work to disrupt this visual rhetoric. More significantly still, they direct our attention well beyond the figure of Eichmann to a world organized now as then by practices and processes that while designed to sustain and even enhance life work as well to efface it.
Power, Judgment and Political Evil Celermajer, Danielle; Schaap, Andrew
2010, 20160408, 2016-04-08, 2016-04-07, 2010-04-01, 2013-03-28, 20100101
eBook
In an interview with Günther Gaus for German television in 1964, Hannah Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher but a political theorist. Disillusioned by the cooperation of German ...intellectuals with the Nazis, she said farewell to philosophy when she fled the country. This book examines Arendt's ideas about thinking, acting and political responsibility, investigating the relationship between the life of the mind and the life of action that preoccupied Arendt throughout her life. By joining in the conversation between Arendt and Gaus, each contributor probes her ideas about thinking and judging and their relation to responsibility, power and violence. An insightful and intelligent treatment of the work of Hannah Arendt, this volume will appeal to a wide number of fields beyond political theory and philosophy, including law, literary studies, social anthropology and cultural history.
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German-Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual ...interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong effort to modify reflective approaches to political experience. Liisi Keedus reveals how Arendt's and Strauss's thinking about political modernity was the product of a common intellectual formation in Weimar Germany, by examining the cross-disciplinary debates guiding their early work. Through a historical reconstruction of their shared interrogative horizons - comprising questions regarding the possibility of an ethically engaged political philosophy after two world wars, the political fate of Jewry, the implications of modern conceptions of freedom, and the relation between theoria and praxis - Keedus unravels striking similarities, as well as genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers.
Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Ziarek provide a reconfiguration of Hannah Arendt's philosophy of natality from the perspective of biopolitical and feminist theory. They show us that Arendt provides new ways ...of contesting biopolitical threats to human plurality and the threat of biopolitics – along with sexism, racism and political theology – to women's reproductive agency. They extend Arendt's account of collective political action to include political hospitality, responsibility and story-telling as ways of countering the harms of biopower. Diprose and Ziarek give us an insightful account of the political ontology of Hannah Arendt and form new dialogues between her and major 20th- and 21st-century thinkers including Foucault, Agamben, Nancy, Kristeva, Esposito, Derrida, Levinas and Cavarero.
While acknowledging Hannah Arendt's keen philosophical and political insights, Kathryn T. Gines claims that there are some problematic assertions and oversights regarding Arendt's treatment of the ..."Negro question." Gines focuses on Arendt's reaction to the desegregation of Little Rock schools, to laws making mixed marriages illegal, and to the growing civil rights movement in the south. Reading them alongside Arendt's writings on revolution, the human condition, violence, and responses to the Eichmann war crimes trial, Gines provides a systematic analysis of anti-black racism in Arendt's work.
The trial that never ends Misemer, Sarah; Golsan, Richard J
The trial that never ends,
2017, 2017, 2017-03-17, Volume:
27, 27.
eBook
"The fiftieth anniversary of the Adolf Eichmann trial may have come and gone but in many countries around the world there is a renewed focus on the trial, Eichmann himself, and the nature of his ...crimes. This increased attention also stimulates scrutiny of Hannah Arendt's influential and controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem."--
"The contributors gathered together by Richard J. Golsan and Sarah M. Misemer in The Trial That Never Ends assess the contested legacy of Hannah Arendt's famous book and the issues she raised: the "banality of evil," the possibility of justice in the aftermath of monstrous crimes, the right of Israel to kidnap and judge Eichmann, and the agency and role of victims. The contributors also interrogate Arendt's own ambivalent attitudes towards race and critically interpret the nature of the crimes Eichmann committed in light of newly discovered Nazi documents. The Trial That Never Ends responds to new scholarship by Deborah Lipstadt, Bettina Stangneth, and Shoshana Felman and offers rich new ground for historical, legal, philosophical, and psychological speculation."--
For the first time, the full story of the conflict between two of the twentieth century's most important thinkers—and how their profound disagreements continue to offer important lessons for ...political theory and philosophy Two of the most iconic thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) fundamentally disagreed on central issues in politics, history and philosophy. In spite of their overlapping lives and experiences as Jewish émigré intellectuals, Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying that she represented "everything that I detest most, " while Arendt met Berlin's hostility with indifference and suspicion. Written in a lively style, and filled with drama, tragedy and passion, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin tells, for the first time, the full story of the fraught relationship between these towering figures, and shows how their profoundly different views continue to offer important lessons for political thought today.Drawing on a wealth of new archival material, Kei Hiruta traces the Arendt–Berlin conflict, from their first meeting in wartime New York through their widening intellectual chasm during the 1950s, the controversy over Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, their final missed opportunity to engage with each other at a 1967 conference and Berlin's continuing animosity toward Arendt after her death. Hiruta blends political philosophy and intellectual history to examine key issues that simultaneously connected and divided Arendt and Berlin, including the nature of totalitarianism, evil and the Holocaust, human agency and moral responsibility, Zionism, American democracy, British imperialism and the Hungarian Revolution. But, most of all, Arendt and Berlin disagreed over a question that goes to the heart of the human condition: what does it mean to be free?
This bold and persuasive study rereads the works of Hannah Arendt to recuperate her relevance to contemporary politics and to show that her deepest concerns are oriented by her ontology. Kimberley ...Curtis interprets Arendt's earlier work through the lenses of The Life of the Mind , elucidating what Curtis calls an aesthetic sensibility of tragic pleasure as a way out of the enclave politics of late modernity. Arguing that oblivion and radical forgetfulness of others are among the most ethically troubling features of our political landscape, Curtis shows that Arendt's aesthetic account of politics offers us an idiom in which to name and resist the depravations and dangers of our political condition. Curtis also elucidates Arendt's debt to phenomenology and argues that our sense of reality is born through highly charged sensuous provocation and mutual responsiveness. Arendt's innovation is to recognize that this countenancing of others is an aesthetic experience that creates the political world. Curtis plumbs the relevance of this work in current issues such as gated communities for the privileged and prisons for the disenfranchised, and in the extraordinary relationship between a black civil rights leader and a Ku Klux Klan officer. Our Sense of the Real is a poetic invocation of Arendt's politics, at once lively, passionate, and crucial.