|
6:00 p.m.
- 8:00 p.m.
|
|
Arendt's
Aporetic Modernism 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.
|
