“...to love the world so much that we think change is possible.”

When I first began work at the bookstore, I had just concluded some years working and living with people for whom Hannah Arendt was a matter of frequent discussion. Wrestling with Arendt’s ideas is like wrestling with the angel — the reader is the one who’s going to come out of it with a permanent limp.

During a lull on the floor, I asked my friend — a Jew — what she made of Arendt. She arched an eyebrow. “You want to know what I make of Arendt? I’ll tell you what I make of Arendt.” She marched over to the “Biography” shelf, pulled a trim, blue book and gave it to me. “That’s what I make of Hannah Arendt.”

"Go on and wrestle with that, sunshine..."

For my friend and for many Jews the late revelation that Arendt not only had a youthful love affair with Martin Heidegger, but returned to him after the war and remained his devoted and intimate friend, rendered her a sudden and complete non-entity. Her life’s work was now worse than chaff.

For me the matter is complicated — admittedly, largely because I’m not Jewish, but also because Arendt’s work continually re-frames my own politics and philosophy. Heidegger’s might too, if I were better able to comprehend it. To place the matter in some perspective, I will close with Leo Strauss’s observation: 

“Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But here is the trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.”

These thoughts are spurred by this terrifically frustrating interview with Ann Heberlein, author of On Love & Tyranny: The Life & Politics of Hannah Arendt — frustrating because it flits so lightly around this central complexity/difficulty/or, to use Strauss’s word: trouble. But, hey — it still acknowledges the trouble, which is a start. And it could well be that Heberlein “wrestles with the angel” in this work.

I am looking forward to reading the book, and for that I am grateful for the interview.

Other links:

• “As I watched the white riot at and inside the Capitol building unfold on television that appalling afternoon — thousands of enraged, clueless, and deluded Randy Quaid/Cousin Eddie clones, man-children staging a violent cosplay insurrection for selfies and their social media accounts — a couple of phrases kept running through my head. One was a line from Frank Zappa’s proto-rap number from his 1966 album Freak Out!, ‘Trouble Every Day’: ‘Hey, you know something, people? I’m not black, but there’s a whole lots a times I wish I could say I’m not white.’ You should listen to it” — Indeed, you should. You should also read Gerald Howard’s excellent essay, The Disappointed at LARB.
• Also: returning to Frank Zappa, CBC Radio Ideas recently re-ran a lovely three-part documentary on the man and his music. I am little more than a passing fan — the only Zappa I own is Strictly Commercial, which outs me rather damningly — but I found Dangerous Kitchen deeply engaging, entertaining and moving.