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This will be the first episode in what will be a series on Hannah Arendt and her last, incomplete work, life Of The Mind.
More on this special series, here:
Book Lunch: Series: Hannah Arendt's “The Life Of The Mind”
Hannah Arendt's The Life Of The Mind is the last published work from Arendt. It is unfinished as it was to be in three volumes titled according to what were for her the three parts of all human mental activity: Thinking, Willing and Judging. We only have Thinking and Willing, finally published in 1977.
Mary McCarthy, one of Arendt's closest friends (and author of the famous The Group) was the editor of this unfinished masterpiece.
Accordingly, I will not only discuss Arendt's text but the work of McCarthy as well, the meaning and significance of their friendship. (I might even discuss Nora Ephron and read from McCarthy's fiction. We shall see)
I will have some help from a discussion of Margarethe von Trotta's biopic Hannah Arendt, (starring Barbara Sukowa and Janet McTeer) including judicious clips throughout the series. (One of the precious few excellent biopics in a by now overcrowded genre)
This will be a series with many episodes; I will try my best to grapple with the complexity of Arendt's text and include, where appropriate. other work by her and others.
Although I have been reading and studying Hannah Arendt for close to forty years, as I have changed over the decades in both my political and other views, so has my relationship with her as an author.
Throughout all of this my estimation of her has never been without a great deal of love.
The method I will use will be a variation of the "close reading" one in which I was trained and I have actually used to discuss practically everything I have covered on this podcast.
Joan Didion was trained in this same method and she claimed it made her both a better writer as well as politically savvy even though it is primarily an aesthetic method.
My interest in this series will be less in trying to evaluate Arendt in terms of whether she is ultimately "correct" or not but in terms of what it means for her to have written and thought in the way that she did.
As will hopefully be clear, I see The Life Of The Mind an aesthetic work of imaginative prose that happens to be non-fiction, with the language and terminology of philosophical and theological traditions.
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