QUILTING POINTS:

For our first meeting of the year we will explore what Arendt means by the term "dark times". To do this we will read the opening section of one of Arendt's less popular but nevertheless useful books, her essay collection  Men in Dark Times  (1968). We will also turn to Arendt's source material for this formulation, Bertolt Brecht's poem 'An die Nachgeborenen/To Those Born Later'. Truly, I live in dark times! The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs Has simply not yet had The terrible news. #1 Hannah Arendt in Dark Times – 06/10/2016, 5–7pm Primary reading:  Hannah Arendt, 'Preface' and 'On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing', in  Men in Dark Times  (New York: Harvest, 1968), pp. vii–x; 3–31.  Click here for PDF . Secondary reading:  Bertolt Brecht, 'An die Nachgeborenen/To Those Born Later', in  Bertolt Brecht: Poetry and Prose , ed. by Rheinhold Grimm and Car...

Quilting Points returns for its fifth consecutive year!  We are excited to announce the return of Quilting Points , the University of Leeds's interdisciplinary critical and cultural theory reading group. This year we will examine the work of Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s influence stretches across political theory, modern history, philosophy, Jewish studies, and cultural studies; Arendt’s corpus continues to shape the way we think about the Holocaust.  Arendt’s work attempted to both theorise the rise of totalitarianism and re-th ink the concepts of power and citizenship. Her writing influenced Foucault, Agamben, and Kristeva, among many others, and her concept of the “banality of evil” has become common parlance, perhaps even a widely misused cliche. Despite Arendt's wide-ranging impact, though, her work is somewhat under-studied as theory in itself, primarily (but not entirely) because she preceded the “theory revolution”. This reading group will therefore be interested in ...