QUILTING POINTS:

'In a constellation that poses the threat of total annihilation through war against the hope for emancipation of all mankind through revolution [...] no cause is left but the most ancient of all [...] the cause of freedom versus tyranny.’ Hannah Arendt, On Revolution In our next session we'll be grappling with "The Meaning of Revolution". We'll explore Arendt's challenge to  the Marxist idealisation of the French Revolution, and her argument that we should take inspiration from America instead. Here, Arendt brings her conceptions of freedom and political action to bear, and proposes revolutionary constitutionalism as the means for emancipation. Is this the answer to the question, 'what happens the day after the revolution'?  Where? LHRI, Seminar room 1 When? Thursday, 2nd Feburary, 5-7pm Primary reading: "The Meaning of Revolution", from On Revolution . PDF here .

In the Jewish tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as Ahabath Israel : "Love of the Jewish people..." In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German Left, I find little trace of this. [...] Would there not have been a place [in Eichmann in Jerusalem ] for what I can only describe with that modest German word  – " Herzenstakt "? – – – Gershom Scholem, Letter to Hannah Arendt, June 23 1963 At stake in Arendt’s tactlessness [...] is a crucial, although often unacknowledged strand in her thought as a whole, namely the issue of the relation between politics and feeling.  – – – Simon Swift, 'Hannah Arendt's Tactlessness' Our first session of 2017 will be run by guest speaker Simon Swift, director of the Northern Theory School and Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Geneva . Simon has published extensively on Hannah Arendt - from articles such as