QUILTING POINTS:

To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind For our penultimate session we will be discussing Arendt's final and lesser-known work, The Life of the Mind . The Life of the Mind is a challenging text in which Arendt seeks to redefine three mental activities: thinking, willing and judging. Although she doesn't quite manage to explicate the relationship between mental activities and action, The Life of the Mind provides a foundation for later theorists who have (including Julia Kristeva). It also offers important insights into the relationship between the individual mind and reality, answering back to Kant and Hegel. We will be focusing on a section of the book that achieves all of the above...

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. Hannah Arendt, 'Civil Disobedience' The refugee who can take only her experience with her when all else has been lost [...] is the model of a resisting and resistant subjectivity. Lyndsey Stonebridge, ' The Inner emigration: on the run with Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud ' We are delighted to announce that our next session will be led by a special guest, Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge , and will focus on Arendt's essays 'Civil Disobedience' and 'Humanity in Dark Times'. Lyndsey is renowned for her work on human rights, Hannah Arendt and, more recently, law. She has published extensively on Arendt and the status of the refugee, and recently appeared on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time . With Lyndsey, we will discuss the themes of civil disobedience and the law, m...