Dramatization: The World As Stage, The Text As Space in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer
Readers are empowered to "continue to envision" forms of government. The text speaks to their imaginations. History is freed from its inevitability. With each person who has spoken or acted, who would have spoken or acted, everything could have happened differently. What would happen if the individual, threatened with expendability in mass society, could contradict and be heard? Through the creation of polyphony in the text, other persons become thinkable, persons who enter the living room with other ideas. Readers in the plural really do exist!
Dramatization: The World As Stage, The Text As Space in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer Here again, something is unlearned: we usually assume that a mask hides the real self, but for Arendt, the mask is the form in which the self can express itself. It enables the person to turn toward the outer world. "We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human. Thus the act of appearing puts a provisional end not only to the two-in-one of thinking but also to the idea that "inside they're all the same" in the way of pure vegetative functioning. "Only what appears outwardly is distinct, different, even unique. In one word, our emotions are all the same, the difference is in what and how we make them appear." Nature, in other words, has hidden and left formless everything that is purely functional. This act of appearing is the gamble of being a person.
Dramatization: The World As Stage, The Text As Space in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer Through the use of quotations, metaphors, rhythms, and tropes, thinking and writing are (like the theater) able to let knowledge that is distant, past – and sometimes also endangered or in danger of being forgotten – make an entrance into our concern about the present. Quotations and fragments interrupt our own voice and train of thought; they people the text that is taking shape in our solitary room and intervene in the flow of ideas. Fragments of alien experience are handed down in quotations, and even taken out of their original context, they still tell of the whole that is concealed behind them and ought not to be given up as lost. Yet at the same time, they clearly reject the ideal of a whole, which is apparent through their own intrusive foreignness. Arendt is aware of her own state of exile, as Franz Rosenzweig formulated it, and her text cannot do without that knowledge. She cannot surrender the experience of foreignness and accept the world as something unmediated.
Dramatization: The World As Stage, The Text As Space in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer Photo taken in Ragged Island Brewing Company, Portsmouth RI By thus returning to the source and rereading the ancient text, the (primal) experience behind the concept can be regained and reinvigorated. According to the source, the only one who can forgive is the person who has been wronged. Moreover, forgiveness demands a dialogue, including specifically the expression of a change of mind on the part of the one who has done wrong. And finally, forgiveness concludes by "releasing" the offender, granting him the freedom to make a new beginning. Remorse, the wish that something had not happened, is for Arendt an impossibiilty, for it is precisely our incapacity to undo our actions that, in her eyes, guarantees human existence and reaffirms that we have truly been alive. According to Arendt, with a change of mind the wrongdoer proves nothing less than that he is, here and now, a different person. The idea of a new moment in which the participants can become different people than they were in the past is a recognition of doing and forgiving as acts of free will, which – assuming a change of mind – forgives the deed and thus grants freedom to both sides.
Forgiveness: The Desperate Search For A Concept Of Reality, in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer LIterature destabilizes thought by breaking open language and smuggling in sound, rhythm, and image – an invasion of aesthetics. More easily than analytic writing, poetry can emancipate itself from the standard definitions of words, enabling a breakthrough to new (and perhaps wayward or even nonsensical) meaning, which can then develop after the fact – different at each new reading. Literary language is presumptuous. It dips into the unknown in order to get nearer to a truth different from that of the superficially visible. As the poet Franz Josef Czernin described it, it is as though one step after another into emptiness could become a ladder. Literary writing can take the writers themselves by surprise; it can disturb and disappoint them – for stirring up turmoil is inherent in metaphor. Thus with every flash of understanding that comes from hearing or reading a poem, the fundamental work of thinking is taken up anew.
Forgiveness: The Desperate Search For A Concept Of Reality, in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer Photo taken in Trinity Rep, Providence RI |
Categories |