Peg Birmingham

Both Arendt and Derrida claim that witnessing is at the heart of what each might name a “ politics of bearing the world.” Both understand witnessing as not simply memory but carrying on for the victims of history. Both claim that the witness bears witness to the singular event that resists all appropriation. My essay takes up Arendt’s and Derrida’s respective accounts of witnessing through the work of art focusing on their differing accounts of how the artist and poet establish an “aesthetic in-between” that marks the groundless ground of the political. I will focus on what seems to be a profound disagreement on the life and death of this aesthetic in-between with Derrida emphasizing the crypt at the heart of this ‘ in-between’ while Arendt emphasizes the resurrection of life that animates it. My essay asks whether their differing understandings of the task of the witness give us two radically different understandings of politics: a politics rooted in mourning and death (Derrida) and a politics rooted in joy and life (Arendt), or whether both are pointing to a politics of bearing the world that includes at its center both death and its resurrection?

Both Arendt and Derrida claim that witnessing is at the heart of what each might name a “politics of bearing the world.” Both understand witnessing as not simply memory but carrying on for the victims of history. Both claim that the witness bears witness to the singular event that resists all appropriation. My essay takes up Arendt’s and Derrida’s respective accounts of witnessing through the work of art focusing on their differing accounts of how the artist and poet establish an “aesthetic in-between” that marks the groundless ground of the political. I will focus on what seems to be a profound disagreement on the life and death of this aesthetic in-between with Derrida emphasizing the crypt at the heart of this ‘in-between’ while Arendt emphasizes the resurrection of life that animates it. My essay asks whether their differing understandings of the task of the witness give us two radically different understandings of politics: a politics rooted in mourning and death (Derrida) and a politics rooted in joy and life (Arendt), or whether both are pointing to a politics of bearing the world that includes at its center both death and its resurrection?

Both Arendt and Derrida claim that witnessing is at the heart of what each might name a “politics of bearing the world.” Both understand witnessing as not simply memory but carrying on for the victims of history. Both claim that the witness bears witness to the singular event that resists all appropriation. My essay takes up Arendt’s and Derrida’s respective accounts of witnessing through the work of art focusing on their differing accounts of how the artist and poet establish an “aesthetic in-between” that marks the groundless ground of the political. I will focus on what seems to be a profound disagreement on the life and death of this aesthetic in-between with Derrida emphasizing the crypt at the heart of this ‘in-between’ while Arendt emphasizes the resurrection of life that animates it. My essay asks whether their differing understandings of the task of the witness give us two radically different understandings of politics: a politics rooted in mourning and death (Derrida) and a politics rooted in joy and life (Arendt), or whether both are pointing to a politics of bearing the world that includes at its center both death and its resurrection?

Both Arendt and Derrida claim that witnessing is at the heart of what each might name a “politics of bearing the world.” Both understand witnessing as not simply memory but carrying on for the victims of history. Both claim that the witness bears witness to the singular event that resists all appropriation. My essay takes up Arendt’s and Derrida’s respective accounts of witnessing through the work of art focusing on their differing accounts of how the artist and poet establish an “aesthetic in-between” that marks the groundless ground of the political. I will focus on what seems to be a profound disagreement on the life and death of this aesthetic in-between with Derrida emphasizing the crypt at the heart of this ‘in-between’ while Arendt emphasizes the resurrection of life that animates it. My essay asks whether their differing understandings of the task of the witness give us two radically different understandings of politics: a politics rooted in mourning and death (Derrida) and a politics rooted in joy and life (Arendt), or whether both are pointing to a politics of bearing the world that includes at its center both death and its resurrection?

In his review of Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, “The Time of the Mind and the History of Freedom,” Reiner Schürmann claims that Arendt’s life of the mind is an ahistorical and unworldly life in which the structure of the mind remains rooted in a metaphysical “mentalist presupposition.” Given the ahistorical nature of the mind, he claims she is unable to give an account of the mind’s freedom and new beginnings and is thereby required at the conclusion of her lectures on willing to turn to the history of political freedom and the life of action. This turn, he argues, retains “the most metaphysical distinction of all,” namely, that between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. This essay offers a response to Schürmann’s claims by first taking up Arendt’s answers to two questions she poses in Life of the Mind, Thinking: “What provokes us to think?” and “Where are we when we think?” and then turns to her lectures on willing addressing two central concerns of Schurmann’s review: 1) the interiority of the will and its desire for mastery in the modern age and 2) the problem of freedom and new beginnings. In conclusion, I submit that Arendt’s account of the reflexive dimension of action in terms of Aristotle’s notion of proairesis adds significantly to her concept of the banality of evil.