"Hurling words against it"

Sometimes, what you remember best, is that what keeps posing a challenge to your habitual understanding. It can be a scene from real life, a picture, or a passage from a book. Something you would not have told or shared or jotted down, because it never really managed to settle down in precise syntactical thought. But silently it keeps haunting you – an unfinished business of understanding, always popping up again whenever another situation, another sentence seems to evoke the initial perplexity.

So these days, while I’m mutely watching the pitiful spectacle  of politics (local, European, world) – while all I want is to withdraw in contemplation and art,  the nagging sentence that keeps popping up, kindling again and again my wonderment, is “The Promise of Politics”.

Having lived through the darkest times of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt did not withdraw from the world, did not settle in a philosophical misanthropy, but relentlessly analysed the human condition, the origins of totalitarianism, and, amongst others, wrote an introduction to politics “The Promise of Politics”.

I keep reading the book, savouring her philosophical-poetical reflections and I keep marking those sentences which are most philosophical & contemplative, and, in my mind, maybe most at variance with a faith in human politics.  

“All thinking activity that is not simply the calculation of means to obtain an intended or willed end, but is concerned with meaning in the most general sense, came to play the role of ‘afterthought’, that is after action had decided and determined reality.” 

a passage which, in my mind, turns into a lament for the loss of reflective thinking (what remains is either calculating thinking or mere opinion).

Or take the following beautiful passage, on the dignity of our words even when we perish. How to circumvent my reflective interpretation of this passage as a wistful consolation for the vanquished, how to see in it a recipe for successful politics via a thoughtful balance between action and speech?

 

“Man cannot defend himself against the blows of fate, against the chicanery of the gods, but he can resist them in speech and respond to them, and though the response changes nothing, neither turning ill fortune aside nor prompting good fortune, such words belong to the event as such. If words are of equal rank with the event, if, as is said at the end of Antigone, “great words” answer  and requite “great blows struck from on high”, then what happens is itself something great and worthy of remembrance and fame. Speech in this sense is a form of action, and our downfall can become a deed if we hurl words against it even as we perish. Greek tragedy – its drama, its enacted events – is based on this fundamental conviction.”

On the back cover of my copy of “The Promise of Politics” Adam Kirsch writes “By insisting that politics remain a promise rather than a threat, Arendt offers a hope that history has yet to justify”