1.full - Herzog - Illuminating Inheritance - Benjamins Nfluence On Arendts Political Storytelling

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Philosophy & Social Criticism
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DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600501
2000 26: 1 Philosophy Social Criticism
Annabel Herzog
storytelling
Illuminating inheritance : Benjamin's influence on Arendt's political
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Annabel Herzog
Illuminating inheritance
Benjamins inuence on Arendts
political storytelling
Abstract This article focuses on the political effect that Arendt wished
to achieve with her old-fashioned storytelling. It is argued that she
inherited her concept of the redemptive power of narrative (Benhabib)
from Walter Benjamin. The close relationship of the two intuitively suggests
an afnity between Arendts concept of a fragmented past and her story-
telling and Benjamins conception of history and narrative. An attempt is
made here to determine the amplitude and the meaning of this proximity.
An account is provided of Benjamins and Arendts shared belief that the
past is fragmented and that only fragmented writing, mainly in the form of
stories, had the capacity to be faithful to its ruins. It is argued that for
both Arendt and Benjamin, the purpose of this writing form was not to
commemorate the dead, but to show their absence their invisibility. It is
suggested that Arendt and Benjamin held a similar conviction: that stories
had the capacity to save the world.
Key words Arendt Benjamin catastrophe experience fragmented
past imagination remembrance revelation standpoint of the defeated
storytelling
There is a Hassidic story that goes like this:
When the Baal Shem had a difcult task before him, he would go to a
certain place in the woods, light a re and meditate in prayer and what
he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the Maggid
of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place
in the woods and say: We can no longer light the re, but we can still speak
the prayers and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation
later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too
PSC
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM
vol 26 no 5
pp. 127
Copyright 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
[0191-4537(200009)26:5;127;013818]
went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a re, nor do we
know the secrets meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the
place in the woods to which it all belongs and that must be sufcient;
and sufcient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi
Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his
golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the re, we cannot speak
the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it
was done. And, the story-teller adds, the story which he told had the same
effect as the actions of the other three.
1
This article focuses on the political effect that Arendt wished to achieve
with her old-fashioned storytelling.
2
My basic argument is that she
inherited her conception of the redemptive power of narrative
3
from
Walter Benjamin.
To date, commentaries have failed to identify the deep connection
between Arendt and Benjamins conceptions of storytelling.
4
However,
a number of simple facts should be recalled: Walter Benjamin was a
cousin of Gnther Stern, Hannah Arendts rst husband. The couple
met Benjamin in Berlin, and again in Paris, in 1934. After Arendt and
Stern separated, and Stern left for New York, Arendts relationship with
Benjamin continued in a circle of German Marxists.
5
After Arendt met
Blcher, Benjamin became the couples best friend in Paris.
6
Arendt and
Benjamin were in contact in 1936, when Benjamin was writing The
Storyteller. In 1938, they became very close and Benjamin was respons-
ible for insistently encouraging Arendt to complete Rahel Varnhagen.
7
Finally, before heading for the Spanish border, Benjamin entrusted
Arendt and Blcher with his last manuscripts, to be delivered to Adorno
in New York. The manuscripts contained his Theses on the Philosophy
of History, which the couple read and discussed in Lisbon with other
refugees while waiting for their ship for the United States. Twenty-eight
years later Arendt became the editor of Illuminations, the rst trans-
lation into English of some of Benjamins writings, including The Story-
teller and Theses on the Philosophy of History. At that time she also
published Men in Dark Times, a collection of essays presenting the
stories of different personalities how they lived their lives, how they
moved in the world, and how they were affected by historical time.
8
Both books contain her essay Walter Benjamin.
9
These well-known facts should at least permit the intuition that
there might be some connection between Benjamins conception of
history and stories and Arendts political storytelling. What I propose
here is to explore this intuition which, in view of the anti-positivist
thinking of both Benjamin and Arendt, can hardly be considered out-
rageous.
However, my intuition is based on Arendts own words. Although
she considered it self-indulgent and awkward to concentrate on
2
Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (5)
methodological approaches,
10
in the last pages of The Life of the Mind,
Vol. One, Thinking, she reveals the basic assumption of her thinking:
I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been
attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories,
as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such
dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition
is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. . . . What has been lost
is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from gener-
ation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency. . . . What
you then are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has
lost its certainty of evaluation.
11
She then quotes a few lines of Shakespeares The Tempest, which
describe the transformation of a dead body lying under the sea into
pearls and coral, [i]nto something rich and strange, and concludes: It
is with such fragments of the past, after their sea-change, that I have
dealt here. At the end of her essay on Benjamin, she quotes the same
verses and then writes:
And [Benjamins] thinking, fed by the present, works with the thought
fragments it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl
diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom
and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls
and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking
delves into the depths of the past but not in order to resuscitate it the
way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides
this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin
of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystal-
lization, that in the depths of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved
what once was alive, some things suffer a sea-change and survive in new
crystallized forms and shape that remain immune to the elements, as
though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down
to them and bring them up into the world of the living.
12
These sentences show that Arendt undoubtedly considered her own
thinking close to that of Benjamin, although she never acknowledged this
explicitly.
13
In the following, I attempt to determine the amplitude and
the meaning of this proximity. I begin with an account of the marked
resemblance between Arendts and Benjamins understanding of history,
14
namely, their shared belief that the past is fragmented and that only frag-
mented writing, mainly in the form of stories, can be faithful to its dead
and its ruins. I then argue that, for Arendt and for Benjamin, the purpose
of this writing was not to commemorate the defeated and the dead, but
to write from their standpoint and, hence, to display their absence, their
invisibility. I shall suggest that although Arendt regarded her own
thinking as much more political than that of Benjamin, they both held a
similar conviction, namely, that stories had the capacity to save the world.
3
Herzog: Illuminating inheritance
Stories of a fragmented past
Fragments and ruins
Before elaborating on Arendts intention in dealing with the enriched
fragments of the past, it is worth noting that in the last chapter of
Thinking, where Arendt alludes to a resemblance between her thinking
and that of Benjamin, she expands the analysis already presented in the
Preface to Between Past and Future. According to this analysis, a
thought-event occurs within broken time. After citing a parable by
Kafka, which she summarizes as follows: The scene is a battleground
on which the forces of the past and the future clash with each other;
between them we nd the man whom Kafka calls he, who, if he wants
to stand his ground at all, must give battle to both forces, she elabor-
ates on her denition of time:
Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between
past and future, time is not a continuum, a ow of uninterrupted succes-
sion; it is broken in the middle, at the point where he stands; and his
standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap
in time which his constant ghting, his making a stand against past and
future, keeps in existence.
15
Arendt adds that Kafkas description of disruption in time by the
insertion of individuals into its ow fails to refute the traditional
metaphor of a rectilinear temporal movement. According to her, the
ghting presence of man in the gap of time should be regarded as a
parallelogram of forces drawing the mysterious and slippery now
16
in a diagonal direction constituting the region of thinking, with an un-
determined ending.
The metaphors of disruption in history, and the ght against
historys opposed tenses thereby to create uncertainty, strikingly call to
mind Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History, particularly
Thesis 17, Thinking involves not only the ow of thoughts, but their
arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a conguration
pregnant with tensions, it gives that conguration a shock, by which it
crystallizes into a monad,
17
and Thesis 9, Benjamins famous descrip-
tion of Paul Klees Angelus Novus:
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the
dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing
from Paradise. . . . This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to
which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
18
4
From his most early works to his last Theses, Benjamin rejected
the idea of time as a linear unidirectional entity, and conceived it as a
disrupted process. His quite complicated
19
or even very complex
20
notion of temporal breaking opposes what Heidegger called our
ordinary conception of time, consisting of a linear succession of
instants, as well as Husserls three-dimensional dissociation between the
tenses. Time, in Benjamins view, is interruption of historical present by
Now-time (Jetztzeit): History is the subject of a structure whose site is
not homogeneous, empty time, but time lled by the presence of the
now [Jetztzeit].
21
Now-time condenses in its moment entire history per-
ceived from the standpoint of its end. Time is [t]elescoping the past
through the present
22
in a singular instant whose monadic structure
mirrors history as a whole. It does not mean that such telescoping takes
place at the very moment of the Now, but that the Now is, per se, a
collision, a ght, a painful moment resulting in the uncertainty of
history. Paradoxically, time becomes historical when it is interrupted, in
its interruption. To cite Peter Osborne, Benjamins now-time histori-
cizes the structure of instantaneity, to produce it as interruption, simul-
taneously contracting the present into the stasis of its point-like source
and expanding its historical content to innity.
23
Similarly, for Arendt, times breaking point is not the present as we
usually understand it but a gap, created by the existence of standing-in-
time individuals. The prime role of such individuals in history corres-
ponds to Benjamins conception of Now-time as the collision of past and
present individual perceptions, and his rejection of the approach of his-
toricism, which sees the historical situation as guiding individuals from
above.
24
Moreover, from Benjamins viewpoint, the criticism of a linear
and continuous perception of time implies the most radical rejection of
the concept of progress. Benjamin claims that the belief in progress sig-
nies total misunderstanding of the real nature of history, which consists
of catastrophes. His statement that The current amazement that the
things we are experiencing are still possible in the twentieth century
is not philosophical
25
has to be understood in the context of the
European political situation at the time that he wrote his theses, namely
in 1940. However, above all, it is a general refutation of the providential
understanding of history, inherited from Christian theology via the
Enlightenment, and developed in Liberalism as well as in Marxist dialec-
tic: There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time
a document of barbarism.
26
For Benjamin, history is not a chain of
events progressing toward a happy, or at least a better end: it is a single
catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.
In Arendts writings cited above, consciousness of catastrophe is
revealed through the metaphors of breaking and gap, which depict the
Now as a collapsing process. Arendt had already quoted Benjamins
5
allegory of the Angel of history and emphasized the utopian character
of the 18
th
-century concept of progress in The Origins of Totalitarian-
ism.
27
Moreover, in On Humanity in Dark Times she wrote that The
pillars of the best-known truths . . . today lie shattered. . . . We need
only look around to see that we are standing in the midst of a veritable
rubble heap of such pillars.
28
Margaret Canovan concludes that like
Benjamin, Arendt did not share the condence in the march of
enlightenment that continues to dominate modern western world.
29
According to Arendt, what one sees when one looks around (like the
Angel of history) is wreckage. Time is broken, and at each moment of
its broken nature, the world is covered with ruins, bearing witness to a
politically enslaved world
30
the material ruins of the destruction of
millions of people, as well as the spiritual ruins of humanity in a world
that has become inhospitable to human needs.
31
The rst sentence of
the Preface to Between Past and Future, a quotation from Paul Eluard,
emphasizes Arendts conviction that the main ruins are the ruins of tra-
dition. Tradition has been lost: Notre hritage nest prcd daucun
testament (There is no testament of our inheritance). According to
Arendt, what is meant here is that the political events of the 20
th
century
have led to an epistemological problem, namely, in dark times the usual
categories of political thought
32
no longer explain anything. This claim
may convey an image of Arendt as an anti-modern thinker, nostalgic for
a past full of tradition. However, in her Preface to Men in Dark Times,
Arendt makes it clear that dark times . . . are as such not identical with
the monstrosities of this century which indeed are of an horrible
novelty. Dark times are times when all truth is degraded to meaning-
less triviality;
33
hence, they result from the erosion of authenticity and
understanding. Benjamin expressed a similar view when he wrote that
the consistency of truth . . . has been lost
34
a phrase which Arendt
later quotes in Walter Benjamin.
35
In this respect, Arendts nostalgia
for tradition is very close to that of Benjamin, for it is not a longing for
a golden age or a desire to resuscitate earlier times of edication. She
knows that the past is one single catastrophe and that there is nothing
to go back to. As she states: I am not homesick enough . . . I do not
believe in a world, be it a past world or a future world, in which mans
mind . . . could or should ever be comfortable at home.
36
Her nostal-
gia resembles Benjamins negative consciousness of something that
never existed, of an eternally reactivated bungling, of the continuous
non-realization of the transmission of immemorial wisdom.
37
Fragmented writing: the life of people
Arendts conception of a broken time formed by catastrophe and
wreckage implies the elaboration of a writing able to recount it. In her
6
Reply to Eric Voegelins review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, one
of her few statements on methodological principles, Arendt claims that
she has tried to dissociate the elements of totalitarianism instead of
writing historically, that is, instead of following a linearity:
What I did . . . was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and to
analyze them in historical terms, tracing these elements back in history as
far as I deemed proper and necessary. That is, I did not write a history of
totalitarianism but an analysis in terms of history. . . . The book, therefore,
does not really deal with the origins of totalitarianism . . . but gives a his-
torical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitarianism, this
account is followed by an analysis of the elemental structure of totalitarian
movements and domination itself.
38
Seyla Benhabib concludes from these sentences that Arendt made
the same methodological choices as Benjamin in order to break the
chain of narrative continuity, to shatter chronology as the natural
structure of narrative, to stress fragmentariness, historical dead ends,
failures and ruptures.
39
Indeed, as Stphane Moss explains,
Benjamins concern was to nd a way to recount the chaos of past
events, and to achieve a new historical method, leading no more to
follow historical processes in their evolution, but to immobilize them,
that is to describe (synchronically and not diachronically) some of their
major connections.
40
Arendts analysis of the elemental structure of
totalitarianism is akin to Benjamins synchronic analysis of connec-
tions. Arendt herself seems to acknowledge the link between her
method and that of Benjamin when, in Walter Benjamin, she returns
to the metaphors of crystallization and chemical processes to charac-
terize Benjamins thinking: What guides this thinking is the conviction
that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process
of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the
depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive,
some things suffer a sea-change and survive in new crystallized forms
and shapes. The ruin of the time is a redundancy here, because for
Benjamin time is ruins. However, from the viewpoint of individual per-
ception, time also consists of crystallization into new shapes, into
monads. Thus, for Benjamin, the purpose of thinking occurring in
time, historical thinking, is to seize this crystallization: A historical
materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it
as a monad.
41
Acknowledging that her own method is to deal with
fragments from the past, after their sea-change, Arendt contends, like
Benjamin, that past and present intermingle in the shock of crystal-
lization, and that the essence of historical writing consists in recount-
ing this shock. Jerome Kohn comments that in this way the old is made
new in this fragmentary recovery of the past; it is not the tradition that
is recovered, but a present past.
42
7
Benjamins conception of temporal non-linearity results in the
attempt to show history rather than narrate it. In the notes collected
in the chapter called On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,
in The Arcades Project, Benjamin writes: I neednt say anything. Merely
show . . . [I]n what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened graphic-
ness [Anschaulichkeit] to the realization of the Marxist method?
43
He
argues that only dialectical images, as opposed to representations of a
linear historical process, have the capacity to show time as discontinu-
ity: The past can be seized only as an image which ashes up at the
instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
44
The aim
of the historian Benjamin intends to be in his writings of the late 1930s
is to display the happenings with which he deals,
45
not to explain them.
Therefore, unlike historicism, which presents an eternal image of
history, Benjamin provides a unique experience with the past.
46
Such
a non-scientic historian would accomplish what medieval chron-
iclers, who from the very start lifted the burden of demonstrable ex-
planation from their own shoulders, did in order to leave room for
interpretations of denite events. Benjamin claims that the storyteller
is the secularized form of the chronicler.
47
The storytellers attempt to
seize time, referring to entire history perceived from its end, is an
exercise in view of the nal chronicle that, according to Thesis 3, can
cite the past in all its moments .
48
This chronicle is interspersed with
innumerable stories, whose function, as explained by Arendt in Walter
Benjamin, is to cite
49
the moments of the past, in order to settle [it]
down, piecemeal, in the present.
50
As images or quotations of events,
stories supply a unique experience with the past.
It is striking that Arendts way of dealing with fragments of the
past is also storytelling. As she explains in On Humanity in Dark
Times, Insofar as any mastering of the past is possible, it consists
in relating what has happened. . . . No philosophy, no analysis, no
aphorism . . . can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a
properly narrated story.
51
Her intention to be a storyteller is so
evident that in a letter written in December 1968, Mary McCarthy
characterizes Men in Dark Times as a series of fairy tales of the
Northern forests.
52
However, as noted by Lisa Disch, Storytelling is
not a term Arendt denes precisely or uses consistently throughout her
writings.
53
Indeed, there are many kinds of stories in Arendts work
biographies of people, anecdotes, parables, etiologic tales, etc.
54
but Arendt never explains whether their purposes are similar or not.
Nonetheless, it is clear that in her mind, stories are the only way to
represent the fragmentary nature of individual life, which ghts and
collapses between past and future, and later reappears crystallized. To
cite Raymond Williams, Arendts mode of telling is not history as
narrative but stories as lives.
55
Stories allow Arendt to seize the gap
8
in time created by the lives of individuals, and tales and parables allow
her to reveal the meaning of events occurring in history in the form of
these lives.
In this sense, biographies, tales and parables reect the existence and
experiences of people in history. As I have argued elsewhere in detail,
56
the purpose of Arendts storytelling is to show individuals crystallized
lives, and, thereby, to give them a public stage on which to appear.
57
In themselves, her stories are a phenomenal disclosure. Arendts bio-
graphy of Rahel, for example, was supposed to be an autobiography:
It was never my intention to write a book about Rahel. . . . What inter-
ested me solely was to narrate the story of Rahels life as she herself
might have told it.
58
Arendt planned to describe who Rahel was and
not what she was, identify her as a subject or, more precisely, reveal her
subjective nature through her writing, namely, make her text a public
scene where Rahel could appear as a subject. On the one hand, Arendts
book is a medium revealing Rahels attempts to be seen: If she wanted
to live, she had to learn to make her presence felt, to display herself;
59
on the other hand, it is in itself the public realm that Rahel could never
fully enter during her life. In this sense, Benjamins epistemological
relation between telling a story and showing the Now becomes, in
Arendts writings, the material of a political aim: her stories aim at
replacing the public realm destroyed in dark times. The purpose of Men
in Dark Times, for example, is to show publicly the life of people in
times when publicity is obscured.
60
The essays collected in the book
never focus on psychological details Elisabeth Young-Bruehl em-
phasizes that Arendt told of people in the world, not of the world
in people
61
but they follow the wanderings of people in the world
through realms as various as politics, poetry, literature, or religion.
These stories make lives appear and, hence, ght the encompassing
catastrophe. They provide people with a public realm of disclosure
which, in some way, had been closed to them. However, stories some-
times also give people the public realm the realm of responsibility
which these people had been reluctant to enter. Eichmann in Jerusalem
aimed at showing who Eichmann really was what he appeared to be
really, not what people fantasized about him therefore, what he really
had to be judged for. Through the revelation of his shallow presence
(I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer)
62
Arendt realized
that to regard him as a monster was to play his game, namely, his refusal
to be responsible. She claimed that the trial had failed in recognizing
the meaning of Eichmanns disclosure and that she had tried to succeed
in this political task, forcing him to appear through her report, and
asking her readers to judge. As Dagmar Barnouw accurately writes: By
using the narrative strategy of oratio obliqua, Arendt was able to let
Eichmanns voice be heard and judged through the perspective provided
9
by the context. . . . Like all good storytellers, Arendt was intent on
revealing meaning: Eichmann was not an incomprehensible monster.
63
Stories and absence
Stories of the defeated and the dead
Benjamins rejection of historicism was based on ethical and political
criticism. From his standpoint, the only continuity to be found in
history is that of oppression: The tradition of the oppressed teaches
us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception
but the rule. As a result, adherents of historicism inevitably empathize
with the victor, and empathy with the victor invariably benets the
rulers.
64
To quote Moss again, in Benjamins thought historical con-
tinuity is unmasked as illusion maintained by the victors mythology
in order to eliminate all traces of the defeated.
65
In Benjamins view,
the basic principle of genuine historical writing opposing empathy with
the victor is contained in the following sentence: Nothing that ever
happened should be regarded as lost for history. Hence, the task of a
chronicler should be to cite events without distinguishing between
major and minor acts.
66
In his/her stories, a chronicler attempts to
seize the fullness of the past, basing his/her reckoning [o]n the differ-
entials of time (which, for others, disturb the main lines of the
inquiry).
67
Thus, Benjamins intention was to focus not only on the past in all
its moments, but rather on the disturbances of the continuous history;
not on the victors and the oppressed at one and the same time, but on
the latter. This does not mean glorifying the story of the dead, com-
memorating them as if they were the genuine victors of history, because
they precisely were not.
68
A chronicle is not apologetics. It does mean,
however, constructing history from the perspective of the defeated, that
is, from the inside of the disruptions of history. Therefore, as proposed
by Rolf Tiedemann, the Angel of history can be regarded as a rep-
resentation of the historical materialist, who looks at history from the
experience of the defeated.
69
For Benjamin, the subject of history is the
defeated and the dead. He claries this major theme by referring to his
passion for collecting. What Benjamin meant by collecting is, as Arendt
emphasizes in Walter Benjamin, seeking strange things that are con-
sidered valueless, so that in his passion for the past for its own sake
. . . there already appears a disturbing factor to announce that . . . tra-
ditional values [may] by no means be as safe in his hands as one might
have assumed at rst glance.
70
A collector of Benjamins type looks at
objects in a new way, against the chronological and systematic order
10
that the conformist tradition of the victors imposes on history, separ-
ating the positive from the negative, the orthodox from the heretical.
In a similar manner, the task of a storyteller/chronicler or of a historical
materialist, as Benjamin calls him/her in his Theses, is to invoke the
fate
71
of the defeated and the forgotten, of the dead who lie prostrate
in the triumphal processions of the victors and have no place in big com-
memorations, and to look at history from the viewpoint of this fate.
The task of a historical materialist is, according to Benjamins famous
expression, to brush history against the grain, and examine cultural
treasures with cautious detachment,
72
that is, to stare at history from
the standpoint of the experience of the dead.
73
It has been noted that in On Revolution Arendt selectively appro-
priates marginal fragments from the past in order to recover last
meanings, concealed and repressed moments. Her history is stubbornly
partial; at best, she aims to seize hold of a memory that would other-
wise be lost, repressed, or distorted.
74
Moreover, in her Reply to
Voegelin, Arendt argues that she has parted quite consciously with the
tradition of sine ira et studio, emphasizing her intention not to write
from the perspective of scientic historiography. She states that To
describe the concentration camps sine ira is not to be objective, but
to condone them; and such condoning cannot be changed by a con-
demnation which the author may feel duty bound to add but which
remains unrelated to the description itself.
75
Disch reports that in a
draft of a memo to her editor Arendt calls for a history written against
what she calls the inherent law of all historiography which is preser-
vation and justication and praise .
76
In these words we hear the echo
of Benjamins thesis: the adherents of historicism actually empathize . . .
with the victors. Arendt claims, as did Benjamin, that the essence of
events is to be revealed as a writing from the standpoint of the experi-
ence of history, which is experience of catastrophe, and not with the
help of conformist comments from above. As she writes in the preface
to The Human Condition: What I propose in the following is a recon-
sideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest
experiences and our most recent fears.
77
The experience of the defeated
is totally taken over by the experience of the storyteller. Arendts
position is emphasized in a paradigmatic way when, at the end of
Imperialism, she focuses on the right to have rights as the most basic
of all human rights. She attempts to determine the true loss of stateless
people by a method that is neither purely descriptive nor purely norm-
ative, but consists of describing events from the point of view of a state-
less person which she was at the time of writing the book: The
survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and
internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people
could see . . . that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human
11
was their greatest danger.
78
It is this standpoint which, in The Origins
of Totalitarianism, allows her to invoke the shades of the departed . . .
only from the sacricial pit of the present,
79
in the manner of Benjamin.
Indeed, in her Reply, she refers to her rejection of the concept of
progress and to her criticism of the conception of linear historical
causality as consequences of her use of personal experience in historical
writing.
80
Benjamins name does not appear, but Arendts text is under-
pinned by his conception of historical writing.
However, in her Reply, Arendt also claims that her method of his-
torical writing does not consist of looking at the past only from the
side of the victims, because this would result in apologetics which of
course is no history at all.
81
How then should we understand the differ-
ence between her critical approach, facilitated by personal experience,
and a writing from the side of the victims? The Origins of Totalit-
arianism does not show empathy for the victims; it is written from the
consciousness of catastrophe, a consciousness that only the defeated and
the dead could possess. Its purpose is not to comfort the victims but to
reect their historical experience of events: When I used the image of
Hell, I did not mean this allegorically but literally. . . . In this sense I
think that a description of the camps as hell on earth is more object-
ive, that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely
sociological or psychological nature.
82
In Rahel Varnhagen, we nd the
same paradoxical difference between a writing from the inside of the
disaster and a writing from the side of the victims. Arendts biography-
autobiography of Rahel is sometimes so critical of her subject that
Jaspers, who to my mind totally misses Arendts point, reproaches her
for her severe judgments: Your view of Rahel is, I feel, loveless. . . .
Again and again you judge isolated actions in a way one should perhaps
not judge if one feels one has at some point seen Rahel whole.
83
But
Arendt never pretends that she has seen Rahel whole; on the contrary,
she attempts to present Rahel from the inside, to present a character
that experiences her life without seeing herself. Her writing is supposed
to be Rahel disclosing herself, not to draw an objective portrait of the
whole Rahel from outside. Therefore she explains in her preface of 1956
that My portrait . . . follows as closely as possible the course of Rahels
own reections upon herself. . . . The criticism corresponds to Rahels
self criticism . . . and at such times may appear to be passing judgment
upon Rahel from some higher vantage point. If so, I have simply failed
in what I set out to do.
84
Benjamin understood Arendts intention, and
wrote to Scholem, as early as February 1939: The book made a great
impression on me. It swims with powerful strokes against the current
of edifying and apologetic Judaic studies. You know best of all that
everything one could read about the Jews in German literature up to
now has allowed itself to be swept along on precisely this current.
85
12
Historical writing, namely writing from the point of view of the
defeated, from the very inside of the catastrophe, is not apologetic
writing; it is even contrary to apologetic writing. A display of the pain,
the helplessness, and the hopelessness of the defeated, it reects the
catastrophe without compassion.
86
The reason why the readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem felt so
uncomfortable, I think, is that Arendt wrote her controversial report
from that same standpoint. In her response to Scholems criticism of the
book Scholem, in a paternalistic tone, emphasized that he regarded
Arendt wholly as a daughter of our people, and for that reason castig-
ated her so-called lack of Herzenstakt and demanded an a priori love
of the Jewish people she writes:
I found it puzzling that you should write I regard you wholly as a daughter
of our people, and in no other way. The truth is I have never pretended to
be anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never even
felt tempted in that direction. . . . I have always regarded my Jewishness as
one of the indisputable factual data of my life, and I have never had the
wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a thing as a basic
gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and was not,
could not be, made; for things that are physei and not nom. . . . Well, in
this sense I do not love the Jews, nor do I believe in them; I merely belong
to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.
87
Writing from the inside of Rahels experience, Arendt could not
love her. Writing from the inside of the Jewish people she was a
daughter of this people and nothing else, not even as a wish she could
not love the Jews. But her relation to her Jewishness was complete
acceptance of what she considered a positive determination: she felt
gratitude for being a part of the Jewish people.
88
To cite Benhabib:
Oddly enough, the Eichmann book is Hannah Arendts most intensely
Jewish work, in which she identies morally and epistemologically with
the Jewish people.
89
Arendt did not write as a Jew, as if she could have
written as something else; nor did she write from the side of the Jews,
as to show empathy with the Jews although there were other possible
sides to write from. Her writing was the extreme historical experience
of Jewishness; it constituted the image of this experience. It did not
relate the history of the dead Jews (Eichmann in Jerusalem tells the story
of Eichmann) but attempted to reect history seen from the Jewish
experience of the catastrophe, with the help of the concept of the
banality of evil. Indeed, as Arendt told McCarthy, this expression was
much less a notion than a faithful description of a phenomenon (in the
same letter Arendt explains that she might write about the nature of evil
some day, but that she surely did not do so in her report).
90
If
Eichmann in Jerusalem is a description unrelated to the nature of evil,
namely unrelated to Eichmanns actions considered from the standpoint
13
of his intention, then the difcult question really is: Where was she
speaking from?
91
I suggest that she strove to describe evil from the
standpoint of those who were able to describe it faithfully, namely those
who had experienced evil, the victims. In my mind, the intention of the
whole book is revealed in the very short chapter Evidence and Wit-
nesses. This chapter is perhaps the most difcult to read because in it,
Arendts ippancy and lack of love of the Jewish people (dixit
Scholem) are the strongest. However, the chapter makes it clear that it
is precisely because the witnesses did not have the simplicity or . . .
ability to tell a story and to remember what really happened to them
as storytellers,
92
that Arendt tells her story. She tries to write from the
faithful viewpoint of the victims experience, as if she herself were an
actual witness of Eichmanns crimes.
93
Truth as absence
In her Reply to Voegelin, Arendt states that it is almost impossible to
write the history of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism because it focuses
on subjects that most historians do not wish to conserve, whereas all
historiography is necessarily salvation and frequently justication.
Therefore, she explains, she has attempted to nd a way to write the
history of something she felt engaged to destroy. Her way of solving
this problem is the lack of unity of The Origins of Totalitarianism,
94
namely her non-objective writing fragmented in elements and stories,
which opposes historicism that condones anti-Semitism and concen-
tration camps. By this, she seems to mean that the written analysis of
the structure of totalitarianism and its dissociation into elements destroy
its victorious unity. Her writing is intended, in itself, to be a tool of
destruction. It is therefore hardly surprising that in Walter Benjamin
Arendt contends that Benjamins use of quotations, his intention to cite
the whole past, was born out of the despair of the present and the desire
to destroy it. She emphasizes that Benjamins historical writing as quo-
tation of the past had a dialectical function: to destroy the ow of his-
toriography, and preserve something of the presented events:
Still, the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally were
inspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve; and
that only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional
preservers all around them did they nally discover that the destructive
power of quotations was the only one which still contains the hope that
something from this period will survive for no other reason than that it
was torn out of it. In this form of thought fragments, quotations have
the double task of interrupting the ow of the presentation with tran-
scendent force . . . and at the same time of concentrating within themselves
that which is presented.
95
14
Like Benjamin (I mean here: Benjamin read and interpreted by
Arendt), Arendt claimed that the destruction of the continuous presen-
tation of history brings out the true essence of events. Her writings are
expressions of the explosion of truth in history.
96
Disch remarks that
The purpose of political theory, as Arendt understands it, is not to make
a descriptively accurate report of the world, but to transcend the lim-
itations of facts and information to tell a provocative and principled
story, and adds that it is Woolfs distinction between truth and fact
that Arendt is attempting to achieve.
97
It seems to me, however, that
Arendts rejection of the continuity of facts and information in order to
reveal the truth of events experienced by the historian is literally copied
from Benjamins conception of storytelling: It is not the object of the
story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information;
rather it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as
experience to those listening.
98
Arendts attempt to write from the view-
point of the defeated represents one side of her methodological project,
which, at the same time, consists of disconstructing events into
elements. In this sense, the standpoint of the dead turns out to be a
destructive standpoint because it dissociates the linearity of the victors
commemoration and wrecks conformist historical narrative. It brings
out the truth in history, or more exactly it is historical truth. The truth
is the disaster experienced by the defeated and reected in the stories of
the storyteller, like the distress experienced by both Jewish pariahs and
Jewish parvenus the fact that [o]ne does not escape Jewishness
99
in her early writings on the Jewish condition, or the darkness and failure
experienced by the characters of Men in Dark Times, or the experienced
collapse of freedom in On Revolution, and the experienced transforma-
tion of the world into Hell in The Origins of Totalitarianism, etc.
For Benjamin, truth is what is passed on to listeners, or readers, by
a materialist historian/storyteller
100
who speaks from the point of view
of the defeated and the dead. Rephrasing this in a more radical but also
more adequate way, truth is the story told by those who have experi-
enced the events and who, by virtue of this very fact, cannot tell and
will never be able to tell any story. In this sense, truth should be abso-
lutely silent.
101
However, thanks to remembrance, it is not. To elabor-
ate the concept of remembrance Benjamin turns to psychoanalysis, as
well as to Proust, and differentiates mmoire volontaire from mmoire
involontaire. On the individual level, voluntary or intellectual recollec-
tion obey[s] the call of attentiveness and provides information about
the experienced past. By contrast, involuntary memory consists only of
what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not
happened to the subject as an experience.
102
Involuntary memory is
much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory.
103
However, what has not been experienced leaves traces, somewhere
15
beyond the reach of the intellect, whereas intellectual memory, which
gives information about the experienced past, retains no trace of it.
104
The task of a chronicler is to recite the fullness of the collective past,
namely its forgotten parts that do not appear in the voluntary collective
memory, in order to pass [them] on as experience to those listening.
Stories offer something that has not been explicitly experienced as col-
lective experiences. They produce experiences synthetically.
105
In other
words, they transmit the repressed as experience. The activity of chron-
iclers/storytellers/historical materialists is a conscious evocation of the
past, so it is as different from the process of involuntary memory as from
that of voluntary memory, which presents an incomplete image of the
past. This voluntary focus on the traces of history is what Benjamin calls
remembrance (Eingedenken). Remembrance does not transform the
repressed into non-repressed, or commemorate the repressed as the vic-
torious part of history (the Angel of history cannot awaken the dead,
make whole what has been smashed); it overturns the very logic of
victory and its obverse.
106
By showing the repressed as repressed, it
displays what Moss calls another history, one that is not only non-
linear and disrupted, but also absolutely negative.
107
Remembrance
shows the repressed the defeated and the dead as absence in collec-
tive memory. It deciphers the traces of history as if they were symbols,
symptoms of the holes of history holes of memory; it shows these holes
as holes. A chronicle of the past consists of remembrance of all its
repressed moments, as such. Benjamin considers this complete citation
as a sign of redemption: To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives
the fullness of its past which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind
has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived
becomes a citation lordre du jour and that day is Judgment Day.
108
In remembrance, the Now joins all parts of the past, not to reanimate it,
but to save it as it was. Without remembrance, the dead will lose, once
again and for ever: Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the
spark of hope in the past who is rmly convinced that even the dead will
not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased
to be victorious.
109
Therefore, on the one hand remembrance completes
the past, and on the other it opens it up: Such mindfulness can make
the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete
(suffering) into something incomplete.
110
In remembrance, the truth is
revealed and the Now and Then meet in a utopian, messianic moment:
We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The
Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. They
stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to
the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for
the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second
of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
111
16
We nd no mention of messianic redemption in Arendts work. At
rst sight, this undeniable fact seems to signify that we have reached the
point where the kinship between the two thinkers ends. Nevertheless, if
we look once again at Arendts Reply, we nd her claim that the
personal experience which is necessarily involved in an historical invest-
igation, and which allows the identication between the event, the
historian and his/her historical writing, employs that faculty of ima-
gination which Kant called Einbildungskraft and which has nothing
in common with ctional ability.
112
Imagination, Arendt adds, may be
more relevant to method in the historical sciences than academic
training realizes. Nevertheless, she does not wish to go into this matter
here, and it is only 17 years later, in a seminar dedicated to Kants
facultas imaginandi, that she delves into the subject more rigorously and
explains that, according to Kant, imagination is this faculty of having
present what is absent through an image.
113
Imagination is more com-
prehensive than memory: memory is related only to the past whereas
imagination can make present at will whatever it chooses. Arendt
contends that Kantian imagination is therefore closer to the Greek
nous than to memory: imagination allows us to discover the truth of
things, which lies beyond the appearances. She recalls that in Kants
schematism, imagination provides the connection between sensibility
and understanding, and offers a kind of intuition of something that
is never present. As a result, imagination is the source of all experi-
ences. In other words, imagination provides as experience a truth that
is always absent in perception, and that can never be experienced.
Arendt adds that in Kants Critique of Judgment, the example is an
analogy with the schema whenever we are concerned with particulars,
and it uses imagination in a similar way. To quote Ronald Beiner, Arendt
here elaborates the notion of exemplary validity . . . [which] is of crucial
importance, for it supplies the basis for a conception of political science
centered on particulars (stories, historical examples), not universals (the
concept of historical process; general laws of history).
114
Indeed, at the
end of the 13th session of her lectures on Kant, Arendt claims the
exemplary validity of all stories.
115
Therefore, the revelation of life
carried by a story concentrates in itself, as an example, a general, namely
political, meaning: Most concepts in the historical and political sciences
. . . have their origin in some particular historical incident, and we then
proceed to make it exemplary to see in the particular what is valid
for more than one case.
116
The exemplary validity of stories links
people together, creates communication,
117
hence opposes the destruc-
tion of the public world, which Arendt calls darkness. Stories illuminate
the earth, that is, neutralize the darkness. Because dark times are a
political condition, illumination through stories has a political effect;
stories can save the world:
17
That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illu-
mination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories
and concepts than from the uncertain, ickering, and often weak light that
some men and women, in their lives and in their works, will kindle under
almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them
on earth this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these
proles were drawn.
118
The function assigned by Arendt to Kantian imagination is therefore
very close to the function assigned by Benjamin to remembrance.
Benjamins remembrance and imagination (Arendts understanding of
Kants Einbildungskraft) both connect the historian to particular facts
and make present as experience what is absolutely absent to perception,
that is, the truth of these facts. Moreover, both have a redemptive
power which is realized in the telling of stories. It could be argued that
Benjamins conception of truth as the missing story of the defeated is not
particularly similar to that of Kant. However, let us not forget that
Arendt invokes imagination in order to describe the death camps
without condoning them; hence, her preoccupation is clearly similar to
that of Benjamin! So why did she only turn to Kants concept of imagina-
tion without a single word on Benjamins remembrance? I conclude this
essay by offering an explanation for Arendts silence on this matter.
End of story: transmission
Arendt and Benjamin were best friends in Paris. Surprisingly, we know
almost nothing of the nature of this close friendship. Arendt never pub-
lished any private comment on Benjamin. Apart from her outstanding
introduction to Illuminations, where she coldly depicted Benjamin as a
German-Jewish writer who was known, but not famous, as contributor
to magazines and literary sections of newspapers for less than ten years
prior to Hitlers seizure of power and his own emigration,
119
there are
only two references to him. The rst, recalled above, forms part of
Thesis 9 quoted in the rst chapter of Imperialism; the second is a short
analysis of Benjamins use of metaphors, in The Life of the Mind, Vol.
One, Thinking.
120
In sum, nothing on their friendship, and minimal
reference to his work.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that in Arendts early article We
Refugees, published in January 1943, her tormented analysis of suicide
among refugees refers particularly to Benjamin:
Unlike other suicides, our friends leave no explanation of their deed. . . .
Nobody cares about motives, they seem to be clear to all of us. . . . We are
the rst non-religious Jews persecuted and we are the rst ones who, not
only in extremis, answer with suicide. Perhaps the philosophers are right
18
who teach that suicide is the last and supreme guarantee of human freedom:
not being free to create our lives or the world in which we live, we never-
theless are free to throw life away and to leave the world.
121
These words foreshadow what she later writes about Benjamin to
Gertrud Jaspers:
This exhaustion, which often went along with a reluctance to make a big
fuss, to summon so much concentration just for the sake of this little bit
of life, that was surely the greatest danger we all faced. And it was the
death of our best friend in Paris, Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide
in October 1940 on the Spanish border with an American visa in his
pocket. This atmosphere of sauve qui peut at the time was dreadful, and
suicide was the only noble gesture, if you even cared enough to want to
perish nobly. In our time you have to hate murder a lot to escape the seduc-
tive power of suicide.
122
We Refugees is a rare essay. It is Arendts only personal text in the
sense that it is the only piece in which she sharply denes and recog-
nizes herself as part of a group: the German-Jewish-refugees. She will
never use this we again. The article depicts the two faces of the refugee
condition: survival with no relatives, occupation, or familiar language,
or suicide. As we know, Benjamin chose the latter solution, and Arendt
the former. In We Refugees Arendt writes: we have found our own
way of mastering an uncertain future. Since everybody plans and wishes
and hopes, so do we.
123
She emphasizes that what makes it possible to
choose life is the recognition that, beyond humiliation, the refugee con-
dition is not an individual fate, but a political one. Those who took their
lives failed to understand this fact or, more precisely, they killed them-
selves because they failed to understand this fact:
Yet our suicides are no mad rebels who hurl deance at life and the world,
who try to kill in themselves the whole universe. Theirs is a quiet way of
vanishing; they seem to apologize for the violent solution they have found
for their personal problems. In their opinion, generally, political events had
nothing to do with their individual fate; in good or bad times they would
believe solely in their personality. . . . Having felt entitled from their earliest
childhood to a certain social standard, they are failures in their own eyes
if this standard cannot be kept any longer. . . . Finally, they die of a kind
of selshness.
124
These words are not so much a criticism as a proclamation of a
personal decision: Arendt chose to live (she did not give up, like
Benjamin), and for her this meant that she chose a political under-
standing of her own fate: her own life had an exemplary validity. From
now on, her way lies apart from the way chosen by friends, including
Benjamin, who chose to commit suicide. Life means the renunciation of
this kind of egocentricity described years later in Walter Benjamin.
19
Indeed, even though in the third part of her presentation of Benjamins
work she concentrates on the originality of his thought his attempt to
cite the whole past in the rst two parts she focuses on his life as
characterized by bungling and bad luck,
125
troubles, and nally
disaster, which she attributes largely to Benjamins misunderstanding of
the general meaning of the events of his life. Franoise Meltzer, who
interpreted Arendts tone and rhetoric as a condemnation of Benjamins
indolence, femininity and marginality, considered this prominent
aspect of Arendts essay to be harsh criticism.
126
Although marginality,
for example, was precisely one of the most conscious and cherished
attributes of Arendts own personality, it is true that Arendt found
Benjamins apolitical attitude in dark times to be disconcerting and a
contradiction to his Marxist commitment.
127
She strongly emphasized,
for example, that For Benjamin, at any rate, a monthly stipend
remained the only possible form of income,
128
a sentence that recalls
the anonymous Having felt entitled from their earliest childhood to a
certain social standard in We Refugees. Moreover, the fact that the
second part of her essay is called Dark Times, even though it focuses
on Benjamins position as an homme de lettres in German-Jewish society
in the 1920s, and not on the political situation that she generally associ-
ates with the metaphor of darkness, reinforces the feeling that, in
Arendts view, historical conditions were considered personal conicts
by Benjamin.
129
I suggest that this is the reason why Arendt does not
refer to Benjamin as a thinker who inuenced her from the very begin-
ning to the very end of her political career.
I have tried to present the diverse evidence of Benjamins inuence
on Arendts work. I would even call this inuence inheritance. The fact
that Benjamin entrusted Arendt with his last manuscripts although he
was supposed to be the rst to leave for the United States and to meet
Adorno may even be seen as symbolizing this notion of inheritance. In
a recent essay, Shoshana Felman recalls that Benjamin left his papers to
Scholem, and she concludes that Benjamin assigns to Scholem the task
of continuing the story . . . the task of inheriting and of continuing the
Story of a Friendship.
130
Nevertheless, it seems to me that in handing
over his manuscript on the concept of history to Arendt, he was asking
her (or she felt she was being asked) to continue the general story, the
work of remembrance. And indeed, Arendt makes it clear in We
Refugees that, in addition to political understanding of individual fate,
refugee life means thinking of the dead: I imagine that at least nightly
we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved, and
writing true stories: Some day somebody will write the true story of
this Jewish emigration from Germany.
131
Arendt inherited Benjamins thought although she never acknow-
ledged this explicitly, not even in her very late homage to him. But didnt
20
she? In Walter Benjamin she quotes a short passage from one of
Benjamins letters to Scholem: Like one who keeps aoat on a ship-
wreck by climbing to the top of a mast that is already crumbling. But
from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue,
132
and
at the end of her essay she comments:
What guides [Benjamins] thinking is the conviction that although the living
is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time
a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks
and is dissolved what once was alive, some things suffer a sea-change and
survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the
elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will
come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living as
thought fragments, as something rich and strange, and perhaps even as
everlasting Urphanomene.
Isnt she saying that although Benjamin could not be rescued and
succumbed, he sent out a signal and left a trace, and that although his
thinking decayed in the ocean that surrounds Port-Bous cemetery,
where his absolute absence is emphasized by the fact his grave was never
found, it took 28 years to change, crystallize in a new form carried up
to the surface,
133
and be saved in the story of a pearl diver, who was
no other than Hannah Arendt herself?
University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Notes
I wish to thank Margaret Canovan, Costas Constantinou and Kia Lindroos for
critical and constructive comments. Special thanks to Nancy K. Miller for
unfailing intellectual and personal support.
1 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York:
Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 34950.
2 Hannah Arendt, Action and the Pursuit of Happiness, lecture delivered
at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1960,
Library of Congress, MSS Box 61, 1.
3 Seyla Benhabib, Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of
Narrative, Social Research 57(1) (Spring 1990): 16796.
4 Benhabib is a noteworthy exception. See Hannah Arendt and the
Redemptive Power of Narrative, p. 181, and The Reluctant Modernism
of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA, London, New Delhi: Sage Pub-
lications, 1996), p. 93. On the link between Arendt and Benjamin, see also
Maurizio Passerin dEntrves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt
(London: Routledge, 1994), p. 31.
21
PSC
5 See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 116.
6 Correspondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers 19261969 (San Diego,
CA, New York, London: Harcourt Brace, 1992), Arendt to Gertrud
Jaspers, 30 May 1946, p. 41.
7 ibid., Arendt to Jaspers, 7 September 1952, p. 197.
8 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace &
World, 1968), p. vii.
9 Walter Benjamin: 18921940 was published in Walter Benjamin, Illumi-
nations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), pp. 158; and in Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 153206.
I quote from Men in Dark Times.
10 See Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, trans.
Richard and Clara Winston (London, Jerusalem, New York: East and
West Library, 1957), p. xi; Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol.
One, Thinking, Vol. Two, Willing, one-volume edn (San Diego, CA, New
York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 211 (Thinking);
Ernest Vollrath, Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking,
Social Research 44 (Spring 1977): 162; Benhabib, Hannah Arendt and
the Redemptive Power of Narrative, p. 171; Lisa Disch, Hannah Arendt
and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University
Press, 1994), p. 108.
11 Arendt, Thinking, p. 212.
12 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 2056.
13 See Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, p. 93: In
using the same lines from Shakespeare to characterize Benjamins efforts
and her own exercises in remembrance, Arendt reveals the signicant
inuence that Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History had on
her views of historical narrative.
14 I focus on Benjamins writings of the 1930s.
15 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, Six Exercises in Political
Thought (Cleveland, OH and New York: Meridian Books, 1963), pp.
1011. See also Arendt, Thinking, p. 203: In other words, the time
continuum, everlasting change, is broken up into the tenses past, present,
future, whereby past and future are antagonistic to each other as the no-
longer and the not-yet only because of the presence of man, who himself
has an origin, his birth, and an end, his death, and therefore stands at
any given moment between them; this in-between is called the present.
17 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, pp.
2623.
18 Benjamin, Theses, pp. 2578. On the historical signicance of Benjamins
Angel of History and on its references, see O. K. Werckmeister, Walter
Benjamins Angel of History, or the Transguration of the Revolutionary
into the Historian, Critical Inquiry 22(2) (Winter 1996): 23967.
19 Correspondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, Arendt to Jaspers, 16
January 1967, p. 667.
20 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 165.
22
21 Benjamin, Theses, p. 261.
22 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999), p. 471.
23 Peter Osborne, Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats, in Walter
Benjamins Philosophy, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 86.
24 See Kia Lindroos, Rupturing Traditions: Benjamins Moment, in The
Moment, ed. Heidrun Friese (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press: forth-
coming).
26 ibid., p. 256.
27 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH and New
York: Meridian Books, 1963), p. 143. In a recent essay, Margaret
Canovan argued that Arendt was haunted by a vision of the angel of
history . See Terrible Truths: Hannah Arendt on Politics, Contingency
and Evil, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2 (June 1999): 178.
29 Canovan, Terrible Truths, p. 178.
31 ibid., p. 11.
32 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 26.
33 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. ix, viii.
34 Benjamin, Some Reections on Kafka, in Illuminations, p. 143.
36 Arendt, Willing, p. 158. On Arendts conception of the loss of tradition
and on her possible nostalgia, see Stan Spyris Draenos, Thinking
Without a Ground: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Situation of
Understanding, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World,
ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St Martins Press, 1979), pp. 20924;
Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt; and Dana R.
Villa, Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Alienation, and Critique, in Hannah
Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John
McGowan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1997), pp. 179206.
37 Robert Alter, Modernism and Nostalgia, Partisan Review LX(3) (1993):
402. Alter focuses on Benjamins reading of Proust and Kafka. For
Benjamins analysis of Baudelaires longing for an early life, see On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire, in Illuminations, pp. 1823. On Benjamins
nostalgia, see Michael Lwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian
Thought in Central Europe, trans. Hope Heaney (London: Athlone Press,
1992), pp. 11718.
38 Hannah Arendt, A Reply, Review of Politics 15 (January 1953): 778.
39 Benhabib, Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative, pp.
1812.
40 Stphane Moss, LAnge de lhistoire (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 97.
42 Jerome Kohn, Thinking/Acting, Social Research 57(1) (Spring 1990): 132.
23
43 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 4601.
44 Benjamin, Theses, p. 255. See also The Arcades Project, p. 462: image
is that wherein what has been comes together in a ash with the now to
form a constellation. See Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art:
The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York
and London: Guilford Press, 1996), p. 245.
45 Benjamin, The Storyteller, in Illuminations, p. 96.
47 Benjamin, The Storyteller, p. 96.
48 Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art, p. 238.
49 See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 458: This work has to develop to
the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks; and p. 476:
To write history thus means to cite history.
51 ibid., pp. 212.
52 Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary
McCarthy: 19491975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York, San Diego, CA,
London: Harcourt Brace, 1995), p. 225.
53 Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 108. Disch char-
acterizes Arendts thinking position as situated impartiality, or visiting
that denotes a critical decision that is not justied with reference to an
abstract standard of right but by visiting a plurality of diverging public
standpoints. In this context, the process of visiting might be conceived
as telling oneself the story of a situation from the plurality of its
constituent perspectives (pp.1623). According to Ernest Vollrath, as well
as David Luban, stories gave Arendt a sense of belonging, unattainable in
positivist methodology, hence allowed her to better understand political
phenomena during the period that she called dark times. See Ernest
Vollrath, Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking, Social
Research 44 (Spring 1977): 16082; and David Luban, Explaining Dark
Times: Hannah Arendts Theory of Theory, Social Research 50 (Spring
1983): 21548.
54 See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendts Storytelling, Social
Research 44 (Spring 1977): 1834.
55 Quoted in Peter Brookers enlightening essay The Postmodern Story,
Critical Survey 9(1) (1997): 85.
56 In a forthcoming essay: The Poetic Nature of Political Disclosure. Hannah
Arendts Storytelling.
57 On the ontology of display in Arendts work, see Kimberley F. Cutis,
Aesthetic Foundations of Democratic Politics in the Work of Hannah
Arendt, in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, pp. 2752.
58 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. xi. Arendt wrote to Jaspers: What I meant
to do was argue further with her, the way she argued with herself. Cor-
respondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, p. 200.
59 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. 96.
60 See Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. vii, 11.
61 Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendts Storytelling, p. 186.
62 Arendt, Thinking, p. 4; emphasis added.
24
63 Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish
Experience (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990), p. 238.
64 Benjamin, Theses, pp. 257, 256.
65 Moss, LAnge de lhistoire, p. 157.
67 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 456.
68 See Rebecca Comay, Benjamins Endgame, in Walter Benjamins Philo-
sophy, p. 266: It is not here a question of . . . bringing the margins into
the centre, essentializing the inessential, thus turning losers into winners
according to the endlessly familiar dialectic . . . of the qui perd gagne. See
also Moss, LAnge de lhistoire, p. 158.
69 Rolf Tiedemann, Historical Materialism or Messianism? An Inter-
pretation of the Theses On the Concept of History , in Benjamin:
Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago, IL: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 175209.
70 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 198, 199.
71 See Benjamin, Unpacking my Library, in Illuminations, p. 61.
72 Benjamin, Theses, pp. 2567.
73 See Michael Lwy, Against the Grain: The Dialectical Conception of
Culture in Walter Benjamins Theses of 1940, in Walter Benjamin and the
Demands of History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY and London:
Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 210.
74 Joan B. Landes, Novus Ordo Saeculorum: Gender and Public Space in
Arendts Revolutionary France, in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah
Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995), p. 197. See also James Miller, The Pathos of Novelty:
Hannah Arendts Image of Freedom in the Modern World, in Hannah
Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, pp. 177208.
75 Arendt, A Reply, p. 79.
76 Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 115.
77 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press and Anchor Books, 1959), p. 6.
78 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 300; emphasis added.
80 Arendt, A Reply, pp. 7980.
81 ibid., p. 77.
82 ibid., p. 79.
83 Correspondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, Jaspers to Arendt, 23
August 1952, p. 193.
84 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. xii. In the same vein, she wrote that If I
moralized or became sentimental, I simply did not do well what I was
supposed to do. Arendt, A Reply, p. 79.
85 The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem
19321940, ed. Gershom Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992), p. 244; emphasis added.
86 In the same vein, Jennifer Ring recently showed that Arendt wrote from
the standpoint of a woman even though she never wrote from the side
25
of women. (Nevertheless, I think that some of the feminist attacks on
Arendt are still relevant.) See Jennifer Ring, The Political Consequences
of Thinking. Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1998).
87 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. An Exchange of Letters
between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt. In her The Jew as Pariah
(New York: Grove Press, 1978), pp. 2467.
88 I would suggest the perhaps disturbing hypothesis that her basic
gratitude was close to a religious feeling. Indeed, in her letter to Scholem,
she writes the following, which is hardly quoted in the literature: [L]et
me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political
personality. . . . What he said . . . ran something like this: You will under-
stand that, as a Socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in
the Jewish people. I found this a shocking statement and, being too
shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: the
greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in
Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than
its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come
out of that? Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, p. 247.
89 Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, p. 181.
90 Between Friends, Arendt to McCarthy, 3 October 1963, p. 152; emphasis
added.
91 Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, p. 181. On the
banality of evil as a description and on Eichmann in Jerusalem in general,
much more has to be said, in a forthcoming essay.
92 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 224.
93 In a letter to Jaspers, Arendt explained that her basic motive in attending
the Eichmann trial was that she wanted to look at this walking disaster
face to face because she had left Germany very early and directly experi-
enced all this very little. In a way, she wanted to experience it. See Cor-
respondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, pp. 40910.
95 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 1934.
96 Her belated response to the attacks on Eichmann in Jerusalem is presented
in her essay Truth and Politics, later published in Between Past and Future.
97 Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 140.
98 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, p. 159. Moreover, Arendts
purpose to transcend the limitations of facts and information (a
quotation from On the Nature of Totalitarianism) is very similar to what
she understood to be Benjamins intention to interrupt the ow of the
presentation with transcendent force .
99 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. 176.
100 See Comay, Benjamins Endgame, p. 269.
101 On the idea of writing from the inside of the catastrophe and relating the
experience of the dead, see Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz
(1998); English translation: Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the
Archive, forthcoming. On the relation between writing and the catastrophe,
26
see Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
102 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, pp. 1601.
103 Benjamin, The Image of Proust, in Illuminations, p. 202.
104 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, p. 158. For a full explanation
of Benjamins theory of memory, see Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-
Space. Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul (London and
New York: Routledge, 1996), in particular Chapter 8, pp. 10927.
105 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, p. 157.
106 Comay, Benjamins Endgame, p. 266.
107 Moss, LAnge de lhistoire, p. 158.
109 ibid., p. 255.
110 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 471.
113 Hannah Arendt, Imagination, in Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy,
ed. Ronald Beiner (Brighton, Sx: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 79.
114 Ronald Beiner, introductory note to Arendt, Imagination, p. 79.
115 Arendt, Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, p. 77.
116 Arendt, Imagination, p. 85.
117 ibid., p. 83.
118 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. ix.
119 ibid., p. 153.
121 Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, pp. 58, 59.
122 Correspondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, pp. 401.
123 Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, p. 56.
124 ibid., pp. 5960.
126 See Franoise Meltzer, Acedia and Melancholia, in Walter Benjamin and
the Demands of History, pp. 14163.
127 Arendts critical feminization of Benjamin could certainly be the starting-
point of a feminist argument against Arendt. However, Arendt undoubt-
edly admired Benjamins marginality, comparing him to Montaigne,
Pascal and Montesquieu! See Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 181. On
Arendts own marginality, see my Marginal Thinking or Communication:
Hannah Arendts Model of a Political Thinker, The European Legacy
6(3) (forthcoming).
129 Arendt, no doubt, missed the collective and political meanings of
Benjamins thinking and particularly of his remembrance, to which she
fails to refer in Walter Benjamin.
130 Shoshana Felman, Benjamins Silence, Critical Inquiry 25(2) (Winter
1999): 233.
131 Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, p. 62.
133 ibid., p. 205.
27

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