This linguist set some serious groundwork for future generations fighting the good fight. Arendt's just not keen on psychoanalysis and all of the sensing and bodily communication it involves. It's not all about living as a political being. We all have a "psychic life" and are part of a "social" world ( source). She just doesn't give enough credit to bodily subjectivity-as in: I see the world from the body of a woman, and that is a particular angle on the world. Yes, we are thinkers, but we are thinkers with bodies-not just free-floating brains and eyes perceiving the world. In The Ends of Arendtian Politics: A Review of Hannah Arendt, I call these disappointments "regrets."įor one, Arendt is no phenomenologist, which is to say that her many examinations of theory and language do not take into consideration that ideas come from a mind that is in a body. It's not all praise ever the critic, I take an unflinching look at some of the letdowns about her work. I couldn't get enough of this German political philosopher and wrote extensively about her work. It's not exactly going to a spa, right? There, she wallows in melancholic memories of the past, unable to escape them, because you can never recover from the traumas of detachment-they always go back to your original detachment from the mother. Having lost her German lover at the end of World War II, the protagonist moves to Hiroshima, a city that had recently been attacked by atomic bombs. To me, Duras's Hiroshima, Mon Amour explores these issues of melancholy, not in overt mother-related ways, but in terms of fully embracing the grimness of depression. So, what if you refuse to (proverbially) wean yourself from mum? Well. (I'm thinking Norman Bates from Psycho, but that is by all means an extreme case.) Painful though it may be, you gotta enter into the symbolic, acquire language, and "sever" ties with Mum. My thesis in a nutshell: Look, we're all supposed to separate from the warm and snuggly mother at some point. Not one to choose light subject matter, I take up Duras (and others) in Black Sun, my study of melancholy and depression.
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