Joshua Corey explores "world poetics" in his latest book.
In the fall of 2011, I lived in Berlin for more than half a month, trying to finish a novel there because my emotions were caught in the whirlwind of history surrounding one of the most ill-fated cities. My great-grandmother and her sisters lived in Berlin in the first half of the 20th century, and one of their daughters, Ilona, died in Auschwitz in 1943. I've always been an avid reader of Hannah Arendt and was once obsessed with the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger during my graduate school years.
Now, I am unconsciously following in their footsteps back into the world of these two men, lingering in their seductive but creepy waltz, the enmity between the philosophers and political thinkers of the 20th century, the metaphysical theorists and refugees, the Nazis and the Jews.
Two years later, while studying literary criticism and theory at Cornell University under Jane Bennett, an instinctive thought popped into my head: If people in the early 21st century were to rehabilitate in the 1930s, would we who could not respond meaningfully to climate change be similar to those who could not respond meaningfully to the rise of fascism?
From this feeling arises the idea that this mysterious love affair between Heidegger and Arendt has become, as Arendt puts it, some kind of paradigm in our struggle today? We are tasked with creating world politics and poetics to reclaim the territory of human action in the face of a more turbulent, dynamic, undisguised, unpolished "earth."
I started writing poems and articles, which eventually led to the little book Hannah and Her Mentor. It retelles the highly symbolic love story of the 20th century, a hodgepodge of pieces of speculative narrative.
I ventured into an unconventional reading of Arendt's work, trying to dig up the remnants of romanticism in her thoughts, literally understanding her Greek, just as Heidegger literally understood his Greek. I wanted to engage history as something alive, and to tell perhaps a different kind of story by relying on fragments of their narrative.
In today's time of climate change, the resurgence of fascism, and rampant white supremacy, we feel it natural, though perhaps weird, to portray her as our own heroine against the end of the world.
She is a character who resists the fatal mystification of "blood and earth" (the Nazi political slogan Blut und Bode6n German racial ideology, which refers to the survival of a nation depending on blood (the blood of the nation) and land (the basis of agricultural production), while also emphasizing the importance of agriculture and the virtues and traditional values of rural life, just like the one-handed heroine in the 2015 film Mad Max 4: Fury Road who redeems herself from her own stupidity in the struggle against recklessness and domination.
Arendt's affair with Heidegger has been told many times before, and the outlines could not be simpler. Born in Kant's hometown of Königsberg, an assimilated German Jewish community, she was an 18-year-old university student at the University of Marburg and became the first student and lover of the 35-year-old philosopher Martin Heidegger.
She described herself as a "pariah" and later a refugee, influenced by the spell of a "magician from Messkirch", whose phenomenological innovations and personal charisma in the "problematic" classroom proved to be so consistent with the anti-Semitic "blood and earth" ideology that it quickly swept throughout Germany.
From this feeling arises the idea of whether this mysterious love affair between Heidegger and Arendt has become some kind of paradigm in our struggle today. As Arendt said, the task before us is to create world politics and poetics.
She wrote love poems to Heidegger, as well as abstract, autobiographical letters that she called "shadows," in which she described herself as someone caught in the trap of non-authenticity and unable to extricate herself, using language echoing Heidegger's terms such as gossip, curiosity, and "the they." She laments the insurmountable distance she feels from "reality," which she suggests stems from her Jewish identity and desire for "simplicity and freedom to grow organically." ”
The self-loathing and hatred shown in the letter reads sadly and seems to foreshadow the accusations that Arendt's friend Gershom Scholem will make against her decades later. On the occasion of the publication of her book, Eichmann of Jerusalem, Sorom accused her of lacking a love for the Jews (ahavath Israel). Arendt's response to Sorom was very telling:
I don't have that kind of love, how right you are. There are two reasons for this: First, I have never "loved" any country or collective in my life. The truth is that I only love my friends and I can't have any other form of love. Secondly, this love for the Jews seems to me to be suspicious, because I am Jewish myself. I don't love myself, nor do I love anything that belongs to the essence of my existence.
Arendt must have intuitively realized that it was the "essence of its existence" that she had never been able to match the "authenticity" demands of her lover and teacher. Had it not been for the publication of his so-called Black Notes in 2014, this man's vicious anti-Semitism might not have been widely revealed. "If a person is attacked as a Jew, he must defend himself as a Jew, not as a German, not as a citizen of the world, not as a holder of individual rights." Arendt might have written the same thing.
But Arendt, who is fiercely opposed to ideology, is forever opposing the returning, tribal demands that she is based on her identity — a kind of dogmatic deterministic politics in which you are either on our side or against us. And she uses precisely the carefully refined weapon of political ethics, which ultimately comes down to her own thinking.
Not in the form of a reflective rebel who boasts of himself, but in the capacity for serious criticism and the ability to sustain pranks and play. Arendt may or may not be a philosopher, and she herself opposes the label, but of course she is a writer, a writer with sharp language and sharp writing, who dares to make judgments, and in the book I reimagines the romantic heroine as a fighter against fascism, collective thinking, and the evil of mediocrity, which makes it difficult for us to detect and respond to the multiple crises of our time.
The English poet Shelley wrote in "In Defense of Poetry," "We long for creativity to imagine what we know, we yearn for the poetry of life." Science expands the boundaries of human domination of the external world, but because of the lack of poetic power, the cultivation of scientific qualities appropriately avoids the boundaries of the inner world; even if man can dominate many elements, he still cannot get rid of the identity of slave. ”
These words remind us that the inexplicable landscape of the Anthropocene is no more than the most recent iteration of a process that could not have been more evident to the prescient poets Shelley and Blake from the earliest stages of industrial capitalism and colonialism. What Shelley calls "poetic power" is similar to Arendt's concept of thought, "the silent dialogue we have with ourselves."
Without such dialogue, we remain ignorant, blind, self-enslaved, unable to engage in substantive dialogue with others — a prerequisite for political action, public virtue and unencumbered freedom.
Arendt, a fierce opponent of ideology, is always opposed to the returnary, tribal demands that are made to her on the basis of her identity, and she uses precisely the carefully refined weapon of political ethics, which ultimately comes down to her own thinking.
The book's dialogue, inspired by Virginia Woolf's "new way of playing" conjecture about writing, carries the risk of releasing Arendt and Heidegger into a mysterious universe divorced from historical events and the reality of life.
While I was drawn to the spell of its crazy love, I tried to wrap it in Asimov's robot novelist and science fiction writer Philip Berger. Philip K. Dick's web replicants and others in the Bible's Book of Joshua, the prostitute "Rahab," and others in the movie Mad Max 4: Fury Road, the one-handed heroine Queen Imperator Furiosa, satirize it.
Hannah and Her Mentor performs a dialectical dance between history and mythology. The study of history is a moral practice, and myth must be used to serve history as a resurrection of connection with the past (or what Marie Luise Knott calls "fragments of exotic experiences"), otherwise it tends to be reactionary—the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism as identified by Heidegger, president of the University of Freiburg.
Walter Benjamin warns us, "Only historians can rekindle the spark of hope in the past." It has been proven to us time and again in the past that if the enemy wins, even the dead will lose their safety. And this enemy who wants to be the victor is never willing to give up. (The translation of the introduction to this sentence is borrowed from Zhang Xudong's translation of the Outline of the Philosophy of History-
Only by understanding history in this way and loving this world as a place of risk and struggle can we help us discover how to recreate new worlds. Salvation can only be made possible by understanding the loss of history, our real and potential loss, whether wildlife, arable land, breathable air, or democracy.
About the Author
Joshua Corey is a poet, critic, translator, and novelist who is the author of Hannah and Her Mentor and the forthcoming novel How Long Now? He is a professor of English at Lake Forest College and lives with his family in the small town of Evanston, Illinois.
Source: Translator Contribution
Author: Joshua Kerry Translated by Wu Wanwei
Original title: Overcoming the tension in life
译自：How Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger’s Relationship Can Inform Our Current Crises by Joshua Corey
The "New Translation of Philosophical Texts" series of articles is a translation submitted by Professor Wu Wanwei, which is mainly the latest and popular philosophical humanities essay selected from the websites of Phosophy Now, Aeon, First Things and other websites.
New translation of Zhewen
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