WHAT IS POLITICS?

A Conference on Hannah Arendt at Villa Aurora on November 9th and 10th, 2013

On November 9th, the date of “Reichskristallnacht“ in Germany in 1938, Villa Aurora, together with the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, hosted a conference on Hannah Arendt by the title of “What is Politics?”.

The German-Jewish-American thinker Hannah Arendt, born in Hannover, exiled to Paris and later to New York, dedicated her work to the reinvention of the public realm and to freedom in political action. Today, as in the 1960s, the ideas of this woman philosopher inspire theoretical debates as well as civil political initiatives. The conference with lectures by experts on Hannah Arendt’s work focused on the influence of her European-American experience and the particular importance of transcultural exchange in Arendt’s theory of political action.

Please find videos of the following lectures on our media-page:

Welcome & Opening Remarks
Annette Rupp, Executive Director Villa Aurora & Marie Luise Knott (Concept), Freelance Author, Journalist and Translator

The Origins of Totalitarianism in Historical Perspective
Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University

Revolutionary Declarations and the Status of Human Rights
Peg Birmingham, DePaul University

The Aesthetics of Arendt’s Politics
Equality, Plurality, and the Enthusiasm of the Spectators
Martín Plot, California Institute of the Arts

Hannah Arendt: The Primacy of Appearance
Robert Harrison, Stanford University

Who is Capable of Performing Action? Some Thoughts on the Importance of Personality
Wolfgang Heuer, Freie Universität Berlin

As part of the conference, Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, talked about Jewish Voices in the Eichmann-Controversy at Skirball Cultural Center on November 10th. The lecture was followed by the screening of Margarethe von Trotta’s movie Hannah Arendt and a Q&A session.

Conference Program: