Category Archives: Arendt

Lewis R. Gordon interviewed on Fanon’s “The Damned of the Earth”

Posted on May 2, 2018 by

“The tragedy is already staged in a system where innocence suffers. The good among both will suffer. Colonialism, enslavement, and racism are tragic so long as we understand that that the suffering of the damned is ignored or, for the most part, doesn’t matter. It is a lived reality of not mattering.”

Posted in Arendt, Fanon, freedom, gender, Nota Bene, revolution, tragic politics, tyranny, violence

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Daniel Cohn-Bendit & Claus Leggewie: “1968: Power to the Imagination”

Posted on April 26, 2018 by

“Our solidarity with the national liberation movements was immense. … What we largely ignored, however, was the suppression proceeding from the liberators themselves, once they had seized power.”

Posted in anarchism, Arendt, crisis, freedom, Nota Bene, revolution, the Left, tragic politics

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Yavor Tarinski: “The Commons: Beyond the State and the Market”

Posted on September 4, 2017 by
“The commons can be found all around the world in different forms: from indigenous communities resisting the cutting of rainforests and Indian farmers fighting GMO crops, to open source software and movements for digital rights over the internet. The main characteristics that they all share, are the direct-democratic procedures of their management, the open design and manufacturing, accessibility, and constant evolvement.”

Posted in anarchism, Arendt, autonomy, Castoriadis, democracy, founding, governance, Nota Bene, the common

Never-before-published Hannah Arendt on What Freedom and Revolution really Mean

Posted on August 5, 2017 by

Thoughts on misery and revolution.

Posted in Arendt, governance, Nota Bene, revolution, terror, tragic politics

Roger Berkowitz: ‘Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting “The Origins of Totalitarianism”’

Posted on April 1, 2017 by

On the rejuvenation of local governance as a defense against totalitarianism:  “A unified and sovereign government combined with a disempowered citizenry poses the greatest danger of totalitarianism. The best way to protect ourselves is, perhaps, to turn back to our roots in local self-government. We cannot turn back the clock. But we might begin to engage in the activity of politics and the multiplication of local power structures that can resist the totalizing impulses of sovereign states. In doing so, we would seek to rediscover the Jeffersonian project of local self-government that Arendt calls the lost treasure of the American Revolution.”

Posted in Arendt, autonomy, democracy, governance, Nota Bene, resistance, Uncategorized

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Juan Carlos Velasco: ” Revitalizing democracy through civil disobedience”

Posted on March 3, 2017 by

Political dissidence:  “Civil disobedience is a widespread form of political protest used by minorities to make their voices heard in democratic societies. It is a mechanism of participation in the process of shaping public opinion, and of intervention, by via negativa, in the legislative process. In exercising it, citizens can assert their public autonomy when faced with serious decisions that, from their perspective, undermine the values on which society is based.”

Posted in Arendt, democracy, disobedience, Nota Bene, power, resistance, Uncategorized

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Zoe Williams: “Totalitarianism in the age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt”

Posted on February 5, 2017 by

“Tangentially, I have a sudden new faith in the feminist framing of recent demonstrations as women’s marches, which does something to allay the intimation of public violence that is always used as the justification of suppression. It seems clear, nonetheless, that it isn’t enough: that perhaps Arendt’s most profound legacy is in establishing that one has to consider oneself political as part of the human condition.”

Posted in Arendt, democracy, founding, governance, Nota Bene, revolution, Uncategorized, violence

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