LIVING DEATH: EXHUMING THE POLITICS OF DEATH AND REMEMBRANCE IN ARENDT
Date: Thursday, 12/14/23
Time: 10:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Zoom
https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/92579049574
Meeting ID: 925 7904 9574, Passcode: 362548
Arendt is commonly read as relegating death to the private and opposing natality—the political condition par excellence—to mortality. And yet, it is no exaggeration to say that, for Arendt, to protect the meaningfulness of death through meaning-generating death activities is to guard against genocide. Death, rather than being a- or even antipolitical, is uniquely connected to meaningfulness and thus of supreme political concern. By situating death in a holistic, phenomenological context, and reading Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) through this lens, we can see the clear connection between Arendt’s early concept of organized oblivion and her later organized remembrance. And, rather than a departure from the political in favor of the philosophical, we find instead an uninterrupted thread of concern for meaningfulness in death as a political safeguard against genocide throughout her corpus—even her ostensibly less political, late work.
