Language:
English
Year of publication:
2011
Titel der Quelle:
Action and Appearance
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2011) 166-183
Keywords:
Arendt, Hannah,
;
Antisemitism History 1800-2000
;
Self-hate (Psychology)
;
Jews Identity
;
Political science Philosophy
Abstract:
A paper delivered at an international workshop held at the University of Western Sydney in May 2009. After the publication of Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism", the writer was accused of inconsistency in this work. In particular, some critics claimed that antisemitism as one of the main constituent elements of totalitarianism (to which an entire section of her book is devoted) was included in her work rather arbitrarily, and others accused her of "Jewish self-hatred". Using Hayden White's typology, argues that antisemitism in Arendt's book is a synecdoche, that allows the writer to sidestep the deterministic tendencies of conventionally "causal" historical explanations. Arendt's deployment of this synecdoche opens up the transfigurative dimensions of the events that fomented antisemitic structures of feeling. In her conception, Jews, and first of all Jewish parvenus and Jewish men with power in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, failed to find a political solution for the situation of the Jews before it was too late, and thus they share the responsibility for totalitarianism.
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