Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida: Writing Between Politics, Poetics, and Philosophy

The collection Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida: Writing between Politics, Poetics, and Philosophy addresses the convergence of insight in the works of two of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century. Both Arendt and Derrida have played a decisive role in reorienting the concerns and methods of philosophy, political theory, and literary studies in recent decades, with implications that extend across the humanities. This volume is the first collection of readings on the relationship between the two thinkers from an interdisciplinary perspective that encompasses political and critical theory, aesthetics, literary theory, and philosophy. It presents a wealth of approaches for thinking about the pressing ethical and political questions that their work raises. Despite notable differences in style, approach, frame of reference, and disciplinary background Arendt and Derrida share a common attempt to challenge the predominant methods and questions of philosophy in order to develop a radically new approach to politics, language, and textual interpretation. Today, the reception of Arendt’s thought has moved beyond political theory and expanded into other areas, including literary studies, while Derrida’s writings are reverberating in a growing number of disciplines and outside the academy in activism, art, and human rights discourse. As they disrupt the borders of their respective fields, surprising resonances as well as productive dissonances, begin to emerge in their re-reading of the concepts of sovereignty and democracy, justice and judgment, inheritance, the relations of law to violence, language and the “mother tongue,” metaphor, poetry and poetic writing, and the peculiar realm of the in-between. Most profoundly, the current volume argues, Derrida and Arendt’s respective philosophical projects cross paths in their shared effort to write, rewrite and deconstruct the political. This collection of essays proposes that reading Arendt and Derrida side by side is not only justified, but urgently needed because both thinkers open philosophy to its other and to the worldly realm of living, with the ultimate aim of rethinking what we mean by politics, language, and writing. In turning toward aesthetics and the imaginary, Arendt and Derrida seek to further modes of thinking—“difference-thinking,” “non-tyrannical thinking”—that are political precicely because they are plural. Together, the essays collected in Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida: Writing between Politics, Poetics, and Philosophy demonstrate that their as-yet-unwritten dialogue yields decisive ways of theorizing our present moment of global crisis and transformation. Joining together internationally renowned scholars as well as emerging researchers from all over the globe, including Peg Birmingham, Robert Eaglestone, Matthias Flatscher, Jennifer Gaffney, Bonnie Honig, Jen Hui Bon Hoa, James Martel, Nassima Sahraoui, Jana Schmidt, and Magdalena Zolkos, this volume offers a wide-ranging discussion of the intersections of Arendt and Derrida’s work.