1.full- herzog- illuminating inheritance- benjamins nfluence on arendts political storytelling

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DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600501

2000 26: 1Philosophy Social CriticismAnnabel Herzogstorytelling

Illuminating inheritance : Benjamin's influence on Arendt's political

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Annabel Herzog

Illuminating inheritance

Benjamins influence on Arendtspolitical storytelling

Abstract This article focuses on the political effect that Arendt wishedto achieve with her old-fashioned storytelling. It is argued that sheinherited her concept of the redemptive power of narrative (Benhabib)from Walter Benjamin. The close relationship of the two intuitively suggestsan affinity between Arendts concept of a fragmented past and her story-telling and Benjamins conception of history and narrative. An attempt ismade here to determine the amplitude and the meaning of this proximity.An account is provided of Benjamins and Arendts shared belief that the

past is fragmented and that only fragmented writing, mainly in the form ofstories, had the capacity to be faithful to its ruins. It is argued that forboth Arendt and Benjamin, the purpose of this writing form was not tocommemorate the dead, but to show their absence their invisibility. It issuggested that Arendt and Benjamin held a similar conviction: that storieshad the capacity to save the world.

Key words Arendt Benjamin catastrophe experience fragmentedpast imagination remembrance revelation standpoint of the defeated storytelling

There is a Hassidic story that goes like this:

When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to acertain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer and whathe had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the Maggidof Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same placein the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speakthe prayers and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generationlater Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too

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went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do weknow the secrets meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know theplace in the woods to which it all belongs and that must be sufficient;

and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and RabbiIsrael of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on hisgolden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speakthe prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how itwas done. And, the story-teller adds, the story which he told had the sameeffect as the actions of the other three.1

This article focuses on the political effect that Arendt wished to achievewith her old-fashioned storytelling.2 My basic argument is that sheinherited her conception of the redemptive power of narrative3 from

Walter Benjamin.To date, commentaries have failed to identify the deep connectionbetween Arendt and Benjamins conceptions of storytelling.4 However,a number of simple facts should be recalled: Walter Benjamin was acousin of Gnther Stern, Hannah Arendts first husband. The couplemet Benjamin in Berlin, and again in Paris, in 1934. After Arendt andStern separated, and Stern left for New York, Arendts relationship withBenjamin continued in a circle of German Marxists.5 After Arendt metBlcher, Benjamin became the couples best friend in Paris.6 Arendt andBenjamin were in contact in 1936, when Benjamin was writing TheStoryteller. In 1938, they became very close and Benjamin was respons-ible for insistently encouraging Arendt to complete Rahel Varnhagen.7

Finally, before heading for the Spanish border, Benjamin entrustedArendt and Blcher with his last manuscripts, to be delivered to Adornoin New York. The manuscripts contained his Theses on the Philosophyof History, which the couple read and discussed in Lisbon with otherrefugees while waiting for their ship for the United States. Twenty-eightyears later Arendt became the editor of Illuminations, the first trans-lation into English of some of Benjamins writings, including The Story-

teller and Theses on the Philosophy of History. At that time she alsopublished Men in Dark Times, a collection of essays presenting thestories of different personalities how they lived their lives, how theymoved in the world, and how they were affected by historical time.8

Both books contain her essay Walter Benjamin.9

These well-known facts should at least permit the intuition thatthere might be some connection between Benjamins conception ofhistory and stories and Arendts political storytelling. What I proposehere is to explore this intuition which, in view of the anti-positivist

thinking of both Benjamin and Arendt, can hardly be considered out-rageous.

However, my intuition is based on Arendts own words. Althoughshe considered it self-indulgent and awkward to concentrate on

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methodological approaches,10 in the last pages of The Life of the Mind,Vol. One, Thinking, she reveals the basic assumption of her thinking:

I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been

attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories,as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Suchdismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of traditionis broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. . . . What has been lostis the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from gener-ation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency. . . . Whatyou then are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past, which haslost its certainty of evaluation.11

She then quotes a few lines of Shakespeares The Tempest, which

describe the transformation of a dead body lying under the sea intopearls and coral, [i]nto something rich and strange, and concludes: Itis with such fragments of the past, after their sea-change, that I havedealt here. At the end of her essay on Benjamin, she quotes the sameverses and then writes:

And [Benjamins] thinking, fed by the present, works with the thoughtfragments it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearldiver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottomand bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls

and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinkingdelves into the depths of the past but not in order to resuscitate it theway it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guidesthis thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruinof the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystal-lization, that in the depths of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolvedwhat once was alive, some things suffer a sea-change and survive in newcrystallized forms and shape that remain immune to the elements, asthough they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come downto them and bring them up into the world of the living.12

These sentences show that Arendt undoubtedly considered her ownthinking close to that of Benjamin, although she never acknowledged thisexplicitly.13 In the following, I attempt to determine the amplitude andthe meaning of this proximity. I begin with an account of the markedresemblance between Arendts and Benjamins understanding of history,14

namely, their shared belief that the past is fragmented and that only frag-mented writing, mainly in the form of stories, can be faithful to its deadand its ruins. I then argue that, for Arendt and for Benjamin, the purposeof this writing was not to commemorate the defeated and the dead, but

to write from their standpointand, hence, to display their absence, theirinvisibility. I shall suggest that although Arendt regarded her ownthinking as much more political than that of Benjamin, they both held asimilar conviction, namely, that stories had the capacity to save the world.

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Stories of a fragmented past

Fragments and ruins

Before elaborating on Arendts intention in dealing with the enrichedfragments of the past, it is worth noting that in the last chapter ofThinking, where Arendt alludes to a resemblance between her thinkingand that of Benjamin, she expands the analysis already presented in thePreface to Between Past and Future. According to this analysis, athought-event occurs within broken time. After citing a parable byKafka, which she summarizes as follows: The scene is a battlegroundon which the forces of the past and the future clash with each other;

between them we find the man whom Kafka calls he, who, if he wantsto stand his ground at all, must give battle to both forces, she elabor-ates on her definition of time:

Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval betweenpast and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succes-sion; it is broken in the middle, at the point where he stands; and hisstandpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gapin time which his constant fighting, his making a stand against past andfuture, keeps in existence.15

Arendt adds that Kafkas description of disruption in time by theinsertion of individuals into its flow fails to refute the traditionalmetaphor of a rectilinear temporal movement. According to her, thefighting presence of man in the gap of time should be regarded as aparallelogram of forces drawing the mysterious and slippery now16

in a diagonal direction constituting the region of thinking, with an un-determined ending.

The metaphors of disruption in history, and the fight againsthistorys opposed tenses thereby to create uncertainty, strikingly call to

mind Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History, particularlyThesis 17, Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but theirarrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configurationpregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which itcrystallizes into a monad,17 and Thesis 9, Benjamins famous descrip-tion of Paul Klees Angelus Novus:

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events,he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckageand hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken thedead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowingfrom Paradise. . . . This storm irresistibly propels him into the future towhich his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him growsskyward. This storm is what we call progress.18

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From his most early works to his last Theses, Benjamin rejectedthe idea of time as a linear unidirectional entity, and conceived it as adisrupted process. His quite complicated19 or even very complex20

notion of temporal breaking opposes what Heidegger called ourordinary conception of time, consisting of a linear succession ofinstants, as well as Husserls three-dimensional dissociation between thetenses. Time, in Benjamins view, is interruption of historical present byNow-time (Jetztzeit): History is the subject of a structure whose site isnot homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of thenow [Jetztzeit].21 Now-time condenses in its moment entire history per-ceived from the standpoint of its end. Time is [t]elescoping the pastthrough the present22 in a singular instant whose monadic structure

mirrors history as a whole. It does not mean that such telescoping takesplace at the very moment of the Now, but that the Now is, per se, acollision, a fight, a painful moment resulting in the uncertainty ofhistory. Paradoxically, time becomes historical when it is interrupted, inits interruption. To cite Peter Osborne, Benjamins now-time histori-cizes the structure of instantaneity, to produce it as interruption, simul-taneously contracting the present into the stasis of its point-like sourceand expanding its historical content to infinity.23

Similarly, for Arendt, times breaking point is not the present as weusually understand it but agap, created by the existence of standing-in-time individuals. The prime role of such individuals in history corres-ponds to Benjamins conception of Now-time as the collision of past andpresent individual perceptions, and his rejection of the approach of his-toricism, which sees the historical situation as guiding individuals fromabove.24 Moreover, from Benjamins viewpoint, the criticism of a linearand continuous perception of time implies the most radical rejection ofthe concept of progress. Benjamin claims that the belief in progress sig-nifies total misunderstanding of the real nature of history, which consistsof catastrophes. His statement that The current amazement that the

things we are experiencing are still possible in the twentieth centuryis not philosophical25 has to be understood in the context of theEuropean political situation at the time that he wrote his theses, namelyin 1940. However, above all, it is a general refutation of the providentialunderstanding of history, inherited from Christian theology via theEnlightenment, and developed in Liberalism as well as in Marxist dialec-tic: There is no document of civilization which is not at the same timea document of barbarism.26 For Benjamin, history is not a chain ofevents progressing toward a happy, or at least a better end: it is a single

catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.In Arendts writings cited above, consciousness of catastrophe is

revealed through the metaphors of breaking and gap, which depict theNow as a collapsing process. Arendt had already quoted Benjamins

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Reply to Eric Voegelins review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, oneof her few statements on methodological principles, Arendt claims thatshe has tried to dissociate the elements of totalitarianism instead of

writing historically, that is, instead of following a linearity:What I did . . . was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and toanalyze them in historical terms, tracing these elements back in history asfar as I deemed proper and necessary. That is, I did not write a history oftotalitarianism but an analysis in terms of history. . . . The book, therefore,does not really deal with the origins of totalitarianism . . . but gives a his-torical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitarianism, thisaccount is followed by an analysis of the elemental structure of totalitarianmovements and domination itself.38

Seyla Benhabib concludes from these sentences that Arendt madethe same methodological choices as Benjamin in order to break thechain of narrative continuity, to shatter chronology as the naturalstructure of narrative, to stress fragmentariness, historical dead ends,failures and ruptures.39 Indeed, as Stphane Moss explains,Benjamins concern was to find a way to recount the chaos of pastevents, and to achieve a new historical method, leading no more tofollow historical processes in their evolution, but to immobilize them,that is to describe (synchronically and not diachronically) some of theirmajor connections.40 Arendts analysis of the elemental structure oftotalitarianism is akin to Benjamins synchronic analysis of connec-tions. Arendt herself seems to acknowledge the link between hermethod and that of Benjamin when, in Walter Benjamin, she returnsto the metaphors of crystallization and chemical processes to charac-terize Benjamins thinking: What guides this thinking is the convictionthat although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the processof decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in thedepth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive,some things suffer a sea-change and survive in new crystallized forms

and shapes. The ruin of the time is a redundancy here, because forBenjamin time is ruins. However, from the viewpoint of individual per-ception, time also consists of crystallization into new shapes, intomonads. Thus, for Benjamin, the purpose of thinking occurring intime, historical thinking, is to seize this crystallization: A historicalmaterialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters itas a monad.41 Acknowledging that her own method is to deal withfragments from the past, after their sea-change, Arendt contends, likeBenjamin, that past and present intermingle in the shock of crystal-

lization, and that the essence of historical writing consists in recount-ing this shock. Jerome Kohn comments that in this way the old is madenew in this fragmentary recovery of the past; it is not the tradition thatis recovered, but apresent past.42

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Benjamins conception of temporal non-linearity results in theattempt to show history rather than narrate it. In the notes collectedin the chapter called On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,

in The Arcades Project, Benjamin writes: I neednt say anything. Merelyshow . . . [I]n what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened graphic-ness [Anschaulichkeit] to the realization of the Marxist method?43 Heargues that only dialectical images, as opposed to representations of alinear historical process, have the capacity to show time as discontinu-ity: The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at theinstant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.44 The aimof the historian Benjamin intends to be in his writings of the late 1930sis to display the happenings with which he deals,45 not to explain them.

Therefore, unlike historicism, which presents an eternal image ofhistory, Benjamin provides a unique experience with the past.46 Sucha non-scientific historian would accomplish what medieval chron-iclers, who from the very start lifted the burden of demonstrable ex-planation from their own shoulders, did in order to leave room forinterpretations of definite events. Benjamin claims that the storytelleris the secularized form of the chronicler.47 The storytellers attempt toseize time, referring to entire history perceived from its end, is anexercise in view of the final chronicle that, according to Thesis 3, cancite the past in all its moments .48 This chronicle is interspersed withinnumerable stories, whose function, as explained by Arendt in WalterBenjamin, is to cite49 the moments of the past, in order to settle [it]down, piecemeal, in the present.50 As images or quotations of events,stories supply a unique experience with the past.

It is striking that Arendts way of dealing with fragments of thepast is also storytelling. As she explains in On Humanity in DarkTimes, Insofar as any mastering of the past is possible, it consistsin relating what has happened. . . . No philosophy, no analysis, noaphorism . . . can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a

properly narrated story.51 Her intention to be a storyteller is soevident that in a letter written in December 1968, Mary McCarthycharacterizes Men in Dark Times as a series of fairy tales of theNorthern forests.52 However, as noted by Lisa Disch, Storytelling isnot a term Arendt defines precisely or uses consistently throughout herwritings.53 Indeed, there are many kinds of stories in Arendts work biographies of people, anecdotes, parables, etiologic tales, etc. 54

but Arendt never explains whether their purposes are similar or not.Nonetheless, it is clear that in her mind, stories are the only way to

represent the fragmentary nature of individual life, which fights andcollapses between past and future, and later reappears crystallized. Tocite Raymond Williams, Arendts mode of telling is not history asnarrative but stories as lives.55 Stories allow Arendt to seize the gap

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in time created by the lives of individuals, and tales and parables allowher to reveal the meaning of events occurring in history in the form ofthese lives.

In this sense, biographies, tales and parables reflectthe existence andexperiences of people in history. As I have argued elsewhere in detail,56

the purpose of Arendts storytelling is to show individuals crystallizedlives, and, thereby, to give them a public stage on which to appear.57

In themselves, her stories are a phenomenal disclosure. Arendts bio-graphy of Rahel, for example, was supposed to be an autobiography:It was never my intention to write a book aboutRahel. . . . What inter-ested me solely was to narrate the story of Rahels life as she herselfmight have told it.58 Arendt planned to describe who Rahel was and

not whatshe was, identify her as a subject or, more precisely, reveal hersubjective nature through her writing, namely, make her text a publicscene where Rahel could appear as a subject. On the one hand, Arendtsbook is a medium revealing Rahels attempts to be seen: If she wantedto live, she had to learn to make her presence felt, to display herself;59

on the other hand, it is in itself the public realm that Rahel could neverfully enter during her life. In this sense, Benjamins epistemologicalrelation between telling a story and showing the Now becomes, inArendts writings, the material of a political aim: her stories aim atreplacing the public realm destroyed in dark times. The purpose of Menin Dark Times, for example, is to show publicly the life of people intimes when publicity is obscured.60 The essays collected in the booknever focus on psychological details Elisabeth Young-Bruehl em-phasizes that Arendt told of people in the world, not of the worldin people61 but they follow the wanderings of people in the worldthrough realms as various as politics, poetry, literature, or religion.These stories make lives appear and, hence, fight the encompassingcatastrophe. They provide people with a public realm of disclosurewhich, in some way, had been closed to them. However, stories some-

times also give people the public realm the realm of responsibility which these people had been reluctant to enter. Eichmann in Jerusalemaimed at showing who Eichmann really was what he appearedto bereally, not what people fantasized about him therefore, what he reallyhad to be judged for. Through the revelation of his shallow presence(I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer)62 Arendt realizedthat to regard him as a monster was to play his game, namely, his refusalto be responsible. She claimed that the trial had failed in recognizingthe meaning of Eichmanns disclosure and that she had tried to succeed

in this political task, forcing him to appear through her report, andasking her readers to judge. As Dagmar Barnouw accurately writes: Byusing the narrative strategy of oratio obliqua, Arendt was able to letEichmanns voice be heard and judged through the perspective provided

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by the context. . . . Like all good storytellers, Arendt was intent onrevealing meaning: Eichmann was not an incomprehensible monster.63

Stories and absence

Stories of the defeated and the dead

Benjamins rejection of historicism was based on ethical and politicalcriticism. From his standpoint, the only continuity to be found inhistory is that of oppression: The tradition of the oppressed teachesus that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception

but the rule. As a result, adherents of historicism inevitably empathizewith the victor, and empathy with the victor invariably benefits therulers.64 To quote Moss again, in Benjamins thought historical con-tinuity is unmasked as illusion maintained by the victors mythologyin order to eliminate all traces of the defeated.65 In Benjamins view,the basic principle of genuine historical writing opposing empathy withthe victor is contained in the following sentence: Nothing that everhappened should be regarded as lost for history. Hence, the task of achronicler should be to cite events without distinguishing betweenmajor and minor acts.66 In his/her stories, a chronicler attempts toseize the fullness of the past, basing his/her reckoning [o]n the differ-entials of time (which, for others, disturb the main lines of theinquiry).67

Thus, Benjamins intention was to focus not only on the past in allits moments, but rather on the disturbances of the continuous history;not on the victors and the oppressed at one and the same time, but onthe latter. This does not mean glorifying the story of the dead, com-memorating them as if they were the genuine victors of history, becausethey precisely were not.68 A chronicle is not apologetics. It does mean,

however, constructing history from the perspective of the defeated, thatis, from the inside of the disruptions of history. Therefore, as proposedby Rolf Tiedemann, the Angel of history can be regarded as a rep-resentation of the historical materialist, who looks at history from theexperience of the defeated.69 For Benjamin, the subjectof history is thedefeated and the dead. He clarifies this major theme by referring to hispassion for collecting. What Benjamin meant by collecting is, as Arendtemphasizes in Walter Benjamin, seeking strange things that are con-sidered valueless, so that in his passion for the past for its own sake

. . . there already appears a disturbing factor to announce that . . . tra-ditional values [may] by no means be as safe in his hands as one mighthave assumed at first glance.70 A collector of Benjamins type looks atobjects in a new way, againstthe chronological and systematic order

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that the conformist tradition of the victors imposes on history, separ-ating the positive from the negative, the orthodox from the heretical.In a similar manner, the task of a storyteller/chronicler or of a historical

materialist, as Benjamin calls him/her in his Theses, is to invoke thefate71 of the defeated and the forgotten, of the dead who lie prostratein the triumphal processions of the victors and have no place in big com-memorations, and to look at history from the viewpoint of this fate.The task of a historical materialist is, according to Benjamins famousexpression, to brush history against the grain, and examine culturaltreasures with cautious detachment,72 that is, to stare at history fromthe standpoint of the experience of the dead.73

It has been noted that in On Revolution Arendt selectively appro-

priates marginal fragments from the past in order to recover lastmeanings, concealed and repressed moments. Her history is stubbornlypartial; at best, she aims to seize hold of a memory that would other-wise be lost, repressed, or distorted.74 Moreover, in her Reply toVoegelin, Arendt argues that she has parted quite consciously with thetradition of sine ira et studio, emphasizing her intention not to writefrom the perspective of scientific historiography. She states that Todescribe the concentration camps sine ira is not to be objective, butto condone them; and such condoning cannot be changed by a con-demnation which the author may feel duty bound to add but whichremains unrelated to the description itself.75 Disch reports that in adraft of a memo to her editor Arendt calls for a history written againstwhat she calls the inherent law of all historiography which is preser-vation and justification and praise .76 In these words we hear the echoof Benjamins thesis: the adherents of historicism actually empathize . . .with the victors. Arendt claims, as did Benjamin, that the essence ofevents is to be revealed as a writing from the standpoint of the experi-ence of history, which is experience of catastrophe, and not with thehelp of conformistcomments from above. As she writes in the preface

to The Human Condition: What I propose in the following is a recon-sideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newestexperiences and our most recent fears.77 The experience of the defeatedis totally taken over by the experience of the storyteller. Arendtsposition is emphasized in a paradigmatic way when, at the end ofImperialism, she focuses on the right to have rights as the most basicof all human rights. She attempts to determine the true loss of statelesspeople by a method that is neither purely descriptive nor purely norm-ative, but consists of describing events from the point of view of a state-

less person which she was at the time of writing the book: Thesurvivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration andinternment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless peoplecould see . . . that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human

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was their greatest danger.78 It is this standpoint which, in The Originsof Totalitarianism, allows her to invoke the shades of the departed . . .only from the sacrificial pit of the present,79 in the manner of Benjamin.

Indeed, in her Reply, she refers to her rejection of the concept ofprogress and to her criticism of the conception of linear historicalcausality as consequences of her use of personal experience in historicalwriting.80 Benjamins name does not appear, but Arendts text is under-pinned by his conception of historical writing.

However, in her Reply, Arendt also claims that her method of his-torical writing does notconsist of looking at the past only from theside of the victims, because this would result in apologetics which ofcourse is no history at all.81 How then should we understand the differ-

ence between her critical approach, facilitated by personal experience,and a writing from the side of the victims? The Origins of Totalit-arianism does not show empathy for the victims; it is written from theconsciousness of catastrophe, a consciousness that only the defeated andthe dead could possess. Its purpose is not to comfort the victims but toreflect their historical experience of events: When I used the image ofHell, I did not mean this allegorically but literally. . . . In this sense Ithink that a description of the camps as hell on earth is more object-ive, that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purelysociological or psychological nature.82 In Rahel Varnhagen, we find thesame paradoxical difference between a writing from the inside of thedisaster and a writing from the side of the victims. Arendts biography-autobiography of Rahel is sometimes so critical of her subject that

Jaspers, who to my mind totally misses Arendts point, reproaches herfor her severe judgments: Your view of Rahel is, I feel, loveless. . . .Again and again you judge isolated actions in a way one should perhapsnot judge if one feels one has at some point seen Rahel whole.83 ButArendt never pretends that she has seen Rahel whole; on the contrary,she attempts to present Rahel from the inside, to present a character

that experiences her life without seeing herself. Her writing is supposedto be Rahel disclosing herself, not to draw an objective portrait of thewhole Rahel from outside. Therefore she explains in her preface of 1956that My portrait . . . follows as closely as possible the course of Rahelsown reflections upon herself. . . . The criticism corresponds to Rahelsself criticism . . . and at such times may appear to be passing judgmentupon Rahel from some higher vantage point. If so, I have simply failedin what I set out to do.84 Benjamin understood Arendts intention, andwrote to Scholem, as early as February 1939: The book made a great

impression on me. It swims with powerful strokes against the currentof edifying and apologetic Judaic studies. You know best of all thateverything one could read about the Jews in German literature up tonow has allowed itself to be swept along on precisely this current.85

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Historical writing, namely writing from the point of view of thedefeated, from the very inside of the catastrophe, is not apologeticwriting; it is even contrary to apologetic writing. A display of the pain,

the helplessness, and the hopelessness of the defeated, it reflects thecatastrophe without compassion.86

The reason why the readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem felt souncomfortable, I think, is that Arendt wrote her controversial reportfrom that same standpoint. In her response to Scholems criticism of thebook Scholem, in a paternalistic tone, emphasized that he regardedArendt wholly as a daughter of our people, and for that reason castig-ated her so-called lack of Herzenstaktand demanded an a priori loveof the Jewish people she writes:

I found it puzzling that you should write I regard you wholly as a daughterof our people, and in no other way. The truth is I have never pretended tobe anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never evenfelt tempted in that direction. . . . I have always regarded my Jewishness asone of the indisputable factual data of my life, and I have never had thewish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a thing as a basicgratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and was not,could not be, made; for things that arephysei and not nom. . . . Well, inthis sense I do not love the Jews, nor do I believe in them; I merely belongto them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.87

Writing from the inside of Rahels experience, Arendt could notlove her. Writing from the inside of the Jewish people she was adaughter of this people and nothing else, not even as a wish she couldnot love the Jews. But her relation to her Jewishness was completeacceptance of what she considered a positive determination: she felt

gratitude for being a part of the Jewish people.88 To cite Benhabib:Oddly enough, the Eichmann book is Hannah Arendts most intensely

Jewish work, in which she identifies morally and epistemologically withthe Jewish people.89 Arendt did not write as a Jew, as if she could have

written as something else; nor did she write from the side of the Jews,as to show empathy with the Jews although there were other possiblesides to write from. Her writing was the extreme historical experienceof Jewishness; it constituted the image of this experience. It did notrelate the history ofthe dead Jews (Eichmann in Jerusalem tells the storyof Eichmann) but attempted to reflect history seen from the Jewishexperience of the catastrophe, with the help of the concept of thebanality of evil. Indeed, as Arendt told McCarthy, this expression wasmuch less a notion than a faithful description of a phenomenon (in the

same letter Arendt explains that she might write about the nature of evilsome day, but that she surely did not do so in her report).90 IfEichmann in Jerusalem is a description unrelated to the nature of evil,namely unrelated to Eichmanns actions considered from the standpoint

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of his intention, then the difficult question really is: Where was shespeaking from?91 I suggest that she strove to describe evil from thestandpoint of those who were able to describe it faithfully, namely those

who had experienced evil, the victims. In my mind, the intention of thewhole book is revealed in the very short chapter Evidence and Wit-nesses. This chapter is perhaps the most difficult to read because in it,Arendts flippancy and lack of love of the Jewish people (dixitScholem) are the strongest. However, the chapter makes it clear that itis precisely because the witnesses did not have the simplicity or . . .ability to tell a story and to remember what really happened to themas storytellers,92 that Arendt tells her story. She tries to write from thefaithful viewpoint of the victims experience, as if she herself were an

actual witness of Eichmanns crimes.93

Truth as absence

In her Reply to Voegelin, Arendt states that it is almost impossible towrite the history of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism because it focuseson subjects that most historians do not wish to conserve, whereas allhistoriography is necessarily salvation and frequently justification.Therefore, she explains, she has attempted to find a way to write thehistory of something she felt engaged to destroy. Her way of solvingthis problem is the lack of unity of The Origins of Totalitarianism,94

namely her non-objective writing fragmented in elements and stories,which opposes historicism that condones anti-Semitism and concen-tration camps. By this, she seems to mean that the written analysis ofthe structure of totalitarianism and its dissociation into elements destroyits victorious unity. Her writing is intended, in itself, to be a tool ofdestruction. It is therefore hardly surprising that in Walter BenjaminArendt contends that Benjamins use of quotations, his intention to citethe whole past, was born out of the despair of the present and the desire

to destroy it. She emphasizes that Benjamins historical writing as quo-tation of the past had a dialectical function: to destroy the flow of his-toriography, and preserve something of the presented events:

Still, the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally wereinspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve; andthat only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professionalpreservers all around them did they finally discover that the destructivepower of quotations was the only one which still contains the hope thatsomething from this period will survive for no other reason than that itwas torn out of it. In this form of thought fragments, quotations havethe double task of interrupting the flow of the presentation with tran-scendent force . . . and at the same time of concentrating within themselvesthat which is presented.95

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Like Benjamin (I mean here: Benjamin read and interpreted byArendt), Arendt claimed that the destruction of the continuous presen-tation of history brings out the true essence of events. Her writings are

expressions of the explosion of truth in history.96 Disch remarks thatThe purpose of political theory, as Arendt understands it, is not to makea descriptively accurate report of the world, but to transcend the lim-itations of facts and information to tell a provocative and principledstory, and adds that it is Woolfs distinction between truth and factthat Arendt is attempting to achieve.97 It seems to me, however, thatArendts rejection of the continuity of facts and information in order toreveal the truth of events experienced by the historian is literally copiedfrom Benjamins conception of storytelling: It is not the object of the

story to convey a happeningper se, which is the purpose of information;rather it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on asexperience to those listening.98 Arendts attempt to write from the view-point of the defeated represents one side of her methodological project,which, at the same time, consists of disconstructing events intoelements. In this sense, the standpoint of the dead turns out to be adestructive standpoint because it dissociates the linearity of the victorscommemoration and wrecks conformist historical narrative. It bringsout the truth in history, or more exactly it is historical truth. The truthis the disaster experienced by the defeated and reflected in the stories ofthe storyteller, like the distress experienced by both Jewish pariahs and

Jewishparvenus the fact that [o]ne does not escape Jewishness99 in her early writings on the Jewish condition, or the darkness and failureexperienced by the characters of Men in Dark Times, or the experiencedcollapse of freedom in On Revolution, and the experienced transforma-tion of the world into Hell in The Origins of Totalitarianism, etc.

For Benjamin, truth is what is passed on to listeners, or readers, bya materialist historian/storyteller100 who speaks from the point of viewof the defeated and the dead. Rephrasing this in a more radical but also

more adequate way, truth is the story told by those who have experi-enced the events and who, by virtue of this very fact, cannot tell andwill never be able to tell any story. In this sense, truth should be abso-lutely silent.101 However, thanks to remembrance, it is not. To elabor-ate the concept of remembrance Benjamin turns to psychoanalysis, aswell as to Proust, and differentiates mmoire volontaire from mmoireinvolontaire. On the individual level, voluntary or intellectual recollec-tion obey[s] the call of attentiveness and provides information aboutthe experienced past. By contrast, involuntary memory consists only of

what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has nothappened to the subject as an experience.102 Involuntary memory ismuch closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory.103

However, what has not been experienced leaves traces, somewhere

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beyond the reach of the intellect, whereas intellectual memory, whichgives information about the experienced past, retains no trace of it.104

The task of a chronicler is to recite the fullness of the collective past,

namely its forgotten parts that do not appear in the voluntary collectivememory, in order to pass [them] on as experience to those listening.Stories offer something that has not been explicitly experienced as col-lective experiences. They produce experiences synthetically.105 In otherwords, they transmit the repressedas experience. The activity of chron-iclers/storytellers/historical materialists is a conscious evocation of thepast, so it is as different from the process of involuntary memory as fromthat of voluntary memory, which presents an incomplete image of thepast. This voluntary focus on the traces of history is what Benjamin calls

remembrance (Eingedenken). Remembrance does not transform therepressed into non-repressed, or commemorate the repressed as the vic-torious part of history (the Angel of history cannot awaken the dead,make whole what has been smashed); it overturns the very logic ofvictory and its obverse.106 By showing the repressed as repressed, itdisplays what Moss calls another history, one that is not only non-linear and disrupted, but also absolutely negative.107 Remembranceshows the repressed the defeated and the dead as absence in collec-tive memory. It deciphers the traces of history as if they were symbols,symptoms of the holes of history holes of memory; it shows these holesas holes. A chronicle of the past consists of remembrance of all itsrepressed moments, as such. Benjamin considers this complete citationas a sign of redemption: To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receivesthe fullness of its past which is to say, only for a redeemed mankindhas its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has livedbecomes a citation lordre du jour and that day is Judgment Day.108

In remembrance, the Now joins all parts of the past, not to reanimate it,but to save it as it was. Without remembrance, the dead will lose, onceagain and for ever: Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the

spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the deadwillnot be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceasedto be victorious.109 Therefore, on the one hand remembrance completesthe past, and on the other it opens it up: Such mindfulness can makethe incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete(suffering) into something incomplete.110 In remembrance, the truth isrevealed and the Now and Then meet in a utopian, messianic moment:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. TheTorah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. Theystripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn tothe soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that forthe Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every secondof time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.111

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We find no mention of messianic redemption in Arendts work. Atfirst sight, this undeniable fact seems to signify that we have reached thepoint where the kinship between the two thinkers ends. Nevertheless, if

we look once again at Arendts Reply, we find her claim that thepersonal experience which is necessarily involved in an historical invest-igation, and which allows the identification between the event, thehistorian and his/her historical writing, employs that faculty of ima-gination which Kant called Einbildungskraft and which has nothingin common with fictional ability.112 Imagination, Arendt adds, may bemore relevant to method in the historical sciences than academictraining realizes. Nevertheless, she does not wish to go into this matterhere, and it is only 17 years later, in a seminar dedicated to Kants

facultas imaginandi, that she delves into the subject more rigorously andexplains that, according to Kant, imagination is this faculty of havingpresent what is absent through an image.113 Imagination is more com-prehensive than memory: memory is related only to the past whereasimagination can make present at will whatever it chooses. Arendtcontends that Kantian imagination is therefore closer to the Greeknous than to memory: imagination allows us to discover the truth ofthings, which lies beyond the appearances. She recalls that in Kantsschematism, imagination provides the connection between sensibilityand understanding, and offers a kind of intuition of something thatis never present. As a result, imagination is the source of all experi-ences. In other words, imagination provides as experience a truth thatis always absent in perception, and that can never be experienced.

Arendt adds that in Kants Critique of Judgment, the example is ananalogy with the schema whenever we are concerned with particulars,and it uses imagination in a similar way. To quote Ronald Beiner, Arendthere elaborates the notion of exemplary validity . . . [which] is of crucialimportance, for it supplies the basis for a conception of political sciencecentered onparticulars (stories, historical examples), not universals (the

concept of historical process; general laws of history).114 Indeed, at theend of the 13th session of her lectures on Kant, Arendt claims theexemplary validity of all stories.115 Therefore, the revelation of lifecarried by a story concentrates in itself, as an example, a general, namely

political, meaning: Most concepts in the historical and political sciences. . . have their origin in some particular historical incident, and we thenproceed to make it exemplary to see in the particular what is validfor more than one case.116 The exemplary validity of stories linkspeople together, creates communication,117 hence opposes the destruc-

tion of the public world, which Arendt calls darkness. Stories illuminatethe earth, that is, neutralize the darkness. Because dark times are apolitical condition, illumination through stories has a political effect;stories can save the world:

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That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illu-mination, and that such illumination may well come less from theoriesand concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that

some men and women, in their lives and in their works, will kindle underalmost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given themon earth this conviction is the inarticulate background against which theseprofiles were drawn.118

The function assigned by Arendt to Kantian imagination is thereforevery close to the function assigned by Benjamin to remembrance.Benjamins remembrance and imagination (Arendts understanding ofKants Einbildungskraft) both connect the historian to particular factsand make present as experience what is absolutely absent to perception,

that is, the truth of these facts. Moreover, both have a redemptivepower which is realized in the telling of stories. It could be argued thatBenjamins conception of truth as the missing story of the defeated is notparticularly similar to that of Kant. However, let us not forget thatArendt invokes imagination in order to describe the death campswithout condoning them; hence, her preoccupation is clearly similar tothat of Benjamin! So why did she only turn to Kants concept of imagina-tion without a single word on Benjamins remembrance? I conclude thisessay by offering an explanation for Arendts silence on this matter.

End of story: transmission

Arendt and Benjamin were best friends in Paris. Surprisingly, we knowalmost nothing of the nature of this close friendship. Arendt never pub-lished any private comment on Benjamin. Apart from her outstandingintroduction to Illuminations, where she coldly depicted Benjamin as aGerman-Jewish writer who was known, but not famous, as contributorto magazines and literary sections of newspapers for less than ten years

prior to Hitlers seizure of power and his own emigration,119 there areonly two references to him. The first, recalled above, forms part ofThesis 9 quoted in the first chapter of Imperialism; the second is a shortanalysis of Benjamins use of metaphors, in The Life of the Mind, Vol.One, Thinking.120 In sum, nothing on their friendship, and minimalreference to his work.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that in Arendts early article WeRefugees, published in January 1943, her tormented analysis of suicideamong refugees refers particularly to Benjamin:

Unlike other suicides, our friends leave no explanation of their deed. . . .Nobody cares about motives, they seem to be clear to all of us. . . . We arethe first non-religious Jews persecuted and we are the first ones who, notonly in extremis, answer with suicide. Perhaps the philosophers are right

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who teach that suicide is the last and supreme guarantee of human freedom:not being free to create our lives or the world in which we live, we never-theless are free to throw life away and to leave the world.121

These words foreshadow what she later writes about Benjamin toGertrud Jaspers:

This exhaustion, which often went along with a reluctance to make a bigfuss, to summon so much concentration just for the sake of this little bitof life, that was surely the greatest danger we all faced. And it was thedeath of our best friend in Paris, Walter Benjamin, who committed suicidein October 1940 on the Spanish border with an American visa in hispocket. This atmosphere of sauve qui peut at the time was dreadful, andsuicide was the only noble gesture, if you even cared enough to want to

perish nobly. In our time you have to hate murder a lot to escape the seduc-tive power of suicide.122

We Refugees is a rare essay. It is Arendts only personal text in thesense that it is the only piece in which she sharply defines and recog-nizes herself as part of a group: the German-Jewish-refugees. She willnever use this we again. The article depicts the two faces of the refugeecondition: survival with no relatives, occupation, or familiar language,or suicide. As we know, Benjamin chose the latter solution, and Arendtthe former. In We Refugees Arendt writes: we have found our own

way of mastering an uncertain future. Since everybody plans and wishesand hopes, so do we.123 She emphasizes that what makes it possible tochoose life is the recognition that, beyond humiliation, the refugee con-dition is not an individual fate, but a political one. Those who took theirlives failed to understand this fact or, more precisely, they killed them-selves because they failed to understand this fact:

Yet our suicides are no mad rebels who hurl defiance at life and the world,who try to kill in themselves the whole universe. Theirs is a quiet way ofvanishing; they seem to apologize for the violent solution they have found

for their personal problems. In their opinion, generally, political events hadnothing to do with their individual fate; in good or bad times they wouldbelieve solely in their personality. . . . Having felt entitled from their earliestchildhood to a certain social standard, they are failures in their own eyesif this standard cannot be kept any longer. . . . Finally, they die of a kindof selfishness.124

These words are not so much a criticism as a proclamation of apersonal decision: Arendt chose to live (she did not give up, likeBenjamin), and for her this meant that she chose a political under-

standing of her own fate: her own life had an exemplary validity. Fromnow on, her way lies apart from the way chosen by friends, includingBenjamin, who chose to commit suicide. Life means the renunciation ofthis kind of egocentricity described years later in Walter Benjamin.

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Indeed, even though in the third part of her presentation of Benjaminswork she concentrates on the originality of his thought his attempt tocite the whole past in the first two parts she focuses on his life as

characterized by bungling and bad luck,125 troubles, and finallydisaster, which she attributes largely to Benjamins misunderstanding ofthe general meaning of the events of his life. Franoise Meltzer, whointerpreted Arendts tone and rhetoric as a condemnation of Benjaminsindolence, femininity and marginality, considered this prominentaspect of Arendts essay to be harsh criticism.126 Although marginality,for example, was precisely one of the most conscious and cherishedattributes of Arendts own personality, it is true that Arendt foundBenjamins apolitical attitude in dark times to be disconcerting and a

contradiction to his Marxist commitment.127

She strongly emphasized,for example, that For Benjamin, at any rate, a monthly stipendremained the only possible form of income,128 a sentence that recallsthe anonymous Having felt entitled from their earliest childhood to acertain social standard in We Refugees. Moreover, the fact that thesecond part of her essay is called Dark Times, even though it focuseson Benjamins position as an homme de lettres in German-Jewish societyin the 1920s, and not on the political situation that she generally associ-ates with the metaphor of darkness, reinforces the feeling that, inArendts view, historical conditions were considered personal conflictsby Benjamin.129 I suggest that this is the reason why Arendt does notrefer to Benjamin as a thinker who influenced her from the very begin-ning to the very end of her political career.

I have tried to present the diverse evidence of Benjamins influenceon Arendts work. I would even call this influence inheritance. The factthat Benjamin entrusted Arendt with his last manuscripts although hewas supposed to be the first to leave for the United States and to meetAdorno may even be seen as symbolizing this notion of inheritance. Ina recent essay, Shoshana Felman recalls that Benjamin left his papers to

Scholem, and she concludes that Benjamin assigns to Scholem the taskof continuing the story . . . the task of inheriting and of continuing theStory of a Friendship.130 Nevertheless, it seems to me that in handingover his manuscript on the concept of history to Arendt, he was askingher (or she felt she was being asked) to continue the general story, thework of remembrance. And indeed, Arendt makes it clear in WeRefugees that, in addition to political understanding of individual fate,refugee life means thinking of the dead: I imagine that at least nightlywe think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved, and

writing true stories: Some day somebody will write the true story ofthis Jewish emigration from Germany.131

Arendt inherited Benjamins thought although she never acknow-ledged this explicitly, not even in her very late homage to him. But didnt

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she? In Walter Benjamin she quotes a short passage from one ofBenjamins letters to Scholem: Like one who keeps afloat on a ship-wreck by climbing to the top of a mast that is already crumbling. But

from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue,132 andat the end of her essay she comments:

What guides [Benjamins] thinking is the conviction that although the livingis subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same timea process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinksand is dissolved what once was alive, some things suffer a sea-change andsurvive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to theelements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day willcome down to them and bring them up into the world of the living asthought fragments, as something rich and strange, and perhaps even aseverlasting Urphanomene.

Isnt she saying that although Benjamin could not be rescued andsuccumbed, he sent out a signal and left a trace, and that although histhinking decayed in the ocean that surrounds Port-Bous cemetery,where his absolute absence is emphasized by the fact his grave was neverfound, it took 28 years to change, crystallize in a new form carried upto the surface,133 and be saved in the story of a pearl diver, who wasno other than Hannah Arendt herself?

University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

Notes

I wish to thank Margaret Canovan, Costas Constantinou and Kia Lindroos forcritical and constructive comments. Special thanks to Nancy K. Miller forunfailing intellectual and personal support.

1 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York:Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 34950.

2 Hannah Arendt, Action and the Pursuit of Happiness, lecture deliveredat the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1960,Library of Congress, MSS Box 61, 1.

3 Seyla Benhabib, Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power ofNarrative, Social Research 57(1) (Spring 1990): 16796.

4 Benhabib is a noteworthy exception. See Hannah Arendt and theRedemptive Power of Narrative, p. 181, and The Reluctant Modernismof Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA, London, New Delhi: Sage Pub-lications, 1996), p. 93. On the link between Arendt and Benjamin, see alsoMaurizio Passerin dEntrves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt(London: Routledge, 1994), p. 31.

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5 See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World(NewHaven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 116.

6 Correspondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers 19261969 (San Diego,

CA, New York, London: Harcourt Brace, 1992), Arendt to GertrudJaspers, 30 May 1946, p. 41.7 ibid., Arendt to Jaspers, 7 September 1952, p. 197.8 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace &

World, 1968), p. vii.9 Walter Benjamin: 18921940 was published in Walter Benjamin, Illumi-

nations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: SchockenBooks, 1969), pp. 158; and in Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 153206.I quote from Men in Dark Times.

10 See Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, trans.

Richard and Clara Winston (London, Jerusalem, New York: East andWest Library, 1957), p. xi; Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol.One, Thinking, Vol. Two, Willing, one-volume edn (San Diego, CA, NewYork, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 211 (Thinking);Ernest Vollrath, Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking,Social Research 44 (Spring 1977): 162; Benhabib, Hannah Arendt andthe Redemptive Power of Narrative, p. 171; Lisa Disch, Hannah Arendtand the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UniversityPress, 1994), p. 108.

11 Arendt, Thinking, p. 212.

12 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 2056.13 See Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, p. 93: Inusing the same lines from Shakespeare to characterize Benjamins effortsand her own exercises in remembrance, Arendt reveals the significantinfluence that Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History had onher views of historical narrative.

14 I focus on Benjamins writings of the 1930s.15 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, Six Exercises in Political

Thought (Cleveland, OH and New York: Meridian Books, 1963), pp.1011. See also Arendt, Thinking, p. 203: In other words, the timecontinuum, everlasting change, is broken up into the tenses past, present,future, whereby past and future are antagonistic to each other as the no-longer and the not-yet only because of the presence of man, who himselfhas an origin, his birth, and an end, his death, and therefore stands atany given moment between them; this in-between is called the present.

16 Arendt, Thinking, p. 208.17 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, pp.

2623.18 Benjamin, Theses, pp. 2578. On the historical significance of Benjamins

Angel of History and on its references, see O. K. Werckmeister, WalterBenjamins Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionaryinto the Historian, Critical Inquiry 22(2) (Winter 1996): 23967.

19 Correspondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, Arendt to Jaspers, 16January 1967, p. 667.

20 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 165.

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21 Benjamin, Theses, p. 261.22 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin

McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1999), p. 471.23 Peter Osborne, Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats, in WalterBenjamins Philosophy, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Londonand New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 86.

24 See Kia Lindroos, Rupturing Traditions: Benjamins Moment, in TheMoment, ed. Heidrun Friese (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press: forth-coming).

25 Benjamin, Theses, p. 257.26 ibid., p. 256.27 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH and New

York: Meridian Books, 1963), p. 143. In a recent essay, MargaretCanovan argued that Arendt was haunted by a vision of the angel ofhistory . See Terrible Truths: Hannah Arendt on Politics, Contingencyand Evil, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2 (June 1999): 178.

28 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 11.29 Canovan, Terrible Truths, p. 178.30 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 30.31 ibid., p. 11.32 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 26.33 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. ix, viii.

34 Benjamin, Some Reflections on Kafka, in Illuminations, p. 143.35 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 193.36 Arendt, Willing, p. 158. On Arendts conception of the loss of tradition

and on her possible nostalgia, see Stan Spyris Draenos, ThinkingWithout a Ground: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Situation ofUnderstanding, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World,ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St Martins Press, 1979), pp. 20924;Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt; and Dana R.Villa, Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Alienation, and Critique, in HannahArendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and JohnMcGowan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,1997), pp. 179206.

37 Robert Alter, Modernism and Nostalgia, Partisan Review LX(3) (1993):402. Alter focuses on Benjamins reading of Proust and Kafka. ForBenjamins analysis of Baudelaires longing for an early life, see On SomeMotifs in Baudelaire, in Illuminations, pp. 1823. On Benjaminsnostalgia, see Michael Lwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish LibertarianThought in Central Europe, trans. Hope Heaney (London: Athlone Press,1992), pp. 11718.

38 Hannah Arendt, A Reply, Review of Politics 15 (January 1953): 778.39 Benhabib, Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative, pp.

1812.40 Stphane Moss, LAnge de lhistoire (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 97.41 Benjamin, Theses, p. 263.42 Jerome Kohn, Thinking/Acting, Social Research 57(1) (Spring 1990): 132.

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43 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 4601.44 Benjamin, Theses, p. 255. See also The Arcades Project, p. 462: image

is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to

form a constellation. See Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art:The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New Yorkand London: Guilford Press, 1996), p. 245.

45 Benjamin, The Storyteller, in Illuminations, p. 96.46 Benjamin, Theses, p. 262.47 Benjamin, The Storyteller, p. 96.48 Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art, p. 238.49 See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 458: This work has to develop to

the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks; and p. 476:To write history thus means to cite history.

50 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 193.51 ibid., pp. 212.52 Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary

McCarthy: 19491975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York, San Diego, CA,London: Harcourt Brace, 1995), p. 225.

53 Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 108. Disch char-acterizes Arendts thinking position as situated impartiality, or visitingthat denotes a critical decision that is not justified with reference to anabstract standard of right but by visiting a plurality of diverging publicstandpoints. In this context, the process of visiting might be conceived

as telling oneself the story of a situation from the plurality of itsconstituent perspectives (pp.1623). According to Ernest Vollrath, as wellas David Luban, stories gave Arendt a sense of belonging, unattainable inpositivist methodology, hence allowed her to better understand politicalphenomena during the period that she called dark times. See ErnestVollrath, Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking, SocialResearch 44 (Spring 1977): 16082; and David Luban, Explaining DarkTimes: Hannah Arendts Theory of Theory, Social Research 50 (Spring1983): 21548.

54 See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendts Storytelling, SocialResearch 44 (Spring 1977): 1834.

55 Quoted in Peter Brookers enlightening essay The Postmodern Story,Critical Survey 9(1) (1997): 85.

56 In a forthcoming essay: The Poetic Nature of Political Disclosure. HannahArendts Storytelling.

57 On the ontology of display in Arendts work, see Kimberley F. Cutis,Aesthetic Foundations of Democratic Politics in the Work of HannahArendt, in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, pp. 2752.

58 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. xi. Arendt wrote to Jaspers: What I meantto do was argue further with her, the way she argued with herself. Cor-respondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, p. 200.

59 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. 96.60 See Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. vii, 11.61 Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendts Storytelling, p. 186.62 Arendt, Thinking, p. 4; emphasis added.

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63 Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-JewishExperience (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,1990), p. 238.

64 Benjamin, Theses, pp. 257, 256.65 Moss, LAnge de lhistoire, p. 157.66 Benjamin, Theses, p. 254.67 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 456.68 See Rebecca Comay, Benjamins Endgame, in Walter Benjamins Philo-

sophy, p. 266: It is not here a question of . . . bringing the margins intothe centre, essentializing the inessential, thus turning losers into winnersaccording to the endlessly familiar dialectic . . . of the qui perd gagne. Seealso Moss, LAnge de lhistoire, p. 158.

69 Rolf Tiedemann, Historical Materialism or Messianism? An Inter-

pretation of the Theses On the Concept of History , in Benjamin:Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago, IL: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 175209.

70 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 198, 199.71 See Benjamin, Unpacking my Library, in Illuminations, p. 61.72 Benjamin, Theses, pp. 2567.73 See Michael Lwy, Against the Grain: The Dialectical Conception of

Culture in Walter Benjamins Theses of 1940, in Walter Benjamin and theDemands of History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY and London:Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 210.

74 Joan B. Landes, Novus Ordo Saeculorum: Gender and Public Space inArendts Revolutionary France, in Feminist Interpretations of HannahArendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 1995), p. 197. See also James Miller, The Pathos of Novelty:Hannah Arendts Image of Freedom in the Modern World, in HannahArendt: The Recovery of the Public World, pp. 177208.

75 Arendt, A Reply, p. 79.76 Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 115.77 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of

Chicago Press and Anchor Books, 1959), p. 6.78 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 300; emphasis added.79 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 201.80 Arendt, A Reply, pp. 7980.81 ibid., p. 77.82 ibid., p. 79.83 Correspondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, Jaspers to Arendt, 23

August 1952, p. 193.84 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. xii. In the same vein, she wrote that If I

moralized or became sentimental, I simply did not do well what I wassupposed to do. Arendt, A Reply, p. 79.

85 The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem19321940, ed. Gershom Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1992), p. 244; emphasis added.

86 In the same vein, Jennifer Ring recently showed that Arendt wrote fromthe standpoint of a woman even though she never wrote from the side

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of women. (Nevertheless, I think that some of the feminist attacks onArendt are still relevant.) See Jennifer Ring, The Political Consequencesof Thinking. Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt(Albany:

State University of New York Press, 1998).87 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. An Exchange of Lettersbetween Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt. In her The Jew as Pariah(New York: Grove Press, 1978), pp. 2467.

88 I would suggest the perhaps disturbing hypothesis that her basicgratitude was close to a religious feeling. Indeed, in her letter to Scholem,she writes the following, which is hardly quoted in the literature: [L]etme tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent politicalpersonality. . . . What he said . . . ran something like this: You will under-stand that, as a Socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in

the Jewish people. I found this a shocking statement and, being tooshocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: thegreatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed inHim in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater thanits fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can comeout of that? Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, p. 247.

89 Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, p. 181.90 Between Friends, Arendt to McCarthy, 3 October 1963, p. 152; emphasis

added.91 Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, p. 181. On the

banality of evil as a description and on Eichmann in Jerusalem in general,much more has to be said, in a forthcoming essay.92 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

(New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 224.93 In a letter to Jaspers, Arendt explained that her basic motive in attending

the Eichmann trial was that she wanted to look at this walking disasterface to face because she had left Germany very early and directly experi-enced all this very little. In a way, she wanted to experience it. See Cor-respondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, pp. 40910.

94 Arendt, A Reply, p. 77.95 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 1934.96 Her belated response to the attacks on Eichmann in Jerusalem is presented

in her essay Truth and Politics, later published in Between Past and Future.97 Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 140.98 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, p. 159. Moreover, Arendts

purpose to transcend the limitations of facts and information (aquotation from On the Nature of Totalitarianism) is very similar to whatshe understood to be Benjamins intention to interrupt the flow of thepresentation with transcendent force .

99 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. 176.100 See Comay, Benjamins Endgame, p. 269.101 On the idea of writing from the inside of the catastrophe and relating the

experience of the dead, see Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz(1998); English translation: Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and theArchive, forthcoming. On the relation between writing and the catastrophe,

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see Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

102 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, pp. 1601.

103 Benjamin, The Image of Proust, in Illuminations, p. 202.104 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, p. 158. For a full explanationof Benjamins theory of memory, see Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul (London andNew York: Routledge, 1996), in particular Chapter 8, pp. 10927.

105 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, p. 157.106 Comay, Benjamins Endgame, p. 266.107 Moss, LAnge de lhistoire, p. 158.108 Benjamin, Theses, p. 254.109 ibid., p. 255.

110 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 471.111 Benjamin, Theses, p. 264.112 Arendt, A Reply, p. 79.113 Hannah Arendt, Imagination, in Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy,

ed. Ronald Beiner (Brighton, Sx: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 79.114 Ronald Beiner, introductory note to Arendt, Imagination, p. 79.115 Arendt, Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, p. 77.116 Arendt, Imagination, p. 85.117 ibid., p. 83.118 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. ix.

119 ibid., p. 153.120 Arendt, Thinking, p. 122.121 Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, pp. 58, 59.122 Correspondence Hannah ArendtKarl Jaspers, pp. 401.123 Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, p. 56.124 ibid., pp. 5960.125 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 160.126 See Franoise Meltzer, Acedia and Melancholia, in Walter Benjamin and

the Demands of History, pp. 14163.127 Arendts critical feminization of Benjamin could certainly be the starting-

point of a feminist argument against Arendt. However, Arendt undoubt-edly admired Benjamins marginality, comparing him to Montaigne,Pascal and Montesquieu! See Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 181. OnArendts own marginality, see my Marginal Thinking or Communication:Hannah Arendts Model of a Political Thinker, The European Legacy6(3) (forthcoming).

128 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 180.129 Arendt, no doubt, missed the collective and political meanings of

Benjamins thinking and particularly of his remembrance, to which shefails to refer in Walter Benjamin.

130 Shoshana Felman, Benjamins Silence, Critical Inquiry 25(2) (Winter1999): 233.

131 Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, p. 62.132 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 172.133 ibid., p. 205.

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