Download or read book Thinking in Dark Times written by Roger Berkowitz and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hannah Arendt is one of the most important political theorists of the 20th century. This book focuses on how, against the professionalized discourses of theory, Arendt insists on the greater political importance of the ordinary activity of thinking.
Download or read book Designing in Dark Times written by Virginia Tassinari and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The architectural historian and critic Kenneth Frampton 'never recovered' from the force of Hannah Arendt's teaching at The New School in New York. The philosopher Richard J. Bernstein considers her the most perceptive political theorist and observer of 'dark times' (a concept which, drawing from Brecht, she made her own). Building on the revival of interest in Hannah Arendt, and on the increasing turn in design towards the expanded field of the social, this unique book uses insights and quotations drawn from Arendt's major writings (The Human Condition; The Origins of Totalitarianism, Men in Dark Times) to assemble a new kind of lexicon for politics, designing and acting today. Taking 56 terms – from Action, Beginnings and Creativity through Mortality, Natality, and Play to Superfluity, Technology and Violence – and inviting designers and scholars of design world-wide to contribute, Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon, offers up an extraordinary range of short essays that use moments and quotations from Arendt's thought as the starting points for reflection on how these terms can be conceived for contemporary design and political praxis. Neither simply dictionary nor glossary, the lexicon brings together designing and political philosophy to begin to create a new language for acting and designing against dark times.
Download or read book Light in Dark Times written by Alisse Waterston and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What will become of us in these trying times? How will we pass the time that we have on earth? In gorgeously rendered graphic form, Light in Dark Times invites readers to consider these questions by exploring the political catastrophes and moral disasters of the past and present, revealing issues that beg to be studied, understood, confronted, and resisted. A profound work of anthropology and art, this book is for anyone yearning to understand the darkness and hoping to hold onto the light. It is a powerful story of encounters with writers, philosophers, activists, and anthropologists whose words are as meaningful today as they were during the times in which they were written. This book is at once a lament over the darkness of our times, an affirmation of the value of knowledge and introspection, and a consideration of truth, lies, and the dangers of the trivial. In a time when many of us struggle with the feeling that we cannot do enough to change the course of the future, this book is a call to action, asking us to envision and create an alternative world from the one in which we now live. Light in Dark Times is beautiful to look at and to hold – an exquisite work of art that is lively, informative, enlightening, deeply moving, and inspiring.
Download or read book Dreaming in Dark Times written by Sharon Sliwinski and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do dreams manage to say—or indeed, show—about human experience that is not legible otherwise? Can the disclosure of our dream-life be understood as a form of political avowal? To what does a dream attest? And to whom? Blending psychoanalytic theory with the work of such political thinkers as Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, Sharon Sliwinski explores how the disclosure of dream-life represents a special kind of communicative gesture—a form of unconscious thinking that can serve as a potent brand of political intervention and a means for resisting sovereign power. Each chapter centers on a specific dream plucked from the historical record, slowly unwinding the significance of this extraordinary disclosure. From Wilfred Owen and Lee Miller to Frantz Fanon and Nelson Mandela, Sliwinski shows how each of these figures grappled with dream-life as a means to conjure up the courage to speak about dark times. Here dreaming is defined as an integral political exercise—a vehicle for otherwise unthinkable thoughts and a wellspring for the freedom of expression. Dreaming in Dark Times defends the idea that dream-life matters—that attending to this thought-landscape is vital to the life of the individual but also vital to our shared social and political worlds.
Download or read book Democracy in Dark Times written by Jeffrey C. Isaac and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viewing contemporary democratic practice through the lens of Hannah Arendt's political theory and thoroughly exploring the difficulties of democratic citizenship and civil society that concerned Arendt, Jeffrey Isaac deals with issues of pressing contemporary relevance. He looks at the Eastern and Central European revolutions of 1989, the future of democracy in America, and the ethical significance of Bosnian genocide.
Download or read book Deep Time Dark Times written by David Wood and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new geological epoch we call the Anthropocene is not just a scientific classification. It marks a radical transformation in the background conditions of life on Earth, one taken for granted by much of who we are and what we hope for. Never before has a species possessed both a geological-scale grasp of the history of the Earth and a sober understanding of its own likely fate. Our situation forces us to confront questions both philosophical and of real practical urgency. We need to rethink who “we” are, what agency means today, how to deal with the passions stirred by our circumstances, whether our manner of dwelling on Earth is open to change, and, ultimately, “What is to be done?” Our future, that of our species, and of all the fellow travelers on the planet depend on it. The real-world consequences of climate change bring new significance to some very traditional philosophical questions about reason, agency, responsibility, community, and man’s place in nature. The focus is shifting from imagining and promoting the “good life” to the survival of the species. Deep Time, Dark Times challenges us to reimagine ourselves as a species, taking on a geological consciousness. Drawing promiscuously on the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and other contemporary French thinkers, as well as the science of climate change, David Wood reflects on the historical series of displacements and de-centerings of both the privilege of the Earth, and of the human, from Copernicus through Darwin and Freud to the declaration of the age of the Anthropocene. He argues for the need to develop a new temporal phronesis and to radically rethink who “we” are in respect to solidarity with other humans, and responsibility for the nonhuman stakeholders with which we share the planet. In these brief, lively chapters, Wood poses a range of questions centered on our individual and collective political agency. Might not human exceptionalism be reborn as a sort of hyperbolic responsibility rather than privilege?
Download or read book Thinking Without a Banister written by Hannah Arendt and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 and lived in America from 1941 until her death in 1975. Thus her life spanned the tumultuous years of the twentieth century, as did her thought. She did not consider herself a philosopher, though she studied and maintained close relationships with two great philosophers—Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger—throughout their lives. She was a thinker, in search not of metaphysical truth but of the meaning of appearances and events. She was a questioner rather than an answerer, and she wrote what she thought, principally to encourage others to think for themselves. Fearless of the consequences of thinking, Arendt found courage woven in each and every strand of human freedom. In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1958 The Human Condition, in 1961 Between Past and Future, in 1963 On Revolution and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in 1968 Men in Dark Times, in 1970 On Violence, in 1972 Crises of the Republic, and in 1978, posthumously, The Life of the Mind. Starting at the turn of the twenty-first century, Schocken Books has published a series of collections of Arendt’s unpublished and uncollected writings, of which Thinking Without a Banister is the fifth volume. The title refers to Arendt’s description of her experience of thinking, an activity she indulged without any of the traditional religious, moral, political, or philosophic pillars of support. The book’s contents are varied: the essays, lectures, reviews, interviews, speeches, and editorials, taken together, manifest the relentless activity of her mind as well as her character, acquainting the reader with the person Arendt was, and who has hardly yet been appreciated or understood. (Edited and with an introduction by Jerome Kohn)
Download or read book Men in Dark Times written by Hannah Arendt and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1968 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of essays which present portraits of individuals ranging from Rosa Luxemburg to Pope John XXIII who the author believes have illuminated "dark times."
Download or read book Dark Times written by Jonathan Sklar and published by Phoenix Publishing House. This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today sees the rise of nationalism, the return of totalitarian parties in Europe to electoral success, and the rise of the alt-right and white supremacists in the US. Psychoanalyst Jonathan Sklar brings his understanding of cruelty, sadomasochism, perversion, and other mental mechanisms to shine a light on what has led to this. Unlike most current news outlets, Sklar goes against the grain of brief sound bites, which are an aid to pass quickly over painful knowledge. Instead, he goes into detail to give extremely dark occurrences, and the human beings affected, respect and understanding. This gives the reader the ability to make unconscious things more conscious, highlighting the quality of humanity in human beings. Listening to these stories enables us to become more aware. By ridding ourselves of the illusions of our political times, we can find greater freedom to think, develop, challenge, and create hope, for the future of our children and our grandchildren, as well as for ourselves. Dark Times is a timely, thought-provoking, and, at times, upsetting work that is a must-read for all those looking for a deeper understanding of today’s world.
Download or read book A Light in Dark Times written by Judith Friedlander and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New School for Social Research opened in 1919 as an act of protest. Founded in the name of academic freedom, it quickly emerged as a pioneer in adult education—providing what its first president, Alvin Johnson, liked to call “the continuing education of the educated.” By the mid-1920s, the New School had become the place to go to hear leading figures lecture on politics and the arts and recent developments in new fields of inquiry, such as anthropology and psychoanalysis. Then in 1933, after Hitler rose to power, Johnson created the University in Exile within the New School. Welcoming nearly two hundred refugees, Johnson, together with these exiled scholars, defiantly maintained the great traditions of Europe’s imperiled universities. Judith Friedlander reconstructs the history of the New School in the context of ongoing debates over academic freedom and the role of education in liberal democracies. Against the backdrop of World War I and the first red scare, the rise of fascism and McCarthyism, the student uprisings during the Vietnam War and the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe, Friedlander tells a dramatic story of intellectual, political, and financial struggle through illuminating sketches of internationally renowned scholars and artists. These include, among others, Charles A. Beard, John Dewey, José Clemente Orozco, Robert Heilbroner, Hannah Arendt, and Ágnes Heller. Featured prominently as well are New School students, trustees, and academic leaders. As the New School prepares to celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary, A Light in Dark Times offers a timely reflection on the legacy of this unique institution, which has boldly defended dissident intellectuals and artists in the United States and overseas.
Download or read book Governance in Dark Times written by Camilla Stivers and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the rush of calamitous events in recent years—the September 11 terror attacks, the Iraq imbroglio, and hurricanes Katrina and Rita—Americans feel themselves to be living in dark times. Trust in one another and in the government is at low ebb. People in public service face profound challenges to the meaning and efficacy of their work. Where can a public servant turn for a public philosophy to sustain practice? Inspired by Hannah Arendt and several other philosophers, Governance in Dark Times is the first book to explore the philosophical and value underpinnings needed to guide public servants in these times. Featuring down-to-earth discussions of such issues as terrorism, torture, and homeland security, it suggests ways for people in government to think more deeply, judge more wisely, and act more meaningfully. Camilla Stivers argues that the most urgent requirement in dark times is re-kindling what Arendt called "the light of the public," and offers practical steps for public servants to create spaces for citizen dialogue and engagement in public life. Ideas like "governance of the common ground" and "public service as social hope" will spark discussion and encourage renewed dedication to the work of governing. Grounded in the author's more than thirty years of teaching and administrative practice, Governance in Dark Times urges public servants in clear, jargon-free prose to reflect, to understand the world we live in, and to act responsibly, both individually and with fellow citizens.
Download or read book Hannah Arendt written by Anne C Heller and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed biographer presents “a perceptive life of the controversial political philosopher” and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Kirkus Reviews). Hannah Arendt was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933. Arendt is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that surrounded her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a kidnapped Nazi war criminal. Arendt’s first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations around the world viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, created fierce debate that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. In this comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s contradictions and achievements to her sense of being a “conscious pariah”—one of those rare people who doesn’t “lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us” and will not “pay any price” to gain the acceptance of others.
Download or read book Hope in the Dark written by Rebecca Solnit and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-05-14 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker
Download or read book Songs in Dark Times written by Amelia M. Glaser and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples. Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.” These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.
Download or read book Violence written by Brad Evans and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a series of penetrating conversations originally published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting edge thinkers--including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, and Elaine Scarry--to explore the problem of violence in everyday life, politics, culture, media, language, memory, and the environment. "To bring out the best of us," writes Evans, "we have to confront the worst of what humans are capable of doing to one another. In short, there is a need to confront the intolerable realities of violence in this world." These lively, in-depth exchanges among historians, theorists, and artists offer a timely and bracing look at how the increasing expression and acceptance of violence--in all strata of society--has become a defining feature of our times. "Many of us live today with a pervasive sense of unease, worried that our own safety is at risk, or that of our loved ones, or that of people whose bad circumstances appear to us through networked media. Violence feels ever-present. Natasha Lennard and Brad Evans help us to analyze those feelings, talking with a wide range of thinkers in order to gain insight into the worst of what humans do, and challenging us to imagine a world in which violence is no longer a given. Their book is full of surprising insights and intelligent compassion."--Sarah Leonard, co-editor of The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century "In Violence, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard have created, alongside their interview subjects, a kaleidoscopic exploration of the concept of violence, in terrains expected and not, in prose taut and unexpectedly gorgeous. Their philosophical rigor provides the reader with an intellectual arsenal against the violence of the current moment."--Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood "We would be wise to read this collection with a similar eye toward service, and in so doing, open ourselves up to the rare mercy of no longer having to stand on our own."--Alana Massey, author of All The Lives I Want "The range of interviews with leading academics, to filmmakers and artists, is impressive, at once immediate and relevant, but also profoundly philosophical. More essentially, though, the conversations underline the need and suggest ways to resist and organize in a visionary way, in the extraordinary times we live in."--Razia Iqbal, BBC News "Notable contemporary thinkers and creators give their individual perspectives in this compelling look at violence. . . . A provocative volume that challenges humanity to correct its runaway course toward an increasingly violent future by learning from its violent past."--Kirkus Reviews "The purpose of the work is to challenge humanity to create more meaningful solutions when it comes to these kinds of violence--or at least to name violence without inadvertently inciting even more anger. . . . passion roars through every chapter . . . This book delivers on what it promises, which is an achievement. "--Alison Gately, The Los Angeles Review of Books "If you wish to read the intellectualization of violence, Violence is a phenomenal anthology. . . . Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard, the interviewers and the 'authors' of the anthology, have done a remarkable job in bringing together perceptive and intelligent contributors from various fields to scout the reaches of violence. Their piercing questions brought out brilliant responses from the interviewees."--L. Ali Khan, New York Journal of Books "Violence: Humans in Dark Times is an intriguing beginning to a much-needed sustained intellectual and aesthetic response to the horrors of modern times."—Zoe Vorsino
Download or read book Left in Dark Times written by Bernard-Henri Lévy and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unprecedented critique, Bernard-Henri Lévy revisits his political roots, scrutinizes the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those on the horizon, and argues powerfully for a new political and moral vision for our times. Are human rights Western or universal? Does anti-Semitism have a future, and, if so, what will it look like? And how is it that progressives themselves–those who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascism–have now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes: an unthinking loathing of Israel; an obsessive anti-Americanism; an idea of “tolerance” that, in its justification of Islamic fanaticism, for example, could become the “cemetery of democracies”; and an indifference, masked by relativism, to the greatest human tragedies facing the world today? At a time of ideological and political transition in America, Left in Dark Times articulates the threats we all face–in many cases without our even being aware of it–and offers a powerful new vision for progressives everywhere.
Download or read book Liberalism in Dark Times written by Joshua L. Cherniss and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely defense of liberalism that draws vital lessons from its greatest midcentury proponents Today, liberalism faces threats from across the political spectrum. While right-wing populists and leftist purists righteously violate liberal norms, theorists of liberalism seem to have little to say. In Liberalism in Dark Times, Joshua Cherniss issues a rousing defense of the liberal tradition, drawing on a neglected strand of liberal thought. Assaults on liberalism—a political order characterized by limits on political power and respect for individual rights—are nothing new. Early in the twentieth century, democracy was under attack around the world, with one country after another succumbing to dictatorship. While many intellectuals dismissed liberalism as outdated, unrealistic, or unworthy, a handful of writers defended and reinvigorated the liberal ideal, including Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin—each of whom is given a compelling new assessment here. Building on the work of these thinkers, Cherniss urges us to imagine liberalism not as a set of policies but as a temperament or disposition—one marked by openness to complexity, willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, tolerance for difference, and resistance to ruthlessness. In the face of rising political fanaticism, he persuasively argues for the continuing importance of this liberal ethos.
