Unlearning with Hannah Arendt

After observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt formulated her controversial concept of the 'banality of evil' and asked the question: how can seemingly normal people carry out genocidal acts? She found her answer by focusing on the machinery of Nazi genocide and the organizational capacity of the victims: the Jewish Councils drawing up lists for deportation. The latter proved hugely controversial when the book was first published in serial form in the New Yorker. Anchoring its discussion in the themes of laughter, translation, forgiveness, and dramatization, this book explores how the iconic political theorist 'unlearned' trends and patterns to establish her own theoretical praxis.

About the Author :
Marie Luise Knott is a journalist, translator, and author living in Berlin. She is the founder of the German edition of Le Monde diplomatique and was its editor-in-chief for eleven years. She has written numerous essays on art and literature, as well as two important studies of Hannah Arendt. David Dollenmayer is an emeritus professor of German at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His translations include works by Bertolt Brecht, Elias and Veza Canetti, Michael Kleeberg, and Hansjorg Schertenleib. He is the recipient of the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize (for Moses Rosenkranz's Childhood) and the 2010 Translation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York (for Michael Kohlmeier's Idyll with Drowning Dog).

Review :
Reading it is like drinking a very challenging espresso on an empty stomach; it delivers a kick out of all proportion to its size... In this new-old era of religious strife, those words, like many others of Arendt's, have lost none of their potency... Powerful Knott presents an uncommonly intimate look at [Arendt's] intellectual processes. Readers...who share Knott's reverence for Arendt will luxuriate in this selection Marie Luise Knott's essays enable the reader to benefit from Arendt, even where you are actually not willing to follow her. It doesn't show her ways of thinking as a fixation of certainties but as a process to dissolve certainties and to systematically forget them It is hard to think of any other book on Arendt that gives out half as much light, not to mention joy A knowledgeable little book Charmingly written, carefully translated, and easy for ordinary readers A really... illuminating essay Highly readable Unlearning with Hannah Arendt takes seriously but not solemnly Arendt's theme of the broken tradition of Western philosophic and political thought. This "unlearning" is actually an essay in learning to think for oneself amidst the shards of outworn concepts