Hannah Arendt, On Truth and Lying in Politics

Lecture and discussion with Prof. Susanne Lüdemann (Munich/Rutgers Univ.)

Hannah Arendt (1906 –1975) was a German-born American political theorist. She escaped Europe during the Holocaust, becoming an American citizen. Her works offer provocative reflections on the conditions of possibility for political experience, an experience that defines the human condition. Her work is deeply concerned with the questions of nationhood, totalitarianism, the status of refugees and stateless persons, and the political sphere as an autonomous domain of human practice.

Susannne Lüdemann is the Charlotte M. Craig Distinguished Visiting Professor of German at Rutgers University and is professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. After having received her Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg (Germany), she held research and teaching positions at Aarhus University (Denmark), at the Freie Universität Berlin, at the University of Konstanz, and at the University of Chicago. Her books include: Politics of Deconstruction. A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida (2014); Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking Through Particulars in Literature, Philosophy, and Law (2015), co-edited with Michèle Lowrie; Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (co-authored with A. Koschorke, T. Frank, E. Matala, 2007); Metaphern der Gesellschaft. Studien zum soziologischen und politischen Imaginären (2004); Mythos und Selbstdarstellung. Zur Poetik der Psychoanalyse (1994). Susanne Lüdemann works at the intersection of modern literature, continental philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis. Her current research project is a critical edition of Hannah Arendts’s unpublished lectures on Immanuel Kant. She is also preparing a monograph on Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Judgment in Modernity. The seminar will begin with a short presentation by Dr. Lüdemann, after which we will discuss the following texts by Hannah Arendt:

• “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in: Crises of the Republic (1972), pp. 1-47 https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/Arendt_Hannah_Crises_of_the_Republic.pdf
• “Truth and Politics”, The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1967, https://idanlandau.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/arendt-truth-and-politics.pdf