Thinking without a Banister
This year's Festival is dedicated to
Hannah Arendt (14.10.1906 – 4.12.1975), a German-American political theorist
of Jewish origin, and this October will
mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. So who was - and
indeed who is - Hannah Arendt? Without doubt she was one the greatest political
minds of the Western world. By way of her works – The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition or Vita
Activa (1958), Between Past and
Future (1961), On Revolution
(1963), On Violence (1970) and The Life of the Mind (1978) – she
single-handedly created one of the most influential corpuses on political
thought of the 20th century, which reached far beyond her time.
Arendt’s work was marked and motivated by the terror of the holocaust, which
she escaped by fleeing first to France and then to the United States, where she
was engaged in writing and lecturing at the country’s most prestigious
universities and, until her death in 1975, the New School of Social Research in NYC. In 1961, as the New Yorker
reporter in Israel,
Hannah Arendt covered the Adolf Eichmann trial, and in 1963 published a book
entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report
on the Banality of Evil. This work incited ongoing controversy as to the
‘banality’ of evil and drastically changed the notion of human action, evil,
terror and collective crime, as well as provoked a debate that continues to
this day. As with The Origins of
Totalitarianism, Arendt
relentlessly exposed the structure of institutions and the actions of people
which led to catastrophes such as holocaust. The ever-more pertinent questions
posed in Hannah Arendt's works represent a radical recapitulation and a brand
new establishment of the relationship between the role of political thought and
political experience.
Vlasta
Jalušič
Thinking without a Banister
˝In
November 1972, a conference ‘The Work of Hannah Arendt’
was organized by the Toronto
Society for the Study of Social and Political Thought. Hannah Arendt was
invited to attend the conference as the guest of honor, but replied that she
would prefer to be invited to participate. In the course of numerous exchanges
over the three days of the conference she spontaneously revealed aspects of her
thinking and the style of her thinking in response to direct questions, or
statements, or challenges, as well as in response to the papers read.
Fortunately we arranged to record the discussion with a view to later
publication.˝ (Melvyn A. Hill, in his editor’s introduction to the conference
transcript)
In the context of such discussion we
have decided to revive the genre of ''reading performance'', which over recent
years has become an increasingly common method of presenting dramatic texts in
Slovene theatres. Despite that this composition is not as such dramatic; it is
structured in the form of a dialogue which has the traits of an exciting event,
and also provides us with the possibility to relate to Hannah Arendt as a living
person and in this instance Arendt’s intellectual universe through the
transcript of her contribution to the debate. Thus we have decided to
reconstruct the actual events of November 1972, but using experts on her work
rather than actors. The discussion is divided into four parts entitled Thinking
and Acting, Thoughts on Society and Politics, The American
Constitution as the Ideal Model and Political Thinking without a
Banister. The event will be followed by a discussion by participants.
Rok Vevar
Concept
and adaptation: Vlasta Jalušič; direction:
Rok Vevar; expert collaborator: Aldo Milohnič; readings by: Savina Frangež,
Gorazd Kovačič, Andrej Marković, Maja Pan,
Dušan Rebolj, Miro Samardžija
Organisation and production:
City of Women, Mirovni
inštitut
In collaboration with:
Klub Gromka/AKC Metelkova mesto
