Teaching in the midst of belatedness: The paradox of natality in hannah arendt's educational thought

Educational Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 435-451

  Levinson, Natasha ^a  

^a KENT STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0141991473     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1997.00435.x     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 177. This book will be referred to as HC with page numbers in the text for all subsequent citations. In keeping with my argument about what it means to learn to live in "the gap bet ween past and future, "I have decided not to alter Arendt's use of the generic male (although my need to draw attention to this decision underscores a certain discomfort). My concern is not merely with the integrity of her text, but with my reluctance to rewrite the past in the image of. the present. Eliminating language that makes us uncomfortable does little to help us understand the exclusions and erasures of the past. As a consequence, our motivations to transform contemporary exclusionary practices becomes less and less clear.
2. Frantz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness, "Black Skin, White Masks, (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 112; 122.
3. Gloria Anzaldua, "Hacienda Caras, una entrada, "in Making Face; Making Soul / Hacienda Cams, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), xix.
4. See, for example, Merle Woo, "Letter to Ma, "in This Bridge Called My Back, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981), 146.
5. Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education, "in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 174. This essay will be referred to as CE with page numbers in the text for ail subsequent citations.
6. Arendt's analysis of this emerges most clearly in the section on action in The Human Condition, but it is also central to her inquiry into freedom and her assessment of "The Crisis in Education" in Arendt, Between Past and Future.
7. Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 236-37.
8. See Melissa Orlie, "Forgiving Trespasses, Promising Futures, "in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 341.
9. Herein lies the dichotomy of the pariah and the parvenu that I explore below. The pariah is aware of his/her "outside" status, and is thus in touch with reality, whereas the parvenu is susceptible to the loss of reality that follows from refusing to admit to his/her marginal or outsider status. However, only the conscious pariah in engaged in a project of self-fashioning that attends both to the fact of his or her social identity and to the task of transforming the political meaning of this social positioning. Arendt explores the loss of reality to which the parvenu is susceptible in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, Rahel Varnhagen (1958; reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace [ovanovich, 1974). The last two chapters are particularly illuminating -"Between Pariah and Parvenu" and "One Does Not Escape Jewishness."
10. Arendt "What is Freedom?" in Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 170. This essay will be referred to as WF with page numbers in the text for all subsequent citations.
11. Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness, "109-14.
12. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 236-37.
13. Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness, "116.
14. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 236-37.
15. I am indebted to Melissa Orlie for this idea of "interrupting" cycles of resentment by taking responsibility for "how we display the effects of what we appear to be." She explains, "We cannot altogether change what we are, nor the fact that in the course of living we trespass against others. But we can change the meaning and significance of what we are when we transmute its effects by challenging the patterns of social rule that multiply our trespasses....When we become responsive to others' claims about our effects and when we show a willingness to transpose them, we may disrupt what are predicted to be and redirect the social necessities that flow from our inherited subject positions, "Orlie, "Forgiving Trespasses, "348.
16. Orlie points out the problems with foreclosing identities in "Forgiving Trespasses, Promising Futures, "344. The discussion of resentment (and its connections to the problem of foreclosure and fixity), which threads through my argument, is also indebted to Orlie's essay.
17. See Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, "Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
18. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 242.
19. Arendt, "Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future, "in Arendt, Between Past and Future. 10.
20. Orlie, "Forgiving Trespasses, "344.
21. In The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), Seyla Benhabib traces the development of Arendt's thinking about the "fatefulness" of Jewish identity in the course of her study of the life of Rahel Varnhagen. See Seyla Benhabib, "The Pariah and Her Shadow: Arendt's Biography of Rahel Varnhagen, "1-34.
22. My discussion of the social pariah, the parvenu and the conscious pariah is indebted to Melissa Orlie's description of their configuration within contemporary conceptions of identity politics. See Orlie, "Forgiving Trespasses, "345-46.
23. Anzaldua, "Hacienda Caras, una entrade, "xx.
24. Bhabha, "'Race, ' Time and the Revision of Modernity, "in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 238.
25. Bhabha "How Newness Enters the World, "in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 218.
26. See Arendt, "Preface, "10-14, in particular.
27. Bhabha, "Race, Time and the Revision of Modernity, "251-53.
28. Arendt, "Preface, "13.
29. Arendt, "What is Authority?" in Arendt, Between Past and Future, 94.
30. These last two questions are raised by Orlie, "Forgiving Trespasses, "343-45.
31. Arendt, "Preface, "13.
32. Arendt, "Preface, "13.