Seeing like a pariah? Note sulla (ri)appropriazione contemporanea del pensiero politico di Hannah Arendt

Abstract

It seems that there will be no end to the interpretation and discussion of Arendt’s political thought as well as of her intellectual stance and legacy. More strikingly, it seems that her diagnoses continue to be precious for dealing with the contemporary crisis of the modern project and categories. While new scholarship, together with new editions and translations of her writings, continue to appear regularly providing new insights into her intellectual constellations, one of the reasons of the persistent relevance of Arendt’s thought seems to be found in her present-focused and intensely realistic and critical style of thinking. In this light, this paper argues that crucial for understanding her thought’s continuing relevance is the role, value and responsibility she assigns to the figure of the conscious pariah (as she proudly was) and thus to the ‘resistant’ point of view the pariah expresses and offers against the totalizing and conformist view of the politics of exclusion.