vrijdag 10 juni 2022

Samantha Rose Hill

(For once this is a "google translate" version of my previous blogpost)

Collateral delight.
That makes me incredibly happy.
Let me explain.
Hannah Arendt is not my philosopher.
You can check it, this blog has a search engine.
Usually when I see a quote by Hannah Arendt, I let it pass. Sometimes I don't.

Samantha Rose Hill wrote a book on Hannah Arendt and quotes her on twitter.

But didn't I write something about that?
Usually I don't use the search engine, nothing is more of an obstruction to the imagination than the realization that one is repeating oneself.  Sometimes I do.

Indeed I did.

"Hannah Arendt stelt dat al haar geschriften slechts één beweegreden hebben: iets te begrijpen. Ze verzuimt echter de vage term 'begrijpen' te definiëren. Begrijpen betekent eigenlijk zoveel als "in bezit nemen" (anders zou het niet zo belangrijk zijn)."
Imre Kertesz, "ik, de ander".

I had an uncontrollable urge to answer that to Samantha Rose Hill, so I went looking for the English source of the quote.
In vain!
Some research taught me that "I, the other" in original was  "Valaki más: A változás krónikája" and that the work had not yet been translated into English.
What a gap for the English-speaking Hannah Arendt enthusiasts.

"Hannah Arendt argues that all her writings only have one motive; to understand something. However, she fails to define the vague term "understanding". To understand actually means as much as "to take possession" (otherwise it wouldn't be so important).
Imre Kertesz.

That sheds a completely different light on the quote.
I want to understand totalitarianism.
I want to take possession of totalitarianism, I want to make it mine.

That impresses.
Not because I say so, but because Imre Kertesz, survivor of Auschwitz, says so.

There was only one detail left for me: looking up Kertesz's quote.
Contrary to the scientific way of working, I neglected to add a reference. For the same money, I could have just made up the quote and attributed it to Imre Kertesz to give it more weight. It's a trick that, knowing myself, wouldn't surprise me.
So I had to find the quote.
And the library was closed.
Maybe I could find it on the internet.
And then I stumbled upon the Noble lecture by Imre Kertesz.

"Here the notion that the world is an objective reality existing independently of us was an axiomatic philosophical truth. Whereas I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded – and which I had to take back from “History”, this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone, and I had to manage it accordingly."
Collateral delight.
But it didn't get me any further.

I had to reread the book. Valaki más: A változás krónikája.
Google translate.
"Someone else, the chronicle of change."
Instant collateral delight.
What a lame translation is "I, the other"?
But the library was closed.

In the meantime, final exam with Miss Arendt (with special thanks to Samantha Rose Hill)

Write an essay on one of the following topics.
I definitely would pick six: "Explain why intellectuals can be attracted by a totalitarian ideology?"
Because they are intellectuals!
Sorry , I didn't notice (Use Milosz).

"A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt. In the same way, the growing influence of the doctrine on my way of thinking came up against the resistance of my whole nature."
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind.

And then I had my book.


Page  17
"Only with Moritz Schlick is it worth showing solidarity: he thought and was shot for that reason - a fitting fate for a philosopher"
Collateral delight.

Page 25
"I had never been a member of the opposition movement, because my dislike of movements was possibly even greater then my dislike of the system."
Collateral delight.

Page 95






10.
Discuss:
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exist."
(Use Imre Kertesz)

 


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