In the days following the Trump election, there was a markedly renewed interest in Hannah Arendt’s work, in particular Origins of Totalitarianism(1951). The book briefly sold out on Amazon, and the well-known Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder opened his ‘how-to’ guide to resisting tyranny with a quotation from it. In Origins, Arendt argues that totalitarianism and fascism axiomatically arrange facts to offer a “total explanation” (470-71) of the world. These political systems thus work at the level of perception. But they do not use falsity to hide a deeper truth; rather, by changing what appears true they produce new realities. What is real, according to Arendt, is what appears (The Life of the Mind, 1978). The question of perception and appearance point to the important role that the aesthetic plays in Arendt’s political philosophy, which conceives of the world as a stage where individuals are seen, heard, and disclose their individuality. Aesthetics refers to the forms of sensory perception—what can be felt, spoken, heard, and perceived—that mediate our engagement in the world, and thus politics. Detaining individuals in gulags or concentration camps, for instance, is not only a form of imprisonment, it prevents individuals from appearing and acting in the common world and thus deprives them of the right to being.At the same time, Arendt argues that aesthetic objects, such as the work of art, are capable of providing a sense of durability and endurance. Literature, art, and drama can thus foster forms of consciousness that resist the crises of perception brought on by extreme political movements.

Philosophical scholarship has demonstrated the importance of Arendt’s writing on aesthetic judgement and the senses to her political philosophy (Sjöholm 2015, Fry 2001), but this work has not explored the consequences of her thinking for literary or visual criticism. In turn, literary criticism has engaged with her political philosophy to think about the relation between literature and political concepts, like human rights (Stonebridge 2011, 2018) and “multidirectional” approaches to the Holocaust and colonialism (Rothberg 2009). Scholarship has focused attention on Arendt’s affinities with other writers like Walter Benjamin and Mary McCarthy (Nelson 2017) and her writings on Rilke, Kafka, and Goethe. Yet, literary criticism has largely left aside a consideration of Arendt’s thinking on aesthetics. This panel seeks to address this gap by exploring how Arendt’s work affords crucial concepts for understanding the role literature, art, and criticism can play in times of political crisis.

Charlie Barrett’s paper sets the framework for the panel by exploring how the aesthetic dimensions of Arendt’s thinking shaped her political philosophy, and the consequences of this for the understanding the relationship between truth and meaning—a distinction that has come under renewed pressure from contemporary political discourses. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt writes that, “the need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same” (15). The tension between these two things comes down to the way the mind cannot help but seek out answers to ultimate questions, such as the existence of God, that it does not have the knowledge to answer, and thus ascribes to this search for meaning the appearance of truth. The paper thus provides a way of thinking through the conundrum posed by ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ that does not simply dismiss such things as irrational, but rather as symptoms of the privileging of meaning over truth. In turn, Barrett proposes a revitalized literary sensibility to the aesthetic, as a way of exploring how the truth can be meaningless and what is meaningful can be false.

Zoë Roth’s paper asks how a formalist model of literary criticism—that is, one that focuses on aesthetic autonomy—may offer an alternative to ideological approaches, which risk reinforcing political languages of urgency and crisis. The aesthetic constructs a durable space outside the realm of politics, and literature’s figurative, allegorical mode stands in stark contrast to the way movements like fascism and totalitarianism make language literal. Rather than turning to literature to illustrate this argument, however, Roth reads Arendt’s essay “On Humanity in Dark Times” for aesthetic form. If art is a “form of thought” (Sjöholm 2015) for Arendt, Roth’s paper argues that her thought is a form of art whose value lies in its ability to exceed political instrumentalization. As such, she explores the potentials for a formalist approach to political discourse.

Finally, Debarati Sanyal’s paper rounds out the panel by reading literary and visual texts through the Arendtian frame for political existence in terms of appearance and recognition. Sanyal argues that the new regime of surveillance set up to prevent refugees from Africa entering Europe compels a reconsideration of what Arendt called “the right to action and speech” in a common world. Cameras, motion detectors, and patrols create a zone of forced visibility, in which surviving—sometimes through concerted collective action—means to remain undetectable, to exercise one’s right to invisibility. Through an exploration of two works dealing this border region, a narrative by Marie NDiaye in Trois Femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women, 2011) and a documentary by Hélène Crouzillat and Laetitia Tura titled Les Messagers (The Messengers, 2014), her paper probes how we might envision a politics organized around seizing the right to disappear rather than appear.

Together, these papers explore the specific contribution aesthetic criticism can make to contemporary political debates, such as the mass displacement of refugees, crises of political perception, and ‘alternative facts.’ In doing so, the panel asserts the centrality of art, literature, and criticism in an age of political crisis.