But really, do I have to wade through all the rest of it? On Violence was 35 pages of blah blah blah, followed by 20 pages of awesomeness, followed by another 50 pages of blah blah blah. On Revolution is better so far; it’s only taken me 25 pages to get to this:
And this relatively new experience, new to those at any rate who made it, was at the same time the experience of man’s faculty to begin something new. These two things together – a new experience which revealed man’s capacity for novelty – are at the root of the enormous pathos which we find in both the American and the French Revolutions, this ever-repeated insistence that nothing comparable in grandeur and significance had ever happened in the whole recorded history of mankind, and which, if we had to account for it in terms of successful reclamation of civil rights, would sound entirely out of place.
Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution. This means of course that revolutions are more than successful insurrections and that we are not justified in calling every coup d’etat a revolution or even in detecting one in each civil war.
Maybe I should have finished this book before I started mouthing off about revolutions?
Anyway, one of the most useful things I learned in a class with J.D. McClatchy is that the first bit of almost any poem starts out with “throat clearing”. Good poets get that way by becoming self-aware enough to identify this throat clearing and merciless enough to slash it off the page. Apparently neither Arendt nor her editor understood this concept?
2 comments:
Well, at least I warned you that the first half of On Violence was unuseful... (:
I like the paragraphs you chose. In addition to just theorizing about revolutions, I think she's also circling around her idea of the condition of natality, which, for her is about one half of what makes humans human. (The other half is the condition of plurality, the idea that humans can't experience meaningfulness in the singular.)
(I'm reading Bulgakov's White Guards right now, and re-reading his Memoirs of a Dead Man - it is causing me to think about revolution also.)
As for the throat-clearing: in Arendt's defense, - without in any way excusing the first half of On Violence - she didn't think of herself as a political thinker, and she didn't feel obliged to give ideas to people in the way someone writing for students of politics might want it. In fact I think at times she deliberately avoided that. Which is part of why she digresses constantly about literature, current events (about which she is more than sometimes wrong), etc.
In which book do I read about all of this natality/plurality business?
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