This bold and persuasive study rereads the works of Hannah Arendt to recuperate her relevance to contemporary politics and to show that her deepest concerns are oriented by her ontology. Kimberley Curtis interprets Arendt's earlier work through the lenses of The Life of the Mind, elucidating what Curtis calls an "aesthetic sensibility of tragic pleasure" as a way out of the enclave politics of late modernity.Arguing that oblivion and radical forgetfulness of others are among the most ethically troubling features of our political landscape, Curtis shows that Arendt's aesthetic account of politics offers us an idiom in which to name and resist the depravations and dangers of our political condition. Curtis also elucidates Arendt's debt to phenomenology and argues that our sense of reality is born through highly charged sensuous provocation and mutual responsiveness. Arendt's innovation is to recognize that this countenancing of others is an aesthetic experience that creates the political world.Curtis plumbs the relevance of this work in current issues such as gated communities for the privileged and prisons for the disenfranchised, and in the extraordinary relationship between a black civil rights leader and a Ku Klux Klan officer. Our Sense of the Real is a poetic invocation of Arendt's politics, at once lively, passionate, and crucial.

About the Author

Kimberley Curtis is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Political Science and Women's Studies at Duke University.

Reviews

Curtis is particularly good in her analysis of Arendt's writing on the relation between thinking and plurality; on the duality of the thinking self in its encounter both with itself and with the material world.

-- Norma Claire Moruzzi, University of Illinois at Chicago * International Studies in Philosophy *

Curtis's book is not easy reading, but the argument is fascinating and very much in the spirit of Arendt's thinking.

* Ethics *

In this excellent study, Curtis tries to reconcile the 'consensual-communicative' and 'agonistic-performative' interpretations of Arendt while exploring the ethical side of her theory. Curtis argues that our foremost moral duty, for Arendt, is to recognize and preserve 'plurality.'

* Choice *



Book Information
ISBN 9780801486401
Author Kimberley Curtis
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 16mm