Ian Storey
Mary McCarthy was only half teasing when, after reading Hannah Arendt’s manuscript of a 1968 piece on Walter Benjamin for The New Yorker,1 she wrote, “Do I need to warn you that what you say about German Jews and Jewishness, even though backed up by the sacred authority of Kafka, will probably cause another storm?”2 On the one hand, Kafka’s place in the German-Jewish canon was not just unimpeachable but so defining of an era and a despair that his name carried a kind of sanctity in desolation, a final saint not just to the death of saints but also to the lost Jewish world of Old Europe. On the other hand, the invocation of one martyr of the lost world in eulogizing another was far from stable territory as the American diaspora wrestled with what it had been and what it was to become. McCarthy and Arendt were painfully aware that the historical memory of Jews in those darkest times had become intensely fraught territory. The cinders were still hot from the furor around Arendt’s reporting on Eichmann.
But there is no extricating the centrality of Kafka, not just to Arendt’s thinking on Benjamin and her thinking in general but to that of an entire intellectual generation of the German-Jewish diaspora: her constructed dialogue between two of that generation’s greatest martyrs reflects an ingrained sensibility that is reflected throughout her corpus. While her longform writing is littered with literary references from Homer to Proust to Faulkner, it is not an exaggeration to say that, in a rigorous cataloging, Kafka holds pride of place as the most consistently and vocally lauded. She had a penchant to name him whenever superlatives were called for: with Bertolt Brecht as “the greatest poets of the postwar period,”3 with Proust as among “the greatest masters of our time,”4 or with Broch, Joyce, and Proust as the benchmarks of “relevance” by which any contemporary poet could be measured. Her elaborate, intricate pictures of Kafka’s poetics bear signs of the extraordinary degree to which her reading of Kafka suffused and inflected the larger architecture of her philosophy at nearly every point. An early piece for Partisan Review, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation”—one of her first as she established her reputation in her new country—already telegraphed concepts of truth, bureaucracy, rights, and the position of critical judgment that would become hallmarks of her thought in the coming decades.
The understatedly immense importance of Kafka to Arendt’s thought leaves two central questions for the reader: how Kafka influenced and drove Arendt’s thought, and the ways in which Arendt used Kafka’s writing to express her thinking. The former is a difficult avenue to follow, because Arendt read Kafka early in her life and we have little documentation of her engagement with his work during this period. The latter, though, leaves a trail all the way through her later writings and provides some access at least to that question of influence by reflection. Read in this way, we see in Arendt’s engagement with Kafka a distinctive trajectory, one in which the two questions of Kafka’s influence can be seen as a coevolving dialogue around the construction of a problem found nowhere so poignantly to Arendt’s mind than in Kafka, along with a kind of solution arising out of the same oeuvre. First in Kafka’s The Castle and The Trial, and then in his letters and his own status as the paradigmatic pariah Jew, there is a multifaceted problem of where the modern creation of bureaucracy and the alienated social leaves the thinking subject.
Arendt’s early writings on Kafka center on three figures—the two “K”s and Kafka himself—each of which opens her path to her late encounters with Kafka. Then, much later in her own writing, the unnamed protagonist of “HE” begins to unfold a kind of answer as well, just as Arendt herself was bringing the strands of her thinking on thinking and judgment to a head. In “HE,” Arendt finds a kind of solution posited in Kafka to the modern labyrinth of his own construction, and a way to finally and fully articulate the role of thinking in her larger architecture of action.
Truth and Bureaucracy: The Two Ks
“Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew” is a kind of prophetic text in its portrayal of a prophetic subject. Published in its first iteration while the war in Europe still raged, the piece not only presages what would become a set of prevalent themes in the postwar intellectual world but also weaves together in striking detail a set of interrelated critiques of the dominance of modern bureaucracy that would be ongoing concerns for much of the core years of Arendt’s writing career. There was no shortage of critiques of bureaucracy in the postwar détente between the anti-Stalinist Left and what existed of the anti-McCarthyist Right, but Arendt’s early intervention carries a level of philosophical complexity in its approach to the subject that few would match. Articulated predominantly through Kafka’s two Ks, the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle who share a moniker, Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s driving sensibility brings together her fears of the automatism of the bureaucrat, the role of necessity in truth claims, and the relationship of human rights to the meaning-making process that builds an enduring human world. Those themes, in turn, would play out to their fullness in her later work on postwar humanitarianism, the trial of Eichmann, the American decision-making apparatus of the Vietnam conflict, and her broader philosophical investments in the concept of judgmen t.
If Arendt’s densely knotted set of concerns in “Franz Kafka” could be untied into a single driving trope, it would be the deification of the bureaucratic world. While the piece dwells on the rise of bureaucracy in pre-totalitarian Europe, its echoes sound not just in Germany and the USSR but in the changing character of the American government as well. The theological language Arendt employs, centered on the idea of deification, is unique within Arendt’s writings on bureaucracy: her reading of the two Ks presents a kind of political theology in miniature. For Arendt,
Kafka really does describe a society that considers itself the representative of God on earth, and he describes men who look upon the laws of society as though they were divine laws that cannot be altered by the will of men. The evil of the world in which Kafka’s protagonists are caught is precisely the world’s deification, its pretense of representing a divine necessity.5
Arendt builds from Kafka’s bureaucracy the structure of a new and dangerous kind of “secret theology and . . . deep faith of bureaucrats to be a faith in necessity as such” in which the theology of the bureaucratic rule is sustained by a faith in the absolute necessity of its continuation, and the functionary “himself is more than just a natural being, into a tool of active destruction.”6
Against this figure of ensnared functionary, Arendt articulates two positions of the outsider and his encounter with bureaucracy, one “outside the power relations governing the world around him”7 and one definitively inside, a literal prisoner of the bureaucratic process itself. Each of the Ks is a kind of displaced subject, alienated from the normal course of a human life by the bureaucracy’s intercession into the deepest crannies of even the social world of the subject. Both Ks occupy a position that demonstrates, through counterposition, the essential inhumanity of the bureaucratic instrument.
With a self-effacing nod toward the “small library of interpretations of Der Prozess,”8 Arendt looks to The Trial to delve specifically into the aspect of necessity that transitions the simple system of rules and processes from which bureaucracy is born into an auto-theology, the self-deification of the functionary. Later, in her reading of America, Arendt would note that this theology itself already entails the alienation of the living, breathing bureaucrat from himself: “Either he is a human being, subject to the fallibility of human perception and cognition, or he . . . needs to at least pretend to command a sort of superhuman perfection as part of his position . . . they act on the assumption of superhuman omnicompetence.”9
The Trial, though, gives us the wider view of the machine-character generated by this double alienation of the bureaucrat, the creation of a machine built for death out of that sanctification of the bureaucrat’s role. At the center of this political theology is the invention of a specific form of power “caused by the way in which human beings admire necessity,”10 a power that takes as its ultimate end the elevation of rules to the level of the sacred. Law, taken to its fulfillment as the sole and sacred provider of the order of necessity, becomes the tool of its own elimination in the hands of those who wield it through mere interpretation:
The domination of bureaucracy implied that the interpretation of the law became an instrument of lawlessness, while the chronic inaction of the interpreters was compensated by a senseless automatism among the lower echelons of the bureaucratic hierarchy.11
As much as Arendt is interested in the peculiarly simple construction Kafka presents of the sacralized bureaucracy, though, perhaps still more interesting to her is K’s failure, despite his best efforts, to escape the machine that has trapped him. It is here that Arendt seems to draw her most important lesson for understanding the terrible power of bureaucratic rule, and it is one of her most unique insights into the much-interpreted story. The strange, alienated world of bureaucracy did not present itself to K, someone from its outside, as anything “real”; K mistakes the fact that it is human-made for mere contingency, failing to understand that eliminating contingency was precisely the heart of bureaucracy’s deification. In K’s attempt to “dismiss the ‘unfamiliar thoughts’ as ‘unreal things’ that did not really concern him,” Arendt locates the fatal error in the fact that the persistence of bureaucracy lies in its ability to render irrelevant its own unreality. The power of bureaucracy is precisely the translation of the contingent and unreal into the necessary and the sacred, and that power cannot be dismissed with a feeble reference to its original contingency. It is difficult to leave this reading of Der Prozess without the lingering suspicion that it is a less-than-subtle admonishment to the American anti-totalitarian Left and to those who seemed to think that merely pointing out the lies that sustained the totalitarian projects would be sufficient to bring them down, or at least ward off their progress.12
The Castle adds to Arendt’s tableau of bureaucratic machine and its two alienated figures—the bureaucrat who kills and the prisoner who is killed—a third figure, so entirely detached from the bureaucratic world that he appears almost as a kind of pure thing, a true human being who, in his impossible innocence, unravels the tableau altogether. The second K is the traveler who finds himself in a new land where the oligarchy of the Castle rules everyday life absolutely, and he is a curious figure of resistance precisely because he does not conform to the standing supposition in the political thought of the Mosaic traditions that to resist is to act, to engage in confrontation. His effect on the bureaucratic rule of the town is simply and entirely a result of his existence as himself, his pre sence as one who simultaneously does not belong to the structure and yet is demonstrably an outside presence and vision in everyday life: “All that K. does achieve he achieves unintentionally. Simply through his attitude and his evaluation of the things going on around him, he manages to open the eyes of the villagers.”13 Everything about his figure is summarized in his occupation, not far in Arendt’s eyes from that of Kafka himself. K is the surveyor, one who sees and notes, one whose very occupation is to describe that which is, without resorting to that which ought or must be.
Arendt is hardly the only thinker to posit the resistive potential of the outsider’s gaze, but she is particularly interested in the prosaic nature of K, his everydayness, the way in which, by simply being a living, working human, K’s sheer ineluctable presence begins the unraveling of the power structure of the Castle’s bureaucracy. The importance of K to the Arendt’s narrative, his intersection with the other, doomed K, is the relationship of strangeness K sustains to bureaucratic rule. While both the Castle’s law and Der Prozess’s court function by sustaining the self-evidence of the bureaucratic rule, The Castle’s K sustains his own innocence of the bureaucratic process even while in its grasp. In that sense, Arendt’s reading of the two Ks can be read as the political contrast between two kinds of innocence: The Trial’s K, who in his bewilderment mistakes the strangeness of bureaucratic rule as something that is simply unreal, and is killed for his mistake, and The Castle’s K, who does question the reality of bureaucratic law but sees its necessity and the necessity of submitting to it.14
Kafka the Jew
Even the story of the second K, though, only appears as fully emancipatory to Arendt if it is falsely bracketed from the specific social and religious context in which it truly appears: The Castle, according to Arendt, is “the one novel in which Kafka discusses the Jewish problem” and K is the only “hero” who “is plainly a Jew”; “what characterizes him as such is not any typically Jewish trait, but the fact that he is involved in situations and perplexities distinctive of Jewish life.”15 Set against the darkness that had enveloped Europe, Arendt translates K from a figure of hope to a figure of the particular despair of the “modern age.” The sociopolitical place of the “man of good will,” the K who “opened the eyes of the villagers” through his insistence on struggling quietly to “obtain the few basic things which society owes to men,”16 cannot be understood as a strictly and deliberately abstracted model of human selfhood and activity, as she seemed in “Franz Kafka” to suggest.
The “man of good will” was the “last and most recent typification of the pariah,”17 and while he may once have been one of the few models of the pariah available to that paradigmatic pariah class, the Jews of Old Europe, Arendt warned that that was no longer the case. While it could once be said that “the life of the pariah, though shorn of political significance, was by no means senseless,” “today it is,” now that “all the old escape mechanisms have broken down.”18 “Branded” as K “with the . . . mark” of the pariah, he is still an outlaw, and “today the truth has come home: there is no protection in heaven or earth against bare murder.”19 The “‘senseless freedom’ of the individual,” which once could provide not just a modicum of personal solace but also some hope of revealing the lie at the heart of the bureaucratic machine, now merely “paves the way for the senseless suffering of his entire people.”20 In her embrace of Kafka’s Zionism, Arendt repositions the successful aloofness of the “man of good will” as an unsuccessful flight now “impossible within the framework of contemporary society.”21
Perhaps even more so than his own fictional character, Kafka was himself the man of good will, for Arendt, and in the world of modern political murder that figure of good will had become something quite different. Once an avatar of a peculiar kind of freedom, Kafka as the Jewish pariah—along with Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus, and an entire generation of Jewish “men of letters”—became what a man with his extraordinary gift could not help but become, a pariah figure turned prophet of collapse, an angel of history. In the modern world, which had revealed the terminal blow that bare murder as a political tool had struck against the possibility of merely living as pariah, it was inevitable that Kafka with his K would simultaneously be one of those from “a ‘pariah people’” who is “most clearly appreciated by those who have had practical experience of just how ambiguous is the freedom which emancipation has ensured.”22
The profound ambiguity of the pariah’s empty freedom plays out in how Arendt describes Kafka’s position, trapped as he was in the bourgeois “culture of Jewish letters.”23 To position him as this kind of prophet was to make of him not a new holy figure of redemption but a representative figure of a collapsed subject-position; she writes, quoting Benjamin and applying it to the writer himself, that “one is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream.”24 Once a figure who neither could nor wanted to reconcile himself to the political system’s refusal to acknowledge the basic rights of his humanness, now the man of good will struggled equally with the Jewishness he could neither escape nor fully desire to escape, and a Jewish s ocial world that would neither let him go nor face up to the truth he demanded.
The failure of Kafka as the man of good will was a failure that the man himself explored and foretold, with perhaps still more clarity than Benjamin: trapped in a world that had evacuated the meaningfulness of his position of the outside, Kafka found himself “reaching down to the sea bottom of the past” of the Jewish tradition with “this peculiar duality of wanting to preserve and wanting to destroy.”25 In Arendt’s narrative of the Jewish prewar moment, Kafka faces a world in which he must belong to the Zionists, yet at the same moment, he rejects their model of belonging; he writes knowing that his very critiques of Jewish middle-class society will become part of the illusory bulwark that sustains their faith such that they can hold on to their impossible position. The already unworldly place of the pariah had in a sense become terminally severed from its last tethers to the world in which they belong: there is no return to a belonging that had previously been promised. The guaranteed belonging of membership in the Chosen People, even (or perhaps especially) changed as it was by the uncertain process of assimilation, had been rejected on principle. Yet the cultural cache of that rejection for the German-Jewish bourgeoisie, which delighted in the pariah’s iconoclasm, and the refusal of the social world to countenance any other place for the pariah to exist as a Jew left the man of good will waffling between ironic and tragic stances toward the only belonging that would be granted him. Despite the appeal of this abstraction, nowhere is this more evident than in Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s (and Benjamin’s and Kraus’s) ambivalent relationship to his own Jewishness:
What was decisive was that these men did not wish to “return” either to the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do so . . . because all traditions and cultures as well as all “belonging” had become equally questionable to them. This is what they felt was wrong with the “return” to the Jewish fold as proposed by Zionists; they could all have said what Kafka once said about being a member of the Jewish people: “. . . my people, provided that I have one.”26
If the problem, for Kafka, “whose outlook on these matters” Arendt says “was more realistic than that of any of his contemporaries,” was that those “intellectual nourish[ed]” by “the Judaism of the fathers” had “their hind legs . . . still stuck” there “and with the forelegs they found no new ground,”27 the pariah who refused the Judaism of the past had neither that historical ground nor a new ground that the pariah could see was missing: “They fought against Jewish society because it would not permit them to live in the world as it happened to be, without illusions,”28 but the commitment to living in truth without illusions left them not with freedom, but with groundlessness. All that remains for the pariah like Kafka the Jew is the truth, and that truth, a truth that he saw Jewish society as denying still more vehemently than gentile society, could not set him free from a modern world that had no intention of letting him go, except in death.29
In spite of this collapse of the resistive potential of the pariah-subject in the face of totalitarianism, Arendt does leave the door open for future possibilities. In her reading of Description of a Fight, Arendt notes, “For Kafka only those things are real whose strength is not impaired but confirmed by thinking . . . thinking is the new weapon—the only one with which, in Kafka’s opinion, the pariah is endowed at birth in his vital struggle against society.”30 The legacy of the prewar models of pariah lay in the innate capacity for “the use of this contemplative faculty as an instrument of self-preservation,”31 and while it would take until the end of Arendt’s writing life to return to the surface, it is the pariah’s thinking as a capacity and as an activity that would serve as the template for Arendt’s model of self-positioning that saves for every human a sacrosanct place in the tumultuous sweep of history.
Standpoints of Judgment
When Arendt finally turned in Part I of The Life of the Mind, Thinking, to her description of the nature of the thinking subject, its powers, and its resistances, it is perhaps unsurprising that she returned to her reading of Kafka in Between Past and Future to describe the place the subject carves out for herself in the flow of history. Kafka’s parable “HE” provides Arendt with the perfect model of the nunc stans, the “standing now” that the subject occupies when she surveys her world and positions herself in the stream of time between her no-longer and her not-yet. Her extended reading of “HE,” reprising and elaborating on her depiction in the introduction to Between Past and Future, is concerned with “the time sensation of the thinking ego . . . our ‘inner state’” when “mental activities recoiling characteristically on themselves,” and “the no-longer of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead”: “a battleground” made literal by Kafka “where the forces of the past and future clash with each other.”32
The militant metaphor of the battleground is important for Arendt, because “this in-between, and what he calls the present” is defined by its struggle, the “long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward.”33 There is more than a tinge of German and French existentialism in Arendt’s attachment here to describing an “exhausting” fight, a “time-pressed, time-tossed existence”34 in which “that past and future . . . manifest[ed] themselves as pure entities,”35 a struggle that leaves the fighter to “[dream] of the unguarded moment when time will have exhausted its force . . . long enough to give ‘him’ the chance of jumping out of the fighting line to be promoted to the position of umpire, the spectator and judge outside the game of life.”36 Thought appears here as the crucial activity through which we “defend [our] presence” against “time itself” by lingering on “what has already disappeared or has not yet appeared,” because “it is only because ‘he’ thinks, and therefore is no longer carried along by the continuity of everyday life in a world of appearances, that past and future manifest themselves as pure entities, so that ‘he’ can become aware of a no-longer that pushes him forward and a not-yet that drives him back.”37
For Arendtians, this moment of jumping out of the line is a particularly fascinating one because it brings to a head and into dialogue with Kafka another old line of her thought, only hinted at in her earlier writings on Kafka and bureaucracy, but fully illuminated in Eichmann in Jerusalem and her lectures on Kant: the problem of judgment. Here, at last, Arendt provides some account of the conditions under which the subject, situated in “the gap between past and future [that] opens only in reflection” can actually attain that elusive position of the spectator that she had so long held out but that seemed so at odds with her lionization of action and the stage of appearance. In Kafka, that “‘position of umpire’ . . . the seat of Pythagoras’s spectators, who are . . . intent only on the spectacle itself,” “who can find out its meaning and judge the performance,”38 appears as a movement in a kind of “parallelogram of forces.”39
In outlining this temporal geometry of the judging subject, Arendt invests in the figure of the fighter her fullest account of the importance of the role of the judging subject. Contemporary readers have been struck and bemused by how at odds with her account of action this seemingly detached and inert figure of the spectator appears to be, but Arendt suggests that, on the contrary, that is precisely “the trouble with Kafka’s metaphor”: far from being “a passive object that is inserted into the stream” of action and history, the spectator is and must be its own particular kind of “fighter who defends his own presence” at the intersection of historicity and futurity by prying open the nunc stans through reflection. It is only “thanks to the insertion of a fighting presence” that the no-longer and not-yet do not appear as a simple linear flow of time in which the subject is caught, and crucially, “thought would no longer have to be situated beyond and above the world and human time.”40
Embedded in the field formed by the arrows of the past and the future, the activity of thought does not step out of time and experience to become a spectator, but remains within it like the “quiet in the center of a storm which, though totally unlike the storm, still belongs to it.”41 The metaphor of movement within the field of time evokes her description in her Kant lectures of visiting the material standpoints of others to expand the visual range of the judging subject: it is precisely in the motion along this thinking line between past and future, not in the distance as such that characterizes classical models of thinking as detachment from the world, that we become “sufficiently removed from past and future to be relied on to find out their meaning, to assume the position . . . of arbiter and judge over the manifold, never-ending affairs of human existence in the world.”42 Arendt’s is an embedded concept of thought, one that, even as the mind wraps itself around itself, still remains constantly positioned in the field from which it takes its movement.
Conclusion
There is no more succinct way to characterize the importance of Kafka to Arendt than in her description of his poetics. For Arendt, Kafka’s style itself is vitally important, a “technique” that serves the function of simultaneously displaying, dismantling, and evoking in the reader a specific process of uptake. Arendt is not content to simply describe Kafka as a conventional author of social-criticism-made-literature. “Kafka’s technique could best be compared to the construction of models,” she writes, “just as a man who wants to build a house or evaluate its stability would draw up a blueprint of the building, Kafka practically devises the blueprints of the existing world.” The peculiar power of these models lies for her in the activity required of the reader, the process of thought that they engender, demanding “the same power of imagination . . . of the reader as went into creating them.”43 If Kafka’s imagination is for Arendt one of the, if not the most, powerful of his generation and the prewar world, it is so not merely in its glittering products but in the way that he elevates and demands the imaginations of his readers themselves. Perhaps this is what makes Kafka Arendt’s constant literary superlative: he not only left artifacts of his own thinking but also created an entire world of thinking that would outlast his own, and left intact the blueprints of an age and those to follow.
Notes
1 The New Yorker, October 19, 1968; reprinted as “Walter Benjamin 1892–1940,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harper Brace Jovanovich, 1968).
2 Dated September 19, 1967. Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995), 205.
3 Hannah Arendt, “Stephen Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday,” in Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 64.
4 “No Longer and Not Yet,” in Reflections, 122.
5 Ibid., 98.
6 Ibid., 101.
7 Ibid., 99.
8 Ibid., 95.
9 Ibid., 103. Although he takes issue with different portions of Arendt’s America reading, a particularly insightful engagement with this reading can be found in Howard Caygill, “The Fate of the Pariah,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 1–14.
10 Ibid., 96.
11 Ibid., 97.
12 Brian Danoff gives a thorough and slightly more charitable read in “Arendt, Kafka, and the Nature of Totalitarianism,” Perspectives on Political Science 29, no. 4 (2000): 211–18.
13 Arendt, Reflections, 100.
14 Julia Kristeva gives a sublime interpretation of Arendt’s relationship to Kafka through figures of strangeness in the third chapter of her Head Cases (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
15 Arendt, Reflections, 84.
16 Ibid., 88.
17 Ibid., 82.
18 Ibid., 90.
19 Ibid., 89.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 90.
22 Ibid., 70.
23 Ibid.
24 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 170.
25 Ibid., 196.
26 Ibid., 190.
27 Ibid., 179, n. 12.
28 Ibid., 186.
29 Manu Samnotra gives a slightly less dispiriting reading of the Arendt’s relationship to Kafka himself as a subject in “Sensitive to Shame,” Constellations 21, no. 3 (2014): 338–50. Likewise, a more exhaustive account of the figure of the pariah, including Arendt’s situation of Kafka in her narrative, can be found in Magdalena Zolkos, “Arendt’s Metamorphic Figurations in ‘The Jew as Pariah,’” in Action and Appearance, ed. Anna Yeatman, Phillip Hansen, Magdalena Zolkos, and Charles Barbour (New York: Continuum, 2011).
30 Arendt, Reflections, 83.
31 Ibid., 84.
32 Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1978), 202–3. This reading is indebted to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s “Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind,” Political Theo ry 10, no. 2 (1982): 277–305. Also, on Arendt’s interpretation of “HE,” see Vivian Liska, “The Gap between Hannah Arendt and Franz Kafka,” Archadia 38, no. 2 (2003): 329–33.
33 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 205.
34 Ibid., 209.
35 Ibid., 206.
36 Ibid., 207.
37 Ibid., 206.
38 Ibid., 207.
39 For a particularly political reading of this subjective geometry, see Kim Lane Scheppele, “A Constitution between Past and Future,” William and Mary Law Review 49 (2007–8), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol49/iss4/11 (accessed February 24, 2019).
40 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 207–8.
41 Ibid., 209.
42 Ibid.
43 Arendt, Reflections, 104.