Julian Honkasalo
Hannah Arendt did not theorize gender as a political question. None of her major works deal with women’s liberation, women’s rights, feminism, or with gendered aspects of power. In her public life, she neither participated nor spoke up in favor of any feminist group. In fact, the single published text where Arendt explicitly reflects on the women’s movement of her time is a brief review of Alice Rühle-Gerstel’s 1932 book Das Frauenproblem in der Gegenwart.1 Although Arendt found the book “instructive” and “stimulating,” she did not see a women’s political party or a women’s movement as the solution to women’s economic, social, and political oppression. Instead, she proposed that women should unite with movements of other oppressed groups, such as the workers’ movement, in their plight for the realization of equal political rights.2
Despite the absence of a theorization of gender in Arendt’s philosophy, and despite her reluctance to support any of the numerous women’s rights groups of her time, Arendt’s voluminous work has generated an entire philosophical and political tradition of feminist responses. Ranging from Adrienne Rich’s famous lamentation that Arendt’s The Human Condition exemplifies the “tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideology” to Julia Kristeva’s characterization of Arendt as a “female genius” to Mario Feit’s claim that “The Human Condition offers a thorough critique of heteronormativity,” for four decades, scholars have debated and further developed Arendt’s thinking for feminist purposes. Arendt’s silence on gender constitutes a riddle that continues to perplex both her most passionate critics and her most enthusiastic followers.
Although Arendt scholarship has undergone a renaissance during the past two decades, there have been only a few attempts to interpret, contextualize, and arrange feminist Arendt receptions. Mary G. Dietz, Bonnie Honig, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, and Kimberly Maslin are among the few contributors to this field of inquiry.3 Although they all discuss only the Anglophone feminist receptions and offer a debriefed and limited perspective to the complexity and polyphony within feminist debates over Arendt, they are the most widely read and frequently cited texts on the relationship between Arendt and feminism.4
In Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), by far still the most extensive biography of Arendt to date, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl illuminates Arendt’s personal and political motivations for her distancing from feminist politics. Understanding Arendt’s reluctance toward identity politics as derivative from her parting with the Zionist movement, Young-Bruehl presents Arendt as a thinker who resisted all types of ideologies and mass movements, including the American women’s liberation movement.5 In “Hannah Arendt among Feminists” (1996), Young-Bruehl moves away from biography and presents a twofold historical categorization of feminist responses to Arendt. According to Young-Bruehl, during the first phase, which lasted from roughly 1975 until the late 1980s, “liberationist,” “cultural,” and “gynocentric” feminist theorists targeted and rejected Arendt’s distinctions between the “public” and the “private” as well as the “social” and the “political” in multiple ways. Then, a second generation of feminist interpretations of Arendt emerged in the mid-1980s. This “younger generation” problematized the previous generation’s interpretative framework, which rested on a strict binary conception of gender.6
In her essays, such as “Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics” (1991), “Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt” (1995), “The Woman Question in Arendt” (2002), and “The Arendt Question in Feminism” (2002), Mary G. Dietz categorizes feminist responses to Arendt by presenting a typology of various types of feminisms, such as “radical-feminism,” “difference-feminism,” and “diversity-feminism.” Dietz contextualizes the emergence of these types of feminist stances on Arendt by appeal to the history of the women’s movement and feminist theorizing. Dietz’s approach is reiterated by Kimberly Maslin (2013).7
Taken together, Dietz, Honig, Young-Bruehl, and Maslin present the history of feminist Arendt receptions as taking place in two distinct historical phases and as occurring exclusively within the Anglophone academic context. The first phase includes second-wave readings from the 1970s and the 1980s. These readings are presented as being characterized by an interest to examine what Arendt had to contribute to the women’s movement. Second, after the 1980s and the early 1990s, a new generation of readers shifted the focus of inquiry and asked how might feminist theorizing look like through an Arendtian conceptual framework and could feminist theorists learn something from Arendt. In Bonnie Honig’s 1995 editorial introduction to the anthology Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, these two phases are characterized as answering one of the two problems: the “Woman Question in Arendt” and the “Arendt Question in Feminism.”
Yet as over twenty years have passed since the publication of Honig’s anthology, feminist theorizing has grown and evolved in multiple new directions. Greater nuance and deeper theoretical reflection on the rich, polyphonic feminist debates over Arendt can be given by posing the question concerning Arendt and feminism somewhat differently. I argue that the most important question that all feminist interpretations, regardless of their historical context, geographical location, or theoretical commitments target is this: How should Arendt’s complete silence on gender and feminist issues be understood?8 By the same token, how and for what purposes have feminist interpreters of Arendt singled out concepts and topics for scrutiny and debate in their efforts to understand the absence of a theory of gender in Arendt’s oeuvre? Why has Hannah Arendt been so widely and passionately read by feminist theorists, despite the fact that she did not engage in this field of inquiry at all? Through these questions, the rich and internally polyphonic feminist scholarship on Arendt can be understood by examining how each theorist interprets the absence of a theory of gender in Arendt’s philosophy and the conceptual clusters the interpreters with which they operate.
Three distinguishable feminist positions emerge from this way of framing feminist interpretations on Arendt’s silence on gender. First, Anglophone, early second-wave feminist responses to Arendt generally approach her work through a “sisterhood framework.” For scholars such as Adrienne Rich (1979), Mary O’ Brien (1981), Hanna Pitkin (1981), and Wendy Brown (1988), Arendt’s silence on gender signifies a disappointing, elitist arrogance, even a hostility, toward the women’s movement and feminist politics of the time.9 The sisterhood-readings argue that despite the fact that Arendt was a woman in a male-dominated occupation, she did not express interest or solidarity toward the women’s movements of her time. Worse, through her rigid conceptual distinctions, such as “the public vs. the private,” “the political vs. the social,” and “action vs. labor,” early second-wave interpreters conclude that Arendt succumbed to a male bias in her thinking. Framing “the human” in The Human Condition as a universal category, Arendt, much like male thinkers throughout the Western tradition, failed to see this category as an abstraction that excludes women’s perspectives. Furthermore, in their analyses, early second-wave readers conceive Arendt herself as a masculine woman and an anti-feminist. The readings that frame Arendt as a masculine thinker draw primarily from the second chapter of The Human Condition, which is titled “The Public and the Private Realm.” Within the interpretative and methodological sisterhood framework, Arendt’s distinction between the public and the private appears to be neglecting the fundamental demand that women be freed from traditional, stereotypical roles and occupations assigned to them by the male, white, heterosexist, supremacist patriarchal order. Also, contrary to the emancipatory goal of early second-wave feminist consciousness-raising, Arendt’s demarcations appear in this framework to exclude the personal from the political.
A different way of appropriating Arendt emerges in the context of the Continental tradition of feminist theorizing. According to these scholars, such as Adriana Cavarero and Julia Kristeva most notably, the theoretical implications of Arendt’s silence on gender should not be exaggerated. Instead, both Cavarero and Kristeva perceive Arendt’s contribution to feminist theorizing as evident in her work because her texts derive from a particularly feminine position. In other words, since Arendt is a woman, her writing inevitably reflects this experience, and the interpreter’s task is to elaborate on the feminine, textual style.10 Major French and Italian receptions within the Continental, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic feminist traditions focus on vocabulary in Arendt’s texts that is taken to reflect feminine experiences, such as “natality,” “birth,” and “life.” The notion of “natality,” in particular, is seen as Arendt’s most important and revolutionary contribution to the feminist theorizing of sexual difference. In French and Italian readings, the fifth chapter of The Human Condition, which deals with action, natality, and new beginnings, functions as the background for concluding that Arendt is a feminine writer and, even more importantly, a female genius. For both Cavarero and Kristeva, there is an urgent ethical need to rethink the Western tradition in order to articulate a feminine language that appropriates the maternal Other. Whereas Cavarero’s ethical task consists in articulating a maternal ontology through Arendt and Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva carries out this ethical project by undoing the totalitarian kernels of Western rationality with Arendt. Hence, for Kristeva, feminist theorizing cannot be carried out in isolation from a serious reflection and critique of totalitarian strands of thought. Despite the seeming similarities in their projects, as well as in their responses to Arendt’s silence on gender, Cavarero and Kristeva come to very different conclusions regarding the meaning of Arendt’s notion of natality. Whereas Cavarero’s project is normative and seeks to establish natality as the concept through which the tradition of Western philosophy can be reframed into a feminine and maternal path of thinking and speaking, Kristeva’s psychoanalytical framework establishes natality as an inherently violent concept. For Kristeva, “abjection” and “matricide” are needed to complement Arendt’s theory of natality if we want to correctly understand the logic of totalitarianism as an inherently masculinist, gendered form of violence.
In contrast to these two opposing ways of appropriating Arendt, a third feminist perspective on Arendt’s silence concerning gender builds on postmodern theorizing. Despite the fact that Arendt did not say much about women’s issues or gender inequality in her written work, these theorists nevertheless view her work as highly valuable for feminist theorizing because Arendt is claimed to anticipate major questions and conceptualizations within postmodern feminist theorizing and emerging queer thought. Bonnie Honig, Mary G. Dietz, Linda Zerilli, and Amy Allen, most notably, focus on Arendt’s formulations such as the disclosure of the agent in speech and action, “unique distinctness,” “spontaneity,” “indeterminacy,” “freedom,” and “solidarity” in order to critique identity politics through Arendt.11 This reading strategy operates also in texts by feminist theorists who defend Arendt’s perceived postmodern leaning by examining “Jewishness” and “gender” as analogous, culturally constructed identity categories in Arendt’s texts.12 By the 1990s, feminist interpreters in Anglophone academia had begun to explore French, poststructuralist readings of Arendt. Aligning Arendt with Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, Honig was the first theorist to frame Arendt as an agonistic rebel and a theorist of performativity.
Through Honig’s Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993), Arendt became widely recognized as an agonistic thinker who highlights pluralist perspectives, unique distinctness, and the performativity of speech and action as well as constituent power and contingent political foundations. This new paradigm was influenced by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and is visible in Honig’s editorial introduction to Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995), which was the first essay anthology on Arendt’s complex relation to feminist theorizing.
Rather than treat male and female or masculine and feminine as categories that organize uniformed and already gendered artifacts, new theorists of gender argue that the categories themselves help to produce and reinforce the very uniformities they claim to describe. These developments have prompted a reconsideration of Arendt that includes a critical reevaluation of earlier feminist judgments of her work. From feminist perspectives that interrogate, politicize, and historicize—rather than simply redeploy—categories like “woman,” “identity” or “experience” Arendt’s hostility to feminism and her critical stance towards identitarian and essentialist definitions of “woman” begin to look more like an advantage than a liability.13
In this historical context, Mary Dietz, Lisa Disch, Linda Zerilli, and Amy Allen among others claimed that feminist theorists from the 1970s and the 1980s, who had framed Arendt through a binary gender order, had missed the complex processes of meaning-formation, change of meaning, and even failure of meaning, that characterize all forms of discourse.
For theorists such as Honig and Allen, non-foundationalism constitutes the leitmotif of Arendt’s political oeuvre. Both argue that even if Arendt was not a feminist and did not explicitly deal with questions such as the political significance of the body and gender in her writings, her persistent and non-compromising reflections on the importance of contingency, openness, and solidarity for democratic politics are crucial elements for feminist attempts to theorize the political.
The efforts to formulate various directions for postmodern “Arendtian feminism” have also influenced and inspired a number of queer theorists for whom Arendt emerges as a protagonist and spokesperson for marginalized and persecuted groups, homosexual men in particular.14 The main textual resources for postmodern and queer interpretations include the fifth chapter of The Human Condition, a number of Arendt’s essays on the Jewish “pariah” and Jewish politics, as well as The Origins of Totalitarianism. Since the late 1980s, gay- and queer-studies scholars have used Arendt as an ally for theorizing lesbian and gay rights as well as for understanding how the “closet” operates in the production of myths about sexuality, race, and gender.15
Gay studies and queer theoretical approaches have pointed out that in Arendt’s early Jewish writings as well as in The Origins of Totalitarianism, her ideal citizen and hero turns out to be the underdog, and this figure takes numerous different identities both in Arendt’s writings and in interpretations of her work, depending on the historical and political context of oppression. Queer interpretations, such as Morris B. Kaplan’s Sexual Justice, Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire, open a path toward theorizing the meaning of Arendt’s silence on gender from a perspective that problematizes conventional and normative conceptions of not only gender and sexuality but also race. Didier Eribon contends that Arendt’s characterization of the racialization of homosexuals and Jews is strikingly close to that of Foucault. So much so that Foucault may have used The Origins as his influence in the first volume of The History of Sexuality.16 It does not come as a surprise that precisely queer interpretations of Arendt have embraced her ambiguity and ambivalence concerning the politics of gender. What is notable on the other hand is the absence of a systematic examination of gay- and queer-studies voices within scholarly, feminist interpretations of Arendt.
Although Arendt is today widely credited as one of the most distinguished political thinkers of the twentieth century, this recognition was given to her only fairly recently. When scholars such as Margareth Canovan, Adrienne Rich, Richard J. Bernstein, Jürgen Habermas, Bhikhu Parekh, Sheldon Wolin, and George Kateb, for example, began to publish chapters and whole books on Arendt’s political theory in the 1970s and the 1980s, she was by no means regarded as an equal by male academics, and her status as a philosopher was disputed. This is partly because during her lifetime, a large community of mostly male Jewish intellectuals attacked and discredited Arendt after the 1963 publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. The “Eichmann controversy” cast a shadow on Arendt’s credibility as a serious and rigorous scholar that lasted for decades. Thus, the dispute over Arendt’s status as a serious philosopher has been an ongoing issue.17 In addition to the “Eichmann controversy,” Arendt’s personal relationship and friendship with her former teacher, Martin Heidegger, has been a persistent source for sexist comments and critique.18
In 1983 Ann M. Lane commented on the reception of Arendt from a feminist perspective in the following way:
The “tough” male critics of Arendt accuse her of political irrelevancy—a victim—of “revolutionary nostalgia,” living a “hopeless, helpless, vicarious life” and “grossly overrated.” For them, she is too soft, too “tender,” unable to live up to their rhetoric of political action and unable to distinguish fact and fantasy.19
Lane refers to texts by scholars such as Martin Jay, as well as to public literature reviews in media such as The New York Times and Harper magazine.
In the tradition of feminist interpretations of Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) is by far the most widely read and frequently cited text. Published seven years after The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the work outlines the philosophical groundwork for Arendt’s political theory, articulated more concretely in essay collections, such as Between Past and Future (1961 and 1968) and Crises of the Republic (1972). In the beginning of The Human Condition, Arendt says that her approach consists in a philosophical and historical analysis of the conditions that constitute and shape human existence. Clarifying her position as non-essentialist, Arendt writes that “the human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature.”20
One aspect that the rich, complex, and multifaceted The Human Condition clearly does not contain is a reflection on gendered aspects of human existence. Unlike her contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir, who had theorized gender and sexuality through an existentialist framework in Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) almost ten years before the publication of The Human Condition, Arendt shows no interest in analyzing women’s condition as separate from that of men. Instead she writes, “‘What we are doing’ is indeed the central theme of this book. It deals only with the most elementary articulations of the human condition, with those activities that traditionally, as well as according to current opinion, are within the range of every human being.”21
In order to understand early feminist responses to Arendt’s works, it is important to highlight the specific historical context in which feminist scholars first discovered The Human Condition. By the time of Arendt’s death in 1975, the second wave of American feminist organizing was undergoing a rapid and explosive growth. The National Organization for Women and the Women’s Liberation movement had gained wide institutional and political victories through, for instance, Betty Friedan’s and the American women’s national strike in 1970, the running of African American Shirley Chisholm as a nominee for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate (1972), the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in Congress (1972), the formation of the National Black Feminist Organization (1973), and the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973). Not only did various women’s grassroots movements and feminist activist organizations achieve wide media attention, they had also reached the academic world. Texts by Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Angela Y. Davis, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, and others were read and circulated on university campuses. As a result of the nationwide, revolutionary student movement as well as feminist consciousness-raising activism, San Diego State University and the State University of New York at Buffalo established the first Women’s Studies programs in 1970, and Feminist Studies, the first academic journal in Women’s Studies, began publishing in 1972.22 As Baxandall and Gordon recall about this time:
The women’s liberation movement, as it was called in the sixties and seventies, was the largest social movement in the history of the United States—and probably the world. Its impact had been felt in every home, school and workplace, in every form of art, entertainment, sport, in all aspects of personal and public life in the United States.23
The question is, then, how could the women’s liberation movement escape Arendt’s attention? During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Arendt was teaching at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and was conducting research on authoritarian elements in American governance. She published several critical essays on the Nixon Administration, such as “Lying and Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” (1971) and “Washington’s ‘Problem-Solvers’: Where They Went Wrong” (1972). Although other texts from this time-period, such as “Reflections on Violence” (1970) and “Civil Disobedience” (1970), for instance, are sympathetic with the radical and worldwide student movement, Arendt remains curiously silent on the ongoing feminist revolutionizing of academia. During the height of the American women’s liberation movement, Arendt had shifted her focus on the vita contemplativa while working on thinking, willing, and judging for the trilogy The Life of the Mind.
Nevertheless, Arendt’s works did catch the attention of feminist scholars of her time. In the historical and academic setting of early second-wave feminist organizing, attempts to contextualize Arendt as a serious scholar emphasized her notably dense commentary on ancient Greek thinkers in particular. Arendt’s wide knowledge in Greek and Roman texts was used by women scholars to legitimize her as a political philosopher comparable to male philosophers in the canon of Western thought.
In this historical context, Arendt’s works were approached with similar excitement and expectations as the works of Simone de Beauvoir.24 As a woman, Arendt was a notable exception in her numerous achievements. She was the first woman to receive a full professorship at Princeton University, to give the highly respected Christian Gauss lectures, and the first woman ever awarded with prizes such as the Sonning Prize, Lessing Prize, and the Sigmund Freud Prize. She had written voluminously on historically remarkable women, such as Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karen Blixen. In addition, by being a woman and a Jew, Arendt stood out from the twentieth-century elite of predominately male political thinkers and academics. Arendt, as the outspoken and bravely confrontational thinker of revolution, political action, civil disobedience, and public freedom, seemed to speak right to the causes that evolved during the second wave of American, feminist political organizing.
Conclusion
By analyzing and contextualizing how various texts in feminist secondary literature constitute distinct responses to Arendt’s silence on gender, feminist responses can be summarized as the following: (a) Arendt was a rigorous female scholar, working in a male-dominated occupation, but she was an anti-feminist; (b) Arendt was reluctant toward theorizing feminist politics, but her writing as a whole is nevertheless an expression of femininity, and even of a female genius; and (c) Arendt remained silent on gender as a political question, but her writings on Jewish resistance for instance contain parallels to feminist critiques of identity politics. Hence, Arendt can be theorized as a precursor to postmodern feminist and queer theorizing.
The three feminist responses identified here do not relate strictly to a chronological, historical, or even thematic order. Instead, versions of each response can be found throughout four decades of feminist secondary literature, and contrasting interpretative shifts appear parallel to each other. This implies that feminist theorists respond to Arendt’s silence on gender with a rich polyphony. Precisely because Arendt did not theorize gender as a political question and did not reflect on the women’s movements of her time, her theoretical conceptions and reflections on other topics, such as “action,” “power,” “violence,” “natality,” “unique distinctness,” “plurality,” “spontaneity,” “revolution,” “pariahdom,” and “freedom,” have been extensively explored by feminist theorists. Arendt’s silence on gender implies that her account on questions such as gender and sexuality must be constructed by drawing from her philosophy at large. Very often, feminist theorists focus on a particular concept, theme, or distinction in Arendt’s thinking, and argue for the importance of precisely this angle of entering Arendt’s works. The polyphony appears when theorists engage in critical debates and dialogue by rejecting or elaborating on each other’s interpretations. It indicates, on one hand, that Arendt’s account on gender and sexuality can only be grasped through multiple perspectives and, on the other hand, that this same holds for feminist interpretations themselves. There is no single, univocal feminist theory or feminism that can be applied to Arendt’s texts in order to answer the question of how and why she left questions related to gender largely untheorized. Instead, there are several feminisms and many feminist voices that relate to each other in differing ways.
Notes
1 A. Rühle-Gerstel, Das Frauenproblem in der Gegenwart: Eine psychologische Bilanz (Stuttgart: S. Hirzel Verlag, 1932). Arendt’s review was first published in the German journal (Die Gesellschaft 10 [1932]: 177–79), a journal of the Weimar socialists. The review was translated into English by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl and published as “On the Emancipation of Women,” in Arendt’s Essays in Understanding 1930-1954 (New York: Shocken Books, 1994). In her review Arendt acknowledges the achievements of the women’s liberation movement, such as “the right to vote” and the “right to run for office,” and laments the fact that “although today’s women have the same rights legally as men, they are not valued equally by society. Economically, their inequality is reflected in the fact that in many cases they work for considerably lower wages than men” (Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 66). Anticipating Betty Friedan, Arendt also expresses criticism toward women’s position in the marriage institution.
2 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 67–68.
3 See Mary Dietz, “Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics,” in Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (London: Polity Press, 1991), 232–52; Dietz, “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt,” in Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995), 17–50; Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002); Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt; For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, second edition); Kimberly Maslin, “The Gender-Neutral Feminism of Hannah Arendt,” Hypatia 28, no. 3 (2013): 417–693. For a systematic interpretation of feminist readings of Arendt, see Julian Honkasalo, Sisterhood, Natality, Queer: Reframing Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Doctoral dissertation, University of Helsinki, Helsinki: Unigrafia, 2016. https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/159340.
4 For a more thorough, philosophical, and historical examination of feminist responses to Arendt over the past four decades, see my “Arendt as an Ally for Queer Politics?,” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History, Feminist Theory 17, no. 2 (2014): 180–200.
5 Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 97.
6 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “Hannah Arendt among Feminists,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. L. May and J. Kohn (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996), 307–25.
7 See Dietz and Maslin’s works cited above.
8 See Honkasalo, Sisterhood, Natality, Queer.
9 Adrienne Rich, “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” in Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979); Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1981; H. F. Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981): 327–52; Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
10 See particularly Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (London: Polity, 1995); first published as Nonostante Platone: figure femminili nella filosofia antica (Roma: Editioni Riuniti, 1990); and Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. R. Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). First published as Le génie féminin: la vie, la folie , les mots. Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette (Paris: Fayard, 1992–2002).
11 See Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Dietz, “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt”; Linda Zerilli, “The Arendtian Body,” in Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt, 167–93; Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Amy Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).
12 See particularly Jennifer Ring, The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (New York: SUNY Press, 1997); Bat-Ami Bar On, The Subject of Violence: Arendtian Exercises in Understanding (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); M. B. Hull, The Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 2002); and Judith Butler, Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
13 Honig, Feminist Receptions, 2–3.
14 See Morris Kaplan, Sexual Justice, Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire (London: Routledge, 1997); Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. M. Lucey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), first published as Réflexions sur la question gay (Paris: Fayard, 1999); Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal. Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Mario Feit, Democratic Anxieties: Same-Sex Marriage, Death and Citizenship (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011); Honkasalo, “Arendt as an Ally for Queer Politics?”
15 One of the first theorists on Arendt’s relevance for gay rights is Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT UP, who in his highly controversial and deliberately confrontational Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS-activist (1989) accuses certain groups of gay men for selfish sexual hedonism and lack of responsibility during the early AIDS pandemic in the United States. Drawing from Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Kramer compares gay community leaders—who collaborated with what Kramer takes to be the heterosexual mainstream society—to Jewish leaders who collaborated with the Nazis. Kramer defines the AIDS pandemic as a Holocaust.
16 For more on the parallels between Arendt and Foucault’s notions of race, see Julian Honkasalo, Superfluous Lives–An Arendtian Critique of Biopolitics. Doctoral dissertation, The New School for Social Research, 2018.
17 The doubt over Arendt’s intellectual credibility has been a persistent element of secondary scholarship and the public reception of Arendt. As Seyla Benhabib points out, Isaiah Berlin for instance has publicly claimed that he does “not greatly respect the lady’s ideas . . . she produces no arguments, no evidence of serious philosophical or historical thought. It’s all a stream of metaphysical associations” (R. Jahanbegloo, Conversations With Isaiah Berlin [New York: Schribner Maxmillan International, 1992], 82–83). In his Introduction to Phenomenology, Dermot Moran sympathizes with Berlin and claims that “Arendt’s practice of phenomenology is original and idiosyncratic; she exhibited no particular interest in the phenomenological method and contributed nothing to the theory of phenomenology” (Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology [London: Routledge, 2000], 289). “In large measure, her overall framework is heavily dependent on the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers and their concerns for human existence and being-in-the-world” (ibid., 318). Moran further states that: “Benhabib, I believe, incorrectly characterizes [Isaiah] Berlin’s view of Arendt as ‘gender stereotyping’” (ibid., 508, n. 56).
18 On the Eichmann controversy, see Ring, The Political Consequences of Thinking; Dana Villa, Public Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 304; and D. Maier-Katkin, “How Hannah Arendt Was Labeled an ‘Enemy of Israel,’” Tikkun, November 1, 2010. http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/how-hannah-arendt-was-labeled-an-enemy-of-israel-email-article-to-a-friend (accessed July 15, 2017). On the Heidegger controversy, see Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, ed. and trans. M. Gendre (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), first published as La fille de Thrace et le penseur professionel: Arendt et Heidegger (Paris: Payot, 1997); Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); and Villa, Public Freedom.
19 Ann Lane, “The Feminism of Hannah Arendt,” Democracy 3, no. 3 (1983): 107–17.
20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 9–10.
21 Ibid., 5, my emphasis. Secondary and biographical literature rarely mention the fact that Arendt was once asked to write a review of de Beuvoir’s The Second Sex. However, in a letter to William Cole, dated December 16, 1952, Arendt resigned from submitting the book review for publication. Arendt wrote, “The objective problem of the book is to treat sex as a social phenomenon. The problem itself is of course entirely legitimate. But it so happens that [in the book] sex as proactive force is the fundament of society while, in another sense, it always has been an anti-social power. The two saving graces in a discussion of sex as a social phenomenon would be a sense of humour and reverential awe for love. Discussion which move beyond love and humor have a tendency to become plain ridiculous. . . . I have the impression that this book does not always succeed in avoiding this danger and that its author is curiously unaware of it” (quoted in U. Ludz, “Hannah Arendt: Femini Generis,” trans. G. Williams, in Hannah Arendt—Critical Assessments, Volume III: The Human Condition [London and New York: Routledge, 2006], 348–57; 350–51).
22 Ginette Castro, American Feminism: A Contemporary History, trans. E. Loverde-Bagwell (New York: New York University Press, 1990), first published as Radioscopie du féminisme américain (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1984); N. F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
23 R. Baxandall and L. Gordon, “S econd-Wave Soundings,” The Nation, July 3, 2000. Retrieved from: http://www.thenation.com/article/second-wave-soundings.
24 Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World, 310; Dietz, “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt,” 17–20.