Thomas Wild’s research and writing in progress gravitate around the question how to read Hannah Arendt’s writing ‘in more than one language’? Arendt published practically her entire work both in English and German, often translated or re-written by herself. Arendt’s texts are further shaped by intense dialogs with quotations, inserts, and mottos in other modern and ancient languages. An integral part of this poetics of plurality too is the wide range of genres, modes, and tones Arendt writes in – spanning from the Origins of Totalitarianism, her many essays on politics, philosophy, and literature to her report on Eichmann in Jerusalem or interventions around Crises of the Republic. Can Arendt’s writing in more than one language be read as a response to the totalitarian experience in the 20thcentury? And, put differently, how can we read that this political thinker of plurality deliberately wrote in a plurality of languages?
Thomas Wild offers to explore these questions through sample passages from Arendt’s books The Human Condition and its German version Vita activa whose bilingual edition he currently prepares together with Patchen Markell for the Kritische Gesamtausgabe. In conversation with the Colloquium, he hopes to further scrutinize core theoretical stakes of this poetics of plurality in light of a dialog between Arendt’s own reflections on language (from unknown archival materials) and voices resonant with Arendt’s project (Benjamin, Derrida, Glissant).
