Hannah Arendt Organized Remembrance

In spite of their differences, I will argue that they are both distinctly. The core of Hannah Arendt’s theory of organized remembrance requires an element of interpretation on behalf of the individual through reflection. For remembrance at once, requires the exercise of thinking – ‘thinking which, withdrawal from the world of appearances is the only essential precondition’ (Arendt, 1978: 78). Furthermore, thinking, as reflection ‘always implies remembrance; every thought is strictly speaking an afterthought’ (Arendt, 1978: 78). And ‘poetry whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it’ (Arendt, 1978: 78). Art and poetry by nature …show more content…
Yet the social realm does not include ‘the shape of our bodies’, and the ‘talents of our minds’, for these are socially relevant and characteristics, at the hazard of erotic not agapic love, at the hazard of our specific social particularity not our quantifiable, aporetic existence’ (Rose, 1993: 229). Thus, she suggests that we edge dangerously towards ‘new births’ in politics, the offering of the actor as saviour, and ‘less on the historical equivocalities of emancipation’, which offers an engaged approach to remembrance. In offering a utilitarian notion of work, we undermine the value of remembrance. Arendt’s Augustinian democracy offers a ‘public life which takes on the deceptive aspect a total of private interests as though these interests could create a new quality of through sheer addition’ (Arendt, 1951: …show more content…
Yet, Arendt’s concept cannot only be interpreted as the polis, but in a wider conceptual manner. Thus Rose and Arendt both offer the realm of art and poetry which has the ability to transcend this, evident in the work of Akhmatova. And drawing on Akhmatova, once can deduce that the realities of people are impossible to know, once in memory. Arendt, for example offers that while remembrance plays an important role to heal the frailty of human affairs also suggests that these narratives myth (Arendt: 1978). Take for instance, Akhmatova’s description of Leningrad. Compared to a darker approach; which implicates the risk of taking anything: books, words, people, architecture and ideology as self evident, it cannot be accepted at face value, for while ‘the general appearance of the city is magnificent, [a testament of] proof of what may be done with brick and plaster, though the surrounding country is very flat, dull and marshy’ (Davis, 1997: