Breakfast with Hannah Arendt

Lecture by Sophie Loidolt before the opening of the exhibition Human Condition

Is there a connection between empathy and emancipation? Or, putting it another way, can our power of empathy help us in the process of social and political self-liberation? What does emancipation mean in fact in a world dominated by systematic injustices? And hasn’t the exalted idea of the Enlightenment given way to general emancipation fatigue and consumption-oriented indifference in our own privileged place in the world? It is worth rethinking and reconsidering these concepts.
As her “human condition” furnished us with one of the basic thematic inspirations for this exhibition, Hannah Arendt can give us food for thought here as well. And as always, she thinks against the grain...

Sophie Loidolt is an assistant lecturer at the Institute for Philosophy of the University of Vienna. She is currently working on a project on Hannah Arendt called Arendt and Kant. Transformation of the Enlightenment, with the support of an APART scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She has made research visits to New York, Paris and Leuven/Belgium. Books published: Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (2009); Das Fremde im Selbst. Das Andere im Selben. Transformationen der Phänomenologie (co-edited with Matthias Flatscher, 2010). 

Hannah Arendt (born Hanover 1906, died New York 1975) was a social and political theorist. She studied philosophy, theology and Greek under Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers and others, writing her PhD dissertation for Jaspers in 1928. After briefly being detained by the Gestapo, she emigrated to Paris in 1933, where she worked as a social worker for Jewish institutions. In 1940, she was interned at Camp Gurs, but escaped. From 1941, she lived in New York, 1944-46 Head of Research for the Conference on Jewish Relations, 1946-49 Chief Editor of Salman Schocken Verlag, 1948-52 Director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Organization (rescue of Jewish cultural artefacts), 1953 several guest lectures (including Princeton and Harvard), professorship at Brooklyn College, New York, 1959 first woman guest professor at Princeton, 1963 professor at the University of Chicago, 1967 at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Publications (selection): Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewess (1958, 1997); The Human Condition (1958); Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963); On Revolution (1963); On Violence (1970); Responsibility and Judgment, (1982; German, 2003).