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11. Saure, Carl Heidenreich, viii. 12. Alla Efimova, interview with Richard Buxbaum, 20 October 2016. carlheidenreichfoundation.org/news/2016/10/20/three-generations-champion-rebel-painter-carl-heidenreich. 13. Hofmann’s mythic reputation precedes him. He is often mistaken as the teacher of the first wave of Abstract Expressionists (Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Reinhardt, Rothko); he was, rather, their colleague. The term “abstract expressionism” was, however, first used to describe Hofmann’s work, and his solo exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 1967 was not only the first solo Abstract Expressionist museum exhibition but also produced the movement’s first monograph. Hofmann’s numerous students, including but by no means limited to Nell Blaine, Ray Eames, Robert De Niro Sr., Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Larry Rivers, belong to the Second New York School. Note, meanwhile, the highly gendered overtones in critic John Yau’s claim that the final proof of Hofmann’s stature is “the fact that the list of artists who didn’t study with Hofmann includes more substantial talent than the list of those who did.” John Yau, “Hans Hofmann: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York,” Artforum (November 1990): 162. 14. Arendt, “Foreword,” 203. 15. Irma B. Jaffe, “A Conversation with Hans Hofmann,” Artforum (January 1971): 34–35. 16. Hans Hofmann, “On the Aims of Art,” The Fortnightly 1, no. 13 (February 1932): 7–11. 17. Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948), ed. Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 41. 18. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 49. 19. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica 1.1.2, 1.3.2. 20. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 51. 21. Ibid. 22. Alla Efimova, “Carl Heidenreich and Hans Hoffmann in Postwar New York: Parallel Lives of Art and Exile Viewed Through a Lens of Abstraction,” press release, BAMPFA, n.d. archive. bampfa.berkeley.edu/press/release/TXT0089. 23. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 95. 24. Arendt, “Foreword,” 204 (my emphasis). 25. Ibid.
Time for Arendt: Political Temporality and the Space-Time of Freedom
HA
Time for Arendt
Essays
Katherine Bermingham
“In the last analysis, the human world is always the product of man’s amor mundi, a human artifice whose potential immortality is always subject to the mortality of those who build it and the natality of those who come to live in it.”1 When she was interviewed in 1964 by Günter Gaus, a prominent German journalist, Hannah Arendt had only recently joined the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, having held numerous temporary academic and journalistic positions since arriving in the United States in 1941.2 At the outset of their conversation, now known as “What Remains? The Language Remains,”3 Arendt rejected Gaus’s attempt to label her a philosopher. “My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory.”4 Scholars of Arendt’s work often cite this part of the interview in order to punctuate the distinction she makes between thinking philosophically and thinking politically.5 Despite her capacious knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition and her continuous engagement with philosophers from the pre-Socratics to her contemporaries, Arendt did not consider herself to be one of them. “As you know, I studied philosophy,” Arendt remarked to Gaus, “but that does not mean that I stayed with it.”6 Later in the interview, Gaus invited Arendt to expand on what prompted her apostasy from philosophy, asking: “Is there a definite event in your memory that dates your turn to the political?” Arendt answered with characteristic decisiveness: “I would say February 27, 1933, the burning of the Reichstag, and the illegal arrests that followed during the same night.”7 Though her upbringing was fairly secular, Arendt’s effort to understand politics, her primary subject, was bound up from the first with the persecution of the Jewish people in mid-twentieth-century Europe.8 “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew,” Arendt told Gaus.9 In addition to demonstrating the significance of the fate of the Jewish people in Arendt’s intellectual trajectory (might she have “stayed with” philosophy if the rise of National Socialism had been thwarted?), the specificity of her reply to Gaus also attests to the primacy of discrete moments in time in Arendt’s political theory. Per Jonathan Schell: “it was events that set her mind in motion, and philosophy that had to adjust,”10 a view corroborated by Arendt’s own reflections on how the horrific events of a particular day prompted her to reorient the course of her intellectual and professional life, Katherine Bermingham
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