Hannah Arendt Swallows the Lessing-Prize

“Real are the dead whom you have forgotten.… they are living ghosts … ”

(“Aftermath of Nazi Rule” 254)

1. The Drama of a Citation

In the end, Hannah left everyone floored. Stupefied and troubled, she found herself ensnared in the granting of a citation that could not evade the aggressive qualities and edges of performative imposition. Addressing the foreign/homeland audience through the traumatic filter of complaint in poetic language, she moves toward the breakout dance of jubilation—a strictly social dedication to rejoicing—enrolling the great Enlightenment thinker, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, to front for the double exigency of exultation and complaint. I will start here by reviewing the case of the inassimilable prize, noting the historical investment of a densely freighted ode to joy to which Arendt attaches her argument. The prize-bestowal crucially depends on the recipient’s capacity to pump and spread joy, to knock off the corrupting temptation of debilitating sadness, an historical inevitability and interpretive stake of depressive consequence.

Lessing had placed a premium on a socializing kind of joyfulness that makes room for the creation of complicities and bonds among its celebrants. Turned for its expression toward a community of fellow beings, joy generates modalities of nearness, throwing bridges across the abyss of human relations. In Arendt’s view, unsuppressed joy primes political bonds. Lessing uniquely established, she hopes and thinks, the communitarian accent of generous affect. His theoretical work accounts for the affirmative turning away from oneself toward the exigency of social bonding, ever responsive to prompts of rejoicing. The address of joy accrues to and even constitutes the friend. In a sense, friendship for Lessing conducts joy to the forefront of binding discourse, marking the experience of a viable shareability that is pulled into place by a political tow. Joy in friendship—the signature affect of amicable closeness and political acuity—acts as the super glue that has kept one world-bound. For Arendt, “gladness, not sadness, is talkative” (“Gesprächig ist die Freude, nicht das Leid”; “On Humanity” 25), and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says. “It is tuned to gladness, we might say” (15). I want to grant this point to Arendt, even though I have visited zones of adept loquacity when falling across the sorrow of the bereft or destitute. Clearly, greatest sorrow goes silent at times, and I will not push a theory of phrasal regimens to include silence in and on the way of language. Nonetheless, I cannot imagine that Arendt would hold these affective levers very far apart for long, since one turns into and to the other at regular intervals of existential off-centeredness.

Hannah had every reason to scrap modulations of muteness from her registry, for she is mistrustful of those who went silent in the night of need, retreating to the relative safety of an “inner emigration.” Thus, Germans who practiced some form of muteness, barely squeaking out protest, fell short of the creditable bar: “while they may well produce sound, they do not produce speech and certainly not dialogue” (16). Dialogue tutors political practicability; it’s the way of showing that you count yourself in. Too many contemporaries faded out and ducked into muted refuge. I am not saying that the conditions and stipulations for dialogue were available or to be seized; she is making it a breaking point, and I get it.

The flair for taking pleasure in the other seems to matter to her argument, establishing a path to the acknowledgement of her dilemma—where is the pleasure in throwing a cable to her donors, the appointed prize-bestowers, those who think they can appraise her accomplishment or understand her sensitive predicament in the face of catastrophic erasure? I am not “over-exaggerating” the stakes, as my students might say. Arising from neither a whim nor a subjective contingency, the ability to take pleasure in others also holds an expansive quality. It allows us to take in a politics based on joy accorded and requisitioned by a...