Twitter through the Prism of Hannah Arendt and Maurice Blanchot

This essay uses an admittedly improbable source, Twitter, to explore the speech theories of Hannah Arendt and Maurice Blanchot. I suggest that and how Twitter offers an opportunity of the kind of speech that Arendt, in The Human Condition, thought contemporary developments were making virtually impossible. As this speech turns out to be fragmentary, discontinuous, and yet conversational, I argue that there are illuminating resonances with what Blanchot was advocating in The Infinite Conversation.