Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Rhetoric of Warning and Hope

2. The Desire to Belong: Rahel Varnhagen

17 2 The Desire to Belong Rahel Varnhagen And so, at the end of her life . . . Rahel had remained a Jew and a pariah. —Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess Arendt’s second major work, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, works as a case study warning us about the danger of an unrestrained desire to belong. This book examines the phases of exclusion, beginning with the moment in which there is a welcome without intention of the possibility of genuine inclusion, which invites a grotesque banality of evil. The Varnhagen manuscript underscores a social danger emanating from the banality of artificial light that offers a false and unfulfilled promise of inclusion. Arendt engages a story that debunks unreflective optimism about belonging through the notion of the “parvenu,” a person seeking social acceptance at any cost, only to have those in power keep the person of social ambition languishing forever outside a given social circle.1 The human subject of Arendt’s narrative biography was Rahel Varnhagen , who was born Rahel Levin in 1771 and died in 1833.2 Arendt felt close to this member of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, revealing historicity in action in that across time two women were connected by a common question of inclusion. We thus find commonality of spirit between Varnhagen and Arendt, a kind of odd friendship of seekers 18 The Desire to Belong with each attempting to respond to a given question. Arendt uses the informative nature of historicity to unite persons, in this case, persons who are 135 years apart. Arendt completed Rahel Varnhagen shortly after concluding her dissertation on Augustine; by 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power, she had completed a draft of the manuscript.3 She wrote the last two chapters and the preface of the work twenty years after the completion of her 1933 version, after Hitler had revoked the citizenship of anyone deemed undesirable to the German government. Arendt interprets the autobiography of Rahel Varnhagen within the genre of confession. Rahel intentionally emulated Jean-Jacques Rousseau, working within a confessional genre akin to the subject of Arendt’s dissertation , Augustine. Rahel went so far as to claim the style and the name of Rousseau: “Rahel set out to create herself as such a subject by writing letters in Rousseau’s name. In a mode of constant repetition, she persuaded herself of her individuality, the integrity of herself, and the importance of her writing.” As stated in chapter 1, this confessional style of idea engagement rests within a vocabulary of a religious age and continues today as “autoethnographic ” research. Arendt examines the confessional/autoethnographic recounting of Rahel Varnhagen and the taunt of openness, followed by the repetitive reality of rejection, exemplifying the life of the parvenu.4 Arendt takes us to a tragic story that continues today whenever the need to belong strips one’s natural sensibility. She offers caution against the manic desire to join a group that gains its joy from feigning openness and repeatedly rejecting others, giving us insight into the corrosive social impulse of the parvenu. This problematic identity unknowingly takes the role of the court jester, amusing those who control the rules and the conclusion of a wicked form of social recreation, an unholy social trinity of “Welcome,” “No, not good enough,” and “Try again”—only to repeat the same cycle once more. The Story: Belonging as a Social Disease As a Jewish woman responding to Hitler’s Germany, Arendt understood the parvenu’s experience of welcome followed by the reality of exclusion . Arendt’s scholarly examination is a story about the danger of an unreflective desire to belong. The word “parvenu” comes from the French parvenir, which means to arrive or to reach;5 the term describes a social phenomenon defined by an unquenchable desire of a person to reach for a sense of affirmation, acknowledgment, and belonging. This reaching without reflective inhibition dampens one’s natural instincts for protection and survival that should be in place in the meeting and engagement of new terrain, ideas, people, cultures, and a different social structure. The Desire to Belong 19 According to Liliane Weissberg, Arendt had early exposure to the concepts of pariah (the outcast) and parvenu (one who arrives with a welcome , greeting, and support, only to fail to meet unstated standards for admission or belonging): “Arendt may have first encountered the...