Senior Thesis: Hannah Arendt and World-Making

How Do We Make A World? Hannah Arendt, the Khoi-San, and the Problems of Alterity and Humanism

20 May 20205 January 2021 Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

I presented this 10-minute talk at the senior thesis presentations for the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World on 19 May 2020. A video recording is available here; my presentation begins at 30:00. The full thesis is available through the Brown Digital Repository. A 26-page revised and condensed version is available here.

*Source: Kevin Davie, “The Storyteller’s Map,” Atavist, 2015. Original held in the Bleek-Lloyd collection at the University of Cape Town.*

I begin my thesis with this map. This object was created by //Kabbo, a prisoner in Cape Town who spoke /Xam, an indigenous language of South Africa, in collaboration with two philologists: Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd. Between 1865 and 1875, they spoke with many prisoners in Cape Town who spoke San languages, to record stories and otherwise document their culture. Bleek and Lloyd, and many of the people who have accessed their collection since, saw their work as saving the relics of a people soon to be washed away by time. Thus, a nineteenth-century historian wrote that it was “a mere matter of time in an unequal struggle between the primitive bow and arrow, with which they fought, and the deadly gun in the hands of their invaders.” Indeed, the history of the San is marked by genocide and assimilation. Dutch settlers saw them as vermin; shooting four of them, an English traveler wrote in 1797, was discussed with “as much composure and indifference as if he had been speaking of four partridges.” In the nineteenth century, the San assimilated into the Coloured people of the Cape, a laboring underclass with mixed slave and indigenous origins. Since the end of apartheid, San people have re-asserted their indigeneity.

Starting from these objects and this history of representation, we come face-to-face with questions of objectivity and humanism. It is these questions that I elaborate on in my thesis in ways that I will show the contours of in my presentation today, before returning to another object of the Bleek-Lloyd collection. The question driving my project is: how can we assert both common rights and uncommon differences?

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What is the world for Hannah Arendt?

24 March 2020 Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

Hannah Arendt once wrote that to grasp Heidegger’s philosophy one needed to properly explicate the place of the world in his writings. One could say much the same about Arendt. Arendt draws on Heidegger’s understanding of the world as developed in Being and Time. For Heidegger, “the world” at first means quite simply the environment, that is what is around us. He writes that:

The answer to the question of the “who” of everyday Dasein is to be obtained by analysing that kind of Being in which Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part. Our investigation takes its orientation from Being-in-the-world — that basic state of Dasein by which every mode of its Being gets co-determined. … In our ‘description’ of that environment which is closest to us — the work-world of the craftsman, for example, — the outcome was that along with the equipment to be found when one is at work [in Arbeit], those Others for whom the ‘work’ [“Werk”] is destined are ‘encountered too.’ (153)

This is quite intuitive to grasp, really — our world consists of not just other objects but other subjects, too. Our mode of being with these other subjects is very important for Heidegger’s own project, which is to answer the question of Being (the Seinsfrage). Our mode of encountering Others is different than how we encounter Things:

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Hannah Arendt and World-Making

10 August 2019 Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

In three weeks, I will begin my last year at Brown. There are many things that are bittersweet about this moment; one of the sweetest is my anticipation for my senior thesis. I am especially excited to be working on my project with the support of an undergraduate fellowship from the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. This means that I will be writing and thinking in the company of many other people doing wonderfully exciting things, from documenting LGBTQ movements in Cambodia to exploring the rights of non-human species in the Yukon.

So, what will I be up to? My thesis is primarily concerned with Hannah Arendt. She offers, I argue, the resources to think differently about world-making. To understand what I mean and why I think this argument is important, it helps to illustrate some of the background. World-making intrigues me because of its double meaning: what in French one might mark by distinguishing globalisation and mondialisation. Arendt is attuned to both these processes. On the one hand, she is an astute reader of Karl Marx, who tells us about the crude expansion of horizons forced open by capital. This same process of globalization in the early modern world also led to the Enlightenment. Kant and Hegel developed the principles of rights and cosmopolitanism that are still hegemonic in liberal circles today. It is these rights that Arendt critiqued in a masterful chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism entitled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” She says that the experience of the Jews gives the lie to the Rights of Man. Not only are the Jews denied basic rights because they do not belong to any government, but they are precluded from the very right to have rights: the right to make a community.

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