Though many have recently attempted either to locate Arendt within feminism or feminism within the great body of Arendt's work, these efforts have proven only modestly successful. Even a cursory examination of Arendt's work should suggest that these efforts would prove frustrating. None of her voluminous writings deal specifically with gender, though some of her work certainly deals with notable women. Her interest is not in gender as such, but in woman as assimilated Jew or woman as social and political (...) revolutionary. In this paper, I argue that Arendt recognized that what frequently passes for a gender question is not essentially a matter of gender at all, but rather an idiosyncratic form of loneliness that typically affects, though is by no means limited to, women. In her work one finds the conceptual tools necessary to understand the “woman problem” rather than an explicit argument or a solution to it. (shrink)

We argue that the problem of violence persists, to a certain degree, because of our refusal or inability to think about traumatic, difficult or “senseless” material systematically. We explore the connection between thinking and violence, and specifically Arendt’s question whether thinking can make men abstain from violence. We are interested in the relationship and tension between knowing and not knowing – as products of thinking – in relation to (also our own capacities for) violence. The tension presents in two main (...) ways. First, thinking is employed to shed light on dark or difficult knowable material, thereby increasing our understanding of ourselves, our place in a troubled society and our relation to violence. Second, thinking bumps up against our ability to know, and it is this unknowability that exposes us to our limits as thinking beings as well as a place of humility and mutual vulnerability. We suggest that paying closer and more nuanced attention to the gender dimensions of the above questions reveals something important about the reasons that gender-based violence persists. We argue, with Arendt, that violence results from non-mastery and that the equation of male power with violence is a lie that violence perpetuates about itself. Similarly, Heberle argues that violence results from the fragile non-cohesiveness of masculine subjectivity and thus also traces the roots of violence to weakness and fragility rather than strength or power. We argue that the antidote for this false mastery and control is thinking. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In recent decades, some feminists have turned to the writings of Hannah Arendt in order to propose a truly emancipatory ethic of care or to find the principles that could lead to the political institutionalization of care. Nevertheless, the feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt are particularly contrasted. According to Sophie Bourgault, this recourse to Hannah Arendt is deeply problematic, mainly because of her strong distinction between the private and public spheres. This article discusses the relevance of using Arendt’s concepts to (...) think about the institutionalization of care by Joan Tronto. Indeed, the most recent analyses developed on the politics of care are shaped by Arendt’s concepts such as power, amor mundi or by her conception of politics as a relationship. (shrink)

RESUMO Neste ensaio, discutiremos o modo como a relação entre liberdade e temporalidade aparece em momentos determinados da reflexão de Hannah Arendt, Sartre e Merleau-Ponty, tomando como eixo de investigação a maneira pela qual cada um deles concebe a articulação entre permanência e mudança na descrição da dinâmica temporal. Com isso, pretende-se estabelecer um horizonte de convergência e, em seu interior, explicitar dois encaminhamentos distintos para uma questão similar, mostrando como é possível estabelecer um eixo fenomenológico comum e, ao mesmo (...) tempo, explicitar a diversidade que o constitui. ABSTRACT In this essay, we will discuss the way in which the relationship between freedom and temporality appears at certain moments of Hannah Arendt, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty reflections, taking the way in which each of them conceives the articulation between permanence and change in time dynamics as an axis of investigation. With this, it is intended to establish a horizon of convergence and, within it, to make explicit two different approaches to a similar issue, showing how it is possible to establish a common phenomenological axis and, at the same time, explain the diversity that constitutes it. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit (...) another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)

The unmanaged organization is moving from coffee corners to social networks. This means not only a change of media, but also a transformation in how organizations exert control over workers and how workers resist the commodification of emotions. After analyzing instances of the online publication of images and texts that escape organizational control, we identified three main ambiguities helpful in framing future studies about organizational control and resistance: ambiguity between private and public spheres, ambiguity between spontaneous and performed manifestations, and (...) ambiguity between the distribution and control of power. Our main contribution is to understanding the Internet, particularly social networks, as a medium for employee resistance through distance, and in using the three aforementioned ambiguities to help analyze this phenomenon. (shrink)