Thomas schestag hannah arendt biography

Paul North

Thomas Schestag: Die unbewältigte Sprache: Hannah Arendts Theorie der Dichtung



Thomas Schestag’s book, Die unbewältigte Sprache: Hannah Arendts Theorie der Dichtung, which belongs among the best deconstructive analyses of the past twenty years, examines the limits of Arendt’s poetics.

It does not contest the relationship between her political theory and her understanding of poetry but it challenges some of her assumptions. Schestag takes Arendt to task for the theory of language that seems to underlie this relationship.

A political sphere founded on a «word» conceived as an enduring «thing» (this argument is outlined in Ch. 23 of Gottlieb’s anthology) is complicated by the fact that the word «word» must first itself be given a foundation.

For Schestag, this self-referential paradox is one of several unacknowledged «Risse» that run through Arendt’s quasi-mythical notion of «word