Credit: Getty Images.

“Is joy really what Arendt would want us to be talking about amid the most racist, cruel and criminal American administration since the civil rights era?”

So asked one of my former students, protesting the theme of this year’s Hannah Arendt Center conference: “JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times,” planned for October at Bard College.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

It’s a fair question. These are indeed dark times. But joy is not a distraction — it is a defiant act of resistance.

I do not claim to speak for Arendt. What I love about her is that she resisted all orthodoxies. She was, in her words, a Selbstdenker — someone who thinks for herself.

Born in Germany, arrested while working for the Zionists in 1933, and a stateless refugee for 18 years, Hannah Arendt wrote seminal works like “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”She imagined now-common ideas like "the banality of evil." And she became the greatest political thinker of the 20th century.

Arendt wrote about totalitarianism not to condemn it from........

© Times Union