What an honor it's been to work with Sam on the Arendt poems she found in a box in the archives. We kept finding more meanings and possible and impossible ways to attempt to render the untranslatable. Sam's insight & knowledge is a gift. Wait until you read her introduction!

AHHH! I love this! The fruits of their magnificent labor, available for preorder (coming to you this fall!): wwnorton.com/books/97813240…

Four years, countless meetings. Genese Grill and I just finished going through the proofs for What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. Doting on the good ones, sighing at the bad ones, endless Heidegger jokes. A Brilliant partner in crime. Liveright Books Haley Bracken

Hannah Arendt before American academia, Hannah Arendt after American academia

Adorno before he read Hegel, Adorno after he read Hegel

'Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality...'

― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt's midterm exam for From Machiavelli to Marx, taught in 1965

I knew Freud was influenced by Kant, but it wasn't until tonight, reading through Freud's Interpretation of Dreams with Brooklyn Institute students that I realized just how much Freud took from Kant. And language-wise stole.

What are the best books and essays on Freud and Kant?

Walter Benjamin's Rules for Writing

'Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity.'

— Hannah Arendt, 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism

'Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding.'

— Hannah Arendt

'If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.'

― George Orwell

“Lies by their very nature have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history.”

— Hannah Arendt, 1974

Hannah Arendt's syllabus for Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century, taught in 1965

Hannah Arendt's syllabus for a seminar on Hegel, taught in 1967

Kant: Totality takes three forms
Hegel: Only the whole is true
Adorno: Totality is untruth
Wittgenstein: The world is the totality of facts not things
Levinas: A particular being can take itself to be a totality only if it's thoughtless
Lukacs: It's one's relationship to totality

Walter Benjamin in the sun

A small pleasure I get teaching Brooklyn Institute is writing subject lines, such as:

Welcome to Dreams
Welcome to Boredom
Welcome to Silence
Welcome to Convalescence
Welcome to Loneliness
Welcome to the Life of the Mind
Welcome to the Human Condition
Welcome to the Problem of Evil

Hannah Arendt mapping Hegel’s dialectic

Hannah Arendt's syllabus for Basic Moral Propositions, taught in 1966