Short Abstract:

In On Humanity in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt argues that the world is what is between humans. “Dark times” are marked by “worldlessness”, the shattering of the shared world. Engaging with her work, we discuss how humans are able to - or fail to - maintain connections across divides today.

Long Abstract:

Hannah Arendt’s 1959 essay Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten (On Humanity in Dark Times) takes up the world as something that exists between humans, is the outcome of their actions together. This shared world, Arendt argues, makes us fully human. “Dark times” are marked by the shattering of the shared world, or “worldlessness”. Absolute truth claims hinder a discussion. Escape into private space results in a loss of connection. The shared experience of oppression could nurture a “brotherliness that obliterated all distinctions”, and yet Arendt proposes friendship as a better alternative to brotherliness of the oppressed which “has never yet survived the hour of liberation by even a minute.” Rather than compassion (Mitleid), she proposes the capacity to rejoice for someone (sich mitfreuen) as a possible basis for a friendship across irreconcilable differences and truth claims. Such friendship may help reestablish a shared world.

Arendt’s essay offers a key and little-read contribution to the theme of commoning and uncommoning, especially in our dark times. This workshop invites contributions in German or English based on ethnographic research that engage with Arendt’s text and relate to aspects of her intervention: how emotions of compassion or shared joy may shape relationships between people and groups; movements of escape from a shared world to the private; ways in which people are able to - or fail to - maintain friendship and connection across divides; and processes of polarisation that result in mutually hostile fragmentary worlds, which only meet in mutual shock and incomprehension.

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