Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Savyon Liebrecht's "The Banality of Love"

The Arts Fuse has published my essay on Israeli playwright Savyon Liebrecht's The Banality of Love a play about the romance between German philosopher (and card carrying Nazi) Martin Heidegger and his Jewish student, the political theorist Hannah Arendt. I attended a reading of the play last month at the Goethe Institut as part of Israeli Stage's series of readings of contemporary Israeli plays in Boston.
[...]Liebrecht does not address Arendt’s rationalizations or the reasons for her dedication to Heidegger, though the dramatist’s title suggests that it is the banal truth of the irrationality of love. This neglects both Arendt the theorist and Arendt the public intellectual. Is her portrait of an innocently banal Heidegger merely the flip side of her portrait of Adolf Eichmann as a ghostly bureaucrat?[...]
Read the rest on The Arts Fuse.

1 comment:

Ian Thal said...

I came upon this essay today by Sol Stern, that while neither addressing Arendt's relationship with Heidegger in detail, nor Liebrecht's play specifically, it does show how Arendt had a rather long streak of issuing philosophical proclamations that had little basis in empirical fact (like her teacher) often with great rhetorical power:

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_hannah-arendt.html