Hannah Arendt’s homeland was populated with friends, most of them men—at least that is what her published correspondence would lead you to believe. The published letters between Arendt and her friends include books with Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Joachim Fest. The only woman whose correspondence with Arendt is published in a standalone volume is Mary McCarthy. But Arendt had other close women friends, including Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil, Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson, and Lotte Kohler. These voices are crucial and yet too often left out of our understanding of Arendt’s political thinking.
One reason Arendt’s letters with women are less available is simply that letters among women have long been devalued in philosophy. It is also true, however, that Arendt cultivated with women a quieter mode of connection—one less bound to the public world and more rooted in emotional resonance, bodily vitality, and care. The exception to this rule is McCarthy, whose published letters with Arendt are rich in intellectual inquiry. It is nevertheless the case that her friendships among women manifest a side of Arendt too often ignored: not the philosopher of worldliness but a woman capable of intimate, even erotic, bonds.
In her speech “On Humanity in Dark Times,” Arendt distinguished two kinds of friendships. “We are wont,” she said, “to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy, in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world.” But her discussion of friendship in the Lessing speech was to be directed toward a different understanding of friendship, namely the “political relevance of friendship.” Based in respect for others, politically inflected friendship “is one of the fundamental requirements for the well-being of the City.” It is the political idea of friendship grounded in discourse and respect that has dominated accounts of her thought.
There is, however, the other side of friendship—intimate and unguarded, embodied, nurtured in “face-to-face encounters.” In intimate friendships, Arendt wrote, we “speak about ourselves.” In political friendships, on the contrary, the focus is on the “common world.”…
https://lithub.com/on-hannah-arendt-and-mary-mccarthys-decades-long-friendship/
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Evil: The Crime against Humanity. Hannah Arendt’s confrontation with totalitarianism
Alexandre Koyré: The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1943)
Lying and history: Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war (2009)
Socrates, the soul and the cosmos
The Concrete Possibility of Total Nihilism: Günther Anders and the Atomic Bomb
Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
Hans Magnus Enzensberger: The Industrialization of the Mind
The Supreme Contradictions of Simone Weil
Seyla Benhabib: Breaking Silence, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King
