Hannah Arendt

I finally saw the Hannah Arendt biopic. It brought her private life, especially as it bore on her work on Eichmann in Jerusalem, to life. (Most of what I knew previously of her life came from the masterful biography, For the Love of the World.)

The funny thing about learning about Arendt's private life is that it seems like, theoretically, she wouldn't approve. She advocates a separation between public and private and privacy for the private. So it's a bit shocking to see her, for instance, chopping vegetables.

I love how she worked in the film--reclining on a chaise lounge, smoking a cigarette, often closing her eyes. I'd like to adopt that method.

There's a lot of friendship in the film. The most surprising line for me in the film was when Arendt said,

I never loved any people, I only love my friends.

Which was, it seems, paraphrased from a response in a letter to someone who accused her of not loving the Jewish people:

How right you are that I have no such love, and for two reasons: first, I have never in my life "loved" some nation or collective — not the German, French or American nation, or the working class, or whatever else might exist.  The fact is that I love only my friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love. 

The film also made me curious about her friendship with Mary McCarthy. To file under Hannah Arendt on women:

It would be a mistake to think of Arendt and McCarthy’s alliance as the result of some shared sense of “sisterhood,” in the parlance of the second wave. Neither was particularly sympathetic with what they called “women’s lib.” A graduate supervisor of mine, Jennifer Nedelsky, of the University of Toronto, was a student of Arendt’s in the nineteen-seventies. She remembers riding in an elevator to a seminar with Arendt. On Nedelsky’s coat was a button for the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Arendt noticed it, pointed, and, drawing her finger around in slow, disdainful circles, said to Nedelsky, “This is not zerious.”