ON MESSIANIC STRAINS IN ARENDT'S THEORY OF POLITICAL ACTION

Daniel Brandes
unpublished
In this paper I examine the "messianic schema" (Susannah Gottlieb) that structures Hannah Arendt's account of the Vita Activa. Focusing on the "internal remedies" by which action is said to redeem itself from the structural frustrations that mark its activity-namely, promising and forgiving-I claim that Arendt's own emphasis on their extraordinariness, or their interruptive and inaugural dimensions, threatens to conceal their miraculous character. I suggest that Arendt's description of
more » ... action as miraculous (and specifically, her description of forgiveness as man's "miracle-working faculty") takes for granted a politico-theological conception of miracle that finds its chief spokesman not in Carl Schmitt but in Franz Rosenzweig.
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