Several political theorists have pointed to a contradiction in Arendt’s The Human Condition. On the one hand, the book appears to argue that action is possible anytime, anywhere: “Wherever you go, you will be a polis.” On the other hand, action appears as conditioned—without lawmaking, no space would exist in which action could appear—and, finally, due to the rise of “the social” in the modern age, as having become altogether unavailable to us. Looking for ways out of this seeming contradiction, with a view to understanding “the gift of freedom,” Cornelissen turns to The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s investigation into the three mental activities she regarded as “constitutive for all political action,” a book project she conceived of as “a kind of second volume” to The Human Condition. By analyzing specific passages from the newly constituted text of The Life of the Mind, which he co-edited for the Complete Works: Critical Edition and which is based on Arendt’s original typescripts, he will present a reading of her last and unfinished work that offers resources for answering Arendt’s critical interpreters. [Ankündigung der Veranstaltungsseite.]

Dr. Wout Cornelissen ist University Lecturer in Philosophy of Law an Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Er ist Mitherausgeber der neuen, kritischen Edition von Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (Wallstein 2024), dem Doppelband 14 der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe. Er hat Aufsätze zu Arendt’s Verständnis des Denkens im Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt (2020) und Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (Fordham UP 2017) veröffentlicht. Zuvor lehrte er an der FU Berlin, der Vanderbilt University, dem Bard College und der VU Amsterdam. Seinen PhD in Political Philosophy erhielt er an der Universität Leiden.