The clash of identities - discourse, politics, and morality in the exchange of letters between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem
Year: 2008
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis analyses the fabled public exchange of letters that occurred between\npolitical theorist Hannah Arendt and historian of Jewish religion Gershom Scholem in\n1964 following the historic trial of Adolf Eichmann and Arendt's subsequent\npublication of her report of the event, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The thesis covers the\nhistorical issues that form the contextual background to the exchange. It involves the\nintroduction of the two participants as defining Jewish intellectuals of the past\ncentury, the course of the trial itself and the political and ideological problems it\nentailed as well as the turbulent history of the reception of Arendt's book. It is down\nto these four factors that guaranteed the eminence of the exchange of letters analysed\nin the thesis. Oft-quoted as the exchange is, there has been no proper analysis of it to\nthis date. To accomplish this task, the thesis adopts the theoretical-methodological\nframework of discourse analysis in general, and the version of rhetorically oriented\ndiscursive psychology, proposed mainly in the publications of Potter and Wetherell\n(1987) and Billig (1996}, in particular. This approach allows the thesis to provide a\nfine-grained analysis of the various ways of textual construction. Firstly, the ways\nexamined concern the significance, worth and value of the debate itself, as formulated\nby both of the participants. Secondly, they involve the construction of the attempt to\nestablish definite versions of the content of the book. Thirdly, they cover the textual\nacts of accounting for that content, or the practice of misinterpretation of that content,\nrespectively. What all these three aspects have in common is the positioning of the\nproblems touched upon in a moral and political context, and ultimately approaching\nthem in terms of the identities of the participants. In this sense, versions of the events\nand ways of accounting for it will not only aim at producing accurate descriptions of\nevents but in the forms of an implied morality or politics an implied "action-plan" for\nthe future as well. The construction of Arendt and Scholem is, hence, analysed in\nterms of its argumentative organisation in order to undermine the other's counterversion\nand to establish its own as the definite one. While, structurally, there are many\nsimilarities in the two letters, what distinguishes them is that they conceive of their\nobjects (i.e. the text), subject positions, and political or moral values according to\nwhich they should be assessed in quite diametrically opposite ways. This thesis not\nonly registers the various rhetorical ways the participants fashion their versions as\ndefinite ones, but also accounts for the differences in their contents.
Author: Dávid Kaposi
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W848602560