![]() Its afterlife expresses and beckons a challenge and a provocation that are both political and kinetic - in one word, choreopolitical - a challenge we must answer. ![]() Of course we could dismiss Arendt’s sentence as a mere expression of a philosopher’s disen- chantment and pessimism with an era moving from the biopolitics of the concentration camps to the thanatopolitics4 of the Cold War, with its specter of total annihilation of human life brought by the invention and proliferation of the atomic bomb.Īnd yet, performatively, Arendt’s fragment persists, resonates, unsettles, stirs. With this in mind, Arendt’s diagnostic that “we do not know - at least not yet - how to move politically” can be also re-written, without losing any accuracy, as: “we do not know - at least not yet - how to move freely.” And this is why we can say that Arendt’s sentence becomes the diagnostic of a double loss, kinetic and semantic, emerging from one and the same event: the loss of knowing how to move politically results in, as much as produces, the loss of being able to find sense, meaning, and orientation, in moving freely. ![]() Consequently, Arendt’s sentence can be re-rendered as: the meaning of politics, which is also its aim or direction, is freedom. Indeed, “sense” in its old English usage carries with it a double meaning that conveys more exactly the dynamics underlying Arendt’s thought, since “sense” simultaneously refers to signification and direction.3 Thus, politics in Arendt can be redefined as a general orientation towards freedom. As she writes in several of her essays, “Der Sinn von Politik ist Freiheit” - a sentence translated into English as: “The meaning of politics is freedom” (2005:108).2 However, “Sinn” (sense) is not quite “Bedeutung” (meaning). We know that for Arendt the notion of a true (or rescued) politics has always been bound, deeply, even ontologically, to the notion of freedom. In a posthumously published fragment, written in August 1950 as a preliminary draft for what would have been the first chapter of her unfinished Introduction into Politics, Hannah Arendt makes the following observation: “ we have arrived in a situation where we do not know - at least not yet - how to move politically.”1
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