Hannah Arendt: An Erotic Life

an essay by Michael Denneny (1982)

Michael Denneny was, I think, the most important of Arendt’s students—although to be honest, I don’t know much about the others! Who were they?

Anyway, although Denneny’s 1979 article “The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,” from the volume he edited Hannah Arendt and the Recovery of the Public World, is often cited in the steadily growing literature on Arendt and judgment, there’s been no work (correct me if I’m wrong!) done on what might be revealed by: Denneny’s correspondence with Arendt (starting from his undergraduate days in the early 60s to her death in 1975), or his dissertation written under her supervision (and almost completed) on the concept of taste (written in the years just before her own lectures on judgement—I think in a process of mutual influence), or his notes from her lectures on ‘thinking’ at Chicago and the New School, or the course he co-taught with her on Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

All of these sources—plus the triangular intellectual relationship of Denneny and Arendt to her fellow teacher Harold Rosenberg, Denneny’s other major influence (Rosenberg’s notion of action and thus his art criticism developed in dialogue with Arendt—but who has written about this?)—surely have some light to shed on the nowadays much-discussed topics of her approach to aesthetics and politics via judgement.

But for a start, at least, there’s my own essay on Denneny and Arendt with Tae-ho Kim—and what I’ll be writing here over the coming weeks and months as I try 1) to make the case that Denneny is important, interesting, or whatever word most signifies to you that you should pay attention to him & 2) to prepare a proper article on Denneny’s own aesthetics and politics via taste, showing how he builds on and in critical ways departs from Arendt, opening some exciting possibilities for our own thinking.

Along the way, I’ll share some of the documents I’m working with. Today, a 1982 essay Denneny wrote on Arendt—the only significant text he wrote about her after the 1979 essay. The 1982 essay was meant to be a review for the NYRB of the recently published Levy-Bruehl bio of Arendt, but was rejected, for reasons that may be obvious reading it. Denneny rather shits on the book, and strays from the topic, to emphasize Arendt as an erotic, Jewish, and political thinker (he also mentions Isak Dinesen a bunch, I guess because he published a biography of her).

There are a couple of copies of this essay in Denneny’s papers. One is a draft from that year, with an accompanying rejection letter from the NYRB. The other, which I’ll be posting below, was typed up by Denneny shortly before his death when some correspondent named Steve (evidently an academic working on a book on Arendt and Drama—I have tried to find out who this person could be, so if you know, or are, Steve, please write!) wrote to him, presumably asking about his relationship to Arendt. This was around the same moment Denneny and I were in correspondence, likewise about Arendt. I hope Steve, whoever he is, is a kindred spirit!