Rethinking Identity Politics with Arendt
Over at The Ideas Letter you can find my new essay on how Arendt and her student the gay publisher Michael Denneny offer some possible foundations for an alternative conception of identity politics. This follows up on an initial essay last year in Tablet and a recent post for the Gay and Lesbian Review’s blog. With a friend, I’m working now on a new essay along these lines for a German journal (I’ll eventually post the English version here)—trying to work out how the Arendt-Denneny connection lets us see identity politics differently, in a way that escapes woke/anti-woke polemics. I’d love to know your thoughts—there, here, or over email!
I haven’t read much Rosenberg (other than a few of his more famous/popular essays), so nothing to add there.
I might mention that I think the first folks to explicitly connect aesthetics to politics may have been the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers (Hume, Hutcheson, etc— followed by Bentham). I’ve always thought there is something super-queer (or, as you prefer, gay) about that movement… it also helps explain why the Englishman Bentham wrote an early tract in defense of homosexuality. A politics based on taste.
The gay world as a “preschool for politics.” Best description ever.
A lesson in how to have our identity politics and eat it, too. Thank you.