Revolution and Time in Hannah Arendt's Political Thought

• Grant number: 22/02216-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: July 01, 2023
• End date: June 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Oswaldo Giacoia Junior
• Grantee: Thiago Dias da Silva
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/14044-1 - Revolution and Time in Hannah Arendt, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

This project intends to broaden and deepen an interpretation of Hannah Arendt's work. In this interpretation, I focus on time as an ontologically structuring element in her thought. This choice is justified by an interpretative emphasis on the importance of the phenomenological movement on Arendtian thought.Scholars of Arendt's work always accept, based on the author's biography, that she belongs to the phenomenological movement, but they have not yet satisfactorily developed what would be a properly Arendtian phenomenology. There surely are a series of studies dedicated to the intellectual relations between Arendt and Martin Heidegger, one of the pillars of phenomenology, but these studies, although useful, do not usually seek Arendtian phenomenology properly and often have the defect of reducing Arendt to a "Heideggerian".In order to contribute to the formulation of an Arendtian phenomenology, my interpretation emphasizes the role of the break of the tradition, which is a decisive theme for the phenomenological movement as a whole, but, following the Arendt's own path, it proposes that Marx is the decisive point for this phenomenology. Studies dedicated to the relationship between Arendt and Marx may mention his role as a "rebel who collapsed tradition", but rarely develop this idea in depth and, even less, fit it into an Arendtian phenomenology.Just as I stated in my thesis that Arendt relies on Marx to propose a post-foundational concept of the human being in The Human Condition, I now propose that she performs a similar procedure in On Revolution in order to dismantle the concept of political body. I showed in the thesis that, in The Human Condition, this operation is based on Marx, as a historical key, and on the notion of time, as an ontological key. I now propose to show that, also in On Revolution, Marx and time appear as a historical and ontological key to dismantling the traditional concept of the political body. In common to both books, there is the concept of beginning, mobilized as an ontological mark capable of preventing the essentialization of politics.