Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics. By Kimberly Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. 224p. $39.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Extract

Of particular interest in the proliferating scholarship on Hannah Arendt is how her thought has recently attracted sympathetic attention in areas of theoretical inquiry once considered problematic for her. So, for example, the Graecophile Arendt, previously dismissed by many feminist thinkers for failing to take adequate account of the machismo and misogyny of ancient Greek culture, has inspired a volume of sympathetic feminist readings of her work (Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, 1995). Respectful reconsiderations of the Eichmann controversy at symposia and in a recently published volume (Steven E. Aschheim's Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, 2001) signal that the shadow once cast on Arendt's theoretical and personal integrity as an investigator of the nature and significance of modern Jewish identity has largely been lifted. To these efforts to engage sympathetically what were once considered the most problematic elements of Arendt's thought can be added Kimberly Curtis's highly interesting and rewarding book.