This lecture returns to Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and reconsiders it by way of questions of context, design, and media architecture. Although Arendt’s book has been read as one of her “Jewish” texts, I argue it as a Second Red Scare text and that it should be read in the American context of McCarthyism, the 1940’s and 50’s political moment in which (then, as now) diversity,  assimilation, dissent, and humor were put on trial. Specifically, former, ex-, or current communists (many of them Jewish), were accused of being dangerous subversives disloyal to America.

Many who had nothing to do with communism were also pinioned by investigations and inquiries that ruined lives and livelihoods. The Lavendar purges would add queer people to the targeted risks to U.S. security. Arendt addresses none of this directly in her Eichmann book, but her objections to the Eichmann trial – heavily litigated for decades in the massive scholarship/criticism on her 1963 book -- were all objections that had been made at mid-century to the hearings and actions of the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which were enabled, empowered, then finally undone, by the newest medium -- television.

Programme

18:00 | Open to public

18:30 | Welcome/opening words

18:45 | Start of lecture followed by discussion with audience

20:00 | Reception

21:30 | End

Bonnie Honig

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University. Her work draws on political theory, literature, law, and film to recast questions of immigration, emergency, democracy, and gender in more agonistic and egalitarian terms. She is author of several books, including: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009), Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge, 2013), Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017), A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard, 2021) and Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (Fordham, 2021: a collection of revised versions of her public writing since 2016). 

Co-Founder of Brown University’s Democracy Project, leading the work on “Varieties of Democratic Experience,” Honig has written on the cultural politics of misogyny and has argued since 2013 for a politics of “public things” to orient democracy now. Author of 70 articles and 11 single-authored books and (co)edited collections, she is now writing The Accidental Ordinary: Language, Politics, Metamorphosis, the topic of her 2026 lectures as Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.