04-05-2019
On March twenty sixth the Hannah Arendt Heart and the Poetry Basis hosted the inaugural occasion for the Phrases We stay By: Poetry and Philosophy in Dialog sequence at Murray’s Sanctuary in Tivoli, NY. Over the course of two hours, Fred Moten, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Ann Lauterbach shared new work and mentioned democracy, race, magnificence, love, Hannah Arendt, and judgment. Thanks to everybody who got here.
The phrase “phrases we stay by” comes from the tip of Hannah Arendt’s e-book On Revolution. Turning to the poet and French resistance fighter Rene Char, Arendt wrote that “the storehouse of reminiscence is saved and watched over by the poets, whose enterprise it’s to seek out and make the phrases we stay by.” The language of poetry is, for Arendt, what remained after the warfare, as a document of expertise that might present a way of sturdiness on the planet, and as a type of pondering that might lead us away from the tyranny of ideological pondering, towards a reckoning with the world as it’s. All through her profession the language of poetry remained on the coronary heart of her political and philosophical writing, as a type of pondering that might deliver illumination in darkish instances. For Arendt, at least for us, this darkness encompasses political, social, financial, and ecological strife, mass homelessness, and loneliness. It’s in that spirit, with the same perception within the potential of poetry that the Arendt Heart in collaboration with the Poetry Basis conceived this new initiative, inviting poets and philosophers to come back collectively in dialog.
