Arendt's archive

The Library of Congress has opened Hannah Arendt's archive

Dear Reader,

The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. has fully opened Hannah Arendt’s archive. Since 2001, it has only been partially available online, and fully available at three computer terminals worldwide.

Here are some of the incredible artifacts you can see now:

• Hannah Arendt’s family papers, including her American naturalization certificate

• An unpublished letter from Thomas Mann

• Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History

• Correspondence with W.H. Auden

• Correspondence with Theodor Adorno

• Correspondence with Randall Jarrell

• Correspondence with Robert Lowell

• Hannah Arendt’s syllabuses

• Hannah Arendt’s lectures

• Manuscript drafts

To mark the occasion, I wrote an essay for LitHub on my experiences in Arendt’s archive. You can read it here. And here is an interview with Barbara Bair who oversees Hannah Arendt’s papers.

Next week I will be hosting a private salon here for subscribers to introduce you to the digitized collection. Invitation forthcoming.

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When I entered Hannah Arendt’s archive for the first time in the summer of 2010 at the Library of Congress, I was not prepared for what I would find. As I was telling a friend this week about the digital relaunch of the archive, they asked me why I was so smitten with archival research. It is a question I have thought a lot about, and while there is much to say about the pleasures and benefits of the archive, here are three ways in which the archive has shaped my work.

I did not really begin to think about the relationship between Hannah Arendt’s life and work before I began handling her papers. The materiality of her life, the artifacts that remain of her being in the world, offer a record of private existence. In the archive I met a woman who spent hours writing letters and months alone editing books, a woman who made endless lists, and put time and energy into planning events. The archive humanizes. Part of the work that I have been doing the past few years is trying to share these documents to humanize Arendt, and demystify the very serious figure of thinking, to show how she was as engaged in a life of action as she was in the life of the mind.

Within the halls (read journals) of academia there is a stale quality to secondary scholarship. (No this is not a universal judgment.) At a certain point I just couldn’t read one more article valorizing Arendt as the great thinker of new beginnings (when so much of her writing is about loss), or Arendt as a proponent of political freedom (which felt completely ahistorical), or Arendt as the woman who slept with Martin Heidegger (which ignored her work). It was exhausting and I was not getting closer to Arendt’s work, I was getting further away, and worse, it felt like I was reading to find cracks to burrow into, instead of being provoked to thinking. The archive invited me into Arendt’s writing in a way that allowed for new beginnings in thinking about her life and work.

Arendt argued that there is no end in thinking. A work is never finished. The archive breaks apart the crystallized image of “a book.” Instead of burrowing into the published version of a text, one is invited into the various elements that exist in relationship to the text, which opens up the work in new ways. Seeing how The Origins of Totalitarianism developed overtime, how The Human Condition emerged out of an attempt to write a book on Karl Marx and the break in tradition, offers a form of depth that is not possible if one binds themselves to a liturgical reading of the so-called original. One must liberate themselves from the tradition.

Arendt’s work is now a part of our tradition, but there are no binding clauses that regulate the inheritance of her bequeathment. I hope you enjoy exploring Arendt’s archive.

Sam