Laughter, events, classes
Dear Reader!
I hope you’re having a good week.
Is it Ranunculus season yet?
When I started my first blog almost fifteen years ago, ThracianGirl, I did not expect anybody to read it. The name, Thracian Girl (which stubbornly remains my Instagram handle), comes from a story recounted by Plato’s Socrates in the Theaetetus:
Theodorus
What do you mean by this, Socrates?Socrates
Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy.
The Thracian Girl’s laughter is innocent, and yet it is also a serious comment about philosophical speculation and the relationship between common sense and reason.
In The Life of the Mind Hannah Arendt writes, “Laughter rather than hostility is the natural reaction of the many to the philosopher’s preoccupation and the apparent uselessness of his concerns.” For Arendt, laughter is a reflection of our withdrawal from the world, which is necessary for thinking. It is also a comment on the absurd, that which one cannot “make sense” of in doing the work of trying to understand.
There is much to say about Hannah Arendt and laughter, which will have to wait for another time, but I will say that her laughter is what most often got her into trouble. Laughter might not be a form of judgment, but people do make judgments about laughter.
Here is a nice essay on Arendt and Laughter that I stumbled across recently.
And here is a notecard from Hannah Arendt’s file on the playwright Bertolt Brecht:
Two upcoming events:
This Saturday February 26th! Join me for a film screening with Zoe Beloff at the Goethe-Institut in NYC and conversation about Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Hannah Arendt. RSVP here.
On March 9 join me virtually for “An Evening with an Author: Hannah Arendt Revisited" with D. N. Rodowick at the American Library in Paris. RSVP here.
Two upcoming classes:
I’m teaching Sado-Masochism in March here. We get into the muck of things, but it is at heart a course on critiques of Hegelian dialectics.
I’m teaching Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism this April here. There are only a few spots left.
I hope there is lots of laughter in your week.
Until soon,
Sam