Hannah Arendt and Political Glory

In this book, Peg Birmingham argues that privileging the event of natality and new beginnings in Hannah Arendt’s political thought overlooks her central problematic with the modern and contemporary production of economic and political superfluousness, treating all life and the earth itself as disposable.

In the face of this unrelenting production, that will not stop until it has destroyed all worlds and the earth itself, Birmingham shows that Arendt’s primary concern is with radically rethinking the Greek notion of immortality and its heroic glory as earthly immortality. This is rooted in a new form of universal solidarity with those who have been produced as superfluous and consigned to holes of oblivion at sea, desert crossings, prisons and camps.

Author Biography

Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Indian UP, 2006), co-editor (with Philippe van Haute), Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (Koros, 1996) and co-editor (with Anna Yeatman), Aporia of Rights: Citizenship in an Era of Human Rights (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on Agamben, Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Hobbes, and Rousseau. She is the editor of Philosophy Today.