Intervene in the flow

Through the use of quotations, metaphors, rhythms, and tropes, thinking and writing are (like the theater) able to let knowledge that is distant, past – and sometimes also endangered or in danger of being forgotten – make an entrance into our concern about the present. Quotations and fragments interrupt our own voice and train of thought; they people the text that is taking shape in our solitary room and intervene in the flow of ideas. Fragments of alien experience are handed down in quotations, and even taken out of their original context, they still tell of the whole that is concealed behind them and ought not to be given up as lost. Yet at the same time, they clearly reject the ideal of a whole, which is apparent through their own intrusive foreignness. Arendt is aware of her own state of exile, as Franz Rosenzweig formulated it, and her text cannot do without that knowledge. She cannot surrender the experience of foreignness and accept the world as something unmediated.

Dramatization: The World As Stage, The Text As Space in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer

Photo taken in Ragged Island Brewing Company, Portsmouth RI