Hannah Arendt e lo spettacolo del mondo. Estetica e politica

Relating to Hannah Arendt’s philosophical aim to bring thinking back to historical and political experience, a great weight is assigned to the tight connection of aesthetics and politics submitted by Arendt's texts. Appearance, form, common sense, taste, spectacle, performance are not, in Arendt’s view, simply ‘aesthetical ideas’ exported from aesthetics and applied to politics, but the very basis of her political theory: this is the thesis the book focuses upon. The essay rereads Arendt’s principal works, from The Human Condition to The Life of the Mind and the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, not forgetting The Origins of Totalitarism, Between Past and Future and several other writings, in search of her conception of the world as a ‘space of appearance’ in its aesthetical, performative, political, and also biological aspects. Arendt’s reflexions on judgement, recognized at last, following Kant’s Third Critique, as the proper way of thinking ‘politically', make definitively clear that her main concern was not only to analize the ways to ‘act politically’ but also to find appropriate means to ‘think politically’, without the ‘bannister’ of logical reasoning or moral laws. Far from contemporary ‘entertaining’ aesthetization and instrumental spectacularity of politics and society, the ‘spectacle of the world’ (the expression Arendt used in 1975 during a conference in Copenhagen) refers here directly to human condition in a double perspective. A first kind of ‘spectacularity’ raises as self-exibition, singular appearance of life: it’s what in The Life of the Mind is described as a sort of ‘wordly’ dimension of life-being itself. Related to human being, it precedes the ‘public sphere’ as “togetherness and intercourse of men”, but at the same time it is still recognizable in the vita activa and in the vita contemplativa, in action as ‘beginning’ (which corresponds to “the fact of birth”) and even in thought as ‘naturally’ human activity. Through and beyond Hannah Arendt’s suggestions, the essay invites to think to the challenging perspective of mutual belonging of aesthetics and politics to respond, aesthetically and politically , to biopolitical questions and to the aesthetical and political deficit occurring at present in overspread phenomena of anaesthetization and apolitical attitude. Through a “spectacle of politics” to counteract “show-politics” and loss of judgement and of genuine political interests and feelings.