Sigrid Weigel on Poetry and Philosophy in Arendt’s Thought Diary

Sigrid Weigel, "Poetics as a Presupposition of Philosophy: Hannah Arendt's. Denktagebuch," Telos, 2009, 146: 97-110.

Sigrid Weigel describes the Thought Diary as an explicit decision on Arendt's part to turn from the personal and literary reflections of her earlier diaries to explicit reflection on questions of political philosophy following the publication of Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. However, in contrast to the earlier split in Arendt's writing between the private diary and public work of the academic dissertation on Augustine, in the Thought Diary "poetics no longer designates the other of philosophy […] but, rather, it now describes the path of or to thought" (102). "Poetics," translating "Dichtung" in Weigel’s original German, refers not merely to rules of producing literary works but to the broader study of the original representational potency of art. Weigel’s "or" opens in two directions, leading us to ask if poetics is the path to the goal of thought (a path that will be familiar to readers of Hegel’s Aesthetics) or an inseparable way of thinking itself.

Weigel’s broader argumentation tends toward the second reading. Commenting on an entry on Hans Blumenberg, she draws out a striking note from Arendt: "In philosophy, one calls concept what in poetics is called metaphor" (105). Weigel continues: "The same words can be understood as concepts or metaphors, yet their designation as metaphor reflects the moment of transmission that is always inscribed in them─at least when it is a question of the designation of the invisible" (105). What appears in the metaphor is the relation to the unseen. Something emerges from darkness and gains minimal perceptibility. Here the "or" in the phrase "concepts or metaphors" can be productively thought of as a conjunction ("and") rather than an alternative. In ways that are only now becoming clear, Arendt reads and writes in a double motion, bringing out fundamental moments of appearance and clarifying structures through conceptual precision.

 -Jeff Champlin