Dear Martin: I have instructed the publisher to send you one of my books. I want to say a few words to you about this. You will see that the book does not have a dedication. If things had ever worked out properly between us—I mean between, I’m not talking about me or you—I would have asked you if I could dedicate it to you; It emerged directly from the early days in Freiburg and owes you almost everything in every way.” (New York, October 28, 1960).
With these words the chronicle of a correspondence that lasted from 1925 to 1975 continues, with a forced interruption during that time in which language was eclipsed, losing, perhaps forever, the harmonious union between what is said and what you think. Speech simply ceased to make sense in a world in which those who shouted hymns to life were, in reality, howling cries of death. In the end it turned out to be true that you can’t write what you don’t talk about; and, even more true, that we cannot speak of what exceeds our capacity for thought. During a silence that lasts almost seventeen years, Heidegger and Arendt stop sending letters to each other. The comings and goings of exile would not have made it easier to trace the young woman’s tracks. In 1933, shortly after hearing the news of the Reichstag fire, and understanding that the absurdity, in its most lethal face, had been unleashed without anything or anyone being able to stop it, Arendt left Berlin and arrived in Paris, where she remained until 1941. , in which he makes the final leap to the United States from Portugal.
In 1950, provisionally, the letters returned, although in a very different tone, tempered as the love inflammation died down. Silence, like time, is therapeutic. The secret magician of Marburg’s thought no longer writes his compliments to that chiaroscuro being who now presents herself as the “joking nymph of the forest”, and now under the guise of an innocent and modest Sophia. The transmitter of his letters is now the essential friend, the one who communicates “something” important in the Merkur, who publishes brave and forceful essays on the human condition, who engages with the question of radical evil and who, a wayward disciple of philosophical thought , dares to mark an alternative path that he contemplates not without a certain astonishment. Also in the confusion that something in her stalks him. What Heidegger never intuits, due to lack of imagination, is that Arendt, in the privacy of her Manhattan apartment, preserves intact that playful and childish profile that makes her entertain her guests with a stuffed mouse mascot. which he lures out of his hiding place with a piece of cheese. The image of the animal coming out of her burrow, in the case of Heidegger, could not be more suggestive. She is also unable to suspect that her former lover has not lost a bit of that euphoric and joyful character of eccentricity and the game of being and not being at the same time. At a party organized by the Marxist party at the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, Arendt surprises dressed as an Egyptian slave from a seraglio, half houri, half Scheherazade. She had just written in Rahel Varnhagen’s biography that a lie is beautiful if it is chosen with total freedom. And it might seem like a contradiction coming from a thinker who spent her entire life searching for the truth.
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The “lie”, in this context, refers to the masking game by which the subject contravenes the discourse established by power relations, while ratifying, to the point of absurdity, an alternate existence. Mikhail Bakhtin says that the mask operates in the wearer a kind of resurrection of the most unspeakable desires, while at the same time proposing a new recitation of his story. In Russian, “resurrection” and “recitation” are related words, expressing a desire to give public validity to the veiled story. The mask implies a rebirth, but also a revolutionary practice, by allowing the subject to be what it should not be and, however, sometimes is. The mask does not hide, it shows the taboo that we are, that possesses us. It unfolds, very fine, one of the skins through which we perspire. “Behind the mask, another mask,” recites the surrealist artist Claude Cahun, resurrecting the androgyne. For this, our ontological condition is prior to the artificiality of genders, hence the continuous vacillation of thought when having to settle on a single definition of woman or man. The mask alludes to that polymorphism with which we are born and to the splits that the forces of power, and linguistics, are perpetrating, with axes, in our matter. The mask, a piece of wood, cardboard or porcelain, evokes the daily tragedy of having to put aside the plurality that inhabits us.
The choice of the Egyptian slave mask merely echoes two essential points in Arendt’s biography: her fascination with “the mystery and enigma of Jewish existence,” as well as her desire to transgress what is established as a way of resisting thoughtless automatisms. The metaphor of “Egyptian style” has been used since the 19th century in the most stylized areas of Germany to speak euphemistically about what is Jewish, in an attempt to make exotic and exorcise the unnameable, turning it into furniture worthy of the couch of the East. In Arendt, a woman with great problems identifying with her Jewish identity, the mask of the Egyptian slave recovers the history of the diaspora of the chosen people, while giving it an ingenious twist that coincides, in the same way, with the irreverent Jewish humor.
The appearance of the Jewish mask, one more among many others, sneaks in anecdotally and inconsequently into the letters. Along with the continuous reluctance to a feeling of belonging, there overlaps the identification with a culture that has been accumulating in the irrational substratum and that is expressed in many jokes about Jews, such as the one that Arendt tells to Jaspers in relation to the fear that a possible war between the USA and the USSR arouses in him: “A Jew is afraid of a barking dog. Another Jew reminds him of the saying ‘a barking dog that bites little’. To which the Jew answers that he knows him, but he is not sure that the dog knows him.
The mask of Judaism reappears on those other occasions in which, as a justification for the most peculiar features of her personality, she wields a Jewish origin that forces her to settle into constant concern about unexpected events, in eternal dissatisfaction, thus as well as maintaining the habit of having your suitcase ready to leave at any time. That is not the only mask used by Arendt. Other of her favorite disguises are that of Pallas Athena, that of a cynical woman, that of a seductress, the latter brings her great successes, because after the death of her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, she continues to receive marriage proposals that, Of course, he doesn’t accept. Perhaps the most noteworthy of her is that which, in 1970, comes from the British poet Wystan Hugh Auden.
For many exiles, dressing up is a way of rebelling, of showing the bankruptcy of appearance. Of lying to tell the truth, as performatively practiced by the German Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler, disguised as the androgynous Prince Yusuf of Thebes, with his baggy leather pants and brightly colored shirts, walking through the inhospitable cities of his exile . Demonstrating, to the point of absurdity, that the other is never as radically exotic as our exalted ignorance would have us believe.
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