The year that was–12 | 2024 in books: Love, hope and resistance—Part 2

READING books is about enlarging the imagination and opening out possibilities that one may not have considered or about affirming ideas that seem a bit out of place.

Doing a review of books of the year is about cultivating a reflective space from which to think of the tumultuous world we live in from a space which is a bit removed from the din of the contemporary world.

This act of reading or list-making is, however, about the world we live in. 

As Emily Dickinson put it:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

…

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

Ann Heberlien, Of Love and Tyranny

Heberlien’s account of the life and politics of Hannah Arendt has been translated from Swedish in 2021. While the authoritative biography of Arendt is by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, titled For Love of the World, Heberlein’s account focuses quite brilliantly on two thematics that dominated both Arendt’s life and her work, namely love and tyranny.

Heberlien’s account of the relationship between Hannah and her teacher, Martin Heidegger is a caution on not judging a relationship based on outward appearances.

Hannah was the student and Martin was the established and famous teacher. To the outward eye, the relationship was unbalanced. “Power is an underlying condition in all relationships. To love puts a person in a weak position. There is a temptation to exploit the other person’s devotion in order to gain the upper hand- after all, the person who loves most, who is most dependent, is always in the more vulnerable position.

“As a result, it is easy, too easy, perhaps to conclude that Hannah was subordinate and that Martin held the balance of power in their relationship. In all likelihood the reality was more complex than that.”

Hannah found her ‘love’ in Heinrich Blucher who she met in Germany and with whom she escaped the Nazis to land up in the United States and begin a new life.

With Heinrich, she cultivated “another mode of being together”, based on their “shared passion for thinking”. The love between them was based on building a common world together, while maintaining their separateness. Though Hannah struggled to accept Henrich’s sexual infidelities, she reasoned that “fidelity was about continuity, about loyalty and reliability … it was about being faithful to what is true, genuine and important. Hannah managed to reason her way to an understanding of fidelity that could accommodate Heinrich’s infidelity.”