A critique of criticism by Irving Horowitz in First Things magazine using an allegedly unfair assault on Hanna Arendt as a case in point:
The honorable tradition of criticism carries with it a displeasing aspect. This is especially the case in the higher academic circles. Reputations are too frequently made when pygmies stand on the shoulders of giants and when iconic and sometimes heroic figures are symbolically cut down to size. The theory is that, if the critic saws off the legs of those who have managed to stand tall for generations, the midgets can win handily in face-to-face combat with the dead. This is not to deny that even the most talented are sometimes in error; criticism is a useful art. It is, however, a derivative art. Criticism finds acceptance in a culture that measures success by small errors rather than by large-scale successes.
The recent critique of Hannah Arendt is a case in point. The most comprehensive assault to date, some thirty-five years after her death, is also the most recent. Bernard Wasserstein, professor of modern European Jewish history at the University of Chicago, comments on Arendt in the Times Literary Supplement in October 2009 under the title “Blame the Victim: Hannah Arendt Among the Nazis.” He offers not just a selective summary of “the historian and her sources” but also an umbrella of charges and allegations from other prominent figures over the past half century. One of the most infamous is that of my good friend Walter Laqueur—a significant figure in his own right. Wasserstein spares us the need to pick through the emotive rubble that has plagued Arendt’s career, stitching together a picture of her as either a gullible reader of neo-Nazi literature or a closet Jewish anti-Semite in need of intellectual detoxification.
After reading, reviewing, and writing on Hannah Arendt, I have come to think of her, fairly or otherwise, as a special voice, one of many—they range from Thomas Mann to Karl Jaspers to Marlene Dietrich—who came through the fires of hell called Nazi Germany with their consciences intact. An entire people was mesmerized by the rupture of a culture and a tradition that were entitled to be called the best in Western civilization but that ended up as the worst ever in Western civilization. The German nation began as a metaphor of Schiller’s ode to the spirit of human freedom and concluded with Hitler’s spirit of life taking on a scale of unparalleled horror.
1 comment:
Ah, a scathing--if insightful--critique of critics and criticism. Isn't there something ironic about that? I think it's a new trend among the edgier, more self-reflective critics to assess and deride their own value to the academy and the world at large.
Emmanuel Levinas writes of the artist: "He tells of the ineffable." But of the critic, he offers: "The fact that there might be something for the public to say, when the artist refuses to say about artwork anything in addition to the work itself, the fact that one cannot contemplate in silence, justifies the critic. He can be defined as the one that still has something to say when everything has been said, that can say about the work something else than that work." And there's the infinite in the finite.
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