NYU Department of German, together with the Department of Comparative Literature Poetics & Theory Program, the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, the Department of Religious Studies, and Deutsches Haus at NYU presents “Home to Roost: Hannah Arendt Conference.”

This conference, to be held on the 50th anniversary of Arendt’s death, takes its title from the last work she published. Printed in The New York Review of Books in June 1975, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address” was the text of a lecture Arendt gave in Boston on the 200th anniversary of the American Republic. In contrast to much of her writing, which is stubbornly optimistic about the history and political significance of the United States, the mood of this address is decidedly somber. Written in the aftermath of the US defeat in Vietnam and of Watergate, Arendt writes apprehensively of “the cataclysm of events that numbs us.” “We may very well,” she speculates, “stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other.”
Arendt addresses an array of subjects none of which have lost their relevance. These range from image-making and post-truth, through the perils of “the doctrine of progress” and the “ray of hope” afforded by the nascent environmental movement, to historical amnesia and political paralysis. But the guiding thread is the critique of neoimperialism evoked in her title. It is as if the chickens of American foreign policy, of American politics in general, and perhaps indeed of the American way of life, have come home to roost. The phrase, Arendt suggests, describes “the boomerang effect, the unexpected and ruinous backfiring of evil deeds on the doer, of which imperialist politicians of former generations were so afraid,” and which politicians in her time, as in ours, seem to have forgotten. Commemorating Arendt 50 years after her death and 250 years after the founding of the United States, the conference will reflect on the ongoing significance of her thought for addressing the perplexities of our time.

Schedule:
Thursday, December 4, 5:30 PM

Home to Roost: Seyla Benhabib in conversation with Samuel Moyn

Friday, December 5

10-11am
Coffee & Radio Recording
Hannah Arendt, Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address,
Boston, May 20, 1975

11am-1pm
Ayten Gündoğdu, Racial Bureaucracy: The Anatomy of a Cruel Machinery
Catherine Malabou, No One Rules Here: Rereading Arendt in Times of Stateless Resistance

2:30-4:30pm
Tal Correm, Responsibility for New Beginnings
Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Common Sense in Great Derangement: Arendt in Climate Crisis

5:00-7:00pm
Avital Ronell, Condemned Sites: An American Crypt
Christoph Menke, The End of Politics is Freedom

“Home to Roost: Hannah Arendt Conference” is supported by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA)

Location: Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003

More Information: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf_uodWBQZCt8SgMBGUGt36Fq4YLzVgulEwrRVgiBjF5At9vw/viewform