Hannah Arendt's Political Aesthetics

This highly original work offers an expanded theoretical account of the origins of Hannah Arendt's unfinished project on political aesthetics and illuminates its vital significance for contemporary deliberative democracy. At the time of her untimely death, Arendt was developing a theory of judgment in close dialogue with Kant's aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment. This political aesthetics was intended to constitute "Judging," the third part of her posthumously published masterpiece, The Life of the Mind, following "Thinking" and "Willing." Through a meticulous rereading of Arendt's writings on Kant's political philosophy, this book retrieves her unfinished project and demonstrates how "thinking without a banister" gives rise to an aesthetic turn in contemporary political thought. Rejecting absolute standards while embracing human plurality, this aesthetic paradigm confronts groundlessness in order to imagine a more democratic, egalitarian, and pluralistic world. At its heart lies the dynamic interplay among difference, contextuality, and nomadism within the Arendtian polis, where political actors embody the conditions of the public realm through communicative performance and judgment. This book is essential reading for scholars and advanced students of Arendt studies, political philosophy, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: The Late-Modern Political Thinker Hannah Arendt.- Part 1- What is Arendt's 'Political Aesthetics'? .- 1. A 'New' Political Philosophy.- 2. 'Arendtianism' as a System of Political Thought.- 3. Arendt's Reading of The Critique of Judgment.- Part 2 - Thought, Thinking, and the Existential Political Ontology.- 4. The German Existential Philosophy and Thinking .- 5. Thought and Thinking.- 6. Thinking and the Groundless Ground .- Part 3- The Typology of Human Pluralities and the Ethics of the Other.- 7. Thinking and the Typology of 'Human Pluralities'.- 8. The Ethics of the Other: Levinas vs. Arendt.- 9. Late-Modern Political Conditions and Arendt's Political Aesthetics.- Concluding Remarks. Autorenportrait Suh You-Kyung is a Professor in the Department of Humanitas Studies and Dean of the Graduate School at Kyung Hee Cyber University, Seoul. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Kyung Hee University, M.A. degrees from the Universities of Kent and Oxford, and a B.A. from Kyung Hee University. A leading Hannah Arendt scholar and translator in Korea, her research centers on political aesthetics, democratic theory, and Korean democracy. She has held major leadership positions, including President of the Korean Association of NGO Studies and Vice President of the Korean Political Science Association and has served as a member of the Presidential Commission on Policy Planning. In addition to translating Arendt's major works into Korean, she has published extensively on democratic governance in works like A New Path for Korean Democracy.