Hannah Arendt ja tarinankerronta

Kohti kontingenssin kriittistä ymmärtämistä

Authors

• Olivia Guaraldo
• Tuija Parvikko

Abstract

In this article I analyse Hannah Arendt’s works from the perspective of storytelling. I argue that in order to understand Arendt’s concept of politics we also have to refer to her idea of storytelling, as a practice that guarantees a non-theoretical understanding of reality. Reality in fact, according to Arendt, is chiefly characterised by unpredictability and novelty. In order to give a fair assessment of these elements and in order not to neutralise the political impact of unpredictability and novelty within the shared world of human affairs I purport that the storytelling or narrative method allows a more complex and therefore more fair account of the texture of reality. From this narrative and contingent perspective I further take Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism into account, demonstrating that the historical reconstructions attempted in the book constitute a good example of storytelling. First of all since the new phenomenon of totalitarianism is unheard of, and secondly because the extremeness of its evil has no precedents in history, Arendt herself feels the need for a new way of understanding it. The traditional intellectual tools – historical or theoretical as they may have been – are no longer able to account for the magnitude of the phenomenon. A new epistemology is needed and Arendt, I would claim, appears to have found it in storytelling.