A B S T R A C T
The Janus
Faced Juno of Arendt’s Politics of Life
Markku Koivusalo
Researcher, Department of Political Science
University of Helsinki
The anniversary symposium celebrates the centenary of
Arendt’s birth. Yet, I do not think that it tries to
rememorize the bare naked birth of the baby girl in Hanover
one hundred years ago. Instead, what seems to have gathered
the symposium together is the power and potentiality, which
her “second birth” to the shared world of words
initiated and which marked a new beginning and an
interruption in the occidental thought, a beginning that
keeps still enduring as a beginning. Furthermore, I think
that her greatest initiative and interruption was exactly
the new way to think the beginning and that it was this
that made her a real genius as a thinker and as a
philosopher, not as a cultivated critic and theoretician,
as she herself claimed to be.
But as all properly philosophical concepts, concepts that
force us to think, her conceptualization of the beginning
is highly ambivalent. It is as double-faced, as the old
Roman God of the beginnings and thresholds, Janus. This
double face characterizes also her views considering
politics, life and its different forms and human plurality.
Furthermore, Arendt – who thought that Romans, to
whom “the religious and political activity could be
considered almost identical” and who were
“perhaps the most political people we have
known”, at least political geniuses in the acts of
political beginnings – wanted to re-remember the
messages that was carried by the Gods of Janus and Minerva.
And yet, she was oddly silent about the very plural
birthday deities, junones, the female counterparts of the
Greek daimons and Roman geniuses. It is with these birthday
deities and Arendt’s thoughts about birth, life and
politics, that this presentation will try to engage with
some simple “spiritual exercises” as Arendt
would called them.
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