Action and appearance : an introduction

The papers collected in this volume all endeavour to address, without pretending to resolve, the ambiguities or aporias at the heart of Arendt’s understanding of action and appearance, or the ambiguities of her work more generally. Despite their innumerable differences, they all take it for granted that Arendt’s writings leave us with as many problems as they solve, and represent not a system of thought or a program of action, but a collection of inexhaustible debates. If Arendt proposed that we look for the ‘new insights’ of ‘great authors’ in their ‘fundamental and flagrant contradictions’, this was not, we might venture to say, because she believed contradiction as such is new, or because she possessed a romantic taste for irrationality and paradox. Rather, it is because, in the work of ‘great authors’, such ‘contradictions’ are destined to generate ever new interpretations and readings – because they, and they alone, ensure that a work is renewed each time it is approached anew, and that it is not so much original as the source of ever new beginnings. Action and Appearance had its beginnings in an intensive two-day workshop entitled “Arendt on / in Action,” held in May 2 009 at the University of Western Sydney’s Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy