Hannah Arendt, an exiled intellectual in desexile in the 20th century

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme invite you to a final lecture on Hannah Arendt, an exiled intellectual in exile in the 20th century, as part of the "Intellectuals in exile: a humanism without borders" series.

Hannah Arendt is an example of the epistemology of exile invented by exiles from a long and rich tradition. The conference will draw on the life of Hannah Arendt and her work on global exile in the 19th-20th and early 21st centuries, with millions of stateless people crossing borders to escape mass extermination and enforced disappearance.

Hannah Arendt was widely recognised when, with uncommonly acute lucidity, she described The Totalitarian System (1943) and its emphasis on action and thought.  

She is striking for her life, her work and her dazzling, intuitive insights. Her intellectual work is a work of understanding, elaborating and creating her situation of forced exile by escaping the extermination of millions of people and taking part in the resistance.

• Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp, former professor of philosophy and political theory at the universities of Lausanne and Geneva and former programme director at the Collège international de philosophie, works on migration policies, the right of asylum, cosmopolitical hospitality, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg, materialist feminists and social movements.
• Discussant: Valeria Wagner (University of Geneva)
• Moderator: Álvaro de Vasconcelos

A series of 5 lectures

Exile has never spared intellectuals. In the twentieth century and right up to the present day, it has even been one of the usual conditions for the life of the mind. But while it forces thought and creation to take a break, it also sometimes leads them to flourish elsewhere, or even to be nourished by this situation of loss and constraint.

The series of lectures entitled "Intellectuals in exile: a humanism without borders" seeks to highlight the complexity of these intellectual trajectories and their importance for the renewal of thought and democracy.

Each conference is organised around one or more exiled intellectuals, most often hosted at the FMSH or the EHESS. Together with the specialists invited to present them, these intellectuals represent a wide range of backgrounds, in terms of their country of origin, their preferred discipline, and the period and conditions of their exile.