In this workshop we will discuss Hannah Arendt’s conception of the ‘world’, what it means to have an orientation to the world and to care for the world. In her famous interview with the journalist Gunter Gaus Arendt defined the world as something that lies in-between human beings, a space of disclosure ‘in which things become public … in  which all kinds of things appear’, including artistic forms, political action, and the revelatory power of distinctive personalities. Arendt contrasted the cultivation of the world as a space for spontaneous action and  public-political association with the quotidian processes of labour and consumption in which ‘man is utterly thrown back on himself’ and thus subject to a condition of loneliness and atomization that renders her or him vulnerable to totalitarian movements. Controversially, in The Human Condition Arendt’s conceives of the polis, the worldly space appropriate to political action as excluding ‘social’ questions such as the redistribution of wealth and the private sphere of the household economy and family. Was Arendt’s conception of the ‘world’ and of genuine political action elitist? What virtues and qualities are needed to create and maintain such a ‘world’?  Does contemporary political debate enable or erode the public world that Arendt extolled? In conversation with our keynote speaker Richard King, and moderator Ned Curthoys, we shall explore the historical context and contemporary significance of Arendt’s influential conception of a world which both binds and separates us at the same time.

The workshop has a limit of twenty participants and is aimed primarily at Higher Degree Research students and advanced undergraduates. Participants will be accepted on a first come first served basis and will be given access to the workshop readings upon enrolment.

Please contact ned.curthoys@anu.edu.au to enrol. Enrolments close on Friday the 11^th of March.