1975-2025: Imaginary interviews with Hannah Arendt

Among the many possible ways to pay tribute to a thinker such as Hannah Arendt, on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, we were de-cided to adopt an unprecedented approach: an imaginary interview. This choice responds to her desire – expressed repeatedly in her works – to invite future readers to grasp the vitality of her thinking, without stopping at the final results and avoiding the risk of impris-oning her philosophy within systematic and rigid formulas. It is a way of questioning the nature of concepts, the development of ar-guments and the dynamics of Arendt's reflections, which often ger-minated in virtuous exchanges of opinion during meetings with her friends – philosophers and poets, historians and writers – who crowded her home. Having emigrated to the United States and always eager for new in-tellectual stimuli, Arendt was sustained by her insatiable desire to learn and meet new people. It is no coincidence that her small flat at 130 Morningside Drive was often filled with a wide circle of acquaint-ances: publishers such as William Phillips and Philip Rahv, critics such as Alfred Kazin, writers such as Robert Lowell, poets such as Randall Jarrell and Wystan Hugh Auden, philosophers such as Hans Jonas, as well as numerous German friends who, like her, had shared the burden of emigration...