Forgiving: JL Austin’s 'Hippolytus' and Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Release

Thu 26 September 2024

St John's College Old Divinity School

This event is organised by the Hannah Arendt Consortium on Crises and Political Transformation in the Faculty of Education, together with the Department of Architecture and the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies.

Prof Honig's paper notes resonances between Hannah Arendt’s account of action as “action that appears in words” (The Human Condition, 1958) and J.L. Austin’s account of performativity, where “the issuing of an utterance is the performing of an action” (How to Do Things with Words, 1955/62). Both thinkers theorize promising as an exemplary speech act but only Arendt paired it with forgiveness, a kind of “release” that Austin did not take up directly. He may, however, have called our attention to it when he cited Euripides' Hippolytus, which, Honig argues, may be read as a drama of (Arendtian) release. Noting the standard reading of the play's denouement as a moving scene of father-son forgiveness/reconciliation, Honig draws out the racial political implications of such readings today and argue for Arendt’s “constant mutual release” as the preferable model – better suited to the Hippolytus and a superior aspiration for politics now.

Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, works in political theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, as well as film, classical, literary, legal, media, religious, and cultural studies. Her articles have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Cultural Critique, Political Theory, American Political Science Review, and Arethusa.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and a Drinks Reception at 7.30pm.

Cost: Free