Ariel Tang | Scripting Silence: Animals Political and Unpolitical in Charlotte Beradt's Dreamscape
About
This talk features the implicit dialogue between the German-Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt (1907-1986) and her fellow émigré, Hannah Arendt, regarding the boundaries between humans and animals, as well as the ethical limits of anthropocentrism during political crises. Beradt's Third Reich of Dreams, a catalogue of dreams compiled between 1933 and 1939 on the basis of dreams retold by more than fifty Germans living under totalitarian rule, prompts her readers to re-evaluate the unique traits of physiological activities such as dreaming—as opposed to discursive reasoning—in safeguarding the humane promise of politics. While conventional pictures of human nature often fall prey to naturalistic or essentialist tendencies, the vital dialogue between Beradt and Arendt helps to resuscitate the unmistakable normative value of anthropological evidence, the substance of which often escapes the immediate capture of language and yet preserves the hope for political renewal lost in effable expe
