Abstract

The Italian translation of the first part of Arendt's "Essays in Understanding" offers the opportunity to discuss the importance of the arendtian reflection regarding history and politics. Arendt, in these early essays (1930-1944), faces the difficulties in understanding and judging the reality of the catastrophe. The question of the historical understanding of the totalitarian phenomenon is therefore considered to be politically interesting insofar as it must not rely on linear and progressive visions of history, but it should, instead, assume the gap, the abyss that has taken place as the unavoidable yet unbridgeable wound which history cannot heal. For Arendt, understanding does not mean to reduce the past to a matter of consequential history, but to accept the ethical and epistemological task of understanding without justifying. By doing so, Arendt, this is the thesis of the essay, develops a new poetics by which politics finds new spaces of meaningfulness.