Abstract

Agaist an anti-modernist lecture of Arendt's defence of politics as a nostalgic regret for the Greek polis the author suggests a peculiar meaning of public space in terms of Arendt's concern for the human artificialist talent. Indeed, Arendt was prepared to praise politics as the distinctive result of something like an art of separation between "idion" and "koinon" thanks to what the common world is guarded agaist barbarism. The author read Arendt's passion for distinctions as a passion for a politics within the limits of publicity; she stress the difference between two possible meanings of publicity in Arendt's work; and she looks at the arendtian problems with the social through that difference.