One connection from the article that I think should be made more explicit. First:
Arendt’s experience at the Eichmann trial bolstered the belief that defines her political philosophy: that there must be a rigorous separation between love, which we can experience only privately, and respect, which we earn in and require for our public lives. If it is true that, as Arendt once observed, “in the works of a great writer we can almost always find a consistent metaphor peculiar to him alone in which his whole work seems to come to a focus,” then her thought is certainly focussed on the image of distance or separation. A dignified individual existence, she believes, requires distance from others, the “interspace” that she described in the Hamburg speech. Compassion is dangerous, in her view, because “not unlike love,” it “abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human intercourse.” What preserves that distance, on the other hand, is pride—the pride of equals that she finds exemplified in the political realm, the “public space.”
Where one should read distance or separation as metaphors for control, and love--which really does reach out across individuals--as dangerous. Also:
At times, Arendt’s love of the public and the political, and her fear of the private and the psychological, becomes almost neurotically intense. As she wrote to McCarthy, “the inner turmoil of the self, its shapelessness,” must be kept under strict quarantine: “It is no less indecent, unfit to appear, than our digestive apparatus, or else our inner organs, which also are hidden from visibility by the skin.”
Though it's presented in the article as a consequence, it seems like the important antecedent condition, thus Arendt's consistent metaphor.
I trust James will tell me where the article goes wrong in presenting Arendt. It certainly did pique my interest, however.
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