Hannah Arendt and Political Glory: Earthly Immortality in an Age of Superfluousness

In this book, Peg Birmingham argues that privileging the event of natality and new beginnings in Hannah Arendt’s political thought overlooks her central problematic with the modern and contemporary production of economic and political superfluousness, treating all life and the earth itself as disposable.

In the face of this unrelenting production, that will not stop until it has destroyed all worlds and the earth itself, Birmingham shows that Arendt’s primary concern is with radically rethinking the Greek notion of immortality and its heroic glory as earthly immortality. This is rooted in a new form of universal solidarity with those who have been produced as superfluous and consigned to holes of oblivion at sea, desert crossings, prisons and camps.