'my tongue swore to, but my heart (or mind or other backstage artiste) did not' Hippolytus to the Nurse (quoted and annotated by Austin)

Public Lecture with Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University 

ORGANISED BY HANNAH ARENDT CONSORTIUM ON CRISES AND POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION (HAC), FACULTY OF EDUCATION (KPP), ARCHITECTURE & THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE CENTRE FOR GENDER STUDIES

This paper notes resonances between Hannah Arendt’s account of action as “action that appears in words” (The Human Condition, 1958) and J.L. Austin’s account of performativity, where “the issuing of an utterance is the performing of an action” (How to Do Things with Words, 1955/62). Both thinkers theorize promising as an exemplary speech act but only Arendt paired it with forgiveness, a kind of “release” that Austin did not take up directly. He may, however, have called our attention to it when he cited Euripides' Hippolytus, which, I argue here, may be read as a drama of (Arendtian) release. Noting the standard reading of the play's denouement as a moving scene of father-son forgiveness/reconciliation, I draw out the racial political implications of such readings today and argue for Arendt’s “constant mutual release” as the preferable model – better suited to the Hippolytus and a superior aspiration for politics now.

Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, works in political theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, as well as film, classical, literary, legal, media, religious, and cultural studies. Her articles have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Cultural Critique, Political Theory, American Political Science Review, and Arethusa. Her award-winning first book, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics was recently reissued as a 30th anniversary edition by Cornell Press (2023). Her other books are: Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics (Princeton, 2009; co-awarded the Easton Prize), Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge, 2013), and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017). Her first essay about the Trump presidency, “The President’s House is Empty,” appeared in the Boston Review in 2017 on Inauguration Day. In 2021, Honig published A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard) and Shellshocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (Fordham). A 2023-4 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2024 Ferrater Mora Chair of Contemporary Thought at the University of Girona, she is now writing a book on the politics of ordinary language philosophy. 

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and a Drinks Reception at 7.30pm.

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