Roger Berkowitz at LitHub:
Arendt rarely wrote about intimate friendships. To the extent she spoke about love, as in The Human Condition, it was to exclude love from the public world. Love, she wrote, is different from friendship. While friendship is the bond that unites us with the common world, “love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.” Love erases the distinctions between two people, “destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.” Contained so fully in the cocoon that isolates two people, love is “not only apolitical but anti political.”
Yet, in her private letters with women, this intimate dimension comes alive. There are, of course, flashes of intimacy in her letters with Blücher and Jaspers. But the gravitational pull of those relationships is public. With women like Hilde Fränkel and Anne Mendelsohn Weil, Arendt’s friendships reached for a more private and intimate insistence on caring support.
more here.
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