POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP AMID MULTIPLE CRISES

Lecture by Nikita Dhawan and María do Mar Castro Varela

Moderated by Cissie Fu

Co-presented with Goethe-Institut Singapore

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt warns that isolating individuals and groups renders them politically impotent, arguing that segregation is a fertile ground for totalitarianism. Authoritarianism sows distrust by pitting vulnerable groups against each other, it robs them of agency and prevents them from acting together. In today's "attention economy," this manifests as minorities compete against each other for visibility, risking an inversion of the feminist principle “the personal is political” to “only the personal is political”. This approch reduces politics to self-interest, both individual and collective.

As an antidote to neoliberal "divide and rule" tactics, it is urgent to build alliances by focusing on the intertextuality of our struggles. Drawing on Arendt’s political understanding of friendship, Nikita Dhawan and Maria do Mar Castro Varela will explore the challenges of building coalitions across distinct vulnerabilities and agencies. They argue that the counterforce to tyranny and terror is to nurture alliances across difference, affinities, and shared experiences creating collectivities where we can listen to each other and find our own voices.

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