Epistolary Narratives of Love, Gender and Agonistic Politics: An Arendtian Approach

This book revolves around epistolary narratives of women political theorists and activists, following traces of Hannah Arendts philosophical approaches to love and agonistic politics. Arends interlocutors are four revolutionary women in the long durée of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and the USA: the romantic socialist Désirée Véret-Gay, the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, the anarchist Emma Goldman and the labour activist Rose Pesotta. The books central argument is that Arendts philosophical thought can throw light on dangerous liaisons between love, gender and agonistic politics, further making connections with feminist ruminations around love as an existential force in the ephemeral constitution of the female self in modernity. Drawing on extended research with physical, digital and published archival collections, the book responds to the challenges of the digital turn and highlights the importance of memory work, as a way of understanding the lasting effects of the past on the present. As such, Epistolary Narratives of Love, Gender and Agonistic Politics will appeal to scholars of sociology and gender studies with interests in research methodsparticularly archival methodsthe work of Arendt, feminist thought and memory studies.