Spinoza Chair
Since 1995, the Philosophy Department of the University of Amsterdam has annually appointed an internationally renowned philosopher from outside the Netherlands as Spinoza Professor. Bonnie Honig is the current holder of the Spinoza Chair. Her work is based on political theory, literature, law, and film to reformulate questions regarding immigration, emergencies, democracy, and gender in agonistic and egalitarian terms.
Reading
This lecture returns to Hannah Arendt’s book *Eichmann in Jerusalem* and reconsiders it through questions of context, design, and media architecture. Although Arendt’s book is seen as one of her 'Jewish' texts, Honig regards it as a text from the Second Red Scare and believes that it should be read in the American context of McCarthyism, the political situation in the 1940s and 1950s in which (then as now) diversity, assimilation, dissent, and humor were under pressure.
