Hannah and the Master
“‘Who may reach into the depths of terror, but lovers?’ asks the MASTER in Joshua Corey’s spellbinding new collection. The question unfolds and folds back on itself multiplying in breathtaking, visionary waves. In this erudite and unflinching landscape, the characters (Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, to name a few) exist both at the margins and at dead center of the 20th century’s furious catastrophes. Being and non-being, poetry and philosophy, fiction and nonfiction, prayer and play, crash into each other creating luminous shards of history, desire, and heartache. Structured like an epic riddle, this book is the perfect mirror in which to discern the resurgence of fascism today.”
Published by MadHat Press. Available wherever books are sold.
Hannah and the Master stages one of the twentieth century's most morally charged love affairs: that between the Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt and her teacher and lover, the Nazi-affiliated philosopher Martin Heidegger. Moving through homophonic translation, speculative drama, and lyric sequence, the book follows its two protagonists — and their science-fiction replicants — from Weimar Germany into our own era of resurgent fascism and climate catastrophe. Against the atavistic nihilism of the MASTER, Hannah rises as a figure for what Arendt called amor mundi, love of the world — the willingness to see, to think, and to act in the face of the WAVE of greed and ignorance that threatens to overwhelm everything. Drawing on Arendt's early love poems, Heidegger's letters, Simone Weil, Paul Celan, Charles Olson, and Blade Runner, Hannah and the Master is a reckoning with the century we inherited and the one we are making.
“How Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger’s Relationship Can Inform Our Current Crisis”
An essay published by Literary Hub tracing the personal and intellectual origins of the book — from my great-grandmother's fate in Berlin to my intuition, studying with Jane Bennett, that our failure to respond to climate change rhymes with the failure to resist fascism in the 1930s. It remains the best single introduction to what Hannah and the Master is doing and why.
EXTERIOR VISION
From city heights the sleeper descends, down the elevator, down the subway stairs, down into bedrock and through, down into the muffled blackness of the earth that imperceptibly at first and then suddenly lightens, whitens into cloud’s furze, sun’s halo, the scored layers of blue sky below which the dimpled hills and valleys of the forest tumble and roll.
HANNAH digs down to him through the scored layers of sky in her dream. Down and down, membrane after membrane, to the cabin roof. She would cut a hole in that roof, a skylight to admit the sky’s qualities, to open the lid of thought in the roof of the cabin on the side of the mountain in the heart of the forest. Light finds the visitor’s registry and blows through the history of names. The MASTER sits at a plain deal table, writing. If he looked up he would see HANNAH floating there like a jellyfish not six inches above his head, motiveless, adopting as her own the subtle movements of the air stirred by the sterile heat of a single bulb. He does not look up. His moving hand and pentip leave a trail to dazzle her retinas, trace a wake. The fox wears no fur. The jellyfish, all skirts, in her inscrutable floating life, rotating, umbilical. Rooted to this cabin, spiracle, a mote in the vast cyanotic eye of the forest. Calling: look up. Vocational. Calling: full stop squatting on top of his head. The MASTER goes on writing. HANNAH’s eyes follow the track of her outstretched arms, down to the earth working in the track of turning treads, filled in behind by corpses, up again to the measuring unsheltered given of being, the home of gods and satellites, our new politics, the steel horizon, the sky.
“Hannah and the Master begins with the dark attraction that held that least-likely pair, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, in mutual orbit through the most troubling decades of a troubled century. But it’s the mix of Corey’s materials that steals the show in Hannah and the Master: journeys to the underworld; ecological anxiety; the aesthetico-political thought of the Jewish 20th century; Hannah’s writings to Martin; Martin’s writings to Hannah; and, of course, Blade Runner all take turns on the stage. What’s remarkable is the degree to which this all coheres. As I turned these pages, my thoughts ran to William Blake and his prophetic poems on France and America. There, as here, an unredeemed world slouches toward apocalypse, and real people stand revealed, not in the light of history, but in the aspect of eternity. Corey’s Arendt is a witchy presence, and like a true goddess, manifests in a thousand forms, some of them fearsome. It’s growing darker out there, people, and only Hannah Furiosa can save us now. Read this and you’ll understand.”
“Joshua Corey’s brilliant and disturbing, sometimes ‘futuristic’ Hannah and the Master reminds us with every word and trope that we are living, as he puts it, in the ‘night of human forgetting.’ Radiating out from the decades-long complex and confounding relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Corey creates a multi-layered and agonized series of reminders including everything from youthful love to the Nazis to the dark dimensions of our current and future cultural and eco-political fate, one in which Arendt, the major heroine of this work, becomes an ‘emigrant as pariah’ transformed into a ‘replicant of herself.’ In the doubled and tripled dimensions of this work—a riff on Charles Olson evokes the archaic, and a character named THE WAVE embodies the foreboding forces of human extinction–Corey echoes a Dante set on a reverse path. ‘I wish to say,’ he writes, ‘that midway through our life’s journey we have misplaced literacy, the soul, right terror for angels.’ His vision is a warning, delivering us, in Corey’s precise yet feverishly beautiful language, not into Paradise but an impending disastrous Apocalypse. ”
