Introductions

This is the personal website of Kiran Banerjee. I'm a BA/MA student at the University of Chicago, doing work on the political theory of Hannah Arendt. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, with a particular interest in the works of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault.

Masters Research

Very Rough: Articulating a Arendtian Citizenship in light of the decline of the Rights of Man

Taking Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the interwar phenomena of statelessness in The Origin's of Totalitarianism as a point of beginning, my project is primarily concerned with exploring the dimensions of what an Arendtian notion of citizenship would be constitutive of; and how such a project addresses what she identifies as the dysfunctional tension between the exclusive ‘identity’ structure of the nation state and claims for universal human rights. Arendt grounds her discussion of the development of statelessness in what she terms 'The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man,' revealing in what manner the First World War destroyed the façade of a civilized structure to the community of nations. The phenomena of statelessness with its ‘institutional solution’ of the internment camp foreshadows, of course, Arendt’s account of the later developments of totalitarianism and the horrors of the concentration camp. From this, Arendt observes that what secures the most basic projection of individuals is not legal or political rights but rather the fundamental belonging to a political community. Consequently, those outside of political community are essentially stripped of their capacity to be political agents. With these considerations in mind I propose to uncover Arendt's philosophical solution to this political problem through an investigation of her notion of the connection of community and the human activity of action.

Non-Academics

The Free Burma Project -

Check out the makeshift site for the University of Chicago Free Burma Project, an organization I work with.