«Amo te esse»: l’ontologia sentimentale dell’esilio tra Hannah Arendt e Günther Anders

In the lives, literally swept away by history, that G. Anders and H. Arendt were forced to live by the terrible circumstances of the 1920s and 1940s, they shared one of these lives, although it lasted only a few years, first as colleagues and friends, then as young married cou ples, and soon as separated fugitives forced by tragic world events to experience the eternal condition of statelessness and “pariah” shared with the people to which they belonged by birth, namely the Jewish people. The syntagm “sentimental ontology” was intended to focus, by way of antinomy, precisely on the relativity of the affections to which they were exposed due to their difficult biographies continually abandoned to daily survival. Love, with all its changing manifestations, is, then, in the existential experience of Anders and Arendt, also a way of experiencing exile, a lens, at first microscopic and then magnifying, to find the possible measure of their own being-in-the-world.