No, Stephie, not Britney Spears.
An article called Samantha Power Working On Obama’s State Department Transition Team came across my desktop last week, and makes me absurdly happy.
I assume if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ve figured out that I’m a bit of a nerd. I mean, I have an unmockably impressive music collection and dress really well (in fact, I have fashion acolytes!), but at heart, I’m very much a bookworm. More…
In undergrad I wrote two Honors theses—one to go with each of my majors. One of them was about Margaret Atwood’s appropriation and revision of Judeo-Christian and Greek/Roman mythology and of Grimm’s fairytales. The other one was on political philosphy: Just-War Theory and noncombatant immunity. This second one happened because I’d been reading a lot of Catherine Elgin for fun. I was very impressed by her because she was the very first female philosopher I’d discovered who wasn’t a feminist philosopher. By which I mean, she’s probably of necessity a feminist, but she focuses on epistemological rather than gender-specific philosophical problems. One of her books touched on a topic in a way that sparked my brain. So, I proposed to my thesis advisor that I would unpack and demolish the concept of binary opposition, i.e. light/dark, good/evil, mind/body, etc. She basically told me that this project would be a thousand-page book or PhD dissertation, and to pick one set of opposites to focus on. She suggested the gender binary. Even though I loved the idea and had taken a Philosophical Anthropology course that touched on the topic while I was in Ireland, I told her she wouldn’t ask a male student to write his thesis on gender, and decided to write mine about war.
That spring, I read a lot of Robert Holmes, Michael Walzer, and Hannah Arendt. I went mad for Hannah Arendt. I’d taken a full-semester course on the metaphysics of Heidegger and Husserl (taught by a monk who wore a Friar Tuck-style cassock every day!) a year earlier, when I was studying at the National University of Ireland, and so the love-affair between Hannah and Martin fascinated me. The summer after I graduated, I read The Origins of Totalitarianism from beginning to end in a serious immersion. I filled the page margins with cramped handwritten notes and started learning German. I had aspirations to become my generation’s Hannah Arendt.
It didn’t take long for Samantha Power to appear on my radar, especially since I work at the same university where she teaches. Here was yet another incredible female philosopher who refused to be fenced into a gender studies department. I bought A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide at the Harvard Bookstore within days of its paperback release. I was inspired by the fact that the kernel of the book had been a paper she’d written in grad school. I devoured it. I discovered that my generation already has its Hannah Arendt.
When I learned last winter that Samantha Power was one of Barack Obama’s policy advisors, I was in awe—if a bit disappointed that she’d chosen him to support. I wasn’t a super-early supporter, but Samantha Power’s affiliation with him forced me to respect him much more (obviously, I’ve become a huge fan since). When she called Hillary Clinton a “monster,” I was horrified. When she was shunted aside over the comment, I considered it a terrible loss, and hoped desperately that this would not signal the end of a brilliant career.
It didn’t. She and Hillary have made up. Samantha Power has a new e-mail address, @the State department. I’m over the moon about it.
