Relational Reading: Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and Vita activa, and The Plurality of Languages.

The article focuses on the multilingual nature of Hannah Arendt's writings, challenging the dominant monolingual paradigm that treats her work as either English or German. It highlights the Hannah Arendt Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Critical Edition), which since 2018 has compiled all her writings in their original languages without translation, revealing Arendt's practice of writing, rewriting, and editing her texts in both English and German, often oscillating between the two. Using examples from *The Human Condition* (1958) and its German counterpart *Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben* (1960), the article explores how Arendt's multilingual poetics complicate traditional notions of original and translation, urging a relational reading that embraces linguistic plurality as integral to her thought. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator," it suggests that Arendt's bilingual writing enacts a dynamic "between" that enriches both languages and reflects her political-theoretical commitment to plurality and non-tyrannical thinking.