Giving an Epistolary Account of Oneself: Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

This article reads the decades-long correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy as an account, following Judith Butler. Specifically, it argues that an epistolary subject emerges through the shared act of durational witness enacted in letter writing. Reading the correspondence as a Butlerian account clarifies why subjects choose a relational form like letter writing for the self-representation of trauma. It observes how particular forms of life writing—letters and the eulogy, among them—provide occasions for the reciprocity on which the account depends, even as they unavoidably fail to make selves more knowable to an other than they can be to themselves.