El Arendtian Storytelling

An Antecedent for Feminist Epistemology

Abstract

Arendt's critique of an Archimedean point of knowledge is shown throughout various works of her theoretical production. The question of the method, not tackled in a systematic way by Arendt, contributes to elucidate the guiding lines of a hermeneutics of the "event" far from categories such as science, causality or objectivity. Its limitation of the notion of understanding the event against the positivist explanation can give us clues or guidelines to carry out a reflection that does not elude the contingency and fragility of the field of human action. The arendtian methodology reveals the ideological traps of a knowledge based on the excessive abstraction of its conceptualizations and on an alleged universality. The impossibility of a neutral historical knowledge is highlighted. Through the story, the true nature of the real, its incompleteness and malleability, becomes clear. No story exhausts the possibilities of the real, there is no epistemic privilege at this point. We can establish a parallelism between the arendtian method and the idea of "situated understanding" raised by the Feminist Standpoint Theory and by those hermeneutics based on the defense of partial, situated and contextual epistemologies.