People who know me know that my favorite theorist is Hannah Arendt, much like one of my favorite professors in college, Dale Carrico. A German Jew, Arendt studied under Martin Heidegger, a popular philosopher, and known-Nazi, with whom she had an affair. Reading her works is like being lent a pair of fresh eyes with which to view the world, her thoughts are so simple yet immediately-palpable. Following her time in Germany, she was interned in a concentration camp, only to later escape to the United States, where she lectured at the New School in New York and wrote several books on love, community, Greek thought, Totalitarianism, European Jewry, literature, politics, the state of the world, and revolution.
She was known to often hold a cigarette in her hand while she incisively philosophized and never liked to consider herself part of any -ism because she thought it was that kind of conforming groupthink that led to Nazism in the first place. An independent thinker, she received much criticism for some of her works (especially Eichmann in Jerusalem), but she stood firm in the independence of her thought, admirably.
Bearer of Pity 