Hannah Arendt 'After Modernity'

Abstract

As one of the most incisive political philosophers of the post-war epoch, Hannah Arendt is well known for her critical reflections on anti-Semitism and the limitations of humanism; violence and revolutionary politics; morality and evil; judgement; and the aetiology of genocide and totalitarianism. Her reflections on the collapse of the public sphere and the loss of the shared human way of experiencing the world in the face of totalitarian state bureaucracies are no less valuable for confronting the destruction of the welfare state in contemporary western democracies today than they were for addressing the genealogy of totalitarianism in early twentieth-century Europe. What is more, Arendt's reflections on the nation state and human rights from the standpoint of the refugee, and her critique of the superfluity of human life associated with mass culture and society have proven to be very fertile ground for contemporary thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, Julia Kristeva, Jacqueline Rose and Edward Said (among others). To take one example, Arendt's observation in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the figure of the refugee is a subject who is deprived of the right to have rights, and as a consequence of the right to representation, has clear resonances in the contemporary geopolitical conjuncture. For Arendt, being deprived of the right to make public statements or hold opinions suggests that the stateless have no rhetorical space as legal subjects; they are, as Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb aptly puts it, 'statementless'. (1) And by denying the stateless rights that were deemed to be inalienable according to the language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the state revealed that human rights for the stateless were in practice contingent upon the sovereignty of a given political community. Indeed, it is the failure of human rights discourse to protect the rights of the stateless that prompts Arendt to resort to the use of a performative contradiction in which she, as a member of the stateless population she describes, declares that the refugee is denied the right to have rights. In so doing, Arendt asserts the right to have rights (such as the right to make speech acts) in spite of the state's denial of such rights to the stateless. What is more, Arendt's suggestion in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the formation of the state of Israel created another population of Palestinian refugees at the very moment it attempted to find a political solution to the Jewish refugee crisis certainly exemplifies her scepticism about the political efficacy of the nation state to protect the rights of the human subject. It is significant indeed that Arendt's 'break with Zionism was due in large part to the creation of a refugee population through the forced expulsion of the Arab population in Israel and the minority status of those Arabs who remained'. (2) With an uncanny prescience based on her own experience of statelessness as a German Jew who escaped from Nazi Germany, Arendt 'predicted nothing but violence for the inhabitants of the new state [of Israel], a violence perpetrated on the minority population in its midst'. (3) One of the most influential thinkers to have provoked a renewed interest in Arendt's thought in recent years is the Italian legal philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In a short commentary on Hannah Arendt's chapter 'The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man' in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Agamben argues that 'the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come'. (4) For Agamben, the figure of the refugee calls into question the universal claims of human rights declarations by 'breaking up' the assumption that the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen includes human subjects who are not citizens. The refugee highlights the fiction that national belonging is guaranteed by nativity or birth, and thereby 'throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty'. …