Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative

Abstract

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative Ned Curthoys . . . authoritative discourse . . . demands our unconditional allegiance ... It is indissolubly fused with its authority—wiüi political power, an institution, a person. . . . One cannot divide it up—agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part. ... A playing with distances, with fusion and dissolution, with approach and retreat, is not here possible ... (authoritative discourse in prose) is by its very nature incapable of being double-voiced; it cannot enter into hybrid constructions ... (t)here is no space around it to play in, no contradictory emotions—it is not surrounded by an agitated and cacophonous dialogic life ... —Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Uprising of the anecdotes. . . . The constructions of history are comparable to instructions that commandeer me true life and confine it to barracks. On the other hand: the street insurgence of the anecdote. The anecdote brings things near to us spatially, lets them enter our life. It represents the strict antithesis to die sort of history which demands 'empathy', which makes everything abstract. .. . The pathos of nearness, the hatred of die abstract configuration of human life in epochs, has animated the great skeptics. —Benjamin, The Arcades Project JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.3 (Fall 2002): 348-370. Copyright © 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Hannah Arendt and the Politics of narrative 349 ... the public realm, as the common world, like every in-between , relates and separates men at the same time. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition With these words Hannah Arendt issued a vibrant challenge to the "unworldliness " she felt had pervaded the mass society of late industrial capitalism , establishing the conditions for the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950) Arendt connects unworldliness to a condition of uprootedness and superfluousness , the lack of a place in the world "recognized and guaranteed by others ". For Arendt, such loneliness in the individual is a "common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government" (475, quoted in Benhabib , 67). In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt suggests that the common world we share is manifested in the spaces between us and the media which connect us, analogous to a table which both relates and separates us, gathers us together and yet prevents us falling over each other (The Human Condition, 50-52). In this essay I explore Arendt's interest in forms of worldliness that can be granted recognition in narrative representation , through biography, anecdote, vignette, and social genealogy. I discuss Arendt's fascination with what Deleuze and Guattari have termed "conceptual personae" (What is Philosophy? 73). These are characters and personalities who immerse thought in the abundance and inconsistencies of worldly existence, and are deeply disdainful of sectarianism and orthodoxy . Conceptual personae 'figure' thought as disposition and praxis, an engaged mode of existence rather than an authoritative or monologic discourse . Evoking Arendt's polysémie worldliness, I hope to put her work in a triangular conversation with Bakhtin's theory of the cacophonous, multiform carnivalesque and Benjamin's philosophy of history. Both Arendt and Benjamin seek to undermine the transparency, utility, and consistency of received traditions and homogeneous metanarratives. Arendt's conceptual personae revive the importance in political life of a public ethos, a disposition to communicate and deliberate rather than indoctrinate , to act spontaneously rather than surrender the language of politics to impersonal historical and material forces. Arendt, I argue, is inter- 350 JNT ested in the genres of writing which illuminate a vital ethos, in particular intellectual biography, and its episodic and anecdotal forms of reportage. Her conceptual personae recover a republican language of politics, which emphasises heroic participatory virtues and individual duties to the polis, an enthusiasm for the political arena as open theatre and spectacle. Throughout her oeuvre, Arendt counterposes individual political virtues to the abstract, mechanistic, and teleological political ideologies that have dominated modernity since the nineteenth century. I focus, in this article, on two Arendt texts, firstly the The Human Condition , which stresses the importance of discursive qualities, particularly rhetorical ability, for the vitality of a political arena. I then discuss Men in Dark Times (1970), a collection of intellectual-biographical essays, which provide examples...