Abstract
Amongst the Arendtian scholars, there is almost a consensus on Arendt’s supposedly reluctance to the question of the body. The Arendtian body is said to belong to the unpolitical realm of necessity, in other words, the body is a private matter that should not appear in public. It is antipolitical. However, in this paper, I want to suggest that there is a possibility to outline a phenomenology of embodied political action in what I think to be Arendt’s hidden phenomenology of the body. To make my point, I will first show that what the scholars call the Arendtian body is in fact an Arendtian Body. Secondly, in the German version of The Human Condition, Arendt surprisingly used the Heideggerian term Befindlichkeit (disposition) that, I will argue, outline the basis of a political phenomenology of the body in Arendt’s work. More precisely, I will try to show that political action is embodied, that there is a hexis, a pathos and an ethos of action.
Highlights
Hannah Arendt’s status as a major political theorist of the twentieth century has gained her an important amount of, sympathetic or not, secondary literature on her work
The body is submitted to the biological life-process, when we are driven by our biological body we cannot act in public because we have to be liberated from the necessity of life in order to appear in public
They give an account of an Arendtian body, while I will argue that the Arendtian body is multifold
Summary
I will analyze the phenomenal structure of the Arendtian bodies. When Merleau-Ponty explained that ‘I am my body,’ it means, from an Arendtian perspective, that our distinctness is necessarily embodied. I built a hypothetical account of what the Arendtian bodies could by putting together Arendt’s formula of ‘being and appearing coincide’ and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body It remains a hypothesis since there is, apparently, no evidence of Arendt’s embodied action or about the embodied-who. She gave clues about this possibility of embodiment when she stated that speech is bound to the existence of a living body (Arendt, 1998: 183) It seems, again, to be a reference to the biological body. This is why, I aim to evidence an Arendtian account of embodiment that does not refer to the biological body as such
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