What Kind of Thing Is Land? Hannah Arendt’s Object Relations, or

Abstract

Informed by D. W. Winnicott’s object relations theory, and focused on the role of Things in constituting the world that is the object of Arendtian care, this essay examines Hannah Arendt’s treatment in The Human Condition of two liminal examples, cultivated land and poetry, that hover on the borders of Labor, Work, and/or Action. Cultivated land could belong to Work because cultivation leaves a lasting mark on the land, but it is assigned to Labor because land, once it is left uncultivated, returns to nature, Arendt says. Poetry could belong to Action, which is the realm of meaning-making speech, but it is assigned to Work because, Arendt argues, poetry’s memorability ultimately depends on its writtenness and, once it is written, it becomes a Thing possessed of the object permanence characteristic of Work’s objects. But (un)cultivated land also has a textualized form; it, too, can be written down as, for example, in the form of mapping. Why does Arendt not consider this? What possibilities of political thought or action (beyond the mere reassignment of land cultivation from Labor to Work) might have been opened had she done so? Working through these questions with particular reference to colonial cartography (in which uncultivated land, deemed “fallow,” has a particularly political resonance), and reading Kafka’s The Castle (cited by Arendt elsewhere) alongside Brian Friel’s Translations, this essay explores practices of participatory mapping and land sabbatical that might make of land a “Thing” in Arendt’s sense. Noting the Biblical origins of land sabbatical and that Arendt’s move in the Work section from cultivated land to text/poem retraces George Steiner’s diasporic journey “From Homeland to Text,” I suggest that The Human Condition, commonly called Arendt’s most Greek text, may have a Jewish unconscious.