The Ambiguities of Agency. A Philosophical Inquiry in Dialogue with Hannah Arendt (original) (raw)

2023, The Ambiguities of Agency. A Philosophical Inquiry in Dialogue with Hannah Arendt, in: Erinnerungspolitik im Zeichen der Ambiguitätstoleranz, eds. H.G. Soeffner, B. Zabel, E. Gardei. Wallstein, Göttingen 2023, S. 89-106.

This paper aims to show, as a philosophical inquiry, a phenomenology of agency that is grounded in Hannah Arendt’s understanding of Auschwitz. Building conceptually on her writings such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, agency is defined here based on two fundamental conditions: (1.) as »natality,« it is the faculty for beginning new, spontaneous and unprecedented actions, accompanied by unpredictable and uncertain outcomes; (2.) as »plurality,« it is the capacity of dealing with diversity, to insert oneself within a common world, shaped as a political agon. This paper is hence structured in dialogue with Arendt’s account of the NS concentration and extermination camps. It retraces the series of processes through which the aim of achieving total domination of the human being requires the disempowerent and destruction of agency, both in terms (3.) of natality – as we can learn from the Auschwitz inmates, particularly in the reduction of the human being to »superfluousness« – and of (4.) plurality – as we can learn from their NS perpetrators, particularly in the »thoughtlessness« of the Spießer-Eichmann. Paradigmatically, systematically disempowered, destroyed and misused by totalitarian regimes, agency attests to a constitutive »ambiguity,« whose spectrum extremes – of undeniable relevance, nonetheless, to reconciliatory processes – will be thematized throughout this paper.