Out of Darkness, Light: Arendt’s cautionary and constructive political theories (original) (raw)
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On Hannah Arendt's Political Thought: Finding the Locus of the Political and the Anti-Political
This paper attempts to find the locus of Hannah Arendt's conception of the political and the anti-political. In doing so, the paper identifies Arendt's essential qualifications of the political and the anti-political and attempt to find concrete spaces where we can more or less locate these events. However, this does not mean, as this paper tries to show that these said loci are uncontroversial, incontestable, and an ideal representative of Arendt's articulation of such activities, most especially the political. Despite this, the paper dares to find the spaces whereby the political and the anti-political could possibly be thought to thrive. The space where anti-political resides can be thought easily, whereas, the political is not. In Arendtian sense, the political is elusive and fragile that it can easily be overwhelmed by anti-political activities. The insights are coming mostly from her two major oeuvres namely: The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism. This paper is divided into two major sections: firstly, an exposition of Arendt's concept of the political explicated in The Human Condition and of anti-political in The Origins of the Totalitarianism and secondly, an attempt to find their loci in our everyday affairs.
2006
For partisans of a contemporary wave of interest in the rediscovery of ‘the political’, the thought of Hannah Arendt offers a seemingly ineluctable intellectual resource. Inasmuch as the problem of totalitarianism is at the core of Arendt’s thought, her sympathy towards this attempt to enlist her in the service of this cause must be imagined to bear heavily upon the place of ‘the political’ in her treatment of totalitarianism itself. This note on Arendt’s thinking on the political thereby proceeds from the claim that there are, at heart, two divergent conceptions of totalitarianism in the cumulative literature on the subject. The first of these, I want to argue, is presently the dominant conception of totalitarianism. It is the dominant conception in social science, among historians and (to a lesser extent) among political theorists. Moreover, it has a special kind of import, in the light of at least two things. At one level, it is informed by the attempt to fashion plausible accoun...
Hannah Arendt and the Philosophical Repression of Politics
Sympathetic readers of Arendt might be surprised by Rancière‟s claim that Arendt‟s political thought, in fact, represses politics in a way paradigmatic of the tradition she sought to escape from. On the contrary, it might appear that rather than offering a rival view of politics, Rancière actually amends and extends an Arendtian conception of politics. I want to caution against such an interpretation. It is true that Arendt is an important influence on Rancière, despite his polemic against her. Arendt's understanding of praxis seems to resonate within Rancière‟s work. However, those apparently Arendtian notions that Rancière make use of are fundamentally transformed when transposed within his broader thematization of dissensus. To develop this argument I first examine Arendt‟s own account of the tension between philosophy and politics in order to understand the phenomenological basis of the political theory that she sought to develop. I then consider how persuasive Rancière‟s characterization of Arendt as an archipolitical thinker is. In the final section, I discuss some key passages in Disagreement in which Rancière alludes to Arendt. These passages highlight how those Arendtian concepts that do seem to find their way into Rancière's thought are transformed when displaced from her ontology.
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 2019
The value of human plurality has come under threat by, among others, populist movements. To find illumination of our dark times, political thinkers have recently turned to the political thought of Hannah Arendt. Since the concept of human plurality is at the heart of Arendt's oeuvre, Sophie Loidolt's book Phenomenology of Plurality promises to be a timely and important contribution to both the scholarship on Arendt and the moral-political problems of the present. However, while Loidolt's book offers an impressive phenomenological analysis of Arendt's work, it does not entirely succeed in demonstrating the relevance of Loidolt's phenomenological musings for the political, moral and social problems of our age. My criticism, in other words, is not (only) that Loidolt develops a problematic interpretation of Arendt; my point, rather, is that large parts of this interpretation are of limited political relevance; and my more general point is that interpreters who misconstrueor refuse to take seriously-Arendt's distinction between the philosopher and the political theorist are bound to fail to grasp the nature, the central orientation and, ultimately, the enormous potential of her distinctly political theory.