Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things 9780231539906

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Sensing Space: Art and the Public Sphere
2. The Work of Art
3. The Encroachment of Others
4. Tensions of Law: Tragedy and the Visibility of Lives
5. Comedy in the Dark: Arendt, Chaplin, and Anti-Semitism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

DOING AESTHETICS WITH ARENDT

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS LY D I A G O E H R A N D G R E G G M . H O R O W I T Z , E D I T O R S

Advisory Board Carolyn Abbate J. M. Bernstein Eve Blau T. J. Clark Arthur C. Danto John Hyman Michael Kelly Paul Kottman Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collections, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully expressed when addressed to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea of philosophy in the series title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace forms of discussion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself; where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged; and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege any particular art, nor does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry. For the list of titles in this series see page 221.

DOING ÆHETICS WI ARENDT HOW TO SEE THINGS

CECILIA SJÖHOLM

CO LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

N E W YO R K

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sjöholm, Cecilia. Doing aesthetics with Arendt : how to see things / Cecilia Sjoholm. pages cm.—(Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-17308-7 (cloth : acid-free paper)— ISBN 978-0-231-53990-6 (e-book) 1. Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Art—Philosophy. I. Title. B945.A694S56 2015 111ʹ .85092—dc23 2015001341

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover and book design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: 1969. © AP Photo References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

FOR MÅRTEN, HOA, AND THU

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

IX

1 SENSING SPACE: ART AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE 1 2 THE WORK OF ART

31

3 THE ENCROACHMENT OF OTHERS

68

4 TENSIONS OF LAW: TRAGEDY AND THE VISIBILITY OF LIVES 1 0 5 5 COMEDY IN THE DARK: ARENDT, CHAPLIN, AND ANTI-SEMITISM 1 33

N OTES

155

BIB LIOG R A P HY IN DEX

211

199

INTRODUCTION

THINGS CAN

be seen in a number of ways. Things, not only things in the material sense of objects but also “things”—that is, problems, concepts, and phenomena—can be scrutinized from a variety of positions and perspectives. The title of this book refers to an aesthetics after Hannah Arendt. She never wrote on aesthetics. But she engaged in problems of art and aesthetic theory—reflecting on sensibility, judgment, and works of art in a manner that is both radical and consistent. The purpose of Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things is double: first, to trace a coherent line in Arendt’s considerations of art and aesthetics in and through the scattered remarks on aesthetic experience and works of art in her published works, notes, and letters, and second, to make her thoughts relevant for us today. This includes a reflection on how her aesthetics may inform and alter our attitude toward philosophical questioning, for instance, on the political, agency, freedom, the law, prejudice, and so on. Together, these purposes form an overall question: If Arendt had produced an aesthetic theory, what would it have looked like? The question is inspired by Arendt herself. She knew well that Kant’s Critique of Judgment was not a book on politics, yet she decided to read it as Kant’s unfinished “politics.” I have made use of that gesture. I know well that Arendt’s reading of Kant was not an aesthetics. Yet I have decided to read it as an unfinished aesthetic theory. Such a reading may appear idiosyncratic. But it follows suggestions present in Arendt’s own work.

INTRODUCTION

X

The research on Arendt’s work is extensive, particularly in the field of political and social philosophy. There is less written on Arendt and aesthetics, and a comprehensive study on this issue is lacking altogether. Attention has been given to Arendt and literature, which focuses on her correspondence with authors (e.g., Benjamin, Broch, Johnson, and McCarthy).1 Arendt’s importance for the arts has been noticed with regard to her notion of public space.2 The role of the spectator has been considered, in particular in relation to Greek drama.3 Arendt’s aesthetic interests have been noted in the field of political philosophy,4 not least with regard to judgment5 and the role of political imagination.6 However, Arendt’s interest in the senses and aesthetic sensibility is underresearched, not least with regard to their prepolitical implications; her political ontology rests on a notion of plurality that cannot be conceived in the abstract. The political is seen, heard, felt, and apprehended through a sensible form of being, producing judgment and imagination as functions of sensibility. Aesthetic sensibility, therefore, underlies all forms of political reflection, producing possibilities as well as constraints. The role of the work of art for Arendt’s ideas has also been neglected, although it may contribute not only to Arendt scholarship but also to theories of art in general and to political philosophy. These are the main contributions to what we may construe as an Arendtian aesthetics. Where, one might ask, is the work of art in her writings? Disregarding a few paragraphs on Homo faber in The Human Condition, all in all there is very little description of visual objects in Arendt’s work. Questions of aesthetics, however, cannot be reduced to art. We experience aesthetic phenomena in our everyday lives, in nature, in the sciences, and so on. Following Kant, we may talk about all those phenomena that appeal to our judgment as belonging to the field of aesthetic inquiry. Judgment intrinsically belongs to the field of aesthetics. We experience aesthetic phenomena as beautiful, ugly, pleasurable, or sublime. It is certain that works of art offer good examples of how to frame aesthetic inquiries. Arendt was an avid reader, and she discusses literature with great enthusiasm. She mentions other forms of art less often. It would appear, then, as if she has nothing to say about visual art, cinema, or music. As one reads her reflections on art and aesthetics, however, it becomes clear that, for her, any kind of categorization of forms of art and any kind of specificity that one may want to give to various forms of aesthetic experience are less interesting than their common features. Arendt’s aesthetics has wider

INTRODUCTION

XI

significance than an exploration of works of a certain medium. She is concerned with the way in which aesthetics teaches us how to see things—not in terms of holding an opinion but rather in terms of how we become concerned and engaged with the world. We have become so used to considering Arendt as a political thinker that we have forgotten the aesthetic aspects of her philosophy. We also have become so used to reading her lectures on Kant through a political lens that we have forgotten their aesthetic implications. Going through her notebooks, however, we find reflections on aesthetics and sensibility that were never fully elaborated in her published work. There is an aesthetics hidden in Arendt’s writings. It can be seen in conjunction with the phenomenology of thought in The Life of the Mind. Heterogeneous and differentiated, thought takes on a multiplicity of forms and functions—one of which is that of art. In lecture notes, notebooks, and letters, and in The Life of the Mind, Arendt elaborates the question of appearance in conjunction with aesthetic sensibility, exploring the sentient aspects of plurality and the contextual nature of human perception. There are four features in her general inquiries into the particular nature of art and aesthetics that stand out. They are produced out of certain presumptions, which have to do with an ontology of plurality and a valorization of all human activity with regard to plurality. The first general feature has to do with a way of appearing: the most distinctive feature of art is that it belongs to public space. Works of art do not appear as isolated phenomena; they are inserted in a great variety of appearances. Second, the work of art is characterized through a quality of permanence. Art conditions human life through simple endurance—it precedes and follows singular generations. Permanence also lends it a quality of resistance against capitalist forces of commodification. Third, action is conditioned by a quality in our sensible apprehension of the world that we talk about in terms of “realness.” Art, in general, does not appear as “real” but contributes to judgment of what is. Narrative helps weave the web that we experience as real. The weight given to narrative stands out along with the capacity to weave a world. Narrative cannot be dissociated from aesthetic sensibility; it structures perception. Fourth, the question is not what art is but what it does. Art holds an important symbolic position intrinsically intertwined with agency. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s critique of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being makes a point of this: Heidegger is not only being

INTRODUCTION

XII

uninterested in action; he fails to account for creativity and art. But art’s agency is conceived in alternate ways. There is a tension between the way the work of art is considered in The Human Condition and in articles such as “The Crisis in Culture” and “Culture and Politics” and the comments in her lesser known notebooks, which read more with The Life of the Mind, her last published great work. In the earlier published works, the question of art is an auxiliary to the theory of action. The first chapter of this book expounds on the first dimension of Arendt’s aesthetics, what it means that art belongs to public space. The stress on public space offers a challenge to the metaphysical tradition of aesthetics in that it brackets the question of Being, focusing entirely on appearance. Plurality does not merely imply that things can be seen in a number of ways in the sense that it advocates a kind of anthropological perspectivism. Plurality has ontological status, and the theory of sense-perception derives from that ontology, undoing the need to identify viewpoints from particular subjects, however different they may be. Things appear because the manifold is given—this means that any attack on the manifold is an attack on perception. What Arendt calls the public sphere is a fundament to appearances of aesthetic as well as political significance. The public sphere manifests freedom as a function of plurality. The possibilities of public space also were explored in the avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s, a fact that made Arendt’s aesthetics resonate with the contemporary art scene, though perhaps unwittingly. The second dimension of an Arendtian aesthetics, the power of an object of art to remain, will be discussed in the second chapter. Works of art coexist with human life. When objects are ruined, so are the lives of people. This is a totalitarian and colonial move; totalitarianism as well as colonialism targeted not only human expressions of culture but also aesthetic and cultural objects. Arendt took an active part in attempting to restore the cultural treasures of the German Jewish communities after the war. The experience made it quite clear that the extinction of cultural objects is intrinsically linked to the persecution of a people. Through this fact, we must learn to understand how cultural objects and artifacts condition not only our culture but also our lives. Art is a thought-thing, the value of which extends well beyond its material duration. For this reason, Arendt also became wary of the distorting influence of capitalism.

INTRODUCTION

XIII

With Arendt, we may argue for a notion of the work of art that resists commodification; its objecthood underscores communal values rather than fetishistic tendencies. Arendt argues in “The Crisis in Culture” that Europe and America must rediscover and restore their objects. Such remarks are completely in line with her aesthetics. The work of art holds an extraordinary place in the contemporary world, given that it conditions an open horizon in which action is made possible. It lines our finite horizon with a continuity that reaches beyond the culture of consumerism that invades both psychic and public spaces. Constitutive of a world, material and immaterial, sensible and intelligent, transcendent and immanent, the work of art appears to occupy a crucial place in Arendt’s philosophy. The third chapter, in turn, explores the aesthetic dimension of realness, a feature of Arendtian aesthetics that has a direct political implication. The chapter follows up on the discussion of public space and develops the theme of plurality through the notion of judgment. As already mentioned, Arendt used Kant’s Critique of Judgment to elaborate a politics that Kant himself never wrote. It is less known that in her readings of Kant she elaborated a possible aesthetics, becoming deeply involved in questions of sensibility and in reflections on the five senses. In other words, Arendt’s reading of Critique of Judgment gives hints of an aesthetics that she never completed. Here I offer an aesthetic interpretation of Arendt’s notion of judging, in which judging according to sensus communis does not mean agreeing on a common theme or solution but rather striving toward a sense of realness. Such sharing can only be achieved through a certain readiness to be impinged on with regards to sense-perception; the question of judgment is intertwined with that of how we see things. To many, Arendt, who preceded the turn of critical theory toward psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, may appear old-fashioned, promoting a view of the world as coherent and meaningful. Arendt’s critics, such as Chantal Mouffe, have deplored a lack of antagonism in her worldview. However, the fragmentation of the world is not a fact to belie or hide; it is a given, a factuality. It takes an extraordinary effort, on the part of individual and the community, to construct and maintain a sense of realness. Art and aesthetic judgment contribute to that effort. The two final chapters examine Arendt’s encounter with particular works of art, looking in particular at the political implications they hold for her.

INTRODUCTION

XIV

The fourth chapter discusses Arendt’s notion of tragedy. Tragedy shows how different kinds of law shape different forms of lives. Arendt’s reading of tragedy offers a perspective on state foundation that further enhances her ideas of our political horizon as populated and embedded. Tragedy offers a key to Arendt’s understanding of exile and colonization, and her reading of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus is of particular interest here. The fifth chapter, in turn, takes up Arendt’s comments on Charlie Chaplin and discusses questions of identification and marginalization, anti-Semitism, and modernity in view of Chaplin’s cinematic art. Here, Arendt’s remarks can be considered in the light of the Frankfurt School and other philosophers working in the tradition of critical theory: anti-Semitism is a symptom that cannot be read in isolation from class struggle, racism, and colonialism. It must be seen in conjunction, also, with a contemporary rightslessness that informs not only political but also aesthetic forms of struggle. Some of the material in this book—for instance, the chapters on tragedy, Chaplin, and the work of art—has been published in other forms. However, even this material has been rewritten. I would like to thank the Baltic Sea Foundation for having offered support for the completion of this book, as well as Vitterhetsakademien, Wenner-Grens Stiftelse, and DAAD. The philosophy department at the Humboldt University of Berlin invited me as a visiting fellow, which allowed me to finalize this book, and my own institution, Södertörn University, granted me leave. The Hannah Arendt– Zentrum at Oldenburg University also offered help in my research. I would not have been able to finalize this manuscript without the support of family, friends, and colleagues. I would like to extend my gratitude, in particular, to Ariella Azoulay, Ulrika Björk, Oliver Bruns, Marcia Cavalcante Schuback, Yat Friedman Rahel Jaeggi, Anders Johansson, Bernard Flynn, Johan Hartle, Christoph Menke, Fredrika Spindler, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, and Eva Ziarek. Many more would have deserved a mention here, and none are forgotten—they are all part of this book.

DOING AESTHETICS WITH ARENDT

1

SENSING SPACE ART AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

AN AESTHETICS FOR OUR TIME IF HANNAH ARENDT had produced an aesthetic theory, what would it have looked like? Although readings of and philosophizing over works of art occupy only a small section of her work, their place is pivotal. Arendt was profoundly engaged in poetry and literature. She dedicated a great part of her philosophical life to the study of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a main source for the modern philosophizing of aesthetics. In The Life of the Mind, she finds the philosophic ignorance of art as scandalous as the ignorance of politics.1 Her notebooks and letters contain reflections on art, literature, and music that never found their way into her published work. All of these details point to a subtext to be explored. As this book seeks to show, there is an aesthetics hidden in the work of Arendt. What would it have looked like if she had expounded upon it rather than sticking reflections in here and there? To begin with, one must perhaps note what is missing. There is only a little reflection on visual or contemporary art. This is somewhat surprising. Arendt lived in the midst of a cultural scene that was rapidly changing, a scene drawing much theoretical attention. First, she lived in the Europe of a flourishing modernism, and then, after many years in exile in other places in the United States, in New York from 1967 onward, where the avant-garde scene grew. There was no involvement on the part of Arendt in the philosophy of aesthetics of her time, neither in the work of Theodor

SENSING SPACE: ART AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

2

Adorno nor Arthur Danto nor in the debates surrounding the legacy of Clement Greenberg. Still, the answer to the question of what an Arendtian aesthetics would have looked like must begin in her immediate environment. Her aesthetics fall well in line with the development of the art scene in her time. The critique of capitalism that was so important for the artistic avant-garde is in many ways compatible with Arendt’s philosophy. Her interest in events and phenomena rather than in the occultation of outstanding works also was typical. In the 1960s and 1970s, many artists questioned objectal forms of aesthetic expression, instead seeking to work with new forms of presentation in which the public sphere was an integral part of the work of art itself. Installations and performances stressed perspective, perception, process, and event. Art and aesthetics offered a new arena for politics. We can place the aesthetics of Arendt in this arena. It is in this arena, also, that she herself found a contribution to be most needed. Although the expression “aesthetics and politics” has become a commonplace, there is no easy relation between the two. Walter Benjamin famously described the extraordinary feat of fascism in terms of aestheticization; fascism made the enjoyment of violence, and ultimately the destruction of human life, into “aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” “Communism,” he writes, “responds by politicizing art.”2 For Arendt, the relation between art and politics is to be seen neither in Adorno’s critique of mimesis nor in Heidegger’s unraveling of Being as lack of ground in the work of art. In fact, the tension between aesthetics and politics recurs in the animosity between Arendt and Adorno, as well as in her disregard for Heidegger. In her view, Adorno was hopelessly unpolitisch, and Heidegger was a political idiot.3 But how are we to conceive of a political aesthetics? The starting point must be: art belongs to and takes part in the public sphere. Artists do not make things in public; they show them there. We are here touching an age-old strife between poetry and politics, more important than the struggle between philosophy and poetry: in order to sustain cultural values, art must be transposed into a realm in which it was not readily conceived.4 The intended appearance has consequences for the way in which works are produced. A certain inherent antagonism will therefore stick to its appearance. Whether we talk about visual works, literature, or music, art invokes exposure, action, conflict, prejudice, wonder, and

SENSING SPACE: ART AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

3

bewilderment. A lot of contemporary art is created with attention to the diversity of perspectives and potential conflicts that will be produced in and through its exposure. This fact offers a key to Arendt’s aesthetics. Working with her notion of public space and another key concept, plurality, we find that they have a particular bearing on the perception of art. Public space is not a community, and plurality is not the same as head count. These concepts have implications for the way in which our perception is formed. Arendt’s aesthetics inquires into the particular nature and function of perception and sense experience, whether that experience is made with regard to objects, artifacts, human bodies, buildings, places, or something else. Artworks are to be judged at the level where perception is formed. In this Arendt recasts, challenges, and reformulates its history, inviting a new consideration of aesthetic sensibility. Her stress on appearances introduces sense-perception, embodiment, and appearance—in short, what we could call aesthesis—as aspects of the public sphere.5 Certainly, discourse in terms of speeches, opinions, exchanges of meaning, and so forth is an inalienable aspect of publicness. But so are sensible exteriors in the form of forms, sounds, living bodies, movement, etc. Stories, music, and visual spectacles all contribute to the public sphere. Art has a particular place as well in Arendt’s theory of plurality. In The Life of the Mind, plurality is discussed in terms of the “sheer entertainment value” of the multitude of views, sounds, and smells that accompany appearances. If philosophers have been negligent of the sentient, sensible character of the world, it is because the facticity of plurality goes against the philosophical instinct of synthetization. In philosophy, “the almost infinite diversity” of appearances has been reduced to truth-claims. This is a complaint that addresses more than the aesthetic insensitivity of the metaphysical tradition. It involves a forceful ontological claim: the question of being, of what is, must always be put in the plural—things are.6 An ontology of plurality does not simply imply a multitude of human individuals. We also deal with aesthetic objects. The concept of plurality may have an anthropological connotation, but it can never be defined as essentially human.7 It explains that our world is constituted by a multitude of appearances. This has consequences for how we are to view society and its makeup. The manifold forms of appearance that constitute our world bears witness to the inherently plural character of being. Consequently,

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ethics, politics, aesthetics, and social life need to be rethought—a task that Arendt never ceased to explore. Plurality becomes an inalienable aspect of the way in which sensible appearances are conceived.8 This has normative implications: Arendt will judge phenomena through the way in which they implicate, relate to, or sustain plurality. Art, of all genres, underscores the sheer joy to be found in a multitude of appearances, a quality that cannot be isolated from other strands of life.

PLURALITY AND OBJECTS With the writings of Adorno, Rancière, Derrida, Kristeva, Butler, and Žižek, among others, one would assume that Benjamin’s theoretical distinction, between the aestheticization of politics, on one hand, and the politicization of art, on the other, has been overcome. Has Adorno not shown aesthetics to be one of the most important questions of our time, insofar as modern art survives and is somehow always ahead of society, almost despite itself, surviving not only the alienating forces of capitalism but also the terror of Auschwitz?9 Have we not also seen Rancière formulate a politics of aesthetics in which the idea that art can be politicized becomes an oxymoron: art is always political through the way in which it both disseminates and reconstructs sensible experience.10 According to Wolfgang Welsch, philosophical aesthetics must be rethought in order to meet the aestheticization of contemporary life, not least with regard to public spaces that have become “hyperaestheticized” to the extent that art (in order to distinguish itself from design) serves more as an annoyance than a decoration.11 All of this indicates that we need to rethink plurality, context, perspective, and style in order to broaden the academic field of aesthetics, exploring the way in which sensibility responds to the exploitation and commodification of the public sphere. For this kind of work, the writings of Arendt are essential. There are a great number of positions taken on the political implications of Arendt’s concept of plurality. Three main strands can be discerned that sometimes intersect and sometimes cancel each other out: the normative, the universalist, and the differential readings. The first position is a response to Arendt’s lack of grounding: nothing happens simply because we bring a group of people together with various points of view.12 If we are

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5

to follow Arendt, political conflicts become agonistic, which leaves them without normative implications or transformative powers.13 Here Arendt’s public sphere is seen as a space of deliberation where participants lack marks of gender, class, nationality, and so on. From this viewpoint, something must be added. This could be a transcendent aspect that Arendt does not add herself, in order to gain a ground for, for instance, human rights.14 Others, such as Richard J. Bernstein, hold that Arendt’s concept of plurality implies a normative elaboration of discourse that brings her close to Jürgen Habermas. Both Arendt and Habermas see the public sphere producing a certain disinterestedness, which supersedes the individual and grounds politics.15 Arguing against such a reading, Seyla Benhabib has pointed out that it assumes democratic principles to be upheld by an autonomous public sphere.16 Dissatisfied by such an addition, Benhabib instead argues for the absence of normative foundations, suggesting a reading based on an “anthropological universalism” through which Arendt’s account of humanity crosses any kind of historical or cultural barriers.17 Dana Villa, in turn, compares Arendt to Foucault and Lyotard, who saw the public sphere as fragmented; plurality means that the common, or consensus, is never to be achieved in the political arena of a modern state.18 On the other hand, plurality is a political tool in positing institutions as important constituents of the public sphere.19 Other authors affirm the differentiating character of plurality yet end up binding features of commonality. For Bonnie Honig, Arendtian plurality implies both equality and distinctiveness. Emphasizing the singularity of the political agent, Arendt shows it to be distinctive. At the same time, the performative feature of plurality grounds a possibility of sharing through that distinctiveness.20 Judith Butler has proposed that plurality entails that we cannot politically fabricate the setting of our social, religious, and cultural environment. The most burning issues of politics and ethics present themselves in the confrontation with this factual makeup of society.21 In my reading, I argue for a position that involves both a factual and a normative reading, adding one crucial aspect: plurality is not merely to be conceived in human terms. It is bound to a dialectic of differentiation at an ontological level through the manifold of appearances. The philosophical exploration of the question of being is immediately confronted with its plural character; it does not make sense to return to the question of being as placed in a singular mode.22 If we disregard the full implications

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of plurality, we may end up in a universalist position that might be close to essentialism. The difference could be formulated roughly: a normative reading of plurality may promote certain ethical and political visions of what society can become; a universalist reading would assert what a human being is. Arendt’s insistence on ontological presuppositions in her philosophy of plurality serves to undo a humanist, universalist position. This has implications for her aesthetics. This comes to the fore as one develops Arendt’s argument of plurality in a phenomenological direction, a direction that is certainly present in The Life of the Mind: plurality already operates at the level of perception. Plurality never presents itself. It comes into being through a multitude of appearances but does not itself appear. The diversity of things and the variety of perspectives are all embedded in our vision. This does not merely imply that our perspective is to be conceived in phenomenological terms as a factor of embodiment. The bodies and viewpoint of others that lie embedded in our vision do not only produce flesh, or imaginary constructs. We are disturbed, daunted, and distracted by our attempts to create a vision of the world as a whole. Our vision is conditioned by plurality; this means that it is always impinged upon.23 Such impingement does not necessarily occur through direct interference. The actions, gestures, words, and movements of other people underlie our sensible experience. The differentiation that protrudes from other bodies and the vision of others that affect my vision generate the sensible qualities that I perceive in the space that surrounds me. In this way, plurality underlies the notion of world as well. It appears through plurality, when things are seen in a number of ways.24 Arendt’s concept of “world” is intimately linked to the realm of “human artifice” and implies that objects of art are an integral part of plurality.25 “World” is that which appears “in between” people.26 Here we find the work of art. The Life of the Mind elaborates the idea that plurality entails a multiplicity of perspectives, histories, and biographies in a phenomenological direction. Acting, thinking, and judging are all activities depending on the plurality of the public sphere. These three activities correspond to Arendt’s three major works: The Human Condition (acting, or vita activa), The Life of the Mind (thinking), and the unfinished Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (judging). In each of these works, the public sphere is inhabited by a multitude of perspectives and by differentiation. This opens a view of

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plurality in which we do not merely deal with a multitude of individuals. We deal, also, with the presence of aesthetic objects.27

PUBLIC SPACE, PLURALITY, AND THE SPACE OF ART Public space is a contingent construction; it rises and deflates and is based on other factors than identification and belonging. The arbitrary factor is crucial. In modernity, the arena of public affairs is no longer restricted to a location like the res publica, or the public square. Instead, virtual communication through digital media offers a new kind of reach. Participants and their readiness to interact and communicate in and through the technologies, architectures, and social orders will create new spaces. A public space may be restricted through legal limits, institutions, and so on, but never through a selection of participants. This is also what distinguishes public space from a collective based on identification with gender, ethnicity, age, etc. If we are to take seriously the contingent aspect of public space, also assuming that the urge to appear is an instinct of all living beings, then its social setup becomes less interesting than its phenomenal constitution. As many commentators have remarked, Arendt’s plurality can be compared to the Heideggerian notion of Mitsein, being-with. Here, also, we find the important aspect of contingency: beings are with other beings not through choice, selection, or natural belonging but through the setting of a historical and cultural situation. One must take into account, however, that Heidegger argues for a particular existential understanding of this matter. Being-with has little to do with the presence or absence of subjects or objects around us. It is a question of care. The people that surround us are objects of solicitude, or Fürsorge. In everyday life, however, it appears as if we are ignorant and cold toward our environment.28 Arendt makes public space into a sphere of differentiation, whereas Heidegger considered public space to be a site of alienation and normalization.29 For Heidegger, appearances in public space belong to a degenerate form of everydayness where differences become obscured: “Das Licht der Öffentlichkeit verdunkelt alles.”30 In the twentieth century, the social phenomenon of das Man has overshadowed other forms of existence.31 When Heidegger complains about the nivellation of public life, he is not questioning plurality as a factor of life;

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he is displacing it from the sphere of appearances to an underlying, hidden form of facticity. In Heidegger, plurality is an underlying existential condition out of which the world acquires depth and meaning. What Arendt argues for in her conception of public space, then, is to a certain extent present in Heidegger’s Mitsein: a facticity of plurality that is not reducible to a mere head count. But what distinguishes Arendt from Heidegger is her insistence that plurality is a condition of Being that cannot be dissociated from the way in which things appear; we need public space as a factor for a world to come into being. There is no das Man, no living being to be conceived outside the urge to appear. Rethinking the existential conditioning of Mitsein through a vitalist aspect of plurality, the vitalist and phenomenal condition each other. The normative strain that is implied in Arendt’s thinking on plurality, as well as on publicness, follows from the assumption that all living beings have an urge to appear. This means appearance and phenomenal differentiation become aspects of a political life form.32 When Arendt discusses public space in terms of human appearances, she is less interested in the ethnic, social, or gendered marks than in the way in which appearances speak to the senses. This does not mean that she finds social coordinates uninteresting for political purposes; on the contrary. From a phenomenological viewpoint, however, the analysis of appearances must be regarded in addition to, counter to, or as resonating with social coordinates. Beings appear through gestures, movements, voices, forms, shapes, and tonalities, speaking to the senses of spectators and auditors because something captures the eye or the ear. These aspects of appearances may underscore social identity, or they may undermine it. Art belongs to the world of appearances; in fact, art is “made for the sole purpose of appearance.” Like Walter Benjamin, Arendt thought that “any discussion of culture must somehow take as its starting point the phenomenon of art.”33 Works of art present an integral part of the development of public space. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, public space developed through the physicality of a cultural location. Museums and galleries contributed to a new constitution of society, making aesthetic and cultural experience available to a large number of people. Limitation, selection, and exclusion may well have been internalized in the constitution of public space, in modernity as well as in the ancient public square.34 Although the museum may have been open and inclusive, it invisibly drew limits in the form of ideologies, social differences, and cultural prejudices.35

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But the modern idea of public space was born as a promise of equal participation, softening the edges of gender, class, ethnic belonging, and so forth. In the same vein, Arendt’s ontologizing of publicness has been considered a problematic feature of her philosophy, not least because it instituted a problematic feminine “inside.” However, Arendt’s own distinction in The Human Condition appears increasingly difficult to maintain in view of the development of her later philosophy.36 When the importance of “human artifice” is noted in the description of the world arising “in between” men, there is little reflection on any gap between interiority and exteriority.37 Public space is conditioned by works of art and culture. This complicates any sharp distinction that one may want to make between the public and the intimate, a fact of which Arendt was well aware. Her separation had less to do with the idea that the private sphere was worthless and the public sphere dignified, than with the insight that the public sphere, in modernity, was besieged by commercial interests and the threat of commodification. The normative strain inherent in Arendt’s evaluation of the public sphere is very different from Kant’s short text “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant described public disinterestedness as a transcendental structure that sustains itself through reason. The development of the public sphere unleashed a new kind of enthusiasm in which freedom became grounded in reason. Only in public space may a subject, as Kant put it, enjoy “unlimited freedom to use his own reason and to speak in his own person.”38 The purpose of the public sphere is ultimately to legitimize a certain order of governance, relying on a universal notion of reason.39 There is, therefore, no easy path between Kant’s reason as the normative support of the public sphere and Arendt’s conception of plurality. As we will see, also, Arendt will need to resort to Kant’s third critique in order to elaborate a more satisfactory assessment of publicness.40 Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” is a point of departure for all modern philosophizing of the public sphere. His legacy, however, has developed in different directions, with Arendt’s focus on appearances being remarkable. In his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which suppresses any reference to Arendt’s work on the public sphere in The Human Condition, Jürgen Habermas takes us through the complex social architecture of the bourgeois household of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.41 Here public discourse develops as a consequence of a new individualism.42 Whereas Arendt considers publicness in spatial and

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temporal terms, Habermas sees individuals come into being as property owners. The universalized category of “human beings” can be regarded as a kind of fiction that is a consequence of a certain idea of individuals and their rights.43 The public sphere is thereby the result of an economic and social process of commodification.44 When capitalism colonizes the spaces of urban environments as well as that of the home, the one collapses into the other. The result is that both the public and the intimate sphere succumb to commodification. As Habermas notes, the role of art is ambivalent in this process. On the one hand, it becomes available to all; on the other, it becomes susceptible to commodification. The unraveling of intimacy cannot be dissociated from the socially and economically structured aspects of the public sphere. The bourgeois enjoyment of banality and sentimentality helped produce a certain experience that, in the language of the Frankfurt School, became part of the culture industry, critical theory proving the susceptibility to reification of a certain discourse of emotions. The aesthetic sensibility that developed in the public sphere of the eighteenth and nineteen centuries, then, created its own inside as well as its own outside. Aesthetic objects became prone to being reduced to cultural objects of exchange, escape, and banality. This is precisely what the arts were revolting against when Habermas’s own book came out in 1962. Habermas, however, had little interest in the emergence of a new avant-garde; for him, culture and art were auxiliaries to social and political analysis. To this end, the arts are but symptoms, perhaps readable as a form of discourse but uninteresting from the perspective of aesthesis. Arendt, in turn, resists grounding the normative aspect inherent in the public sphere in reason, and she resists grounding a modern concept of “human beings” in the process of ownership, emerging individualism, and commodification. The category of individual is not joint to liberal ideas of freedom but rather to the negative immersion in society; authors become symbolic for a new kind of individualism through which the will is trying to assert itself against social perpetration.45 From an Arendtian perspective, then, the “private” scenery of the novel can be interpreted from a political point of view, which supersedes the aspect of commodification. With the development of a bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit, the normative strain inherent in the conception of the common good developed alongside the multiple expressions of sensibility that were commonly exploited. We may

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take as example Samuel Richardson’s widely published Pamela, in which the intimate details of the seduction of a young woman created frissons for an audience that felt they were looking into the secrets of her privacy; the excitement became even greater as her seduction was exposed. There is a deep antagonism inherent in the relation between society and culture: the turn against society that can be seen in the production of art from the eighteenth century onward is not only a political form of engagement but also the result of an escape that has been the mark of art since the birth of bourgeois society. That escape is not politically irrelevant, but it must be seen as an expression of agency in itself. Certainly, art cannot be equated with the political life of bios politikos.46 It has a life of its own. But since art addresses a plural space of perception from its conception, it represents a form of agency, although that agency is not identical to that of its maker. Arendt does not distinguish between bourgeois art forms of the eighteenth century and the politically aware avant-garde of the 1960s; she sees the latter as a direct development of the former. Modern art started with a rebellion against a class society that made political agency available only to the few.47 Works of art bear witness to an inherent conflict that cannot be reduced to banalization. The uneasy relation between artist and society is carried into the works of art themselves and is part of their appearances. In modernity, the novel allows for agencies to present themselves in ways that would not have been visible in politics—not through making claims or demands, but through making visible. The role that Richardson’s novel took in the dismantling of the distinction between public and private, men and women, aristocracy and common people, was perhaps not intended by Richardson himself. For art to be politically active, it needs to have a distinct voice or address, but that voice is not necessarily reproducing that of the author or artist. In her analysis of modernity, Arendt shows a new logic at work in the relation between the intimate and the public. Heidegger honored philosophers and writers as secluded beings. Henri Bergson looked for “the fundamental self ” in distinction from social life, and W. H. Auden saw sane speech to have become “soiled, profaned, debased/to a horrid mechanical screech.”48 But to Arendt, art and literature have a special place in the formation of the public sphere, although they may speak of the most intimate details. This does not imply that the public sphere itself offers a solid, durable, or common world, against which fragile human affairs are

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conducted.49 It means, rather, that our perception develops through art. The importance of art lies in the way that it is implicated in the reality we perceive, extending shadows from the imaginary world to the world of the living. Art is made to appear, sometimes through the invisible threads of disappearance. Through its sensible qualities, it makes public space a product of aesthesis, implying an invisible web of forms of being that help produce our perception. When the public sphere is minimized and exploited, art escapes more and more into intimate details. At the same time, these details are made public. Since the public sphere is conditioning our view of things, art in general upholds a pivotal place for the development of perception. If public space did not exist, it would appear that there would be no art. But Arendt argues the other way around. Without art, public space would be even more perverted. In times when public space is threatened, those that act politically or with their art will appear shadowy, as if they occupy mere corners of our vision rather than the focal point of our consciousness. But the marginal character of art in public space is an illusion; art occupies a crucial role for both the maintenance and function of publicness. Art and literature displaces the way in which publicness is to be conceived.

PLURALITY AND APPEARANCES Arendt’s critique of the metaphysical tradition for producing bad politics is well known. In contrast, her critique of that same tradition as being unable to account for man as a sentient and indeed a creative being is much less commented on. In The Life of the Mind, Heidegger’s philosophy of Being was declared incapable of approaching not only politics but also creativity and art.50 Hence, The Life of the Mind introduced plurality in aesthetic terms, as the “sheer entertainment value” of the multitude of views, sounds, and smells that accompany appearances.51 This was already presented in The Human Condition, but in The Life of the Mind Arendt develops the phenomenological implications with a defiant kind of vitalism: everything that is alive has an “urge to appear.” This is a property of living, sentient beings, including animals. The development “of life itself ” is characterized by an urge toward “self-display” and heading toward exposure. This impulse manifests itself through action as well as speech.52 At the

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same time, every being tries “to fit itself into the world of appearances.” It does so not by showing its “inner self ” but by producing a surface “fit to be seen and meant to appear to others.”53 Appearances are “displaying and showing” for a spectator. This appears to be restricted to vision. However, Arendt includes smell, touch, or taste, the sense organs of sentient beings. A plurality of the senses informs all possibilities of perception. This also informs the subject's conception of itself. Sentient beings are subjects and objects at the same time. They can both see and be seen, as well as hear and be heard. The Life of the Mind suggests that the double status of humans as subject-object, perceiving and perceived, is a part of the ontology of plurality, which should inform all philosophical questioning. To appear always means to appear for others, whether through vision, hearing, or touch.54 The fixity of the self can only be temporary.55 Because it is conceivable only through plurality, the self always has an aspect of semblance to it. It is always encroached upon and beset by the multiplicity of alterities through which it appears. Living beings must always exist in the plural because they are not just in the world, they are of the world; they are products of the diversity in which they appear. The multiplicity of the senses is an aspect of this diversity. Life exists for the sake of the multiplicity of appearances, and it manifests itself through multiple forms of appearance.56 To appear is to act, take up space, take shape, talk, or gesture. Philosophizing through appearances rather than the question of being means displacing the question of what it means to act and think in a world that is defined through what it means to be human, in favor of the question of what it means to act and think in a world that is defined through differentiation. Appearances can only be conceived of in terms of variety, multiplicity, and heterogeneity, aspects of being that cannot be conceived of only in terms of human capacities.57 Here, the artwork presents itself as an aspect of plurality. Everything that is, appears, Arendt writes in her notebooks. What we consider to be forms of life are forms that are actualizing the function of “appearancing.” All appearances have a kind of transcendent grounding in the sense that appearances and disappearances take part in the same process of world making.58 But there is no transcendent ground that would account for the value of appearances as being particularly linked to a specific human setup of the world. Instead, appearances are attached to the senses. The

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world appears “in the manner of,” “it seems to me”—dokei moi. It appears “through a multitude of perspectives.”59 There is an element of semblance in all appearance, depending also on what sense organ is perceiving. The world can only appear in a manner that is fragmentary and multifaceted at the same time. Aesthetic appearances allow such a character of semblance to protrude, bringing out the “manner of,” and pointing to the stereophony of our senses. In becoming aware of the “manner of ” through the work of art, we become aware also of the multitude of perspectives that are already embedded in our vision, revealing some aspects and hiding others. As Emmanuel Levinas argues, art is a sensible aspect of being, a resemblance that structures the sensible.60 Arendt, too, makes art a model of appearances, and therefore of “world.” Here she touches on problems that are inherently aesthetic.61 As we go about our daily routines in our usual environment we inhabit a world that appears meaningful, and we experience the world through a certain directedness. Works of art come to inhibit such a sense of direction. Rather than simply presenting themselves as things, works of art come to the fore as “pure appearances.”62 Art is separated if not from “reality,” then at least from everyday appearances. This is an age-old separation that was originally conceived by Plato, who distinguished doxa (opinion) from knowledge, and phainestai (appearance) from reality, what is, onta.63 In The Republic, the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry is instigated when Socrates wishes to substitute the rule of philosophy for the rule of poetry, since the poet only deals with appearances. In this, the poet appeals to the senses rather than the intellect.64 Three steps away from truth, poetry mimics appearances that are themselves reflections or re-presentations. As Arendt noted in her readings of Plato, mimesis produces a loss of reality.65 In the Platonic tradition the concept of mimesis responds to the ontological difference between beings and Being, indicating that there is always a split inherent in our way of considering the world of objects.66 Such a split corresponds to the wonder that leads to a philosophy of being, and to the kind of wonder that attaches to thought. Thought is sparked by the wonder of phenomenal appearances, in a direct line from Plato to Heidegger. But it is only the Parmenidean claim to the whole that has made thought retract from the wonder at a multitude of appearances and begin to wonder at thought itself, or logos.67 Art creates appearances of appearances, semblances of things that appear to exist although they do not.

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To Plato, art’s deceitful truth-claims are worrisome, but even more worrisome is the desire that art awakens, a desire to revel in appearances themselves.68 Art appeals to a multiplicity of sensible responses and seduces us into forgetfulness of cognition’s primacy. Here ugliness, dirt, and the bad serve no purpose; although Plato marvels at the way in which the world appears, only a few things are allowed to become objects of thought. When Homer becomes a moral guide, art has corrupted.69 To Arendt, however, this fear of ugliness has more to do with the fixation of thought’s own capacities than with moral indignation. Plato warns against the uncritical acceptance of the pleasure that aesthetic appearances may give rise to. As Socrates argues in Ion, the power of poetry lies in dizzying and divine inspiration. Poetry may engage people in a “connected chain” through a common, heightened sensibility.70 At the same time, however, art may produce a certain irreality and an obfuscation of tongues. Ion situates the problem of poetry in its relation to public life. Homer’s work and the heightened sensibility to which it gives rise occupy an important place in public life but do nothing for it.71 This argument, for Arendt, is nothing but Plato’s expression of jealousy—Homer is educating his audience whereas the philosopher is not. Plato’s philosopher is imbued with the desire not just to enjoy thought but also to experience if not the rule of pleasure, then the pleasure of rule—a pleasure that Plato clearly identified as dangerous, when in the hands of poets. The madness of Eros, presenting itself as an underlying desire to rule in the tragedies, recurs in Plato.72 Plato’s philosopher takes pleasure in the art of ruling and replaces art with politics; in this, the desire of the philosopher is like that of the tyrant.73 The ruler was a “maker of the city. He organized it according to a certain shape,” or as Plato writes, “The philosopher-king makes the city in the same way that a sculptor makes a statue.”74 As is well known, Arendt considered philosophers without a politics to be stranded at the gates of being.75 The jealousy shown by the philosopher toward the poet is inspired by the inability to negotiate a multitude of appearances, an inability that has political consequences. 76 Thinking, for Arendt, involves a metaphorical disappearance from this world. If philosophy has shown hostility toward politics, it has to do with the way in which thinking is experienced. Philosophical reflection involves, by necessity, some kind of exile from worldliness: “The man who does the revealing is not involved in the appearances; he is blind, shielded against the visible in

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order to be able to ‘see’ the invisible.”77 Such a metaphorical disappearance is contrasted with the appearances and the visibility of political life. Poetry does not negotiate the question of truth, which is in itself a tool of a certain manipulation. It presents a focal point in our negotiation of appearances. Reality, Arendt argues, “is not guaranteed primarily by the ‘common nature’ of all men who constitute it but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object.”78 The sameness is not identity. Any work of art is always subject to shortcomings, diffractions, obfuscations, and ruptures, always hinting at its own invisible, unspoken angles. Objects of art appear, but imbued with displacements and splits. Art presents us with a sense of realness, which unravels in and through the multifaceted aspects of our perception. This is a paradox: what we perceive as real is in every way tainted by a dose of the imaginary. The sense of the real crosses the limits between what Plato would consider the difference between appearance and truth; it is neither appearance nor truth but a function of plurality. Here, we may find reason to pause. Arendt seems to argue for a radical distinction between what is real and what is unreal. But this is not what is truly at stake. Through the gathering of perspectives, what Arendt calls reality comes into being through a multitude of appearances. Unless we perceive things in and through the perspectives of others, objects are not real; they remain in the shadowy realm of the unreal.79 Where something comes to light in the work of art, Heidegger writes, something also conceals itself.80 Appearances expose but also protect. Quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Arendt regards the dynamic between exposure and protection as a function of plurality: “No thing, no side of a thing, shows itself except by actively hiding the others.”81 Aesthetic appearances produce something invisible as well as something visible, something not seen as well as something seen, something that cannot be experienced as well as something that is experienced. The appearance of the work produces also shadows and intangible aspects. Familiar with Heidegger’s seminal lectures on Nietzsche, Arendt discards the idea that art has come to occupy the place of truth. Instead, she invokes Goethe: it is not the object but the form and condition of the appearance that is of importance—the Sich-zeigen of something.82 It is the texture and perceptible structure of the work that matters—material and immaterial, sensible and intelligent, transcendent and immanent.

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AN ANTIHUMANIST IDEA OF FREEDOM The public sphere is a space of freedom. There is no freedom to be conceived beyond such a sphere, at least not in a form that appears relevant to Arendt.83 In On Revolution, we are reminded that liberation and freedom are not the same: liberation may condition freedom, but liberation implies that we are liberated from something, which does not necessarily lead to the freedom of action or creation.84 The idea of freedom in the form of an inner life, the capacity to think and feel as a free being, is derivative. Freedom cannot be thought of as mere possibilities of choice or a function of the will. It has little to do with the liberal impulse that we should be free to choose schools and health care, start our own businesses, and so on. Nor is freedom to be conceived in existential terms, as if our actions manifest themselves against a lack of foundation. Furthermore, Arendt’s freedom is not defined by reason or conceived as sovereignty.85 It is not the result of democratic regulations, and it is irreducible to laws and political cultures. Such a conception of freedom is not conceived in the abstract but is derivative of its practice in some kind of “tangible reality.”86 Freedom can only be thought through the way it manifests itself in appearances—through actions, words, and movements in the public sphere. Arendt’s relocation of judgment from the transcendental subject to the plurality of the public sphere involves a negotiation of perception, in which both material objects and human agents take part. Aesthetic reflection, through judgment, serves freedom. In this development, our freedom takes on a paradoxical character. We are impinged on not only by those who share our immediate environment but also by fictional figures—their stories, views, and insignia. Here, her position would come close to that of Merleau-Ponty: our vision of the world is shaped in and through the impingement of the view of others. Plurality is needed for us to perceive a world. What we perceive as reality is an effect of the manifold of appearances.87 This may seem to be conducive to a democratic and egalitarian world. But it is no easy feat; if the things we see, hear, and experience are filtered through the encroachment of others, this means that any conception of what is “real” must be the result of conflicting and antagonistic points of view. Whereas Kant posited the public sphere as a grounding of reason, Arendt’s ontology of plurality undermines any monolithic understanding of how judgment in the public sphere might be produced. Rather than

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merely asserting “the common,” the public sphere is also a sphere of the permutation of values, representations, and facts. Since man is “conditioned” through the plurality inhabiting the public sphere, his span of thought and action will always depend upon certain contingencies. If there is a normative ground to be found in Arendt, this has less to do with the development of reason than with the necessity to affirm freedom through action as well as thought. Such freedom, however, is not individualist but amounts to an affirmation of plurality itself. In this way, political action is to be likened with the performing arts: acting and musical performances.88 This is a conception that goes against the Enlightenment idea that freedom is equated with reason. Instead, freedom becomes a kind of excess that can only be realized in and through a populated horizon, an infinite diversity of appearances. Such a conception of freedom might seem to be a paradox. On the one hand, freedom is not existential; it is not to be thought of as creatio ex nihilo. On the other hand, it cannot be thought of in the negative sense, as a freedom from restrictions and limits. The liberal mistake has consisted precisely in this, in thinking of freedom as a freedom from politics, state intervention, or contractual guarantees.89 If we are to think the concept of freedom through an ontology of plurality, grounding it neither in reason nor in nothingness but in differentiation, then we must affirm that others and other things will impinge upon our choices, decisions, and actions. This might seem contrary to our intuitions about how freedom might manifest itself. It would appear that the encroachment of others would hinder freedom from realizing itself. But it is precisely the encroaching character of differentiation that ends up conditioning freedom. This is a radical and antiheroic gesture. Thinking the concept of freedom not through demands of emancipation but rather through actions that are made possible through the contingent formations of collectivity, Arendt affirms a kind of freedom that manifests itself in our everyday life, without given goals or purposes.90 Nevertheless, freedom does not manifest itself in any which way. It can only be thought through the phenomenon of initium, a beginning that sets itself up as principle and example at the same time. An initium is not performed with regard to origin or calculated consequences.91 But for an initium to be meaningful, a horizon of plurality is necessary.92 It is this horizon that makes man a zōon politikon, a political animal. Arendt’s distinction between naked life and political life has often been misunderstood.93

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Separating bios politikos from zoe, political or dignified life from mere life or naked life that is governed by the cyclical nature of biology, it would appear as if she is identifying “the human” with the political and thereby producing a concept of freedom that cannot be distinguished from an essentialist humanism. Governed by necessities, naked life would be less human than political life. If we are to conceive of freedom, then we would need to equate it with an essentialist definition of the human, which is to be distinguished from forms of life that appear as “less human.” The intertwinement between plurality, the political, and action that has earned Arendt a critique for naive humanism has made her a target from both the left and the right for insufficiently defending an anti-essentialist stance of freedom. According to Slavoj Žižek, Arendt may be critical of the apolitical attitude that she sees as bourgeois, but she is still unable to fully fathom the bourgeois ideology informing her own ideas of political action based on a certain conception of “the human.”94 In Lyotard’s famous critique, Arendt is outed as a “humanist” for having “anthropologized” Kant’s antinomies in the Critique of Practical Reason. For Kant, freedom is conditioned by law, which in turn is identified by transcendental reason. Arendt, however, appears to equate freedom with natality—Arendt’s concept for the capacity to think, act, and construe anew, a vocation to reinvent. Unlike Kant, however, Arendt covers over the unbearable paradoxes of thought that allow for sovereignty to be the ground of freedom.95 Robert Pippin, in contrast, argues that Arendt fails to see the deadlock that traps her into arguing for a relation between bourgeois values and totalitarianism; if totalitarianism is the result of bourgeois individualism, there is nothing left on which one can base moral values.96 All of these critiques imply that Arendt centers her ideas of the political on an idea of the human that must be conceived of as free and as manifesting itself as diversity. But if we reverse the logic of this argument, which is certainly more true to Arendt herself, we lose the essentialist implications. It is not a multitude of “humans” that condition freedom. It is the facticity of plurality itself. As Hobbes understood, if we interpret the idea of zōon politikon as a definition of humanity, we lose sight of its political implications: the political is never in man in the singular. Politics arises “between” and so “outside” of man.97 The idea that man is a political being is based on differentiation rather than on any concept of “the human.” Humans can only be thought of as plural, and plurality is the condition of politics, not humanity.

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Every idea of humanity as one form, or essence, goes against a concept of freedom that would be consistent and noncontradictory. What conditions human life is not “human nature.” There is no way to summarize “the human” according to, for instance, the sum of her biology or history. Therefore, there is no way to conceptualize freedom on the basis of presumptions concerning humanity. One of Kant’s questions in the series of lectures that preceded the third Critique was “What is man?”98 The purpose of that question, like the question of Being in late Heidegger, is to undo metaphysical presumptions and to work with new philosophical premises. Arendt’s philosophy pursues this kind of work. And she adds another Kantian question: Why are there “men” rather than “man”?99 What Lyotard forgets in his critique is that natality embodies a paradox in itself.100 Natality is not infinity in the abstract. There is no way for natality to realize itself outside of the polis. Natality, as Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb has argued, can be likened to Benjamin’s concept of generation: a weak form of messianism that builds more on exposure than on strength.101 Natality, paradoxically, is the generation of beings without grounds, framed through contingent laws, societies, and collectivities. There are no new beginnings without the frames corresponding to the walls of the polis. What we see, then, in the concept of natality is a freedom made possible through laws of political negotiation. The concept of natality, contrary to what Lyotard claims, is not a naturalization of freedom. Rather, it incorporates the self-perception of man as singular and finite and, at the same time, infinitely differentiated. Rather than placing man, or even humans, at the core of being, Arendt invokes perspectives, differentiations, and various forms of being. The idea that freedom can only manifest itself through a “tangible reality” is a direct consequence of an ontology of plurality. This view may well fail to serve the Enlightenment view of freedom as a product of political struggles serving reason or even emancipation. It also destabilizes the notion that “man” can be an agent of freedom at an individual level, outside of the plural sphere of appearances that defines “publicness.” It offers, instead, an ontological perspective on what conditions freedom, which in turn provides a normative ground for the political: the public sphere must be erected and protected in order to promote and empower the differentiation that in itself sparks public freedom.

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The facticity of plurality will always precede one’s capacity to act. This means that our freedom can only be thought through certain limitations that come with plurality itself, a certain horizon of differentiation. The facticity of plurality will allow for my freedom to realize itself. My actions will always potentially destabilize or undermine any given order. But the potency of my actions has a direct relation to the limitations of my horizon: I cannot know the end of the cycle of events or effects that my actions give rise to. This is a form of finitude that serves my freedom: if I knew the outcome of my actions, I would not act according to the principle of freedom but rather according to the principle of means, in order to reach a certain end. The public realm serves to de-essentialize the concept of freedom. It is a space of negativity that does not necessarily have to be realized by a human agent. What conditions action and thought is not necessarily “human.” As a work of art is introduced into a public space, we have no possibility of overseeing the consequences, in a manner similar to that of a human agent. Augustine asserted that man has no power over his own creations; humans are always strangers in front of their own things and their own world.102 Works of art offer a material resistance inherent in their “thingness” that may not present a direct cause for action. But they contribute to the horizon of appearances. Here we encounter, again, a normative conception of what the facticity and primacy of plurality might entail. As we will see, this normative conception has a direct relation to aesthetics. Arendt grapples with what Hanna Fenichel Pitkin calls the “real-world problem”: whoever lives in a paralyzing grip between the shadows of the past and the untrustworthy imaginaries of the future is unfree.103 Freedom is, paradoxically, produced through the limitations that the horizon of the public sphere produces. It is therefore no coincidence that the radical transformation of art toward new forms of spaces is coextensive with the radicalization of politics. Art and politics have in common their appearance in the public sphere.104 Just as an action gives a unique value to an individual, the work of art has unique qualities. A work of art may unravel an answer to the question of “who” produced it.105 When it does, art represents a form of agency, even if it appears as object.106 It is not simply to be regarded as a remnant from a disappearing world, a world of manufacturing. Its unique quality lies in its

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direction toward public space from the very beginning.107 The work transcends the living person.108 In a paradoxical way, this is where its import lies. It represents freedom in the particular sense that Arendt gives to that concept: freedom not as a freedom of choice but as a sphere distinct from the life in which we are subjectivized. Without public space, there is no art, and without art, public space is repressed. Arendt’s idea that freedom must be attached to public space may rely on a retroactive, reactive, and reactionary-exclusionary fantasy, and it may perhaps even be poorly conceived, if one looks at it from a social or historical viewpoint. Looked at from an aesthetic viewpoint, however, it appears otherwise; it introduces an important dislocation of political freedom. Whereas goal-oriented politics, speech, and deliberation may serve emancipatory purposes, spaces that offer aesthetic experience serve the freedom of the initium, the example and the principle. Aesthetics and art, in a post-totalitarian world, take on a whole new meaning. It is no coincidence that the avant-garde flourished at a time when Arendt began glancing back toward alternative forms of political space; Arendt’s philosophy of an imaginary polis of ancient Greece arose simultaneously with the new art spaces in Manhattan.

COMPROMISING AESTHETIC FREEDOM In “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt argues that American literature and art have a special place in modernism.109 This seems like a quote taken from the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an organization sponsored by CIA that promoted American avant-gardism for the sake of political propaganda. She was associated with members of the committee— her close friend Mary McCarthy, in particular—and she received stipends for her work through them.110 Many aspects of Arendt’s aesthetics, as well as her politics, fit all accusations that she was allied with the committee— and therefore with the CIA. Her reverence for the American Revolution, her provocative comparison of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as totalitarian societies—these are political claims that fit the agenda of the committee. Certain views on art also seem to reflect this agenda: modernism is allied with American freedom, and totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union are incapable of understanding Picasso’s modernism.111

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The committee, in contrast to the narrow tastes of politicians, chose abstract expressionism, and the work of Jackson Pollock in particular, in order to promote an American brand of freedom of expression and enterprise, promoting abstract painting over representational, realist aesthetics. 112 Artistic freedom, cultural freedom, and political freedom—all of these were seen as different aspects of the same hegemonic order. Hence, a critic like Clement Greenberg was able to promote the genius of a selected gang of male, white modernists while praising the economic and industrial supremacy of the postwar United States.113 Arendt’s aesthetics, however, cannot be read as a ready-made ideology. It must be read against the backdrop of a retroactive phenomenology. One must begin with its inversion—ideologies of racism, persecution, and the concentration camps. Arendt’s book on totalitarianism precedes her political ontology. The final chapter of that book, “Ideology and Terror,” describes everything that political and aesthetic freedom is not. “Total domination,” the goal of totalitarian regimes, packs up differences and attempts, in their formation of bodies, architecture, and structures, to represent human beings “as if all of humanity were just one individual.”114 Totalitarian ideologies are like “sandstorms”: they obliterate all differences.115 The formation of the camps constituted a kind of “anti-aesthetics” that spoke its own language: clustering, pressing, and flattening. In the removal of individual markers from human bodies, total domination expressed itself to the fullest.116 German officials were systematic in their effort to obliterate differences. In looking at the formation of these camps, their function, formation, and impact, Arendt reversed the description of their anti-aesthetics into what one might call the phenomenology of freedom in public space. If the camp is an anti-aesthetics, then the polis is a space of aesthesis, of a multitude of bodies, sounds, movements, and things. This can be seen in contrast to the extinction of individual differences, cultural objects, and sensible experiences. In the camps, people were pressed together with no individual space left; they were made to look the same, with shaved heads and camp clothes. The regime was striving to systematize more than the extinguishing of human lives. Oppression operates at both an aesthetic and a political level, suppressing public spaces, producing false ideas of reality, replacing political law with fantasies about how nature operates.117 What dictatorial regimes ultimately came to repress was “the differentiation of

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the individual, his unique identity.”118 The suppression of differentiation became a means to kill any manifestation of freedom, and it required a radical reversal of all structures that allowed the manifold to appear. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that the strategy of totalitarian regimes is precisely to close down public spaces.119 The suppression of public space—whether through commercialism or oppression— highlights the importance of an art scene. Societies of censorship and surveillance, as well as those of commodification, produce a specific kind of loneliness, in which the horizon of multiplicity is suppressed. Isolation can be the condition for poiesis and for praxis, the making of things and action. For the production of art, the space of isolation is necessary, although the production is undertaken with a view toward appearance.120 In societies where the production of art is closely watched over, loneliness replaces the space of production. In such societies, man loses his contact not only with other people but also with things.121 However, repressive regimes can also, unwittingly, serve aesthetic freedom, an idea that the American Committee for Cultural Freedom would never have endorsed. In societies where the production of art is controlled, argued Arendt, authorities have a difficult time suppressing the spaces that make art manifest. In fact, alternative social spaces may be produced out of the apparatus of control itself, contributing in the end to its breakdown. This can be seen not least through the forms of politics that are produced through art. In 1966, Arendt spoke about the unexpected flourishing of art in the Stalinist Soviet Union—although it was still clandestine, the expression was now free. Although artists remained in their studios, they were trying out forms of modernism that had not been tolerated before.122 It is no coincidence that the most important art form was theater, which created momentary forms of political space that in turn contested, debated, and undermined totalitarian forces in coded ways.123 Moreover, Arendt was critical of the suppression of public spaces in the West. Her argument in “The Crisis in Culture” is based not on liberal but on Marxist arguments, refuting the fetishistic value of art. American art, Arendt argues, is more prone to modernism because, unlike Europe, it has not been dominated by class society. This has made it possible to undermine the dominant forms of signification that have underscored its value in the European tradition, where art has come to prove taste and therefore class.124

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Ironically, then, consumer society serves art better than a society of “good taste.” Raw capitalism unwittingly unravels the ontological value of art. Consumer society, Arendt remarks, does not know what to do with objects made for appearance only.125 They become truly useless, escaping the traps of commodity fetishism through which art acquires a place in a social hierarchy rather than serving a cultural function. This means that the hegemonic values of aesthetics are radically altered. In the bourgeois order, both art and artists have been held hostage. The complete ignorance of consumerist culture, ironically, made art more free. The performative and political potential became more obvious.126 Rather than antagonism being inherent in the form of the work and so forcing it away from social and political significance, art now becomes appearance only—useless objects or performances. This uselessness is precisely what underscores its social and political value. “The Crisis in Culture” is one of the few articles in which Arendt reflects on the artistic avant-garde. It is clear that she does not find it necessary to draw a distinction between bourgeois forms of art of the eighteenth century and the politically aware avant-garde of the 1960s. Instead, the function of the latter is a direct development of the former. The artist of the avant-garde is no more embedded in the social fabric of his day than Richardson was; the artist is the “last individual left in mass society.”127 All the insignia that have been said to mark mass society—loneliness, lack of judgment, consumption, egocentricity, and alienation—come from an antagonism between a liberal conception of freedom that promotes freedom based on social identity and another conception of freedom in which action is based on a transcendent aspect of plurality. Old Europe’s incapacity to solve the conflict inherent in the relation between artist and society has disqualified it from construing a role for the artist in which he is not at odds with public space but rather is embedded in it. One may read Men in Dark Times in this vein, as a reflection on a European development of modernism as interior flight. In contrast to this development, Arendt promotes a conception of public space primarily based on appearances.128 Thinkers, writers, and artists are “refugees” in modernity, shuddering in times of persecution, failure, or disappointment. Their flight is an answer to the destitution of public space. Here, the bourgeois home, and perhaps elitist forms of art, offer a kind of freedom that the revolution fails to grant.129

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But Arendt does not simply celebrate the development of modernism. She warns, also, against its deflection from public space. If avant-garde art is to have a political value, it must work in and through publicness, and it must work against commodification. Both the perception of art and the act of its creation are a function of public space. It is the expected communication with others that makes us think, and this is also the case in the making of objects of art, transposed toward a space of appearances.130 Altering the relation between public and private also affects the way in which aesthetic objects are created and perceived.131 Privacy must be heard in its original meaning—as a form of deprivation, because in privacy we are deprived of others. With the rise of the social sphere, or the economic maintenance of the city, the distinction between public and private becomes blurred. This perverts both the freedom of the public sphere and the sensibility of individuals. Warning against the contamination of the intimate in public life, however, Arendt argues that too much exposure of the intimate will threaten to allow social bonds to overtake the dimension of plurality that makes political life possible. The world of men tends to disappear if one lives intensely through emotions. In its worst form, modernity is an escape from the public sphere into the intimate and the emotions that capture their subjects in a reclusive spot of self-indulgence.132 In The Human Condition, it may appear as if art is made to sustain a sphere that is nonpublic; in Men in Dark Times, the production of literature comes across as melancholic and private. This reflects the limitless swelling of the intimate domain and the ensuing disintegration of publicness. Since the eighteenth century, most areas of human life have been coerced into commodified systems of exchange and modes of production. The interest that modern man shows in intimate life—pride, love, shame, melancholy, self-indulgence—are attempts to erect a new form of autonomy, escaping the appetites of the market economy. Consumerism has produced a melancholy of inner exile, an intimate world of emotions and inner experience that molds literature and philosophy in ways that refrain from the mimesis of action. In Men in Dark Times, the state of inner exile becomes intertwined with outer flight. The flourishing of modernist, melancholy art and literature appear to correspond to the destitution of public space in repressive societies. The escape is not a voluntary action, performed in order to

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reach a comfort zone. Rather, it is a question of having been expelled, and a necessary flight. The flight itself is a form of expression.133 It is a form of negative witnessing: the larger the avoidance of reality, the greater the impact. In fact, literature, art, music, and philosophy have an immense importance, rather than being marginal phenomena placed at the periphery of “real” political action. All those things that belong to our “inner life” and the life of the senses prevail in the life of shadows. When they are de-individualized and de-privatized, they help re-create a world of permanence.134 Action, thought, and speech is replaced by books, music, and visual images. Art, then, helps re-erect and relocate public space. Here we again encounter a pressing paradox. In spite of the fact that Arendt’s philosophical method may appear anthropologizing and historicizing, making man present as an acting and thinking being, the inhuman is a condition of the human. This can be seen, not least, in the work of art.135

THE BODY PROBLEM The art of using living bodies in the art scene of the 1960s can be considered particularly interesting with regard to the way in which public space was challenged and restructured. Art is no longer a ready-made construction or an object to be unraveled but an ongoing work, engaging new perceptual modes. The process is emphasized, examining new forms of aesthetic sensibility. Arendt’s article “Crisis in Culture” was written before Schneemann and Morris’s Site was staged in 1964. The performative revolution, then, occurred after Arendt began working with her text in the 1950s. Nevertheless, the tendency of avant-garde art to liberate itself from hegemonic forms, sites, and audiences was quite clear throughout the whole period in which she reflected on the function of modernism. The fixation with a certain formal conception of modernism, which did not accept performance, for instance, was not specific to Arendt but informed the whole scene of critical aesthetic reflection.136 It can be contrasted to the philosophical arguments in Arendt’s phenomenological and political understanding of the function of appearance, which can be looked at in conjunction with the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, which exploded in New York City, where Arendt resided from 1967.

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In creating new relations between time and space, subject and object, perceiving and enacting, gaze and performance, self and other, an aesthetic turn of the public sphere conjoined social and political issues. Situated between the immediate enjoyment of sensible qualities and the limitations of sensibility, these works raised political issues, social issues, and gender issues, and examined the demarcation between the West and its Others. Performance art “aestheticized” the human body—shaped and submitted it to aesthetic procedures. Artists such as Hannah Wilke, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Vito Acconci reconfigured the relation among embodiment, appearance, and public space through their art, as did Yvonne Rainer in rethinking choreography. Through installations and performances in and outside of galleries and museums, art began negotiating the makeup of public space through its own work. With the advent of land art, art was displaced from the museum. Galleries became the center for a new scene through live performances, and museums took up the challenge. In the 1950s and 1960s, also, dance and film developed in a manner that was intertwined with art through their manner of production, address, and display. Public spaces were used in a new way for actions, events, and talks. When American artist Carolee Schneemann performed Up to and Including Her Limits in the 1970s, nude and suspended in the air, drawing with chalk on a huge piece of paper, and using all her body as a seismograph, the work was as much about the space of appearance as it was a feminist critique of a certain canon of art.137 In another work she included her cat, her furniture, the foods she liked, plants, and so forth, in an attempt to do away with “performance” as a fixed category in art, as well as the notion of a fixed audience.138 Performance art came in multiple varieties and had different kinds of goals. It could be highly structured and monitored or scaled down in preparations, in order to meet the unexpected. The antagonism between society and artist that plagued European class society, deplored in “The Crisis in Culture,” received an answer in the development of performance art that overstepped the boundaries between lonely contemplation and public exposure. It played with the audience and its expectations, questioning, as Schneemann put it, “embedded modes of behavior and an aesthetic ideal taken for granted, invisible cultural assumptions.”139 This propelled new questions about art. The gallery or art museum produced a collective experience that could not be repeated elsewhere.

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As Arthur Danto remarked in his seminal text “The Artworld” in 1964, a new social sphere emerged, the artworld, in which new forms of art could emerge because they were also seen and considered in a new way.140 Performance art became equated with agency. The question of art, then, echoing the beginning of this chapter, became not so much what it is but what it does. Arendt did not take any active interest in these new developments, but she was made part of Judy Chicago’s grand piece, Herstory.141 Arendt described agency as an event, an action leaping from the known to the unknown.142 Just as dancers, actors, and musicians need a space of appearance for their work, so too do politicians need a “kind of theater” in which freedom—that is, the elaboration of political argumentation— can appear.143 Given the great enthusiasm in Arendt’s account of sensible appearances, her reluctance to confront anything like real bodies or affects seems surprising. Some critics have seen Arendt’s public space as an abstract construction rather than a real space inhabited by living bodies.144 This is strange, and to many also worrying. Although appearances and actions are at the forefront of all reflections, all the bodies that would perform actions take a backseat as objects of appearance. Bonnie Honig has even gone so far as to declare an obsession with this absence in Arendt, declaring the body in her writings to be “mute and shrouded in secrecy,” even bestowed with a mood of the “uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and sacred attributes that Freud associates with the fundamentally ambivalent structure of taboo.”145 For Honig, the suppression of the real body threatens to undo the potentially radical thought of plurality; if plurality is made up only of unreflective “natural bodies,” then there is little left to use for a more radical, carnivalesque, excessive body.146 It is certain that the body problem in Arendt disallows a certain performative notion of plurality from establishing itself. On one hand, the body belongs to the individual and is unique. On the other hand, we tend to think of bodies as marked by gender, social status, ethnicity, and so on, but Arendt’s bodies have been neutralized and made devoid of gender, ethnicity, and social class. With this neglect, a feminist problem imposes itself as well. Arendt even seems to express, at least indirectly, a kind of contempt for the bodies engaged in the tasks of housekeeping and caretaking, repetitive tasks of labor. The body of labor is negated and depreciated because an “action” cannot be a repetitive act

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of maintenance; it has to be an initium, a new beginning, enacting its own principle.147 Again, we must read Arendt in reverse in order to understand the implications of a plural aesthetics. Although there is a lack of reflection on the rich diversity of looks and actions of bodies that appear in a society of free speech, we do encounter the opposite. In discussing totalitarianism, for example, Arendt demonstrates that the human body, in a nihilistic effort, is made not to appear: the censuring organ of control peels the body off, takes its clothes off, shaves it, and exterminates all signs of distinction. The bodies in a terrorist ideology are made to look one and the same, with no sexual distinctions. In the ultimate consequence of total oppression and nihilistic ideology, the concentration camp, bodies are pressed together so that no space of perception or recognition may be produced; the body is manipulated so that the person is destroyed. The ideal Aryan body was figured as real, whereas the body of the concentration camp was undone and destroyed as inhuman, and the concentration camp, in shaving, undressing, getting rid of all differentiating traits among bodies, was a place where bodies were undone as appearances. The ideology of National Socialism wanted to replace a multiplicity of bodies with one naturalistic idea of “the human.”148 In contrast, the corporeal artworks of her time produced what Arendt calls, in her description of the phenomenology of public space, a unique form of appearance.149 The use of living bodies, exposing themselves in vulnerable positions to the glance of the public, created a shift in the perception of embodiment. The exposure of living bodies in intimate postures created a sense of urgency that transcended the intimacy that was exhibited. This exposure contributed to an aesthetic turn in which the appearance of the body of the artist interacted with the impulses, affects, and emotions of the audience.150 Moreover, the embodied agency of the artist challenged given notions about the body’s social production. This is why any notion of an Arendtian aesthetics must take into consideration a development that went on in alignment with, rather than in contrast to, Arendtian ideas. Through our bodies, we are also capable of acting in a way that transcends our social identity—thus invoking the full political reach of human embodiment.

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THE WORK OF ART

THE THINGS THAT FALL APART IN 1958, two books of significance appeared: The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt, and Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. They have something in common: the recognition that the destruction of human life coincides with the destruction of cultural objects. In Achebe’s novel, the protagonist kills himself as a result of a distortion of the values and cultural forms of life that he knows. Arendt, in turn, tells of the necessity to maintain things that do not fall apart: cultural objects. She had already noted the connection between culture and life in The Origins of Totalitarianism, remarking that the racist Boers in South Africa had no literature or art. The Boers abandoned their farms and belongings when their possessions were threatened, as if they had no ability to value things.1 The destruction of African culture by the Boers, Arendt argues, was accompanied by an inability to understand, appreciate, or even perceive the objects, habits, and values that sustain life. That inability was not directed only toward the culture of the colonized. The colonizers had little capacity to appreciate their own cultural objects as well, an inability that contributed to the destruction of others. These two accounts of colonization, Arendt’s and Achebe’s, reflect each other, although unwittingly so. Arendt’s history of the colonization of Africa is deeply problematic. She failed to recognize the existence of African literature, demonstrating no knowledge of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, or

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.2 She was blind to her own racism.3 As in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, she refers to people of African culture as “prehistoric man,” and they are conceived to be lacking temporal consciousness or historicity. Allegedly, it is precisely this lack of “world” that makes colonization possible.4 This recounting is, at best, a paraphrase of Conrad’s novel.5 Read against Achebe, however, one may pick up the story of colonization from another perspective. Achebe’s fiction depicts a process of colonization in which the destruction of culture equaled a destruction of life. Seen from that perspective, it was not a lack of culture and cultural objects on the part of the colonizers that made the crimes possible. On the contrary, the devastation of culture was an integral part of systematic exploitation, including, in the end, the ruination of life forms. This is a story that Arendt knows. It is something she witnessed in a direct manner in another context. As an envoy for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Arendt traveled extensively in Germany in 1949 and 1950, gathering information on the whereabouts of confiscated library collections, art collections, ceremonial objects, and other cultural material of the lost Jewish population. Meeting with librarians, museum directors, and local German and Jewish organizations, Arendt helped map the state of the cultural Jewish heritage in postwar Germany.6 Her stances on the work of art can be interpreted in this light. Having seen a cultural heritage break into pieces, she also witnessed the importance attached to it, not only by the German Jewish population but also by those who took possession of the cultural material or destroyed it. The systematic destruction of cultural objects conveyed the attempt to obliterate a people; conversely, their reconstruction became a road to a possible resuscitation.7 It is, Arendt writes, “the objective status of the cultural world, which, insofar as it contains tangible things—books and paintings, statues, buildings and music—comprehends, and gives testimony to, the entire recorded past of countries, nations, and ultimately mankind.”8 The notion that art offers a value of permanence is more than a note in the margin of The Human Condition. It is a remark based on the observation of cultural and human extinction. Cultural objects uphold a value beyond their immediate aesthetic, social, or economic worth.9 They condition what Arendt calls world—that which subsists in-between.10 The in-between is like a table that “is located between, [and] relates and separates at the same time.”11

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The works of artists, writers, and musicians last well beyond the life span of human individuals. Art not only addresses itself to the public sphere but also contributes to its form of conditioning by offering permanency and steadfastness.12 With Arendt, one could argue for a “sustainable” model of the object of art, representing permanence rather than fantasy, collectivity rather than possessive individualism, solidarity rather than projection. Such a model implies a difference between reification—the process in which works acquire a value of permanence—and commodification—the process in which they become objects of consumption. Arendt presents four features of the artwork that make it sustainable. First, it belongs to public space, as was shown in the first chapter. Second, as will be dealt with in this chapter, it is a thought-thing, both material and immaterial. Third, it is a form of agency appearing in a nonhuman form. The fourth feature of the work of art is that it contributes to a quality of realness, a feature that will be further negotiated in the third chapter, on judgment. Works of art, like human labor and services, can be commodified. But art cannot be degraded into its use-value only, or reduced to nothing but a commodity.13 Indeed, a work of art may well present more resilience against commodification than human labor; this is Arendt’s modernist idealization of art. An artwork is not simply a dead thing, or an object. It is a thought-thing, irreducible in terms of a dialectic duality between object and subject. Art cannot be exhausted in its objecthood, in relation to a subject. It belongs to the field of plurality, situated in a field of shared perspectives, usages, and impacts. The ontological conception of plurality, together with its phenomenological implications, serves to rethink political categories in aesthetic terms. The humanist focus on human agency and human actions is displaced and renegotiated toward phenomena, things, and objects that condition the political. As has been repeated on several occasions already, there is little prolonged discussion of art and aesthetics in Arendt’s writings. This absence is reflected in the scholarship on her philosophy. Whereas her notion of judgment is much commented upon, its connection to the work of art and, ironically, to aesthetics, is hardly discussed. In contrast, there is a lot of research on Arendt and literature, looked at within a political and/or cultural context, not least through the work of Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb and Barbara Hahn.14 As a friend of writers such as Mary McCarthy, Hermann Broch, and W. H. Auden, Arendt’s relation to

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the literary world was put on display in a 2007 exhibition—put together by Marie-Luise Knott and Barbara Hahn—which included a catalog of facsimiles of her manuscripts and letters and gave witness to her intimate concerns with literature. Language in the form of philosophies, stories, narratives, and poetry may take on the same status as material objects, offering traces that are needed for a culture to prevail. Language is a “fossil of history”; reminiscences are passed on.15 If we examine those reminiscences we may shed light on that history. Narrative is a central category not only of cultural expression but also of the understanding of agency at a transcendental level. Poetry, in turn, is language as tone, at the level of sounding— transcending the narrow structures of signification and operating at the level of the senses. The question of the nonlinguistic work of art, such as musical or visual work, is less represented in Arendt’s writings. Nevertheless, works of all categories carry significant symbolic weight. Artworks condition world—the in-between—because they remain, superseding the horizon of human temporality as it is counted in generations. The place of art in Arendt’s writings, then, holds an important symbolic position. In criticizing the commodification of culture, Arendt speaks not only of the transformation of life forms but also of disaster.16 Cultural objects are not replaceable. There is an intrinsic relation between art and forms of life.17 Art, aesthetics, and cultural objects maintain a life-world to which politics is absolutely obligated. In order to illuminate this, we need to refer to Arendt’s letters and notebooks in addition to her published texts. In doing so, we will notice a contrast between the way in which the work of art is considered in The Human Condition, “Culture and Politics,” and “The Crisis in Culture,” on the one hand, and her great work, The Life of the Mind, on the other. In her earlier published works, art is an auxiliary to action. In The Life of the Mind, spectatorship replaces agency. In the same work, we find a sketch of the thought-thing that tends to undermine the duality between spectatorship and agency.18 Arendt asserts the value of art and cultural objects not just in the face of totalitarian or colonial forces but also as against the capitalist invasion of the public sphere. In “Society and Culture,” from 1960, she calls for the West to discover its past anew; here she sees the American future as incarnated in the past inherited from its literature.19 In “The Crisis of Culture,” two years later, she observes that Europe and America are seeing their

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cultural heritage break down under forces of commodification and commercialism, a kind of ruin that can have only one solution: the West must rediscover its objects. As argued above, this stance was not only theoretical but also had a biographical background. As she returned to her childhood Berlin after the war, she found herself in a fractured city. Witnessing the unveiling of the Pergamon fresco in Berlin, she observed that the various representations of works of art—from opera, to museums that Arendt visited in various parts of the city—served as knots that tied the different sections of Berlin together. These knots were erected, also, as bridges to the past: art serving both as world and place in a city that lacked cohesion.20 Asserting that only “tangible things” from the “cultural world,” things such as “books and paintings, statues, buildings, and music,” can give us some kind of comprehension of our history, Arendt seems to speak for a conservative humanism in which bourgeois art forms convey a universal truth about mankind.21 This is, however, not the case. Arendt’s idea of world does not hold high culture to be a peak of world-making. Her question was, Why does consumer society commodify art rather than preserve it? One may bring this question up to date: Why argue that “culture” must sustain itself, rather than affirm the need for support for museums, archives, and institutions that preserve cultural objects? In the light of the aggressive forms of commodification that dominate our life-world, alienate us from our cultural heritage, commercialize everyday habits and communication, the idea that works of art and culture offer a world is not necessarily reactive. Of course, the idea is not necessarily progressive, either. It would be wrong to evaluate Arendt’s theory of art as being on either side of a scale measuring the political in terms of ideology. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been eras of commodification. A good number of theoreticians within philosophy, economy, and social theory have shown that the moral issues raised by markets present some of the most pressing issues of our time. The dramatic development of market commodification must be looked at in terms that undermine traditional categories of moral, political, legal, and social theory. These concerns are not new. Arendt’s contemporary and colleague, C. B. Macpherson, named “possessive individualism” as the spirit of modernity, wherein even the notion of the individual itself becomes imbued with a normative notion of possessiveness; here, freedom can only be conceived

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of in terms of contractual relations built on self-interest.22 With the growth of the liberal market, this norm has steadily gained ground, undermining values such as collectivity, solidarity, plurality, and equality. How is critical theory to deal with this? The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been an era of the object. From Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno to Jacques Lacan, the object has been made the focus of critical thought and interpretation. It is not just any object. It is an object of desire, which we could loosely associate with some kind of universal phallic structure of subjectivity; the object is something we want to have and must have. Because we want to and must have it—or perhaps, from a more subtle viewpoint, because we desire it—the object gives rise to projections, hopes, and dreams that also give it a value. The object, then, is a changing body, it comes in multiple shapes and forms, and it may be framed from both a conscious perspective and through the workings of the unconscious. For Marx, consumer goods are symbols of social exchange. Commodity fetishism is one of the cornerstones of Marxist theory. In Freud’s writings, the objectifying process of desire is correlative to the becoming of the subject, a process made all the more concrete with Melanie Klein. Adorno appeals to the “preponderance” of the object in Negative Dialectics, by which he appeals to objectivity as an inherent part of subjectivity.23 In works of art “the subject becomes aesthetically objective.”24 There is, therefore, no belief in any kind of intentionality of the artist that would rescue a misguided aesthetic proposal through an honest intent. In works of art, subjectivity is alienated and concealed.25 Lacan reformulated the characterization of the object by introducing the objet petit a as cause of desire. But all these theories have in common the perception of a structural correlation between object, desire, and the becoming of the subject. There is reason to ask whether we ought to renegotiate the Marxist and psychoanalytic “individualist” theories of the object, which harbor the fantasies and desires of individuals, and replace them with a theory of the object that instead contains values of collective thought and memory, culture, and resistance against commodification. Arendt opts for the latter. With the help of her ontology we may observe a difference between these two kinds of objects, thereby making it possible to counter forms of possessive individualism with cultural objects that are needed in order to form concepts of collectivity and solidarity. Such renegotiation must take into consideration two tendencies that seem to be at odds with one another.

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On one hand is an increasing commodification of all the goods, values, services, and experiences that surround modern lives. Here, commodification entails consumerism, which means that cultural objects are used for the sake of individual pleasure, without leaving a mark on a public body. In contrast to such private consumerism, we would find the works that offer themselves to the plural world of a variety of perspectives and viewpoints over time. The distinction between these cannot be made on internal grounds—there is no inherent quality that makes a certain object more “political” than another. However, there is an aesthetics to be inferred, which integrates public space. “Culture” does not necessarily represent the ideals of an educated, privileged class.26 It supports the negotiation of ethics, politics, and social values. When art and culture are hollowed out, the loss hits democracy. Rather than promoting “possessive” individualism, art and cultural objects ought to resist ownership and promote plurality.

FROM PERMANENCE TO COMMODIFICATION How can this be achieved? In English, which is the language in which Arendt wrote The Human Condition, the world of Homo faber is one of reification, which implies that manufactured objects acquire a form of permanence.27 In “Culture and Politics,” Arendt distinguishes between art and objects fabricated by the culture industry.28 This distinction corresponds to an inherent differentiation between reification and commodification. The latter are objects made for enjoyment after work and sleep have been taken care of, filling a basic need in an empty cycle of consumption. This is also what bestows on these objects an evanescent character—they must be consumed over and over again. In contrast, the reified objects of art create a kind of permanence through transpositions and transfigurations.29 The distinction between commodities and “real” cultural objects cannot be made on internal grounds—there is no inherent quality that makes a certain object more commodified than another. As objects partake in a plural sphere, they are intrinsically made part of political life, but also of a structure of economic and social exchange. This entails, on the one hand, that one must be sensitive to the power inherent in the work itself, without falling prey to fetishization, and, on the other, that one must resist an overarching turn to theorization that suppresses

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sensible and aesthetic qualities. Permanence is not merely material. Art is a thought-thing, liberated from the coercion that concepts will exert on the mind.30 The liberated thought in the aesthetic work is a form of intransience, attached to sensible qualities. Reification has a goal; the sustenance of Homo faber himself. The making of art is Verdinglichung in German, which brings forth the question of “the thing,” or das Ding, in Arendt’s maternal tongue (the language in which she was always really at home, she told Günter Gaus in the famous television interview of 1962). The question of the thing pertains not only to the object, or to the maker, or to their relation, but also to the way in which historical beings are conditioned by reification or Verdinglichung. The German terminology is clearer than the English. Humans are historical, political, and cultural beings—they are conditioned, or bedingt in German. In this, she argues for a philosophical tradition inherited from Hegel and Carl Schmitt.31 What is peculiar in the thought of Arendt, however, is her combination of a nondialectical form of materialism and ontological plurality. Philosophy, as the question of being, began with the idea of permanence.32 Such permanence is to be found in the thing as hypokeimenon, the core or subsistence of the object. The object has sensual qualities, whereas the thing is the resistance of materiality that allows for objects of knowledge to be conceived. At the same time, the idea of “substance” is a philosophical hypothesis. Things and objects do appear to possess a form of substance or substantiality. We experience a difference between “objecthood” and the flowing inconsistency of the natural environment in which it has a place.33 Aristotle’s thing, which sustains the metaphysical question of being, evaporates and reappears in an alternate shape in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which Arendt read as a manuscript before publication.34 Heidegger there proposes work to be integral to the question of the thing, in attempting to show how human practices and their historicity are to be found not only as the “content” or appearance of the work of art but also as an integral part of their making.35 Art unravels forms of being. Arendt reverses the logic of that reasoning, and the hegemonic order of the argument. Whereas to Heidegger works of art unravel forms of being, to Arendt they condition the way in which thought appears. It allows for thought to present itself. Artworks are the “worldliest of things”; they are made only with respect to appearance.36 This gives works of art a particular status:

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“nowhere else [other than in the work of art] does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the nonmortal home for mortal beings.”37 Whereas the question of commodification was central to many in the Frankfurt School of critical theory, not least to Arendt’s own “favorite,” Walter Benjamin, it is not so much expounded upon in Arendt as it is implied in her differentiation between Homo faber and animal laborans. Commodification is an intrinsic aspect of alienation in the social sphere. When things are no longer made, the conditioning of Homo faber as a life form is suppressed.38 When machines take over the task of making objects, the human body becomes instrumentalized. Animal laborans, replacing Homo faber, does not create things. It imitates natural processes. Whereas the world of man-made conditioning established values and objects of permanence, the world of industrialization moves in cycles—natural products take part in a temporal wheel of birth and death; they are never “finished.” The development of technology has thereby “automatized” the world. When things and objects are replaced by mass-produced products, this entails more than a distinction between objects of mass production and artworks with an “aura,” as Benjamin suggested. Arendt never liked Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” perhaps because loss of aura was a minimal damage, relative to the disasters she observed.39 In Arendtian thought, both Homo faber and the possibility of political life depend on the kind of permanence that cultural objects offer. With the event of automatization, however, things are no longer valued as cultural objects or thought-things but only according to their usefulness in the cycle of production. This makes them useless as protectors of reflection, action, and freedom. Arendt makes it clear that she considers entertainment a part of the “biological life process,” immersed in “a metabolism feeding on things by devouring them.” As the entertainment industry spreads, mass society will “eat” cultural objects. They become transformed into commodities. They are no longer thought-things.40 This is a remark with dire ontological consequences. It signals the onset of a disaster in which man will annihilate himself, as in colonization or totalitarianism. With no cultural objects to sustain it, life is put in peril or even extinguished. Arendt’s reason for being wary of Marxist theory lies in Marx’s disregard of the conditions of political life.41 The Marxist concept of “commodity fetishism” implies the transformation of aesthetic and cultural values

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into a commercial or social surplus. Describing the extraordinary glow of objects that become fetishes, Marx indicates the death of bourgeois culture. Fetishes are objects that do not become commodities on a market; instead, they are produced as such.42 For Arendt, however, commodification is not a problem of social or economic exchange but of ontological disaster; when the object of art is turned to consumption, the thing that sustains plurality disappears. Whereas Marx celebrated the death of the bourgeoisie, and Adorno and Benjamin worried about the impact of commodification on human sense-perception, Arendt’s outlook on the future was in many ways more dire.43 Things have a life, Arjun Appadurai has remarked. Although we know that they are not living beings, they acquire a history of their own. Things may transform; even if an object has been used as a commodity at a particular time, this does not mean that it will remain a commodity.44 For Arendt, however, the commodification of things is the end of a life form. At the time of Arendt’s writing, Benjamin’s masterpiece on the phenomenology of commodification, the Passagenwerk, was not known or published. It is unclear whether Arendt knew of it during her friendship with Benjamin in France in the late 1930s, when they were interned in camps. Before Benjamin’s disastrous flight toward Spain, his subsequent suicide, and Arendt’s flight to the United States, she was given a manuscript of his Theses on the Philosophy of History.45 It is clear that she admired Benjamin’s ingenious critique of phenomena or Denkbilder, images of thought, more than Adorno’s more systematic theory of objecthood.46 Her favorite work by Benjamin was his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, because that is where his poetic thinking came to the fore: critique is not only the interpretation but a recreation of the thought of a work. 47 This is an aspect of every work of art.48 It is through comments, views, judgments, and reflection that art becomes part of our public and social spaces. Art creates a discourse that is unlike any other, irreducible to ideological debate.49 This is a belief joining Benjamin with Arendt, and dissociating them from Adorno.50 Both Arendt and Adorno kept their distance from popular culture, because it implies a transformation of art. But they speak of different kinds of transformation. For Adorno, the experience of art has been commodified by the culture industry, transforming human experience into a repetition of the same. The streamlining of cultural products makes them sentimental, pain and pleasure serving similar goals.51 Music, for instance, produces a certain, given set of emotions. At the same time, the consumer

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of music is not so much enjoying the emotions and feelings that music gives rise to as the value he receives from its enjoyment: status, or social and economic stature. Music acquires, like all goods, an exchange value. In this way, the pleasure production stretches from the culture industry to works of fine art.52 Adorno points to the susceptibility of all forms of art to commodification, and its subsequent impact on perception. For Arendt, also, commodification posed a threat through the very alterations taking place in the appearances of objects. Arendt sees mass society as a development of class society, a development mirrored in the cultural values surrounding objects of art. “Mass” is a phenomenon that has been incorporated into “class,” and not a distinctly new phenomenon. If the event of “mass” sees a whole new cultural industry develop, this must be seen as part of a revolt against the values that have been intrinsic to class society. The derogatory ring that stuck to the notion of “culture” in the eighteenth century—in the writings of Rousseau, for instance—developed into a popular revolt; because “culture” had become repressive, new forms of cultural expressions were needed.53 What worried Arendt more than the development of popular culture or mass-culture as new forms of expression was the subsequent loss of materiality sustaining a life-world. As objects of art are altered in the process of mass production, not only do certain forms of objects and appearances disappear or lose their cultural value, but also the very “thingness” of the work—the matter of the material, the aestheton of its tones, shapes, and dimensions—is lost or altered. Objects no longer serve as objects of collective memory or interest. Instead, they are digested by individuals. A thought-thing has a life for the many. The commodity serves the appetite of an individual. The commodification of culture entails a collapse of collectivity. This is not only a problem of expression. To Arendt, an aesthetic work is a product that escapes ruination per se.54 This applies both to material arts and to literature, which is made to be preserved through the rhythms of its composition.55 Permanence is a temporal and not a material concept in Arendt’s writings. Paradoxically, permanence has little to do with material standing. For instance, we have little left of ancient tragedy, an art form to which Arendt returned incessantly.56 In some cases, only fragments remain, and we constantly need to reassess our knowledge of how it was read, performed, and viewed. And yet ancient tragedy is one of the most enduring art forms to be found—continuously performed worldwide, interpreted and reinterpreted

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in multifaceted ways, exported across national and continental boundaries, discussed at all levels of education across the centuries, and reflected and philosophized upon in multiple schools of thought. For all its various guises, there is always something left that allows us to recognize events and characters as belonging to the ancient tradition of ancient tragic theater. Tragedy offers a value of permanence that counters the effects of commodification not only through the way it has been passed on through generations but also through the way in which it speaks to the collective. It erects a collective space of negotiation and reflection, integrating problems of laws, limits, and agency. The belief that art works serve permanence does not in itself presume that one subscribes to the ideology of cultural conservatism. The concept of permanence appeals to a particular conception of temporality that sustains collective ideas and values, but not necessarily of a particular ideological kind. In calling for Europe and America to rediscover its objects, Arendt does not merely echo the aesthetic ideology of the “free world,” as invoked by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. She was critical not only of Soviet forms of social realism but also of Western varieties of the avant-garde. Its pet form, abstract expressionism, did not hold any particular place in her private canon. She was highly critical of “kitsch,” which she regarded as a direct aestheticization of commodification. Although she was well aware of its intentions—deliberately using and magnifying aesthetic forms that speak to a broad popular market and relieving art of its “thought”—she considered kitsch to be fully complicit in the very phenomena it was criticizing.57 The remarks on kitsch indicate that Arendt was at least aware of aesthetic debates in the 1960s, and she sympathized with its politics. The new genres that were created—performance, installations, and conceptual art—had their root in a will to create works that could not be objects on the market, challenging the commodification of art. The creation of conceptual works, performances, and installations that disappeared sometimes had a direct political motivation. In the 1960s, the same people who collected art could be involved in the weapons industry that waged war against Vietnam. Thus, creating insubstantial objects and works that disappeared became a form of protest.58 Although she did not engage publicly in many protests, Arendt signed a number of petitions against the war, together with other intellectuals.59 Certainly the new forms of art that emerged during this period informed her view on aesthetics.

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APPEARANCES AND ART In a 1937 letter from Paris, Arendt’s husband Heinrich Blücher writes to her about a painting he has seen in the Louvre, Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath. Scandalized by the “beautifying” golden tone of color that has modified a copy, he insists that the beauty of Bathsheba lies in the hard clarity of the original painting. What makes the model of the painting so desirable are the marks on her body, the traces of her work, life, and love. These traces set light and shadows into play, making visible female experiences that otherwise remain hidden. “This is Rembrandt’s great contribution to the liberation of woman.”60 Answering Blücher’s letter, Arendt mildly opposes the feminist ravings of her husband, pointing instead to Rembrandt’s uncompromising depiction of the face: “The true discrepancy lies between the face and the body of Bathsheba herself.” Bathsheba, Arendt notes, is to be offered to King David’s bed after her husband has been sent to war. “Here the face, and with it the human being, emancipates itself from the beautiful and used body.61 Because the body is imperfect, and because the painting carries a story, it is the face of Bathsheba that transpires to the viewer. In this, Rembrandt depicts a moment of emancipation that affects not only the relief of subjugation for Bathsheba, as a symbol of womanhood. He depicts the primacy of experience over a more universal conception of humanity. This is one of the few passages where Arendt comments on a wellknown work of art.62 There are two aspects that are of particular interest. First, where Blücher sees a body, Arendt sees a face. Although the nude body is depicted with scrupulous detail, the face of the painting transpires as the focal point of visibility. This can be read in conjunction with Arendt’s devaluation of cyclic processes; only that which transcends the repetitions of biology is subject to philosophical reflection. For Blücher, who was complaining about the alteration made in a popular print, the aging body is celebrated as a force of life, whereas for Arendt the decay of the body is overcome through the appearance of the face. Every living organism is dominated by “the urge to self-display.”63 Such a display does not reveal anything “hidden.” There is no depth in the soul or in the interior of the body that will reveal itself as truer than the appearance of the face. Nevertheless—and this is the second aspect of note in her remark— Rembrandt’s paintings show that man had a life and experience and gained

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knowledge about this life.64 Transcending any conceivable duality between (passive) spectatorship and (active) reflection, the power of Rembrandt’s portraits lies in the face, making the viewer reflect on how the work sees us. It sees us as we see it.65 Through our imagination, we learn to negotiate sensible qualities. Literature, like the other arts, appeals to our senses through its way of toning, or using narrative in fiction to “bring about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are.”66 All art comes into being through the transposition of interior life to the public world of appearances. The transposition between internal and public constitutes a decisive ontological cut. In the world of appearances, feelings are of no consequence or interest. Only shape and sensible qualities give sustenance. It is only at this level that a work of art will manifest some kind of individuality. Appearances are manifold, whereas feelings and emotions tend to repeat themselves. Emotive sensibility is private and detachable from appearances. There is an unbridgeable gap between the emotions of the producer of the work and the sensibilities of the one who sees it. Arendt’s idea of singularity, therefore, is correlative with a certain prohibition of understanding, a certain aspect of what Édouard Glissant would call “opacity,” a right not to be understood.67 For Arendt, it is the very opacity of the work that makes reflection possible. In this, she distances herself from most of her contemporaries, including Heidegger, Adorno, and Freud. It is indicative that Arendt’s interpretation of Rembrandt starkly contrasts with Genet’s famous text “Le secret de Rembrandt,” which appeared in 1958. Rembrandt, he says, has been chasing “a truth that escapes him” through his art: the lack of love for the mother; the love he has, after all, for his son, and for Hendrijke, the woman we believe to have been the model for Bathsheba. Rembrandt moves, in his art, from theatrical virtuosity to the illumination of the real model.68 In a few pages, Genet gives us the whole narrative of the life of Rembrandt, offering us not only the idea of a secret in the paintings but also a truth behind the secret. Arendt’s modernist aesthetics disallows any notion of psychological unraveling, as can be seen in her reading of Nathalie Sarraute. In transposing the world of emotive responses to “scenes” in which the movements and interactions among the protagonists overtake the traditional role of a rich character, a novelist like Sarraute manages to overcome the banality

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of interiority. Using psychological vivisection, rather than the couch, was a stroke of genius, Arendt argues: “The inner life of the self can explode on the surface in what is so commonly called ‘scenes.’ ”69 A work of art can never offer a glimpse of any inner truth; there is nothing “inner” to be seen. When Arendt sees a Matisse sculpture in Chicago, she writes indignantly in her notebook, “The five sculptured heads of Jeanette (1910–1913): the first—her appearance, and then as though layer upon layer were ripped off, one uglier than the former, the last like a monstrosity makes the first look as though our face were nothing but a precarious facade.”70 Matisse’s sculpture is a series of five heads, the first a classic figuration of a woman in the form of a classic bust. Then Matisse made a second one that elaborated the first, and so forth, until he was content with the last. Striving to move away from physical realism, Matisse wanted the bronze to unravel a persona beyond appearances. Unable or unwilling to integrate any notion of layers or topologies into her aesthetics, what Arendt saw was degeneration: the second head as a distorted version of the first, the third an even more disfigured version, and so on, through the last one, in which the figure of a human head is barely recognizable anymore. Nothing in Matisse’s sculpture indicates that the last head is intended as an ugly revelation of the truth beneath the surface. However, the sculpture reminds Arendt of the Freudian recasting of body and mind, in which the invisible and the unconscious overcome visibility and appearance. The faces are set up as a display of the forced traces of guilt—appearance withdrawing to leave space for projection, the fantasy of content. The search for a single, inner, hidden truth makes psychoanalysis, for instance, blind to the variety of expressions that appearances actually offer.71 In failing to recognize the cut between mind and body, we may fall into the trap of identifying with an “inner truth” the repetitive workings of the emotions, affects, and corporeal sensations that we all seem to have in common.72 As embodied beings we think and live through the senses rather than through emotions. To appear means to exist for a spectator, who perceives primarily through vision but also through smell, touch, and taste. The difference between the visible and the invisible is fundamental. All things reveal, and in that process, they also conceal. It is a mistake, however, to allow the function of concealment to guide us into metaphysical explanations. Sentient beings are both subjects and objects; they can both see and be seen, hear and be heard.73 The heterogeneity

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of appearances, in conjunction with the plurality of the senses, stands in stark contrast to the repetitive forms that anything “inner” will take on. Emotions are similar for all of us, and therefore uninteresting. This is what motivates Arendt’s repeated critique of psychology and psychoanalysis: attempting to unravel unconscious motivations, they fail to take account of what appears. They mistake repetitive forms of “inner life” for deeper forms of truth.74 In contrast to such repetitive emotions, the reality of the senses is rich in tones, forms, and shades. And yet the senses are themselves incapable of revealing a truth; truth will always remain ineffable. The Greek tradition has trusted vision as a primary sense of metaphysical truth. In the Hebrew tradition, hearing has filled the same function. Both traditions have used metaphors to stake out a truth beyond appearances. What is particular to the senses, Arendt argues, is their untranslatability. Smell cannot be sight, sight not be heard; sensations can only be inadequately described in words that are in themselves mere instruments of the ineffable.75 This is an aspect of the irreducibility of the world of appearance; philosophy and religion, trusting the metaphorical ability of one sense or the other, has only been able to stake out the ineffable point of truth. This indicates that the question of truth must give place to the multisensory function of appearances. In “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that perceptions of the world are refracted through “perceptions, shadows, levels, and horizons,” and so thought can never possess things but can only stake out what we are not yet thinking.76 Appearing in a footnote in The Life of the Mind, the work of Merleau-Ponty informs Arendt’s idea of the “real” to an extent that she herself perhaps does not fully appreciate. In his discussion of Cézanne, in The Phenomenology of Perception and “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty has illuminated the sensual qualities that lie at the “core of real”: “a thing is a thing because, whatever it imparts to us, it is imparted through the very organization of its sensible aspects.”77 The senses are interacting, and this is what is also explored in Cézanne’s paintings; his play with perspective and dimensions in a singular surface imply a new kind of “ordering” of things in which the perspectivism of perception is intertwined with that of knowledge. Our life-world is constituted by man-made objects, Merleau-Ponty asserts, and most of the time we only experience them as they are put to use: tools, houses, streets, and

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so on. Cézanne’s paintings, however, throw us out of our ordinary relation to these objects.78 The importance of modern art, then, lies in the way in which it recasts the relation between thought and appearance. An appearance is never “grasped” by thought but rather is conduced by it. In modern art, the difference between techne and poiesis, thinking and thought, original creation and dichten, or creating poetry or fiction disappears. It is precisely on this point that Arendt’s aesthetics meets with Merleau-Ponty; appearances are produced and articulated at a point of differentiation that challenges the Kantian assumption of the transcendental subject as the beginning of all creation. As noted, the celebration of the senses has nothing to do with aesthetic realism. To the spectator, Arendt writes, modern painting may appear to violate the senses, distorting reality. However, that violence introduces a kind of “open sesame”: the faltering surface introduces an opening through which spectator and the work interact. Unfolding in six dimensions: height and depth, right and left, foreground and background, Cézanne’s paintings add dimensional imagination to our perception.79 Our limited sensual capacity is thereby overcome. By that logic, Heidegger’s seeming violations of poetry is also redeemed. Usually, Arendt’s estimation of Heidegger’s poetic sensibility is low at worst and ambivalent at best, as in her remarks on Holzwege as both genial and downright crazy and wrongheaded.80 Complaining about Heidegger’s lack of understanding of modern literature, she makes it clear that she has little regard for his poetics.81 The tone changes, however, as she compares his poetics with the art of Cézanne. Suddenly defending Heidegger’s reading of Trakl’s poetry rather than accusing it of being apolitical manipulation, she explains that the poem brings Heidegger, like any modernist, to the point at which the foreign aspect of the world unfolds.82 His reading is not a violation of the poem but must be read as a modernist work of art in itself. Heidegger’s reading is performing no more violence on his object than a painting master such as Picasso does in his distortions and idiosyncrasies. In Arendt’s concept of world, appearances are independent from human consciousness.83 The urge to appear is a direct consequence of plurality, an invisible aspect of the visible, hidden to ourselves.84 In Merleau-Ponty’s text on “Le chiasme—entrelacs,” that hidden point is the écart, or divergence.85 We orient ourselves in the world through an interlacing of the tangible and the visual, which makes our body the locus of all possible knowledge. What

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conduces our gaze is also something that makes us conscious of ourselves as bodies, as weight. But where is the original gaze? What sees? The point of origin is replaced by an organic intertwinement, which still leaves the question of écart unresolved.86 It is this fundamental problem of an original gaze that Arendt supplements—rather than resolves—with plurality. In Arendt’s writings, the oscillation between visibility and invisibility is not a function of perception or embodiment but of appearance itself. The plurality of appearances introduces the function of negativity, in which appearances give themselves up to a multitude of perspectives. We can neither see from the perspective of others nor fully grasp the ground from which we form our own perspective. The plurality of spectatorships already implies the existence of other perspectives, and therefore, the urge to go beyond appearances. Our wish to go beyond what we see, however, will never take us further, but only back to the facticity of plurality and to the negativity inherent in differentiation as such.87 What is called an “urge” is not truly a foundation to appearances. The lack of ground or fundament is pivotal; the manifold is factual. Not even the situation of the body can be considered fundamental, since it is only one factor of many in the production of appearances. This is where The Life of the Mind takes a direction oppositional to Merleau-Ponty. To Arendt, the thinking subject is embodied, and therefore submitted to different perspectives. But if we make the body a fundament for thought, we are only recasting the relation between mind and body that the metaphysical tradition has relied upon. Arendt quotes Merleau-Ponty: the soul “enroaches” upon the body.88 Here Arendt introduces the notion that the mind itself is a split entity; I am not only for others but also for myself. I may conceive of myself from a certain viewpoint, but I cannot control the way others see me. The part of me that I may be showing to others but cannot see myself is an “invisible” part of me of which I may be vaguely aware but not fully conscious. As we are with others, we may experience, through the gaze laid upon us, that we are not only a question to ourselves but also to others. The answer to that question can never have any answer beyond the appearing character of our personhood, and “who” we are is hidden to ourselves even more than to others; we live a “daimon life.”89 This is of direct relevance to art. The artist who makes the work appear is not himself appearing; “he is blind, shielded against the visible, in order

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to be able to ‘see’ the invisible.”90 In the double motion of visibility and invisibility, I become other to myself. So far, this argument may appear to follow Merleau-Ponty. The latter, however, argues for a corporeal ground of self-consciousness, through which the world unfolds. For Arendt, there is no hierarchy between mind and body, being and world; all talk of grounding is meaningless and, in the end, only a metaphorical tool for an understanding that will remain fragmentary. Visible and invisible to others and to myself, the self cannot be conceived of otherwise than in terms of an inherent split, or plurality.91 Thought is abyssal, originating neither in the mind nor the body but rather in the multiple relations between appearances and their differentiation.

THE THOUGHT-THING In her notebooks, Arendt returns several times to the idea that art is a form of the thought-thing. In The Life of the Mind, thought takes on a multiplicity of forms and functions. Art is not merely a form of appearance. It is a form of thought. There is not one life of the mind but many. Philosophical thought is to be kept separate from the life of politics; the internal life of contemplation is distinct from the sense of reality that is born through a shared perspective; the infinite appearances of the world that are the objects of aesthetics are distinct from the theorization that produces the history of metaphysics; and so on. Art, as we have seen, is using the senses in the production and elaboration of appearances. Rather than accompanying thought, or being intertwined with thought (as in the work of Merleau-Ponty), Arendt’s art, provokingly, is thought. The concept of thought-thing is a general description of an aesthetic object. More precisely, however, it is a description of modernist art in the twentieth century, suggesting its double function. Stressing the element of thought in art, Arendt indicates the importance of the abstract and the conceptual, stressing the value of autonomy, imagination, and spontaneous acts of creation. At the same time, the thing belongs to the world of appearances and comes inserted into a perceptual field that negates, or at least negotiates, the belief in autonomous creations. In her foreword to an early-1960s catalog for a New York exhibition by friend and painter Carl Heidenreich, she quotes Juan Gris: “If I am not

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in possession of the abstract, with what am I to control the concrete? . . . If I am not in possession of the concrete, with what am I to control the abstract?”92 These sentences are not in the catalog to describe art in general but to characterize the particular style of Heidenreich, deemed degenerate in National Socialist Germany. Although he was a modernist in intellectual terms, Heidenreich clung to a mimetic ideal of natural landscapes, in which “basic elements” of landscape imagery and “basic colors” protruded. Arendt clearly saw that his art was uninteresting from a more progressive aesthetic point of view, but it colluded with her resentment against metaphysical pretensions in the depiction of “inner truths.” Her quotation of Gris in this particular context bears witness to the kind of problematic with which she grappled in attempting to retain an ontology of plurality while negotiating aesthetics and its legacy in German transcendentalism. The idea of the thought-thing cannot simply be translated into the diverse categories of “idea” and “matter.” In fact, art’s doublesidedness of being material object, on the one hand, and Geist, or spirit, on the other—a well-known figure in accounts of art from Hegel onward—is problematized by Arendt’s reworking of the thought-thing: “thought” is irreducible to idea and “thing” is irreducible to matter. Rather, what is at stake, yet again, is a search for an aesthetic support of permanence that allows for a politically astute notion of reification to defy commodification. The thought-thing is a concept picked up from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In Kant, the concept (usually translated in English as “thought-entities”) refers to ideas that cannot be experienced or intuited. Kant uses the notion to advance a critique of metaphysics, arguing that reason produces a belief in the existence of certain objects even though we cannot have any knowledge of them. These objects are the products of pure reason, or at least that is the only way in which we can conceive of them. Kant names three kinds of transcendental ideas that serve as Gedankenwesen, or thought-things: psychological (the self), cosmological (the world), and theological (God).93 All of these serve as regulative ideas of the systematic unity of knowledge. The fact that they are regulative means that they serve to explain the possibility of knowledge without being objects of knowledge. They cannot be known through any of the faculties, nor can they be shown as origins of knowledge in themselves. Kant, Arendt writes, was worried that these ideas would appear as leere Gedankendinge, “empty thought-things.”94 Instead of being the result of a creative capacity,

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thought-things could be mistaken for empty games of the mind, although they have a value that is neither cognitive nor moral. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt writes that thoughts “are” for Kant. Thoughts, being a result of the speculative powers of man, have a form of being that transcends the cognitive faculties.95 A thought is a thing that we cannot expect to be able to perceive through the senses. Concepts such as justice, freedom, courage, and the like lie beyond sensible experience and could be examples of Kantian thought-entities. Although Arendt picks up the terminology from the Critique of Pure Reason, there is little left of Kant in Arendt’s thought-things. Arendt uses the model in the context of a creative process in which experiences or ideas have gone through a process of dematerialization. In that process, the intellect is preparing its own objects through relieving sense-objects of material and spatial qualities.96 Through such an act of negation, a certain general quality will transpire through which the intellect can be said to have produced its own object. A thought-thing is produced through the defiance of the fleeting character of thought processes, allowing for a certain appearing attachment. Such a thought-thing may appear to give only a secondary importance to formal and sensible qualities. Thought-things induce our will to go beyond appearances. What transpires in the end, however, is a thought that can never be conceived as wholly and duly abstract. It is, however, liberated from the coercing force of concepts. The idea that art is a thought-thing may appear to go against the other thesis that Arendt is promoting simultaneously: art is appearance, and thereby a sensible form of experience that allows for a multiplicity of perspectives. Art is produced through an act of derealization in which the sense-object is transposed—through the reception of the spectator— into something more than that: an idea, a memory, a value, a shape, a narrative—something that is attached to the sense-object and yet can be considered in detachment from it.97 Art as thought-thing both affirms and underplays the sensual qualities of the object. Inserted into an intelligible context, a work assumes form and sensible qualities while remaining opaque. Appearances take an active part in hiding something and in protecting from exposure.98 The artist is an agency set between visibility and invisibility, becoming other to him- or herself through the work. That split is reduplicated in the thought-thing. That which is hidden is not an “inner” truth. Thought is not a fundament, properly speaking. But thought may

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be produced by wonder.99 At a certain level, the thought-thing is available only to those who do not act: the listener, reader, or spectator. At the same time, a thought-thing is created in view of the transposition toward public space.100 Wonder is a phenomenon that can only be conceived of in relation to plurality, a notion lost in the Platonic tradition.101 If things were reducible to the same—the same view, the same meaning, the same latent emotion—we would never experience wonder. Wonder can never simply be the concern of a single individual. The wonder that we may experience in the lines of aging faces in Rembrandt’s portraiture has to do with the multiple ways we can conceive of them and the many ways in which experience is reflected in them. Wonder has nothing to do with truth; it engages in the shadows, discrepancies, questions, and faults that evade reason. Produced at the cost of presence, an object, story, or piece of theater will lose its concretion at any given moment and be overcome by a strange form of the uncanny. The vitality of the thought-thing may be resurrected, but it will not fail to perish once more. Thought grasps things, forcing a transformation through which their meaning can be offered at the cost of the life that they would have otherwise enjoyed. When a thought is brought out of context “it loses its reality and acquires a curious kind of eeriness.” At the same time, such eeriness reveals their thinglike character: “What gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but for themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them.”102 Works of art are situated between the real and the unreal, in an uncanny borderland where thought touches itself through the sensible qualities of the work. A thought-thing is not produced as a mimesis of what is but rather as an elaboration of what is not. Set between the visible and the invisible, the sensible and the intellectual, the thought-thing could be described as thought affecting itself.103 If art makes us think, it is because our thought is already engaged in sensorial forms. Arendt’s “uncanny” aesthetics appears close to Heidegger’s when she refers to van Gogh’s picture of the farmer’s empty shoes. However, Heidegger sees there a withdrawal, an uncanny sense of finitude.104 For Arendt, the eeriness that haunts a work of art is not a reminder of death but a result of displacement.105 The distinction between Arendt’s and Heidegger’s aesthetics is caused by the impact of plurality. The context, the stories, the life in and through which we normally perceive reality is called into question. The sense of realness through which we normally perceive the world is

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replaced by a dizzying sense of unreality. We are immersed in the multiplicity of appearances, perspectives, and senses, but we are used to things appearing in a certain way. The thought-thing brings us out of context, as if the thing itself is possessed by a thought and quickly loses its grip on reality. Such dizziness can only be temporary; it can only be experienced in certain moments.106 Naturally, there are many ways of conceiving of Arendt’s thought-thing. One may think of conceptual art—self-referential art in the tradition of Joseph Kosuth, for instance. In the famous example of his One and Three Chairs, art refers not only to itself as particularity but to the concept of art as such.107 One may also think of the development of music and dance in the 1960s and 1970s, through the works of John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, and others, in which manifestos, or at least reflections on art, conduced as much of the aesthetic development as the works themselves. The Life of the Mind performs an aesthetic turn that is reminiscent of Kant’s turn in the first section of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the transcendental deduction, Kant shows sensible experience to be the measure of finitude. We may draw conclusions about things that lie beyond our sensible grasp of the world, but this knowledge is always limited. Just like the production of art, thought is a process. Making present what is absent, thought will rely on the desensualization and dematerialization of sense-objects. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is not an allegory of aesthetic objects, but of the thought process as such: thought deals with invisibles in the world of appearances. 108 In the absence of things, the mind recoils on itself, attempting to grasp itself. Therefore, the uncanny shadow in art reminds us of the displacement through which thought has manifested itself. Kant feared the abstract when he spoke about ideas of pure reason as “empty thought-things.” Concepts such as freedom, subjectivity, solidarity, public space, and the like may appear “empty” if they are brought out of a living context. This is also where we encounter the limits of philosophy: it has difficulty accounting for the objects, things, and sensible qualities that motivate our engagement in real life. Art, in contrast, has body and sensible qualities and mobilizes our senses. Art is the self-affectation of thought. It is not merely an autonomous play of the imagination, displacing our mind in a dizzying sense of irreality. It produces colors, sounds, shapes, and space that make our senses interact in a new way.

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NARRATING AGENCY Works of art are constitutive of a particular form of agency. It is a thought that is unique—immaterial and somehow personal at the same time. It may be a thing, but it is not a dead object. It will present a unique voice or shape in the environment in which it is presented. Plurality does not only consist of a certain number of voices coming from equal positions or representing similar individuals. It is heterogeneous and differentiated— coming from people, novels, films, or visual works, presenting itself through appearances that may be spectral, audible, or tangible. When Arendt discusses agency apropos of works of art, she is interested, above all, in a theatrical form of mimesis. A character in a piece of theater will exhibit a unique form of being.109 Rather than being mimicry of action or character, art conditions man as a historical, political, and social agent. Individuals are not mirrored in art. Art produces models of what we perceive of as human appearance.110 The original word for person is persona, and a persona is also an aesthetic requisite, a mask used in the Roman theater and associated with certain standard characters. These masks, notes Arendt, “correspond with great precision to our way of appearing in society.”111 In public space we may appear as types: women, men, children, mothers, businesspeople, teachers, nuns, and so on. As we speak or act, however, we make our mark beyond our persona. We become visible to others as persons or individuals, beyond our characters. This unique aspect of agency is “empty,” a matter of sheer contingency over which we have no control.112 An agency is not the same thing as a “self.” Whereas the self, to Arendt, is close to the transcendental ego of apperception in Kant, an ego that may objectify itself but is incapable of overcoming the spatial and temporal terms of its placement, the agent is produced through action. What is intended by an agent, Dante writes, “is the disclosure of his own image.”113 Agencies always appear in a manner subject to displacement. In Arendt’s discourse, the acting agent of the “who” that we encounter in Vita activa (The Human Condition) is not the same as a reflective one, or the thinking ego, vita contemplativa, in the first volume of The Life of the Mind. However, both are subject to the same kind of logic: the acting agent as well as the subject of thought is conceiving of itself through the displacing grid of its social environment. The difference is that the agent is acting upon it.

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The agent is produced through narrative, a story. The notion of narrative has a particular position in Arendt’s ontology of plurality, providing the missing link between singularity and the manifold. Narrative singularizes beings, but at the same time it does so through indicating its place in a plural environment: narrative is pointing to a form of agency that is neither simply an individual nor part of a collective. Narrative, also, is present in Arendt’s notion of bios, which equates the value of a life with that of a possibility of biography—the traces of our actions will produce a narrative that will counter the degenerative aspects of zoe, biological life. Life is nothing beyond these traces, or the narrative through which it appears in the form of bios. It is the narrative aspect of agency that makes it possible for one person to ask of another, “Who are you?” Arendt’s thought on the question of the “who” is immanent to her critique of essentialism. There is no human essence to be found in terms of “what” it is. Each individual, however, can be thought in terms of “who” it is.114 The question of the who—Who am I? Who is he?—must replace the metaphysical question of the what. The question is not What is Man? but rather Why are there men rather than Man?115 Metaphysical desire is simply formulated in another way. The who and the what follow each other, in a life where “I have become a question to myself.”116 The open character of that question makes subjectivization, or the social, historical, or political processes that may determine the identity of an individual, secondary to the quest to keep the question open. The question of the who, in Arendt, is much more than a stance against reductionism—it is deeply embedded in her ontology. More importantly, perhaps, if it is narrative that singularizes beings, then that entails that agents cannot be a result of deeper layers of truths or the unconscious, nor can agents be socially construed. Arendt’s preference for narrative implies a notion of radical contingency at the heart of her conception of agency. This can be seen in her aesthetic examples and explorations into literary narratives. It is no coincidence that Arendt’s preferred readings are authors who resist psychologism. Franz Kafka, Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), William Faulkner, and Walter Benjamin all are authors who tell stories, emptying foregoing psychological explanations. In the case of Benjamin, the bitterly ironic turns surrounding his fate turned the significance of his life and work around several times—not even après coup, or after death, can a bios be closed; it keeps being overturned, over

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and over again. Benjamin’s work was situated at a limit, neither philosophy nor literature, so that it was only to reach an audience after his death— which of course radically changed the significance of his work.117 Arendt’s stance that life is a narrative was indirectly the cause of her becoming persona non grata in the Adolf Eichmann affair. As she reported on the trial against Eichmann in 1961 she gave an account only of the impact of action, not the psychological constitution of his self, a fact which greatly upset her contemporaries.118 Psychologism is empty, and it fails to contribute to any critical account of the bearings of any action. This is an ethos that Arendt sticks to in her philosophical as well as her critical work. Stories are not there to explain, excuse, or illuminate. Stories are there to create appearances. Agencies can never appear as “inner” beings. As a consequence, in our apprehension of ourselves, we do not appear to ourselves as inner beings. As agents we appear as stories: as the narrative of a life, directed toward an interlocutor. Appearing as narratives, the “inner” life of any agent is lost; there is no deeper truth to be found. Only when I think do I appear to myself, and this appearance must have some kind of content. Thought is a process that can only be made intelligible in conjunction with appearances attached to the transcendental category of the I of apperception. The content of an appearance of a self can only present itself in the form of a story or narrative. Given that stories or narratives are not there in order to present any “deeper” truth, the content of lives is always contingent.119 We may well attempt to poeticize our lives and make them appear more true and deeper in essence. But such attempts are merely different in rhetoric from narratives that embrace contingency, and not more true in essence. Arendt’s own elective affinities in literature are an example of this, through the authors’ work, their own lives, or both. In her reflections on Karen Blixen, she sees the irony in Blixen’s belief in a story of love that she failed to live, and Arendt takes that belief as a clear sign that Blixen was blissfully unable to separate fact from fiction.120 Kafka, like Benjamin, becomes an example of the contingent response to the question of the who, through the blueprintlike and sketchy character of the protagonist.121 Our interpretation of Arendt’s philosophical stance on agency makes it clear that singularity as such cannot appear. It must be accompanied by something that makes it appear. In the case of art, this becomes obvious. What Arendt calls the who can never present itself directly; it can only appear through the means of an aesthetic

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elaboration—for instance, a theatrical mask or persona, a narrative, or a portrait. Here, the notion of the who as a presentation at the level of techne is useful. The question of the who and the what, as Bernard Stiegler has argued, are two sides of the same phenomenon: an individual is defined by the structuring tool of the signifier, whether that tool is aesthetic or linguistic.122 Stiegler, in reading Heidegger, argues that the who and the what are tied to each other through the rupture of the sign that is coextensive with the reflecting being. An individual reflecting on himself can never ask, “Who am I?” in a mode of sheer interiority. This also explains why the self can never appear as authentic, bare, or true.123 Stiegler’s argument points to a reflective mediation that is also present in Arendt, although Arendt avoids introducing signifying hierarchies. Agency is always mediated through a narrative, an image, or a persona. These are returned to us through the glance of a “third.” 124 Overtaking the question of mediation from the tradition of religious meditation, the “third” is introduced as a component inherent in self-reflection: as I ask about the nature of my individuality or singularity, I become a question to myself.125 I will not be able to answer that question. I am always double, and always mediated, through my story, my image or my body. The who that I am can only be disclosed in interaction with others. Here we confront an ineffable aspect of singularity: as we become signs to others, we become ineffable to ourselves.126 The revelatory quality of action and speech demands its own mimesis; this is to be found, although in a transformed guise, in art. In art, we are confronted with the remainder of our daimon life, which means that a daimon is never to be confused with a true aspect of the self that we fail to grasp—the daimon is more of a byproduct, a leftover. What is at play in the revelation of the who is not a logic of recognition but rather an aestheticized form of misrecognition. Although the hierarchies of signification are a nonissue for Arendt, one might compare Arendt’s idea of narrative as structuring agency with Lacan’s idea of the signifier. The signifier is different from the sign. The sign has a meaning and a content, it represents something. The signifier points to nothing but itself. In a Lacanian register, a subject comes into being through a signifier that represents a subject for another signifier, meaning that subjectivity and language support each other; there is no signifier conceivable beyond subjectivity, and no subject conceivable beyond the signifier.127 Arendt’s “who” has a similar structure. The who comes into

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being through a narrative or life story. At the same time, it is inserted in a web of other signifiers/stories. This makes us appear in different ways, in different forms, from different perspectives. Narratives make us appear, but how we appear is a matter of contingency. The agent of action and speech, argues Arendt, is not its author but its actor and sufferer; the story of our lives is somehow always handed over to a third.128 The appearance of the who is the result of a dialectic of mediation.129 Actions give rise to stories and events that are unintended byproducts, narratives that are transformed and transposed within the realm of Verdinglichung. There is no “story of our lives” untainted by various techne—technologies, forms of presentation, or mediums.130 Here, the power of aesthetics makes itself heard—in narration, lives are not controlled but aestheticized. We may, once again, point to the phenomenal motivation behind Arendt’s aesthetics. On the sidewalks around the Bavarian Quarter in Berlin’s Schöneberg district, signposts bear witness to the systematic erasure of the individuality and personhood of the persecuted Jews in Berlin. The signs are part of an art project by Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock called Places of Remembrance: Isolation and Deprivation of Rights, Expulsion, Deportation, and Murder of Berlin Jews in the Years 1933 to 1945. As the viewer follows the signposts and approaches the city hall in Schöneberg, the erasure of personhood implied by the laws increases gradually, year after year. One sign reads, “All Jews must adopt the name Israel for men and Sarah for women as additional first names.” The law of naming or renaming Jewish citizens as part of their deprivation of rights strikes one as somewhat enigmatic, but it makes sense within a logic of such an erasure. The intention, besides being a bureaucratic convenience, was not to name or rename but to de-name. If everyone is called the same, serial anonymity is created. The move made the Holocaust easier, not only in terms of bureaucracy but also at a psychological level. If Arendt stresses the force of agency in her theory of bios and the who, this has a direct motivation in her observations on a system where the erasure of agency became a state goal.

ART AS BEGINNING Action cannot be the free beginning of just anything. My freedom can only be thought through the limits of my own horizon. Therefore,

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paradoxically, my capacity to act as a free being is conditioned by my own limitations. Works of art are spontaneity in a nonhuman form. In the modern world, life itself has become the object of politics, which is detrimental to freedom: “Contemporary politics is concerned with the naked existence of us all.”131 When politics degenerates to techne, art remains a possible expression of spontaneity.132 There are two kinds of action in Arendt’s thought: initium, which is a political action properly speaking, and gerere, which is the completion of an action started elsewhere. Action as initium— principle and example—corresponds to the concept of natality. When we act, we do not know the consequences that our actions might give rise to. Our freedom lies in not knowing, and in accepting the finite perspective. If we look at the concept of natality from an aesthetic point of view, it becomes clearer, perhaps, that a work of art presents a particular form of agency, less interesting for what it is than for what it does. Vita activa and vita contemplativa may represent two separate principles in Arendt’s work, but there is no ontological split between the two; they are but separate aspects of lives that must be conceived in the plural, but not necessarily in the human form. A work of art will influence the environment in which it is situated. It will give rise to new impulses, thoughts, and reflections, perhaps new actions and new patterns of behavior. On Revolution makes it clear that action always carries a risk of violence.133 Collective action, action “in concert,” is political spontaneity and can lead to revolutions.134 Art, also, can lead to violent reactions. If we chose to write the history of art from the point of unprecedented beginnings rather than metaphysical inquiries, then we would add aesthetic history to political history. Instead of Edmund Burke, for example, we would bring forward Olympe de Gouges, an activist and playwright who was active during the French Revolution. De Gouges, today, is re-erected as a symbol of the revolution and has a place in the pantheon. For centuries she was considered a crazy dilettante, but in the past decades some of her work has been restored and published, such as L’Esclavages des nègres, which placed African descendants from French colonies in focus. The presence of actors that looked like slaves, on stage and in leading roles, caused an uproar, though the scandal was caused by the physical presence of actors staged as Africans rather than by the political positioning of the play.135 The event is an example of the fact that political action can be produced by appearances impinging on political reality. The spontaneous

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character of public space, Arendt says, is integral to conceptions of political agency.136 If we choose to place action in the midst of aesthetics, then the transcendental aspects of politics acquire new colors. The theater of de Gouges reveals public space as a product of aesthesis rather than discourse. Whereas collective action—action “in concert”—gave rise to the revolution, de Gouges’s theater was a disruption that was staged, acted, and derided. But it was very much part of a revolution that later decided to send de Gouges to the guillotine for having been a Girondist and an “unnatural” and “cold” mother.137 How, then, are we to conceive of a political imperative for contemporary art? The antagonism between politics and aesthetics cannot be reduced to the shifting of perspectives in which one is situated in the realm of action and the other in the realm of contemplation. The agency of art is not the same as that of political action. It is in many ways more reckless and unpredictable. A work of art cannot act in the same way that a human being can act; measuring and weighing consequences, deliberating, posing questions, and so forth. It is this particular quality of unpredictability that makes it a powerful kind of agency. 138 Regimes of terror, according to Arendt, strive not toward a despotic rule over men, but toward the killing of all spontaneity.139 Spontaneity, also, is what lies behind creativity. Some regimes cannot tolerate art that they cannot control, even when it does not aspire to political activism. Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiatives may be more provocative than political opposition. This is not because such initiatives present political alternatives but because they lay bare new forms of appearance and bring new thoughts into being. Regimes that strive toward total control—whether driven by ideology or market economy—cannot abide activities that are not predictable. They cannot grapple with appearances, sense-data, or bodies that do not fit within the representative plan. This, Arendt remarks, is why Picasso was never tolerated in the Soviet Union.140 His confusing and annoying imagery was unacceptable to the authorities, less for what it showed than for what it refused to show—a certain image of reality. Picasso’s art, in all its unpredictability, looked like an unwelcome spontaneous act. In the German Democratic Republic, Brecht’s silence, like Picasso’s confusion, became an involuntary gesture, an action he never intended.141 Modernism regrouped formal language in order to remake art as action.

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The examples of Brecht and Picasso show that the relation between aesthetics and politics had little to do with expression. Arendt notes that realism is not necessarily more revolutionary than avant-garde art. On the other hand, she also observes that avant-garde art is not necessarily more “free.” Brecht thought that he maintained the revolution with his representations of the real, but served an irreality for which he was in no way responsible with his own work. In no way, either, can Brecht’s sense of the real be accused of aesthetic realism—his formal language was as abstract as any American hero painter. Picasso, in turn, attempted to serve the revolution with a modernist, revolutionary formal language that was regarded as lunacy by the Soviet system. But as Arendt rightly saw, aesthetic freedom is not reducible to content or form, in contrast to what was suggested by, for instance, Clement Greenberg. The agency of art is heterogeneous. In the case of Picasso in the Soviet Union, his frustration was more political than his paintings. As for Brecht in Eastern Germany, it was his silence that became, in the end, a political expression. The agency of art can be measured in terms of unpredictability. It is not far-fetched to think of the imprisonment of members of the band Pussy Riot in 2012 as a symptom of the Russian regime’s disdain for unpredictability. They were imprisoned not only for what they said but also for the way they acted: with sudden, well-distributed appearances in public spaces, irregular events that defied the apparatus of state control. Let us return again to the assertion that art is less interesting for what it is than for what it does. This does not mean that works of art can be equated with deliberative political agency. What art can do, however, is break into politics with the urgency of the unexpected. This is the aspect of aesthetic freedom that is the most difficult to kill.

ARENDT AND KAFKA: NARRATIVE AS THOUGHT-EVENT Political forms of art do not always come with revolutionary gestures. Franz Kafka, for instance, unravels the structure of a “thought-event,” political agency as narrative.142 Arendt’s notion of narrative has often been mistaken for plot, the ability to give coherence and meaning to events.143 But her conception of narrative has less to do with any literary genre than

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with a particular form of temporality and spatiality. Kafka’s protagonists are sometimes sheer signifiers—K., B., Er, and so on—and accompany our interpretation of Arendt’s philosophical stance on singularity: agency as such cannot appear. Kafka’s literary style is one of systematic derealization. He puts unreality and unfamiliarity into play with milieus and characters, working with a structural sketch, or what Arendt calls a “blueprint,” which, although “it is rooted in reality, owes its discovery to a thought process more than to sensory experience.”144 The re-realization of experience does not imply a lack of the real. What Kafka does, rather, is to provide an architecture for the real. Kafka’s little story “Er” (“He”) is a minimal sketch and an abstract blueprint, which nevertheless “harbors all the riches, varieties, and dramatic elements characteristic of ‘real’ life.”145 In Arendt’s reflections on Kafka, we can spot an aesthetic turn repeated in her investigation into the various functions and forms of thought. Narrative structures our sensibility and forms our sense of “realness,” a key concept, often repeated by Arendt, that has attracted little attention among Arendt scholars. Narrative transgresses the borders between fiction and history writing. Both fiction and the depiction of facts involve a measure of the real that has less to do with a factual kind of reality than a sense of realness. The opposite of truth is not fictional illusion but the kind of lying that can be seen in, for instance, political propaganda or falsification of facts. The production of realness is irreducible to the quoting of facts. Rather, realness is produced through a web of narratives, through witnessing, reports, fictional storytelling, and other forms of writing or discourse. The ways in which we narrate the background of a political action or motivate our beliefs with a story help to construe the reality in which we situate our actions. Stories, backgrounds, descriptions, and examples are not just part and parcel of political rhetoric; they produce the in-between, the web that forms our sense of reality. Narrative helps produce a sense of realness, vital for our capacity of judgment as well as our capacity to act. Realness has nothing to do with realism. Perhaps paradoxically, in Arendt’s writings it is Kafka who provides the primary model for how we are to conceive of the construct of narrative. As she explains in “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” although Kafka is capable of releasing a gruesome sensation of irreality, he also offers a nonmetaphysical model of the real which is “not impaired but confirmed by thinking,” and which we, as thinkers, artists, or scholars,

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should attempt to inhabit.146 Modernism, represented by Benjamin, Kafka, and Marcel Proust, gives proof of an aesthetic in which the antagonistic relation to bourgeois forms of identity, including expressions of social or cultural antagonisms such as the unconscious, are already integrated. These authors would use the insignia of certain stigmatized subjectivities as focal points of the narrative. But like Benjamin, Arendt is more interested in phenomena and appearances than in subjectivities.147 Arendt first wrote on Kafka in 1944, in Partisan Review. She returns to the writings of Kafka repeatedly, without being able to complete the great essay she has in mind.148 Perhaps this has to do with the premonitions she sees in Kafka. Kafka, like Benjamin, provides the figure that places the thinking individual in a position of contingency—to think involves an acceptance of the failure to fully comprehend past and future, and therefore to try to immerse oneself in the fleeting present. Narrative begins in that failure, in the gap between past and future that necessarily throws us toward the present. Kafka and his short stories serve to provide figures for that impossibility. His stories are written by means of blueprint rather than details; they can be compared to sketches and drawings rather than full-fledged paintings. His language is devoid of mannerism, clear to the point of coldness. What comes to the fore with this clarity of style, or what Arendt herself characterizes as lack of style, is the construct of the narrative itself. In Kafka, she assures us, we never know what to expect. There is not a singular turn in the construction of the narrative that serves as an indication of what is to come. We are brought to expect future events. But when they appear, we are overcome, taken aback. The cold clarity of Kafka’s images and the factual recounting of events are unsettling. At first, his stories appear to make no sense. And then, gradually, the meaning of the events in his narratives grows upon us, until suddenly, through whatever kind of experience, we are made to realize what they meant.149 The Trial shows what it means to live without the acceptance of contingency. Here the protagonist, K., is accused and finally executed without ever being allowed to know the crime of which he is accused. A big part of the story focuses on the efforts of the lawyer who is attempting to make K. accept the course of events. What appears as contingent is made to appear necessary; what protrudes as random and unmotivated is made to be a course of events that must be accepted.

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Arendt sees that Kafka’s The Trial depicts the terror of a machinery that has become uplifted to necessity, a combination of bureaucracy and anti-Semitism. In this, Kafka’s narrative becomes a chilling premonition of times to come, and a model for Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann, for instance, who in many ways corresponds to the lawyer in the tale— nonthinking, nonreflecting, submitting to the machinery itself. What is extraordinary in the tales of Kafka, and the reason that they appear so horrific—even after the concentration camps, The Penal Colony will horrify us—is not the mere apocalyptic mood of their content. Many authors share that mood. What is horrifying in Kafka, Arendt explains, is the way in which he figures agency. Although Arendt calls for an immersion in the present as an ethos for any thinker or author, Kafka’s constructed narratives also point to the impossibility of that immersion. Many of Kafka’s stories present us with protagonists that appear as empty signifiers; they do not have a name. Instead, they are called Er, K., and so on. And yet Kafka precisely performs the opposite of denaming into anonymity. In Kafka’s stories, the inhuman aspect of the signifier comes to work as an in-between. What appears to be anonymous comes to the fore as singular; a seemingly anonymous blueprint comes to insert itself into a world of the real. Kafka, unlike many of the philosophers or authors of modernity, refuses to provide an agent of exception. His protagonists are not the marginalized identities of Proust or Broch, nor do they have any of the supreme view of genius, as in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Kafka, Arendt assures us, wanted to be a member of a community, immersed in the present, a nonexception, a fellow being.150 Kafka, who works in what Arendt perceives of as abstracts models of blueprint, leaving out the sensual detailing of realism, nevertheless presented us with models of “real life” through his capacity of sketching events in the form of a thought-event.151 If art makes us think, it is not because it presents us with a mimesis of forms. If art makes us think, it does so because it recognizes that our thought is already engaged in sensorial forms. This is why the stories of Kafka, so extreme in abstraction, will still uncover what we perceive as world. They uncover the structure of narrative itself, showing what it means for events to protrude through the structure of narrative, and for thought to uncover itself. This is also why Kafka’s stories, so painful in their tales of guilt, failed encounters, and disasters, still retain their extraordinary humor. If we laugh, we do so because we see the exposure of mimetic failure.

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Kafka’s short story “Er” figures in many of Arendt’s texts: in Between Past and Future as a figure of historical agency, in The Life of the Mind and a letter to Heidegger as a figure of thought, and in her notebooks as presenting a locus of judgment. The parable is used in different contexts but implies a common construct that all relates to the narrating agent. Here is the story: “He has two antagonists. The first presses him from behind, from his origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both.” Theoretically, then, Kafka says, both antagonists would fight each other. But the man stands between them. His dream is that “he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.”152 This is the philosopher’s dream, Arendt explains in The Life of the Mind, to find a nonmoving spot of thought, of withdrawal and spectatorship, in which time and space offer themselves to contemplation from a position outside of that time and space.153 But the problem, as depicted by Kafka, is the position of the er, or the “he.” He cannot withdraw from either the past or the future because in all ways his thought is produced in the temporal gap between them. He cannot capture himself thinking in the present because his thought is produced in the same gap. Thought demands a certain absence of egoity, a certain abstraction, perhaps even an annihilation of the self. “It is because the thinking ego is ageless and nowhere that past and future can become manifest to it as such, emptied, as it were, of their concrete content and liberated from all spatial categories.”154 The primacy of the presence appears to itself, in forms that to Arendt have changed from the land of pure intellect, the cogito, Heidegger’s Being, and so on. In acknowledging this timeless spot, Arendt acknowledges the necessity and the value of the metaphysical tradition that she has otherwise so vehemently criticized. Kafka’s tale, however, does not only present a problem of ontology, or the antagonism between being and becoming. It also presents a problem that takes us to the domain of politics and action. How are we to immerse ourselves in the present, to assume a proper position of judgment, where thinking can meet action, if we are always to be thrown out of a position of Being? Kafka’s Er dreams of jumping out of time to serve as Richter, or judge, over the two fighters, past and future. But there is an aspect missing from Kafka’s story: place, or space. In her collection Between Past and

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Future, Arendt criticizes Kafka for sacrificing to the old metaphysics of temporality. Certainly, thought, as well as judgment, need to exist not only in time but also in “time-space,” a space in which the thinker of “Er” is himself reflected. Time can come into being “only with his own, self-inserting appearance, the enormous, ever-changing time-space which is created and limited by the forces of past and future.”155 What Kafka depicts, Arendt argues, is the dead zone of the present—the in-between of the past and of the future, which tends to slip away as we attempt to conceive of it. But if we are to remain satisfied with that, it has limited use. What the parable actually shows, beyond Kafka’s own intentions, is that the er positioned between the past and the future not only is hindering the past from meeting with the future but also is deflecting the future from the position in which he is inserted.156 To think and to judge is to be immersed in a present from which one neither can nor should escape. It is to be in a position of contingency, to subsume the limits of comprehension and to deflect things and events that come our way. This is where the parable also becomes a model of the narrating agent. We cannot know what will happen in the future. But the contingency of our position in history forces us to immerse ourselves in the present. With Arendt’s emendations to Kafka’s metaphysical parable, place as well as time will come to inform the antagonism between being and becoming. This makes it a model of narrative. Narrative is not a simple retelling of facts. It implies a position of thought, from which the encounter between the past and the future will be deflected, curved, and impinged upon. It does not merely offer an account of events. It creates a weave of witnessing, fictional accounts, and documentaries, all of which help to form our sense of history. Each generation must reinvent itself in that process. Karen Blixen is another of the authors most quoted by Arendt, possibly because she, like Kafka, works with a blueprint-like kind of fable, as in her Seven Gothic Tales. Rather than evoking details, landscapes, characters, or what one would talk about in terms of realism, Blixen made the short story, fable, or tale a favored genre. Blixen’s belief in stories was both a professional vocation and a philosophy of life that fascinated Arendt. Storytelling released Blixen from the fixity of a social identity, allowing her a fluid existence that was neither less true nor less false than her more limited social self.157 A particular quote by Blixen recurs in Arendt: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”158 This is not

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to be understood in the therapeutic sense, but literally. Given that stories have the power to make agents appear, stories are what bestows meaning on action. It is stories that offer the reality that Arendt discusses in The Human Condition as a “web” of relationships, creating an in-between that is intangible but nevertheless constituent of reality.159 It is precisely that intangible web of realness that makes action possible, producing both the futurality of natality and the forgiveness of the past.

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ENGAGING WITH KANT: AN APOLOGY OF SENSIBILITY WHERE IS

judgment? Nowhere. These are words of a possible introduction to Kant’s unwritten “politics,” laconically placed as a single line among Arendt’s notes.1 The line is somewhat enigmatic. Does it refer to judgment lacking a subject? To the context of presuppositions that always seem to surround us? Or does it refer to the enigmatic place of “taste,” somehow both within us and beyond us? Kafka’s short story “Er” (“He”) shows that there is no given place in time from which we could safely judge, and yet it is precisely such a spot that we tend to search for. In her notes, Arendt attempted to draw the lack of location for an “ideal” judgment with arrows: judgment is placed outside of time, in the clash between an approaching future and a forward-pushing past.2 The image has a certain resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s messianic angel of history, as described in paragraph 9 of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, which was given to Arendt as a manuscript before he fled to Spain.3 In Benjamin’s account, describing Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the messianic angel of history has fixed his gaze on the disasters of the past, and yet he is swept forward by the winds of future generations. The image is ambiguous. Does the angel move away from the ruins of disaster, or are they merely being accumulated in front of his eyes, which are forever turned backward?4

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There is no doubt that Benjamin’s fragments on the temporality of history were deeply inspirational to Arendt. She was immensely serious in her role as the inheritor of Benjamin’s legacy, and she struggled hard to publish his writings, often in conflict with Theodor Adorno, who was appointed editor of Benjamin’s collected works. The struggle finally resulted in Illuminations, a collection that contained Theses on History, among other texts, and for which she also wrote a well-known foreword. Benjamin’s way of thinking philosophy poetically served to undermine metaphysical constructs: as thought-image, the angel undermined unreflected accounts of progress that dominated narratives of modernity. But Arendt did not simply transpose Benjamin’s thought-image into philosophy. Kafka’s short story “Er” depicts the kind of void in which judgment is placed. Arendt’s drawing depicts a figure who attempts to jump out of time so that he can serve as Richter, or judge, over two fighters: past and future.5 This, to Arendt, appears to be the position that we strive for in judgment, and that we can never achieve. She uses Kafka to introduce that predicament at a certain point in time, the war years, the point at which life is determined by “things that are no longer and things that are not yet.”6 Judgment presumes a certain knowledge of a historic past, and it cannot but look into the future for guidance. What it must do, however, is to strive for a rootedness in the reality of the present—a reality that can only be made present through sensible experience. It may well be the case that judgment is “nowhere.” On the other hand, its reflection is produced in the “time-space” that produces it. Our own appearances influence the way we judge and when we judge; we serve ourselves to influence the course of history. What Arendt is looking to construe here, then, is less a description of everyday judgment than a critique of the metaphysical impulses that haunt not only banal accounts of history (of progress, for instance) but also philosophical ones. Arendt’s argument for judgment as a prerequisite for political action is well known. The link between political and aesthetic judgment also has been frequently commented upon. The aesthetic character attached to Arendt’s notion of judgment, however, has gone largely unnoticed, though she herself often insisted on it. Aesthetic judgment helps form perception. It helps perceive of a context as having depth, weight, and sensorial substance.

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Although most research on Arendt has been more interested in the relevance of judgment for politics than for art, there is some work that relates to aesthetics, more or less explicitly. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves has undone the seemingly agonistic relation between judgment for the sake of action and judgment for the sake of spectatorship in order to point toward Arendt’s valuation of deliberation and pluralism in contrast to monolithic conceptions of truth.7 Max Deutscher has pointed to the close connection between perception, experience, and action.8 Bonnie Honig, David Ingram, and Dana Villa have highlighted the “postmodern” character of her theory of judgment, placing the stress on appearances and productivity within a Nietzschean tradition.9 Arendt’s pioneering theorization about the role of imagination for political agency has been given ample attention by, for instance, Peg Birmingham and Linda Zerilli.10 Lisa Disch and Iris Marion Young have noted the normative implication inherent in the relation between Arendt’s concepts of plurality and realness: the former is necessary for the latter to be produced. Young writes that democracy ought to strive toward inclusion of diverse social groups, because a diversity of perspectives helps to disclose reality.11 However, the only author to develop a sustained argument about the aesthetic quality of realness in relation to the political is Kimberley Curtis. I share Curtis’s view that Arendt’s idea of realness offers a key to her notion of political judgment.12 Curtis has focused on the role of narrative in this regard and uses the notion of narrative that has a direct bearing on political judgment. For instance, one cannot expect the inhabitants of a gated community to possess the same account of reality as the inhabitants that live outside of it. Accounts of reality are always already deeply politicized, and no form of political judgment can afford to ignore the way in which narratives surrounding events are construed. In this chapter, I will stress the aesthetic and sensorial weight given to the concept of realness. Realness, far from being equal to “realism,” offers clues to the question that we are attempting to address: If Arendt had written an aesthetics, what would it have looked like? It is certain that a concept such as realness sounds as if it has a normative implication in the sense that it posits itself as the opposite of aloofness, imaginary worlds, and fantasy. There is, however, no reason to assume that the concept of realness would have anything to do with the aesthetic genre of realism, with its attention to detail, stress on everydayness, and a certain manner of depicting events. Looking at the kind of works that Arendt refers to—but even more, at the

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way in which she presents questions of aesthetic sensibility—it seems her aesthetics would instead correspond to modern and postmodern forms of art, although that must be said reservedly. An Arendtian aesthetics stresses perception, the capacity to form narrations, and the capacity to form flexible accounts of reality, but it does not serve any metaphysical pretension to a given account of reality, or any all-knowing narrative author or painter. The concept of judgment plays a key role in Arendt’s notion of the political in her later work, even though a full monograph on judgment never came to full fruition. In her earlier writings, the role of judgment is implied rather than explored. Then, a full work on judgment was intended to follow The Human Condition (Vita activa), the first part of which was written in the 1950s. Here, from a philosophical-anthropological perspective, action is seen as distinct from contemplative forms of deliberation. Many years later, she followed this up with The Life of the Mind (Vita contemplativa), which in turn was to contain three parts: Thinking, Willing, and Judging. The first two were published shortly after her death, though they had yet to be completed. Her lectures on Kant’s political philosophy, given at the New School in 1970, were intended as preparation for the planned volume Judging, which was never completed. These lectures, which presented a political reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, were to form the last, missing leg of the trilogy.13 Whereas The Human Condition elaborates agency, The Life of the Mind replaces agency with spectatorship. However, Arendt intended to elaborate the relation between action and thought in her attempt to overcome a clear-cut division between agency and spectatorship—itself a project that concerned her for more than a decade but that never really came to fruition.14 It is certain that the overcoming of this division offers a key to her notion of judgment. The Critique of Judgment lectures offer a politics that Kant never wrote, and Arendt found the kernel of such a politics in his analysis of aesthetic judgments, or judgments of taste. This reading entails avoiding Kant’s universalist ethics and the republicanism that could perhaps have followed from Critique of Practical Reason. Instead, Arendt examines the plurality within Critique of Judgment that is necessarily implied by her own framework but which had never before been explored.15 Examining the conditioning of reason as a consequence of a community sense, rather than departing from reason as a means of erecting a community through an abstract contract, Arendt’s reading of Kant is highly controversial.

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She shares with Kant a notion that a critical project on judgment involves an investigation into the limits of communicability.16 She also shares with him the notion that aesthetics has something to do with the question of community. But then she reads Kant “backward”: rather than exploring further his critique into the limits of aesthetic judgment, she claims that his aesthetics is in fact a politics that was never completed. Arendt’s lectures on Kant endeavor to show that the Critique of Judgment is actually a political treatise.17 This claim must be seen against the overall picture of Arendt’s own struggles throughout her life to formulate a satisfactory theory of the political. In “The Promise of Politics,” her unfinished manuscript on the nature of politics, which contains six texts that were intended for a larger project—Einführung in die politik, or Introduction to Politics, never published in her lifetime—Arendt was concerned with forms of government, power, and law. But her lectures on Kant extend the notion of politics in the direction she really wanted to go: examining how the political is a question of everyday life and of the social and material environments that surround people. Given that she sees the political as a question that arises in all walks of life and not just in the chambers of politicians, the notion of judgment offers a new way of looking at politics that also can deal with the political in all strands of life. Therefore, along the way toward a political theory, Arendt elaborates an aesthetics. Politics and aesthetics are close, sharing the same concerns through the question of judgment: “Kant first saw the importance of judgment in the field of aesthetics.”18 He applied the concept to the field of art and aesthetics.19 But Kant’s Critique of Judgment remains an unfinished politics, because the true issues are directed not toward the sensible experience of single artworks but rather toward questions of communicability, sensus communis, and the relation between singular and collective judgment. As has already been argued many times in this book, Arendt’s own, politicized reading of Kant contains an unfinished aesthetics. This is not surprising. Her writings in general are littered with complaints about the failure of philosophers to understand the relation between art and politics. In reflecting on judgment, Arendt pursues a kind of “aesthetic turn” that was already introduced in The Life of the Mind, a turn that in many ways follows in the path of Kant. Judgment, particularly in the domain of politics, needs to be considered against a background of sensible experience.

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What is elaborated here is not so much the question of discourse as of perception. Such conception of freedom cannot be made without a deep analysis of the way in which public space engages the senses. This is the decisive distinction between a Habermasian and an Arendtian concept of the public sphere: for Habermas, the concept is grounded in the Kantian enlightenment texts, with a direct reference to the social process of individualism; for Arendt, it is grounded in Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment. The very term aesthetic has often been regarded as a subcategory in her lectures on Kant, which traced the political ambitions. This is, however, a mistake. Rather than disregarding the aesthetic aspects, the lectures put them to a new use. Arendt begins by noting that Kant formulated the concept of critique in an environment where it was mostly applied to art.20 Kant, she argues, appealed to aesthetics in his writings on judgment, because “art and politics are closely intertwined since they both have to do with the world.”21 In the Critique of Judgment, Kant demonstrates that our relation to questions of aesthetics must be talked about in terms of judgment rather than in terms of truth; aesthetics offers a kind of knowledge, but not a kind to examine in the same terms as the knowledge provided by the categories of reason. Arendt, in a famous rereading of Kant, argues that a community is constituted by a common sense of realness and not by opinions; in order to form a community we first need to agree on what kind of reality we perceive. Judgment is about the way in which we see things, and the way in which we smell, hear, or taste the present in which we are immersed. It is based upon a certain knowledge or perception of reality that we may share, a knowledge that we cannot reduce to facts or claims to truth. Another Kantian concept needs to be introduced here as well—that of imagination. Political judgment is not based on perception in the immediate sense. It is based on imagination, our capacity to bring forth that which is absent, to transpose the apprehension of objects of sense-perception into a state of an “inner sense.” As we reflect on objects, as Kant understood, we reflect on their representation; the operation of judgment and reflection, therefore, is not an immediate consequence of perception. It always requires the faculty of imagination as supplement.22 Following Arendt, we could argue that aesthetics could be perceived as an inquiry into the prepolitical rather than into political issues. In what way does the sense of reality imply a community? In what way will an object be perceived through the conflicts and struggles that follow the

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formation of such a community? In what way may we separate prejudice from judgment? These issues, posed in Arendt’s unfinished Introduction to Politics, belong to a standard set of inquiries that followed the birth of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, although they were perhaps formulated differently. If we are to judge properly, we need to share in a sense of realness that makes our judgments meaningful. The philosophical debates about how we conceive of reality, of course, involve issues outside the aesthetic. We may be reminded of the Nietzschean concept of a will to power, which allows certain conceptions of reality to dominate over others.23 With Nietzsche the notion of a sense of realness belongs to the field of aesthetics; the question of how we organize our sensible apprehension of the world is an aesthetic question.24 Arendt reads Kant at a variety of levels. In her discussion of the Critique of Judgment she inquires above all into questions about communicability and sensus communis. In her discussion of the thought-thing, she addresses Critique of Pure Reason; and in celebrating sensibility, she pursues a reading of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In her notebooks, Arendt derives the title “Apologie für die sinnlichkeit” from Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer hinsicht, and she stresses two aspects of sensibility involved in the acquisition of knowledge: Sinn (meaning) and Einbildungskraft (imagination).25 In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduced the term aesthetics in his transcendental deduction, when he shows that sensible experience is a measure of our finitude. We may well draw conclusions about entities that lie beyond our sensible experience, but this knowledge is limited. It is impossible to acquire complete knowledge about the world on the basis of a given set of a priori conditions. The Life of the Mind performs an aesthetic turn in the same vein by relying on appearances and fully bracketing noumena as belonging to another sphere of enquiry. For the rest of her inquiries, however, Arendt pursues the line drawn in Critique of Judgment. Knowledge in the sense of facts is less important than the knowledge that we need in order to engage in our natural and social environment on a day-to-day basis. The kind of knowledge that we need as citizens and social beings is not factual. Judgment, rather, belongs to the necessity of everyday life. We move, talk, and behave according to decisions based on judgments rather than facts. Judgment implies a form of knowledge that is not episteme; that is, judgment cannot be deduced from a law or subsumed

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under a general rule. Instead, it introduces the idea that social and political engagement negotiates another form of shared knowledge.26 Such shared knowledge can be characterized through the term judgment. There are two forms of judgment in Kant, and only one of them is qualified as aesthetic: reflective judgment, which also can be a judgment of taste, through which we determine qualities of beauty and pleasure. A determinate judgment is a rule under which a particular can be subsumed, such as a natural law. For instance, we may assume that all lions are dangerous to humans, because lions are carnivores. Determinate judgments are about particulars, but they concern the faculty of cognition and therefore allow us to generalize according to given rules.27 A reflective judgment, on the other hand, cannot serve to derive particulars or to determine the quality of a particular object according to a rule. Instead, they are made according the model of “as if ”; although we cannot judge according to a rule, we judge as if we can assume that everyone agrees. The third Critique indicates that some objects are better suited for reflective judgment than others. Objects that can give rise to aesthetic pleasure are objects of reflective judgment. Beauty, for instance, can never be a property of objects. If I experience a rose as beautiful, I may well assume that other people find roses beautiful as well. I judge as if everyone agrees. The Critique of Judgment says little about art, but it enables us to form a picture of what kind of art Kant celebrated. For Kant, the most dignified expression of art is that of the sketch; the “taste” for the pleasurable is tainted in seeking the stimulating explosions of color or movement. Instead, pure reflective judgments are posited with regard to the composition that comes before the music and the sketched lines that come before the painting. The further they stray from determinate judgments, the more the freedom of aesthetic judgments grows. As Jay Bernstein has argued, this would entail that art itself moves further away from the mimetic requirements of realism. As Bernstein suggests, perhaps aesthetic reflective judgments are substitutes for actual demands of taste and therefore for a social or cultural community that would be held together by those values.28 In the same vein, Bernstein reads Adorno’s aesthetics as a form of melancholy representation; art moves from realism to modernism in a movement of derealization.29 In Adorno’s aesthetics, negativity is substituted for the positive requirements of taste that would represent a community.30

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Unlike Adorno, Arendt does not discuss the negativity inherent in the appearance of art, a negativity to be conceived of, for instance, in the resistance and incompatible relation between the part and the whole, appearance and actuality, mimetic rendering and social reality.31 To Arendt, there is no intrinsic conflictual relation between reality and art. Rather than looking at art as a dialectic relation between appearances and materiality, she sees visual, poetic, narrative, and tonal artworks produce traces that make reflection and historicity possible. Arendt’s reason for not becoming a Marxist lies in the failure of materialism to affirm the value of a judging agency for collectivist purposes. As we have seen in chapter 2, in her discussion of the thought-thing, Arendt could be celebrating an aesthetics of autonomy, disinterestedness, conceptualism, and abstraction—for political rather than merely aesthetic reasons. However, Arendt does not celebrate art for its ideas but for its expression and sensible appearance, the flexibility of perspectives and forms of perception that can be conceived of in terms of weight, action, movement, and presence. We find the traces of an unfinished “apology for sensibility,” to borrow a title from Kant—that is, reflections on aesthetics and sensibility that were never fully elaborated in her published work.32 Here, sensibility helps to unfold the key to the political as first philosophy. In his pragmatic anthropology, Kant presents a “defense” for the faculty of sensibility, which has been accused of confusing understanding and imagination. Here, Kant argues for a conception of understanding that uses the senses—sight, hearing, taste, and smell—rather than discarding their function for philosophical inquiries or celebrating only the theoretical sense of vision for the use of contemplation.33 This is not the only place where Arendt reflects on the importance of the senses for understanding our engagement in the world, whether we are talking about this engagement in political, ethical, or social terms. The Human Condition asserts that human curiosity is increased by the senses and that worldly experience is primarily derived from vision.34 In her later work, political action and freedom are rooted in the sensible word and are not a transcendental function of the subject. Therefore, politics and aesthetics are linked in terms of a structural similarity between political and aesthetic judgment. The key to such structural similarity is the matter of disinterestedness. In aesthetic judgment, a beholder contemplates an object. In political spectatorship, the revolutionary stands aside and

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watches in awe as events unfold.35 None of these judgments assumes disinterestedness in the sense that the spectatorship makes people less engaged, distanced, or immobilized. They imply an immersion in the sensible world. The path between politics and aesthetics, then, is motivated by the spectatorship that we call disinterestedness—which is anything but an absence of interest. It has more to do with the capacity for a perceptive and emotive form of engagement. This is a somewhat neglected aspect of Arendt’s philosophy. It is, however, a highly important one.36 Thinking through politics, Arendt becomes engrossed in concerns with sensibility. As we will see further, the structural similarity between aesthetic and political judgment does not annihilate the potentially conflicting relation between aesthetics and politics. A good poet may be a bad politician. Good literature is of no use to politics per se. Whereas art allows us to see new things, politics often negotiates certain given forms of prejudice in order to keep the community together. As we inquire into the function of judgment, the spheres of aesthetics and politics tend to merge and interlace. But a certain productive antagonism remains.

EMBODIMENT AND TASTE; INCORPORATION Here, a certain reflection on the hierarchies among the senses needs to be examined. Like most philosophers, Arendt seems, at first, prone to give a certain preponderance to vision. She makes spectatorship and appearances into primary philosophical categories. As we will see, however, the further Arendt engages in the question of sensibility, the more she comes to appreciate the cooperation among the senses. Here, taste has a particular position. While also working on Kant, Arendt took excerpts from the classics of aesthetics—Alexander Baumgarten, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann—in order to trace a history of aesthetic taste.37 Although this work was left incomplete, the excerpts clearly point to an understanding of this aspect of the history of aesthetics. Arendt cites a number of thinkers, from Cicero to Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, from Johann Christoph Gottsched to l’abbé Du Bos, focusing on the relation between sensibility and taste. In an excerpt from Du Bois, she has underlined the line that the judgment of a work of art appeals

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to a sixth sense.38 In the chapter on metaphors in The Life of the Mind, Arendt discusses the hierarchy of the senses and shows how they are used to imply the transposition between thought and language. Language uses metaphors to explore how the world of experience can be “interiorized.” In Greek philosophy, from Plato to Heidegger, sight is logos—the object as revealing itself—and therefore the highest sense. This idea, however, relies on an idea of the thinking mind as a “passive” state of receptivity, which Arendt does not accept. Hearing, in turn, is the sense of a certain submission to the law, or the exposure to an invisible form of domination. The senses cannot be translated or transposed into one another—“no sound can be seen, no image can be heard”—and yet they appear to be bound together by some kind of “common sense.”39 In other words, the conception of a “sixth sense” is needed. It is precisely the notion of a sixth sense that offers a key to Arendt’s conception of sensus communis, a form of attunement that has little to do with formal agreement. Her reflections on the hierarchy of the senses can be looked at with this in mind. Taste belongs here, as being one of the most corporeal and least theoretical of the senses. Approaching taste, Arendt differs from Kant in many aspects. Kant made judgments of taste into models of aesthetic judgments overall and placed taste in the social sphere. The sensible experience of taste is submitted to the judgment of representation and has an interest only in a social situation, not in itself.40 Taste imputes a form of duty—it appears as if everyone must judge a sensible apprehension in a certain manner. And yet that judgment cannot be ascertained; in taste, we hit upon the limits of actual communicability and must rely upon a priori assertions.41 Taste becomes a model for those judgments that are situated between the social and the asocial and imbued with an imperative that may be felt as an obligation to feel, act, or react in a certain manner. This is the case even if we cannot argue for that imperative on rational grounds.42 Martin Heidegger argued that the tradition of aesthetics relies on a limiting notion of subjectivity and that the aestheton must be relieved from judgment. Offering a radical critique of the subject-object divide, Heidegger does away with the transcendental in favor of a new way of approaching sense impressions as in-betweens, situated in neither subject nor object.43 Although Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics is hardly appreciated by Arendt, he nevertheless stakes out a path that she herself treads on. In her notebooks, taste relies on a theory of embodiment. Why does

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taste become taste, Arendt asks; that is, why does a matter of sense end up as a matter of judgment? The answer is that both taste and judgment make up the limits through which subjects can perceive themselves as embodied persons. Taste is a corporeal, sensing, and self-affective aspect of thought. Arendt, in contrast to Kant, considered taste to be a constitutive moment of corporeal subjectivity. To think and to feel are opposite kinds of activities. For thinking, one needs distance and space.44 Taste, however, is constitutive of an inside; it is nonnegotiable and cannot be transformed by arguments.45 Subjects do not have taste, as an object. Through taste we position ourselves in the world and conceive of ourselves in relation to objects; it helps us to explore the way we think about ourselves in relation to values and institutions. Taste helps define embodied individuals in a social context. This is why taste must be set in contrast to the flux of individual consciousness.46 Arendt considered three possible functions of taste. In German these can be divided into, first, Geschmack; second, the expression that something gefällt mir; and third, the concept of tasten. These expressions would correspond to aesthetic taste (Geschmack), the fact that things give pleasure or not (es gefällt mir), and the function of literally tasting with the tongue (tasten). All of these functions interact. Although the sense of taste seems to be completely private and enclosed, it is socially active. Aesthetic judgment helps to create the borders of an embodied self, while engaging in a social context. When I say that I like something or not (es schmeckt, es schmeckt nicht), I perform a kind of aesthetic judgment. In doing this, a difference between what is outside and what is inside of me is erected. At the same time, aesthetic taste is never to be conceived as a kind of timeless “core.” Schmecken signals likes or dislikes; it does something to the outer in the inner, transforming the subject. Smell, disgust, and tasting with the tongue are corporeal senses—they do not imply space and distance.47 Taste, in terms of aesthetic judgment, is incorporated (wird einverleibt) and so becomes part of my own corporeal being.48 Aesthetic judgment defines the social nature of embodied subjectivity; the way we are affected or disaffected, the way we conceive of ourselves and of others, and the way we take part in or disavow social contexts. When I taste, my feeling is intimately linked with the representation in front of me. Taste offers some kind of attunement that can be described in terms of how we experience pleasure or displeasure, likes or dislikes. It determines how we fit into the world

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and how we may choose what we want to integrate—things, persons, or actions—as a part of ourselves, or not.49 The function of taste is an integral part of our desire to share in a community—or even to erect and create that community. For that reason, racism and xenophobia may color experiences of taste. Social, racial, and political context is always part of our aesthetic experience. It is clear that Arendt very much disliked the kind of bourgeois lifeworld in which aesthetic taste provided the norm for belonging. 50 In her reading of Rahel Varnhagen, aesthetic taste, or the escape into love beauty, much more so than any other social or religious component, becomes a factor of self-repressive tendencies. As has been pointed out, Arendt’s biography of Varnhagen can be read as a covert version of her own autobiography, in which assimilation of the European Jews becomes a prerogative that in the end does nothing for them.51 In Arendt’s reading of Nathalie Sarraute, the social aspect of taste is shown to be as destructive as it can be constructive. In Sarraute’s novels, people wither as a consequence of being drawn into an alienated form of community—the “they”—dominated by the dusty taste of a dying bourgeoisie that was unwilling to give up on their circle of affinities. This is the dark side of taste. In its constructive form, taste enables us to judge on an everyday basis and thereby to separate the real from the imaginary. Or it allows us to embrace and confront facts that appear as core elements to be negotiated in a community. Reading Arendt on Sarraute, one senses the possibly dark side of taste as it has been conceived in the aesthetic domain: its proneness to adaptation, a certain attraction to shallowness and ease, an unwillingness to engage in profound and difficult experience. Placing social affinities and communicability before experience, taste implicates certain coercive standards that serve blind prejudice. Sometimes, as in Sarraute’s novel, elective standards of taste force us into the confines of a social class that has decided to escape experience altogether.52 Taste, then, cannot stand on its own as a measure of judgment. Its importance lies in the way it shows that people incorporate values as part of their own corporeal being. What we live as beautiful, disgusting, pleasurable, or difficult is integrated as a part of us and is not experienced as contingent. In her reflections on Varnhagen and Sarraute, however, Arendt shows that the corporeal aspect of taste, its seemingly very personal and intimate character, may fool us into mistaking the contingent for the necessary, the social

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for the authentic. Because we experience taste at a physical level, we may well conceive of it as an aspect of ourselves and be unable to discern the arbitrary and social aspect of it.

SENSUS COMMUNIS AND THE SENSE OF REALNESS One may, like Albrecht Wellmer, argue that Arendt’s conception of the sensus communis is as little present in the real world as the polis; it is but a model of a possible community, or of a community that never was.53 Again, we are reminded of Kafka’s “Er”: judgment is placed nowhere, looking simultaneously at a past it cannot comprehend and at a future it cannot fathom. Jean-François Lyotard, in contrast, has accused Arendt of attempting to erect a community in the literal sense of the word. Arendt, Lyotard insists, reads Kant as if a sensus communis is a possible empirical fact, which is an absurdity; instead, sensus communis is a postulate, a transcendental concept.54 Lyotard reads Arendt as a melancholy survivor who never fully dared to approach the question of the sublime. For Lyotard, Arendt is trading being for appearances that are neither being nor imaginary fantasies that cover the nothingness of being. In her reliance on appearances, the moment of transcendental deduction that is the core of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is never brought in. Instead, we find ourselves embedded in the forest of appearances, a condition which, for Lyotard, forces us into the night, where “all cows are grey,” and fails to reach that point in which the question of sensus communis is replaced with that of the sublime.55 It is true that Arendt attempts to move away from the transcendental logic of Kant. However, she does not treat sensus communis as an empirical fact, but instead unfolds something that is better described as the transcendental conditioning of a community based on a sense of realness, rather than the “ought” involved in aesthetic judgment. Arendt relocates the question of judgment from the transcendental subject to the plurality of the public sphere. To Arendt, a community is always coming into being through the time-space of its conditioning, a time-space that is itself affected by its inhabitants. Rather than being erected through transcendental laws of apprehension that forever remain the same, a community of taste is affected by the bodies that inhabit it.

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Communities can be seen from a variety of perspectives. We may perceive of them as the gathering of millions of people under the same political banner or as manifesting themselves in revolutionary uprisings in the form of action and political will. We also may conceive of them as small, fleeting alliances, such as the avant-garde art scene in New York in the 1960s. Plural, political communities arise at all times when people act in concert. These actions are made possible because some kind of change in reality is urgently required by a collective.56 It is against this background that we ought to conceive of Arendt’s sensus communis. I argue for three possible ways to interpret it: In her early work in The Human Condition, it is the coming together of a certain joint view of reality. In The Life of the Mind, it is a sixth sense, grounding all the others, offering a three-dimensional perspective of realness to our perceptions. In the Kant readings, it is the sensing of community itself, “what judgment appeals to.”57 These three models represent a development, although they intersect. In The Human Condition, the common sense (a distinction between common sense and sensus communis has not yet been formulated) is what brings the other senses together: “It is by virtue of common sense that the other sense perceptions are known to disclose reality and are not merely felt as irritations of our nerves or resistance sensations of our bodies.”58 Here, common sense is contrasted with the alienation and the meaningless cycle of animal laborans that produces a withering sense of irreality. Common sense is produced in and through the public sphere, which offers a fairly straightforward ground for agreement: “the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves.”59 The perception of what is real becomes a gathering force, distinct from the scattered irreality of the private. Here, the real is considered also as the in-between that is formed by storytelling and narrative, the in-between of life stories that offer an intangible web of “relationships and enacted stories. . . . no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common.”60 The Life of the Mind produces a second conception of sensus communis, as an invisible ground of appearances, a sixth sense foundational to all the others.61 Our sixth sense is not a common measure of generality or universality but the sense of realness itself. Here, realness is the quality produced when the senses are cooperating.62 It is not, as in The Human Condition,

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an assurance of reality. All forms of experience that are made by the senses have a character of reality. This quality, however, cannot be produced by a sense organ or sensual object outside of a context. The plurality of the senses, in conjunction with the sheer variety of shapes, forms, objects, things, and persons that make up our world, contribute to our immediate grasp of appearances as somehow being real. We are reminded of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Cézanne, in which the mutual conditioning of the senses was explored; in particular, the aspect that we today would call the haptic sensibility of vision or the tactile capturing of the eye.63 Arendt recognizes such a multisensory quality in the writings of Adalbert Stifter, who avoided all generalities and abstractions, wanting to appeal only to sensual experience: “He will never write of a rider on a horse but rather of a welldescribed man on a dapple-grey.” For Arendt, Stifter became an intimate “friend of reality,” the “greatest landscape painter in literature,” because nature always had priority over abstractions. Therefore, in her foreword to “Rock Crystal,” Arendt decided to see Stifter’s project as daring rather than reactionary, though his narrative aesthetics would have appeared as traditional to most of her contemporaries.64 The sense of realness is, like the work of art, a thought-thing—a sensible quality irreducible to materiality or concepts. Here, we have traveled far from the presuppositions in The Human Condition; Arendt is no longer postulating the existence of a common ground for perception. Instead, she is concerned with a possible description of the sense of realness. Realness has nothing to do with the difference between fiction and reality. It does not have any bearing on the question of mimesis or on what one would call philosophical realism in the metaphysical tradition after Plato. Realness describes a phenomenal quality in our conception of our environment. Appearances are “real,” but not because they have an existence outside of us. We believe in what we see because we can never control what appears, or how it appears. It is from this position that we may theorize an aesthetics. As we perceive, experience, and consider a work of art we are made aware of its colors, textures, and shades of light. The reason for my wanting to engage with art is that it provokes, disturbs, or engages my sense of realness.65 Art affects the taste, perception, and aesthetic forms of experience that are made within a community. In the first example, sensus communis is produced in and through the public sphere, and offers a ground for agreement. In the second, sensus

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communis is a kind of sixth sense, underlying the sense of realness produced through the other senses. In the third example, Arendt stresses the productive and social aspect of such a sense of realness. In Arendt’s lectures on Kant, sensus communis is a general agreement that is formed without concepts. It is not an agreement in terms but a form of social attunement that is part of our sense perceptions, already, as we form them. Judgment, in Arendt’s reading, acquires a curious prereflective form; it becomes not so much an act of judging an object as beautiful or ugly as of being able to perceive it at all. Judgment never takes place in isolation; I am affected by and through others that may or may not think like me. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant examines the function of a priori assumptions in everyday life. Judgment may appear to be concerned with discrete phenomena. However, as Jay Bernstein has pointed out, Kantian judgment is close to what Hegel calls the ethical sphere; it reflects an everyday way of thinking and perceiving the environment that we share with others.66 How can we know that we talk about the same thing or that we experience in ways that are at least remotely similar? To Kant, aesthetic judgments all have a dimension of ought inscribed in them; the subjective necessity is conditioned by a certain idea of generality—a sensus communis.67 This is based not on concepts but on sense perceptions. Sensations cannot be communicated in themselves, but their formal aspects can. As we judge, we are instinctively abstracting from sensual stimuli. Thinking in accordance with sensus communis means that we abstract from the limitations that contingency attaches to our own judgment. Our judgment is then relieved from the cognitive aspect of the senses and engages in the free play of our capacity for knowledge (“dem freien Spiel unserer Erkenntniskräfte”).68 The judgment of taste appeals to an imaginary community and requires “a regard to universal communicability.”69 This is why Kant places judgment in a transcendental sphere. For Arendt, such a move is not obvious. Sensus communis is the sense of a sense, quite literally bringing together the experience of discrete phenomena. A judgment of taste uses an “inner sense.”70 We position ourselves through this inner sense, through apprehending who we are in relation to others. The inner sense is not in itself a sensation but rather a foundation for other senses.71 This does not mean that it is measured against any coercive standards of agreement. It means, rather, that the standards we use are integrated and embodied, made part of our sensory system. As in

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Kant, judgment implies a form of elaboration of the senses within a social context.72 Such an elaboration requires a good deal of imaginative flexibility, as that which informs our sense perceptions. Realness never implies a direct perception of reality; it invokes an imaginative capacity to relate to a community. Here, again, Arendt distinguished herself from Kant on an important point. For Kant, aesthetic pleasure increases as we agree on it—a community is experienced.73 To Arendt, sensus communis is a social function that does not simply involve sharing the same reality; it involves creating it, with imagination taking an active part. Arendt’s sensus communis involves a production, a sensible creation of the real.74

JUDGMENT AS THE ENCROACHMENT OF OTHERS For some, Arendt’s reading of Kant opens a promising politicization of citizenship, based on responsibility and judgment.75 For others, it is a flat account of merely imagining everyone else’s opinion.76 I would argue, however, that the spatial metaphors used by Arendt are crucial. Plurality is not something we observe, it is a factual state making observation possible. If objects in the world did not appear different in shape, color, and matter, we would not be able to say much about them. Plurality is needed for us to perceive a world at all. What we perceive as reality is an effect of plurality.77 In this regard, judgment, like public space, is a product of the encroachment of others. The notion of “enlarged thought” places judgment at a level where it informs both consciousness and perception. Judgments of taste offer a model for all other reflective judgments. This is what makes aesthetics political; from the position of individuals we embrace the perspective of a community. This would entail that there is an intrinsic relation between judgment and perception. The remarkable character of Kant’s idea of aesthetic judgment is that it forces itself on us while being experienced as free.78 The free play of the faculties that we experience as pleasurable in the encounter with beauty has nothing to do with free will but is imposed on us through the very forms of perception. This appears paradoxical, because Kant writes that the pleasure we take in beauty is based on the fact that it stands free from the laws of cognition.79 But the coercion presents itself at another level. Aesthetic judgment cannot be understood without the concept of disinterestedness.

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What is universal in a judgment of taste is the built-in conviction that everyone will judge in the same way as oneself. At the same time, this prediction is based on the conviction that others’ judgments are formed through the same kind of disinterestedness. This is the paradoxical ground upon which Arendt’s reading of Kant’s political philosophy is based. In Kant, disinterestedness represents freedom at a transcendental level. In Arendt, freedom can only be thought through plurality. The coercion informing judgment, therefore, is understood in other terms. In Arendt, the coercion involved in judgment does not take the form of the as if, as if everyone else is experiencing the beautiful object in the same way as oneself. It involves, rather, a certain giving up of the core of subjectivity as being formulated in relation to an object. Judgment teaches us what it means to think not just for ourselves but also in and through others. This is a lesson taught by Kant, although it is not developed in the direction that Arendt wants to go. In “Was heisst sich im denken orientieren?” (1786), Kant shows that thinking is not a solitary affair but is dependent on others.80 For Kant, an enlarged thought comes, ideally, from the position of the spectator. Placed next to the grand spectacle of the French Revolution—without being able to participate—he experienced man’s perpetual progress through an optimism or enthusiasm only made possible through the position as spectator. In the tradition of contemplation, initiated through Plato’s cave, the spectator is immobile. It would appear, then, that we must choose between two kinds of life—a political, active life and a philosophical, contemplative life. As Arendt saw, however, the idea that contemplative life is immobile and inactive has less to do with contemplation itself and more to do with the condition of isolation in which the spectator is set. The genius is alone. The spectator, in contrast, judges among many others.81 Arendt evokes this in a literal sense: sensus communis is never only the disinterested agreement of the as if but is also the affirmation of a sense of community that we have either experienced or expect to experience. Judgment involves a capacity to think in the place of others, Arendt elaborates this as a consequence of “enlarged thought.”82 Judgment demands a capacity for moving over several positions and involves a capacity for acceptance, tolerance, and empathy. However, one cannot reduce judgment to empathy. Arendtian judgment is a reflective flexibility, or a re-flexibility, which moves not from the singular to the general but involves various

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perspectives.83 Here, we need imagination and the capacity to imagine the perspective of a different social position—another gender, culture, or ethnic group. The self is never a fixed point. If there is coherence, this comes from the time-space in which the re-flexible position is situated and the way in which the real is put together.84 Judgment claims a reflection other than empathy. It does not merely involve the “acceptance” of others but also a capacity for a radical transformation of one’s own subjectivity. We may put this in another way: plurality forces me into a position where my sensibility is always encroached upon by the sensibility of others. Plurality does not represent a normative rule or order. It assures that my sensibility is impinged upon. This is, of course, why Kant’s theory of judgment works with aesthetic examples.85 Works of art do not supply rules or norms. They provide the sensation of other viewpoints. We do not experience aesthetic pleasure as a mere private sensation. It is not farfetched to assume that “enlarged thought” is applicable to judgment rather than to thought in the sense of contemplation. To think in the place of others means to engage in alternative positions of perception, imagining another perspective in spatial and temporal terms, imagining a place alternate to my own, from which somebody is speaking, feeling, and sensing, conditioned by other social and geographic coordinates.86 This does not involve having to encompass another position. It involves the transformative capacity of our faculties, a capacity not to transcend social or cultural differences but rather to experience them and to allow that experience to influence our view of the “real.” In order to illuminate this claim, we need to look at Arendt’s meditations on prejudice. Prejudice is not merely a veil; it contributes to vision and perception. We need prejudice in order to have some kind of pre-understanding of phenomena. We cannot easily imagine a society without prejudice—prejudice is always operative at the level of Alltagsleben, everyday life.87 The idea of a prejudgment that installs itself at the level of perception appears to be a kind of requisite for judgment. We could even say that prejudice, to some extent, measures our sociality; if we live with a certain measure of prejudice in our life, it makes our life easier. The differentiation, individuation, and creation of individuals and objects that appear, that take on weight and texture, is always formed within a certain cultural, social, and historical context. In everyday life, we use prejudice to belong. By incorporating prejudice, we belong to a community. In fact,

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prejudice is a requisite for the formation of a community, and we belong to a community to a greater extent when we rely on prejudice than when we resort to judgment. At this level, prejudice is a social factor rather than a detrimental fault of character. On the other hand, there is nothing inherently positive about it. We use it to evade the fatigue that unexpected events and sensations may cause. Prejudice is a grid that allows us to avoid confronting things head-on, a protective veil over our everyday lives. It may well falsify reality at an everyday level and make us avoid experience, new knowledge, and judgment proper. This is what worries Arendt. This is why poets concern us; aesthetic experience provokes not only our intellectual capacity for understanding but also our notion of the real. If we do not agree on what kind of reality we perceive, then we must be ready to negotiate other points of view. Given that works of art present us with complex emotional and sensorial experiences, they may offer ways of elaborating prejudice and other forms of categorizations at an affective and sensorial level. Major challenges are to be found. An enlarged thought is a way of judging that methodically gets rid of the prejudices that circumvent judgment. Here, we find a key to the claim that judgment may inform perception, rather than relying on the idea that perception is and will remain a primary factor, and the basis for judgment. Rather than figuring perception as the primary or even the only factor in sensible experience, we must consider the way such experience is formed by prejudice, on the one hand, and the capacity to transform such prejudice through judgment, on the other. If we admit to the possibility of judgment informing perception, rather than relying on the idea that perception is formed in total disregard of judgment, the relation between perception and politics is made clear. As Arendt has shown in her reflections on anti-Semitism, racism informs perception in a way that has nothing to do with experience. The idea that certain ethnic groups behave, look, or appear in a certain way precludes experience. Prejudice freezes perception, forcing us into a false position of certainty. Judgment, on the other hand, negotiates uncertainty. As we judge, we are embedded in plural forms of perception.88 Vision is encroached upon by the multiplicity of bodies that inhabit the world. Judgment is not reducible to a relation between a subject and an object. It is the “effect of a reflection upon a mind,” which passes through plurality.89

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The plural constitution of sensus communis is already part of our sense perceptions as we form them. Judgment cannot be made in isolation; I am affected in and through others that may or may not think like me. For Kant, the coercive force in judgment has to do with the formal Übereinstimmung between concept and judgment. For Arendt, the coercive force is the presence of others. In a certain way, judgment could be described as a form of submission; it is as if others already inhabit my perspective. As Emmanuel Levinas argued in Peace and Proximity, we are always submitted to the singular existence of the other, a singularity symbolized in the phenomenal sense by the face of the other.90 Only imagination makes it possible to judge “in the place of others.”91 Of course, the imagination used in judgment cannot be an activity in which we are attempting to formulate the standpoint of each and every person we encounter. Rather, the existence of other viewpoints is something that informs our perspective in such a way that we become disturbed and moved, perhaps pushed from a position that we hitherto have held to be comfortable. Through judgment, we are also impinged upon, coerced, forced to try to take new standpoints and attempt new points of view. Judgment engages us in a demanding process, exacting from us as much as we can possibly produce in terms of presence and vitality. At the same time, it requires a certain withdrawal, so as not to be ensconced in paralyzing emotions or overcome by the demands of others. Chantal Mouffe and Lyotard accuse Arendt of leaving out the antagonism inherent in the sublime when taking the example of beauty as an unquestioned basis for sensus communis.92 But sublimity—and, as we have seen, the antagonisms involved in any Kantian concept of freedom—is never left out of Arendtian reflections. In Men in Dark Times Arendt sums up what happens when we make beauty our only parameter: if burning torches become the measure of beauty, “we will be prepared, like Nero, to set living human bodies aflame.”93 The possibility of sublimity is always sustained through the paradoxical form that freedom takes through the facticity of plurality. Arendt never reduces aesthetic judgment to formal agreement. It applies to an imaginative elaboration of sense perception. Arendt’s aesthetics stops short of conceiving a monumental, universal consciousness. It is the opening of a plural conditioning of judgment that allows for a radical transformation of sensual experience.

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REALNESS AND NARRATIVE Outside forces may ruin the sense of realness by reducing, mastering, denaming, and so on. In times when the engendering of plurality is broken, the world does not cease to exist, but perception becomes thwarted. When public spaces are being closed down, we lose the measure of our experience of the real. Our view of things becomes manipulated and distorted. The experience of the senses is replaced with the overruling imaginary structures of ideology. For Arendt, this means disconnecting thought and experience; it is no longer possible to judge reality according to one’s experience. It is this disconnection that has made the machinery of racism and anti-Semitism possible—the disconnection between judgment and experience serves the grid of ideology.94 When this happens, the experience of realness loses its weight. Rather than negotiating reality as a ground for the feasibility of action, the actor becomes stifled with opinions. When opinions rule over experience, no gaps or lacks are allowed to appear. In experience, gaps are in themselves aspects of realness.95 What Arendt calls the totalitarian state operates at the level of perception. Facts are continuously distorted or censured, so that there is no reality to be affirmed.96 It is a system in which any sense of the real is undermined. It is not only a machine aimed toward the destruction of life; it is also a grid influencing the way in which people see themselves and others, destroying perceptual differentiation. When we are no longer able to perceive differences, our lives can also be manipulated toward ends that do away with all possible negotiation and struggle.97 Life can be manipulated through the way in which our environment is construed. It can also be manipulated through the suppression of stories, cultural objects, and artifacts. The grid of ideology is not so much construed by what artworks show or say but by what they do not show or say. It is quite possible to dominate and suppress a population through fragmentation, distortion, lies, and propaganda. Arendt was concerned with specific forms of ideology, but her reflections also speak to the need for an environment that does not replace cultural values with ideological or commercial interests. The terror of ideology lies not merely in the way it implements power but also in the way in which it creates a “new and unprecedented concept of reality,” and in addition, an “unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious

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world.”98 The most extreme expression of terroristic ideology, the concentration camp, managed to produce a “skillfully manufactured unreality,” a phantom world that lacked a structure that would have made experience possible. In the camps, a specific form of unreality emerged.99 But this also can permeate whole societies. Ideology serves to undo the recognition of facts through slogans, construed images, manufactured ideas, and so on. The goal of the propaganda machine is to separate thought from experience and reality.100 Its ideal subject is unable to distinguish between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) or between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought).101 After the Third Reich, the sense of unreality stuck to memory. People did not even believe that the documentary footage that circulated from the camps was authentic. Arendt’s idea that reality can only be shaped in collectives came from Carl Schmitt, who in turn linked individualism to passivity and a lack of grasp of reality.102 For Arendt, however, there is no decisive cut between passivity and activity; realness is to be found at the level of judgment. A sense of realness offers a possibility of fitting my experience into a reality that I perceive as shared by others. There is reason to pause and discuss the seemingly naive idea of a fit—can a sense of realness be a litmus test of an open society? From the point of view of psychoanalyst Lacan, what Arendt calls the real would be open to critique; it would rather correspond to the imaginary. The Lacanian imaginary is not so much as a sphere of lures, disguises, and masks as it is a protruding fact that presents itself with fictional coherence and sustenance.103 What psychoanalysis can do is to see that there is always some kind of gain involved in keeping a certain order in place. What appears as “reality” always passes through a grid or perspective that has some interest in asserting a certain state or order of things.104 Therefore, Lacanian analysis would perceive a rendering of reality without gaps or dark angles as the imaginary rather than the real; the real, in turn, would correspond to the foreclosure of experience, showing its face not through appearance or coherence but rather through gaps, repetitions, a particular fantasy, and so forth. When the real rules, the appearance of reality is in no way open to negotiation, judgment, or reasoning. It is only possible to restructure a fantasy that glues the subject to the real if the gain that sustains the fantasy is withdrawn.105 The insistence on realness is easy to perceive as a naive celebration of collectivity. From an Arendtian position, however, it is quite hard to

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conceive of anything like a naive conception of the real at all. Rather, it takes some effort to sustain it. This is, certainly, a political project that cannot do away with aesthetics. It can be achieved through the way in which we weave our stories together, through our cultural objects, and through our visual surroundings. We may only construe realness with the help of complex, saturated aesthetic and cultural objects. What is also needed is a free play of interaction at the level of stories. Narrative contributes to the possibility of sustainability through invoking collective memory.106 Narrative, here, evokes a form of temporality in which the future is made conceivable through the past. In the historically dead zone of time, the years after the war, it was literature—like work by René Char and Kafka—that came to the rescue, resetting it.107 Literature may never gather a full perspective on things, nor theorize; in this way, the construction of its time-space is shared by judgment. But literature may transpose life into narrative and contribute to the creation those objects of collectivity, sustainability, and solidarity that are needed to make experience possible. For the web of narratives to be construed, we need the help of “the artist, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them, the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all.”108 The stories that offer the fabric of reality are primarily offered in the form of art: “in documents and monuments, they may be visible in use objects and art works.”109 As Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb has noted in a beautiful comparison of Arendt with W. H. Auden, there is a strand of messianism in this appreciation of temporality that cannot go unnoticed. Saving the world through the child (natality) as an antidote to ruination, Arendt imposes the web of stories as an antidote to worldlessness.110 Art requires freedom from censorship and a certain resistance to commercialization, commodification, and the persecution of religious, sexual, or ethnic minorities. Aesthetic activism and political activism are often joined—ever since Dadaism, surrealism, situationism, and other forms of artistic activism, such as feminism, have followed the development of modern and postmodern art. At a certain level, however, aesthetic and political work may appear antagonistic. In politics, we are always turned toward a certain horizon of expectations. The encounter with new and unexpected phenomena may appear unbearably exhausting. At another level, however, we consistently need to incorporate new levels of the real

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and new stories. If we are to sustain the openness of realness, we need to produce it in and through the weaving of new stories and images. If Arendt considers realness other than as a naive image of the world, it is because a certain amount of active work—through poetic creation, cultural critique, or new, politically motivated forms of understanding—is necessary to sustain it. This is why realness can never be naive. If ideologies have been successful in the twentieth century, it is not because they present us with an image of the world that fits our preconceptions. Ideologies, rather, live off our fear of the exertions of the real. Ideologies and Weltanschauungen are successful because they protect us from the demanding experience of something new. The logic at work in ideologies lies neither in a symptomatic organization of the imaginary nor in the flight from the burden of the real. It lies, rather, at the level of political structure, with the closure of spaces where questions of fact, truth, reality, and sense perception are up for negotiation. When these spaces close, the work of construing realness as a space-time in which judgment not only is made possible but also is an active agent participating in the construct of that “realness” is foreclosed. In the grid of ideology, everything that is ever to be presented as “real” is already foreseen. Rather than pretending to have passed through the test of the real, ideology forecloses experience. This is a consequence that can be drawn from the Eichmann trial, for instance.111 What made the concentration camps possible was a “new and unprecedented concept of reality” that had very little to do with realness. Nazism lived off an “unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world.”112 The intended outcome of its ideology was not a distortion but a destruction of experience. The will to manipulate the “real” was not only an attempt to put it into the service of a certain ideological order. It was a war against facts, feasibility, and comprehension. The terroristic weapons of ideology did not just impose censorship and distortion of facts; they also reinforced the destruction of an existing reality—and of everything “real” to come. Experience, common sense, and all “the plausibilities of the world” became meaningless.113 This is why art had to be a primary target of suppression, as in the branding of entartete Kunst. With the coining of the conception of degenerate art, German modernism became as homeless as many of its citizens.114 When we confront a work of art, we confront something new that cannot be subsumed under ordinary means of measurement.115 Before we examine

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common grounds of judgment, or begin interpreting a work of art, we must ask ourselves what we see and how we see it. Aesthetic experience engages our perception, awakening not only our curiosity but also a sense of pleasure or displeasure, attraction or horror. Works of art expose us to complex experiences by rupturing the veil of our measuring grid. Art is not subsumed under a regularity we can expect. The sense of the real it may produce, then, is of a wholly different kind than that in everyday life. The real can only appear in certain moments, as the sense of something coming together. One would be wrong to assume that, in Arendt’s view, only totalitarian societies grapple with the real. In her articles from the 1960s, which put American political life under scrutiny, it is clear that the real is under pressure from questionable decisions and lies. As Derrida notes, Arendt saw that a lie in a modern democratic society does not merely refer to a false representation. A political lie is only successful if it manages to destroy reality as such, whether that lie is performed within a totalitarian state or within a democratic government.116 Again, what we see is not only a distortion of an existing conception of reality but also an attack on experience. Imagination, therefore, is as interesting for politics as it is for art. In “Politics and Truth” Arendt describes political imagination as a capacity of “enlarged mentality,” or a capacity to consider what lies beyond the experiences of the self. Such enlarged mentality allows freedom, plurality, and political action to acquire a meaning.117 Without the experience of a materially and sensually given world, we would be “enclosed” in the particularity of sense data that are in themselves unreliable and treacherous.118 We can never replace a weave of narratives with imaginary grids. If we do, we will reinforce models of imaginary realities that will destroy the realness that enables political action. Art and politics both serve the hard and conflict-ridden path toward a construction of realness that allows for new experiences to come into being, and for ideology to lose its grip on how we see things. Contemporary art, Arendt stated in the 1960s, has a new call: it must be ethical.119 But the place of ethics belongs to the work, not with the artist or writer.120 How is it that we may enjoy poetry by politically questionable poets? Arendt puts the question on the table with regard to Gottfried Benn, Knut Hamsun, and Ezra Pound, who occupied the fascist end of the political spectrum. In the same vein, she returns to the enigmatic careers

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of Bertolt Brecht and Pablo Picasso, who were found at the other end.121 There is no real contradiction in assuming that good artists may make bad judgments. In contrast, Eichmann became morally indignant when he was given Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita to read in prison.122 How can a novel about nihilism appear more revolting than the killing of millions? The answer recalls these considerations. The ethical call is not applied to the moral stance of the artists and writers. It is possible, Arendt says, that one should be more tolerant of “spiritual transgressions”—bad judgments—made in the name of art or philosophy than one should be of bad judgments in politics or ethics.123 This is, possibly, why her disdain for Heidegger did not develop into outright political confrontation. What she criticized was not so much his political stance—surprising, and perhaps even shocking, given Heidegger’s collaboration with the Nazi regime, as Rektor in Freiburg from 1933—as his inability to properly see and fathom the relation between art and action, on the one hand, and philosophy and action, on the other. Perhaps she regarded Heidegger as a political idiot who thought he was sheltered by his politically impotent relation to society. She then forgave his inability to deal with politics. His impotence, however, appears to have existed in Arendt’s imagination, not in Heidegger’s. As can be seen in the schwarze Hefte (black notebooks), his anti-Semitism was conscious and well ingrained. Poets may be a bit like Kafka’s dogs in his story “Forschungen eines hundes” (“Explorations of a Dog”)—they lift above the ground and hover in the air in mysterious poses. If we are to accept Goethe’s thought that poets “shun gravity,” then they are unable to accept the burden and responsibility imposed by ethical and political conflicts. If a fleeing writer is unable to perceive his own work as flight, the problem becomes double. This was the case with Brecht, who dedicated his life to the depiction of class struggle, poverty, and repression. Settling down in East Berlin after the fall of the Third Reich, Brecht became the most prominent writer of the German Democratic Republic. What interests Arendt in her article on Brecht in Men in Dark Times is not his inventive aesthetics, political conviction, or extraordinary theater. It is, instead, his failure—the silence that ensues after seven years at the theater in East Berlin. His silence is interpreted not as an artistic failure but as the result of the pressing necessity to grapple with political, social, and historical facts. Brecht was caught in the grip of two conflicting views of reality that canceled each other out: the regime’s view

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of the supremacy of the political system, and the dialectical materialism of his own fictional interpretation of the hardships of everyday life. Observing that Brecht had no belief in progress, which would otherwise have been the cornerstone of a leftist politics and aesthetics, Arendt notes that the “truth” of that interpretation caught up with him. Brecht did not fail to unravel the real. But he unraveled a reality he did not intend to show.124 What he wanted to see and what he saw actually was never one and the same. In the end, Brecht stood face-to-face with the inexpressible, a new kind of suffering. One cannot see the limits before having passed them, Arendt writes, and once you have passed them, they turn into walls that you cannot cross again.125 Brecht’s silence became a self-imposed punishment. In the case of Picasso, things can be seen from the other end. Picasso shared the same ideology as the state-supported style of social realism. Though he tried to contribute to the ideological images of socialism, he failed to be accepted in the Soviet Union. His formal language was incomprehensible to those who were in power and who were deciding what kind of art was to be shown.126 Picasso himself never saw the provocative aspect of expressionism in the face of social realism. If anything, he considered his work to serve the emancipation from bourgeois restraints of life. With Picasso, we find that there is no semiotic language that is inherently more “free” than any other. The examples of Brecht and Picasso delineate the problem that Arendt herself brings up—the relation between art and politics is irreducible to expression.127 It has less to do with content or semiotic language than with factors that Arendt discusses in terms of attunement, or Stimmung.

THE SOUNDING OF POETRY In her notebooks Arendt describes a state that is only found in poetry and love. It is a state in which we cannot remain for long: a state of sounding. Usually, our speech with others is speech about (über) something. But there are exceptions. The language of lovers is free from any qualification of what it is to be about. In love, we speak with rather than about—with the “you” as we speak with ourselves. The language of love is a language of devotion in which, to some extent, we also lose our grip on the world. We are forlorn in a necessary intimacy, from which we cannot return to the

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open unless we lose love itself: “Love . . . is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.”128 As we speak lovingly, we lose ourselves and abandon our sense of the world at the same time. The language of lovers is poetic. It is not talking (rede) and it is not speech (sprechen). Lovers’ speech is a sounding in which we are suspended, at the cost of the world disappearing. To speak in a lover’s tone is not to translate a feeling. It implies, rather, a feeling of being overturned, of being swept up: “out of my mouth came a sound, which assailed me unconditionally,” writes Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to his beloved.129 Sounding does not create meaning, but it sensualizes language. As we talk of the sounding of language, we refer not to the tone of the speaker who creates the words but to the way in which the words assail the speaker. Sounding is not a question of translating emotions. Rather, it is about being exposed to abandonment. In Rilke’s poetic talk of abandonment, lovers are lost in the sounding of language. The language of love is a language that, like all others, aims to emerge. The audible element contains something we interpret as an inner process: the sounding of love as revealing ourselves not only to our lover but also to ourselves.130 Such a sounding has its own temporality. It is a state in which it is impossible to remain, Arendt notes. Sooner or later, the sounding must change into verbal meaning and become a Mit-teilung, a message that also has an addressee. The sounding undergoes a process of dissolution. Therefore, the language of love is the language of abandonment and loss. The language of love is the same kind of sounding that we encounter in poetry. Its language does not refer to something we can see, touch, or even speak about. It is not about something. And yet we do experience a meaning. The sounding becomes a kind of incarnation of language’s desire for the sensible. A tone has no form and no object, but it speaks to our sensibility. Poetic language is a language of “interiorization,” which does not reveal that which is invisible but rather transforms it to tone. In poetry we find ourselves inside of language instead of talking about it.131 This is where we find the language of sounding.132 Sounding makes no claim to a higher truth, nor is it a key to a higher art form. But sounding speaks to the senses. The sounding of language exceeds the difference between object and subject that is indicated by traditional aesthetics. In this way, sounding avoids the supremacy of sight and speaks to other senses.

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As Arendt remarks on poetry, she may well have been thinking of Heidegger’s dialogue between a Japanese man and an interlocutor in On the Way to Language. Traditional aesthetic questioning, according to Heidegger, is underpinned by a metaphysics in which the sensual is separated from the nonsensual, and what is perceived through the senses is separated from what is not perceived.133 Such an approach assumes that aesthetic experience is located in a subject beholding an object. The phenomenon of toning allows us to grasp the problem of dualism from another end. The contemplation of a work of art cannot be isolated from the work itself. The colors, shapes, texture, and style of a work of art cannot be abstracted from the actual experience of it. After the performance of a Chinese opera, Arendt describes how the tones speak to several senses at the same time— not only as melody or harmony but as a multisensorial experience.134 Handel’s Messiah is also described as a language of sounding. It is, Arendt says, a musical conceptualization of natality, a sounding of new beginnings.135 In the famous section 14 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant identifies tone as an impression conveyed by our senses. As is the case with the perception of color, sensations of tone cannot be the same for everyone. A tone is not a concept, a thing, or a thought. Kant treats tones and colors as the same kind of sensation. We also speak of tones when we talk about color; we differentiate colors according to their tones. Like audible tones, they can be lighter or darker.136 The fact that we generally perceive colors as interrelated comes down to a kind of rhythmic connection. Color is a formal attribute that creates unity in a diversity of sensations. The same applies to tone. Tones are shaped by composition. By analogy, the outlines of a painting provide the form that enables us to experience color. When a tone or color is given a form, it can also become beautiful. The composition brings out the tone’s sensual component and makes sensation part of an aesthetic experience. Wilhelm von Humboldt thought of spoken sound as an embodiment or sensualization of thought. For Humboldt, thought articulates itself as language, as a transposition from the interior to the exterior. If this is true, Arendt argues, it is because thought is struggling to emerge as speech. It is not possible to think without a language. But it is not possible to speak without thinking either. If we are to follow Arendt’s reflections on this, sounding is what bestows a proper life of the mind.137 It is impossible to conceive of life as solitary and silent; through the senses we are always submerged. And even if we were to sit alone in a cell, the tone of our

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thoughts would keep us company. Solitude, like love, is based on a state in which it is impossible to remain. It cancels itself out. Sooner or later it must become language, or be destroyed. Although we can keep our grip on the world when we are alone, thanks to a basic logic that enables us to rely on our senses, solitude is a state that we need to leave behind at some stage. This means that language has a dual function. On the one hand, it forces an inner world into the light. On the other hand, language transforms visible phenomena into metaphors for an inner life. Language brings forth a world. But it also transforms a world of visible phenomena into an internal, metaphorical existence. Such “inner” life does not reveal some deeper truth. Rather, it bears witness to what Arendt describes as a kind of escape, from the realm of appearances and action to intimate forms of art such as poetry, music, and so on. Such art operates through soundings and tonalities rather than through appearances. Nevertheless, although it cannot be clearly articulated, the “internal” can reveal itself in soundings.138 Philosophy also is a form of flight that is act in itself and not merely a form of hiding. To think is to speak for oneself and to hear oneself “innerlich.”139 There is a tonality involved in the experience of thinking as such. Thought produces its own moods.140 The mood of the thinking ego is serenity, whereas melancholy is a mood of remembrance.141 Arendt describes Antigone’s voice as “whining, toning.” The injustice unraveled in her monologue is transmitted through tonality.142 In hearing, we cannot distance or protect ourselves. This exposure becomes even stronger in German: the verb hören (to hear) also carries echoes of gehorchen, hörich, and gehören—which in English translate to “to obey,” “to be in bondage,” and “to belong.”143 In gehören (to belong), the “hearing” implies not just a sense but also a relationship of power. There is thus something disturbing in sounding. The tone speaks to the hearing. A listener is a receptor, exposed to a sound he or she cannot avoid. Some experiences seem to have produced themselves even outside of the possibility of human speech.144 In objectifying language, we take up a position in which we are above and beyond it, without really being inside it.145 The sensual experience of sounding, however, allows us to experience images, poetry, or music. The idea of sounding takes account of how the senses interact. The senses communicate with each other, melding and reinforcing one another. Sounding creates a path between the senses in which signs and symbols, metaphors, and other linguistic images interact.

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ATTUNING ACTION The most important question to Hannah Arendt, around which all of her work revolves, is posed in On Revolution: What is it that makes action in concert possible? It is no coincidence that Arendt uses a term that is also musical: a concert is a musical performance, and to act in concert is to act in agreement, in a way that one could best describe as attunement. In Kafka’s “Explorations of a Dog,” an old dog recalls a scene from his childhood: Some dogs appear in front of him, suddenly and silently. But to him, they are playing loud, horrible music that only he can hear. Why? He attempts to ask this question, but there is no answer. The dogs disappear. Did they find him too unimportant to respond? Did they not hear him? Or did they speak a different language? The aging dog begins to doubt his memory; because no one has confirmed the images he recalls, it is as if the scene never happened.146 This story, Arendt notes, recalls the old fear that our sense organs may deceive us. The dog not only does not trust his senses, he also does not trust the memories of his senses. Maybe the memories are not “real.” But then, how are we to characterize the real? As we have seen, realness can be characterized as a particular experience in which all senses cooperate. There is an intrinsic relation between realness and sensus communis. In Kafka’s story, the dog is isolated, and his senses are either deceiving him or are not cooperating. There is no relation between his audible perceptions and the outside world. This as an inversion of sensus communis. In apprehending the world, we are not alone; we can assume that others are hearing and seeing similar things as ourselves, and our experience is that we can be understood and confirmed. Realness, therefore, is a social aspect of sense perception. It is not to be confused with aesthetic or philosophical realism, mimesis, or the belief in the existence of things outside of human consciousness. It has nothing to do with the capacity for asserting perceptions as true or false, or with agreeing on statements. The political element in aesthetics is usually perceived as coming from rhetoric, Arendt notes. But what rhetoric is looking for is persuasion.147 The ground of judgment, or the perceptual commonality of sensus communis, is aesthetic rather than rhetorical. For judgment in the form of sensus communis, we need to understand sounding at a supra-individual level. In this function, we can talk about sounding as Stimmung, attunement.

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Communal forms of experience can be communicated through the coming together of some kind of tonality rather than abstractions—enthusiasm, melancholy, or enjoyment, for instance.148 The sensible experiences involved in judgments acquire a certain attunement.149 Stimmung, a concept often associated with Heidegger, is sometimes interpreted as “mood.” It can be understood as a form of preverbal atmosphere. In the word Stimmung we can hear the etymology of Stimme, or voice. But a mood is not always created by a voice. Perhaps we might say that a mood is a tone, but not necessarily an audible tone. A mood can be experienced without being heard. For Heidegger, Gestimmtheit (mood) refers to the experience of phenomena such as abandonment, uncanniness, and so on. In Heidegger’s concept of mood, Stimmung, and Gestimmtheit, such phenomena refer to a preverbal atmosphere that is not perceptible through the senses. Rather, the opposite is the case—because Being reveals itself against the backdrop of a necessary expulsion, we are never really, truly, authentically “at home” in this world and therefore are unable to perceive the “mood” of Being. Fear is perhaps the most characteristic mood of mankind. However, mood is translatable into the arts. Heidegger saw the intrinsic relations between language, sound, poetry, and music here; all revel in some aspect of mood or Stimmung.150 Like Heidegger, Arendt considered a mood to be incommunicable in itself, and not something we may see or experience as an object or as tangible matter. Thinking and acting, for instance, are accompanied by two kinds of mood. Remembrance, as has been mentioned, is melancholy.151 The will, in contrast, always looks ahead, and preparation for the future has a mood completely different from melancholy.152 Arendt's concept of mood, however, is more directed than Heidegger’s toward the communal elements that direct our sense perception. It is what is presumed for us to experience worldly phenomena of different kinds. Sensus communis can never really unfold. Arendt’s sensus communis overrides the subject-object distinction as well as the correlation between truth and reality. Here arises, for instance, the complex issue of what Arendt called public happiness, the mood of the revolution. It cannot be described as an actual reality of the people but rather is a sense of a communal will. It might be difficult today to recover the quest for public happiness that was the mood during the onset of the American movement toward independence, but the spirited discourse of new possibilities was

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very much part of the turn of politics of the time—more so than the ideas in the abstract sense. Arendt goes so far as to declare that the experience of the mood of public happiness guided the subsequent politics of the founding fathers of the American Revolution. In contrast, there was no such positive mood to be found after the onset of the French Revolution. Instead, there was a fear of what might come after, a factor that also led to its failure.153 The French crowds had no “real” experience of the possibility of common action before the revolution, although they were inspired by ancient literature that suggested such spaces.154 Here, the sensory aspects of Arendt’s understanding of the concepts of attunement and mood become clear. Even if we develop our theoretical understanding of relations of power, and political and social contexts, the question remains: How can we develop a sensory perception that is politically functional? How do we perceive what we act upon? The primary interest of judgments, to Arendt, is not what they say about phenomena. The question is how they relate to moods. If something becomes public, it means that it becomes visible and audible. The experience of realness measures the way in which our perceptions “fit” in the world—or attunes to it.155 A Stimmung is incommunicable in itself; it is not something we may see or experience as an object or as tangible matter. It is rather what is presumed, in turn, for us to experience worldly phenomena of different kinds. As Erik Wallrup has noted, attunement is something that we cannot search for. It is something that happens, something that we simply wrap up in without us noticing how or why.156 Tones set the modes for actions. The quest for a new tone, inherent in Arendt’s philosophy, enables us to orient ourselves toward phenomena that were not hitherto considered political. Miguel Abensour has noted a new disposition (Stimmung) of philosophy in Arendt. With the help of a new tone, Abensour writes, we might start to consider the political in ways that have been unavailable before.157 Here, there is reason to return to our primary question: What makes it possible for us to act in concert, that is, to act together and achieve power? The possibility of acting in concert undoes the agonistic idea of public life in which individuals act with specific goals in mind.158 The revolutions in France and America may have been inspired by abstract ideas of freedom, but they were converted into moods of compassion and a vision of happiness for the many—which was just as forceful as the vision of freedom.159 In contrast, the strategy to create a society of

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atomization and fragmentation, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described Stalin’s Soviet Union, undoes collective action.160 To Arendt, the American Revolution was a success. It was not, however, a revolution of slaves. Steve McQueen’s movie Twelve Years a Slave shows the attunement of the revolution at another level. In the film, we follow Solomon Northup, kidnapped from his family in the American North and illegally sold as a slave in the South. Histories and fates develop from his perspective; he is the narrator, the focus of our attention and empathy. In one scene, however, this perspective is altered. We see a woman singer lead her fellow workers in the song “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” Solomon, a skilled violinist, first stands aside. Then—and it has taken many years for him to reach this point—he joins in the song. Affirming it, he finds that it does not reduce him to a piece in a collective; rather, it empowers him. Rather than entertaining white people with his violin, he has become part of a movement of resistance and pride. This scene is the most clearly politicized in the movie. It hints at a collectivity that may appear to have more to do with racial politics today than with historical facts—a retroactive fantasy of a collective will. But it is more subtle. What appears is not Solomon’s embrace of a new identity but rather a giving up of an old self. Solomon leaves his ironic position, his body transported toward a new kind of being, with another sensibility and corporeality. He leaves his old self, educated among white people with white tastes, in order to become part of a collective that sounds, feels, and connects differently. What we see is a moment that cannot be described as a formation of collective will, consensus, or agenda. Neither does it circumscribe a community, properly speaking. But it appears to condition a community, without determining its borders or goals. It is a conditioning that contributes to the formation of a collective without determining who is to belong to that community or who may be left out of it. One may consider that conditioning in terms of attunement—mood—or Stimmung. Attunement is often supplemented through works of art that offer a sensible structure and texture to the conditioning of a collective. If the coming together of collective actions in politics is to be conceived of in terms of attunement or mood, it captures the possibility of agency and action without reducing political action to imposed goals. Attunement transforms subjectivities without imposing itself in a universal form. It may well transpire through abandonment rather than through objects

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or goals in the affirmative sense. McQueen explores the explosive power of an abandoning God rather than a present one. The film depicts something that can be described in terms of neither religious belief nor political activity, an attunement of collective suffering and ensuing empowerment. It is clear that abandonment is not the same thing as lack. This is perhaps why attunement is such a powerful tool for understanding what makes action in concert possible; it serves an action without a given goal, and a need for change without a defined purpose. The attunement of action in concert, offered in the form of abandonment, may compose a community without erecting exclusionary borders. Perhaps this is why McQueen and Arendt both see a kind of prepolitical community form through a Stimmung of abandonment and absence, a state in which one cannot remain for long.

4

TENSIONS OF LAW TRAGEDY AND THE VISIBILITY OF LIVES

THE LAW, TRAGEDY, AND THE MAKING OF HUMAN LIFE IN THE

uncompleted manuscript of a book on the political, Arendt describes, surprisingly perhaps, the political as derivative. It originates, she argues, in the “prepolitical data of biological life” and finds its end in the “postpolitical, [the] highest possibility of human destiny.” For Arendt, this is freedom.1 These remarks call for consideration. They invoke, inevitably, the notion of tragedy. As I argued in the first chapter, there is no essential bond between “human” and “freedom” in Arendt’s writings. This means that there is no way to conceptualize freedom on the basis of presumptions concerning humanity. There is no such thing as “the human,” conceived of as a specific form of life. There are, however, a variety of forms of life, and political life, seeking freedom, is one of these. It is conditioned by institutions such as law, art, and politics. One might interpret Arendt’s “prepolitical data” as the limits circumventing the span of human life, or perhaps as the bonds of love and family. The “postpolitical” is a point at which there is no need to define freedom through institutions. This does not mean that freedom requires the extinction of the state, which would be a liberalism. As we have seen, there is no freedom beyond the encroachment of others. If freedom is postpolitical, rather, it is because it is bound up with philosophy and art.

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The fact that freedom is not only about action but also about the representation and reflection of lives can be seen with regard to the particular place given to tragedy in Arendt’s writings. She repeatedly quotes the chorus in Oedipus at Colonus, as toward the end of On Revolution: “Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by far the second-best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible whence it came” (lines 1220–23).2 For Arendt, this quote points to the difference between the meaningfulness of political life and the dead end of a life conducted through goal-oriented action. To Theseus, spokesman of Athens, only polis, the space of the free man, could endow life with splendor. The other life, life overtaken by necessities, is not worth living. Tragedy defines human life as both the origin and the end of the political. It does not, however, define the political as the origin and the end of human life. Rather than taking for granted that a political life is to serve a certain conception of human freedom, Arendt resorts to tragedy to illuminate how art makes visible various kinds of lives. It has been argued that Arendt’s way of resorting to the Greeks is a nostalgic return that is both ahistorical and naive.3 Instead, however, it is a way of approaching political modernity from new perspectives, such as by finding alternatives to the idea that the question of the political equals that of sovereignty. Unlike modern philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arendt did not see sovereignty— regarded as an institutionalized idea of freedom in politics—as either the origin or the end of the political.4 For Rousseau, the political opens up with the question of freedom and is therefore to be solved with a concept of sovereignty in which “natural” freedom is replaced with law.5 But for Arendt, man is not necessarily born free and no politics may follow from any “nature-given” facts. Instead, the question is what lawgiving can do to define a kind of life in which politics is made possible. As has been famously quoted many times from The Origins of Totalitarianism, the principle of sovereignty has failed to include certain forms of life. This is because sovereignty has become bound up with the nationstate, a confusion that was never necessary. It is, nevertheless, not a marginal shortcoming related to sovereignty but a major problem that could well be seen as motivation for Arendt’s return to the Greeks. Her disbelief in modern politics requires a reversal of the history of political philosophy. This is where the seemingly strange admiration of polis comes in.

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The tension between a notion of the political regarded as sovereignty—a principle of freedom—and the political regarded as a space—a principle serving the contingent formation of plurality as such—resonates throughout Arendt’s writings. Her considerations on tragedy, also, can be seen in this light. In tragedy, the political is bound up with law. Research by Robert Pirro and Peter Euben on Arendt’s relation to tragedy reflects the political role of spectatorship and demonstrates the overcoming of the duality between spectatorship and agency.6 However, what is of interest to us here is the relation between lawmaking and tragedy. On this, Giorgio Agamben’s work, as well as that of Jacques Rancière, offers a critical and, at the same time, careful perspective.7 Other researchers have pointed to the intrinsic relation between Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception and Arendt’s problematizing of lawmaking. Here, the works of Eva Geulen and Christoph Menke have been particularly helpful.8 What has been less commented upon is the way in which Arendt’s conception of Greek lawgiving points to a making visible of lives, a making visible that, returning to the focus on spectatorship and theater that Pirro and Euben have pointed out, is central to Arendt’s concern with the Greeks overall. The Greek lawgiver, Arendt says, was prepolitical. Just as the city walls were a prepolitical condition, so did the forms of lawgiving involve something from the outside. Greek laws were not divine, and unlike the foundational laws of modern revolutions, they made no appeal to a “supreme being.” No superior power existed outside of the law. However, the prepolitical foundation of the law inscribed a foreign aspect to it: “The lawgiver came from outside of the community . . . he could be a stranger and be called from abroad.”9 The origins and destiny of the political, then, are not in themselves political; they may consist in the physical construction of a city wall or in the foreign body of the legislator. This is an understanding of the law underscored by Sophocles in the sacrifice of Oedipus at Colonus, in which Oedipus offers his body as the foundation of Athens. What Arendt sketches, in referring to the lawmaker as coming from the outside, is the making of laws through the simultaneous introduction and exclusion of a foreign body. However, one would be wrong to see an Arendtian notion of political lawmaking as fully based on Greek tragedy. Arendt’s politics is certainly a form of republicanism, in the sense that it is based on a conception of

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public space passed from Rome to the eighteenth century. For a modern notion of the political, she advocates a model of Roman lawmaking in which the law is made a political tool. On the other hand, the Greek model, in which the law circumvents a political space, is a prerequisite for Arendtian ontology. In this chapter, we will look at the tensions between these competing conceptions of the relation between the law and the political, and the way in which both inform aspects of Arendtian thought. This is the time to engage in a focused consideration of Greek tragedy. No reflection on Arendt’s aesthetics can afford to do without it. Tragedy negotiates what comes before and after the political. Scattered quotes and remarks taken from Sophocles indicate that tragedy points to the primary task of the political: to make life visible. Avoiding the identification of political bonds with the sovereignty of the state, Arendt uses the exiled as a necessary challenge to the rethinking of the political in the European tradition.10 Much quoted in contemporary debates on the lack of rights for refugees, Arendt’s discussion of refugees’ situation during World War II discloses the exception and the foreclosure of the refugee in relation to a European conception of sovereignty. The discussion of the refugee has a bearing not only on lawmaking but also on the definition of political life as historically contingent.11 The refugee leads us to question the focus on sovereignty, offering in its place a differentiated space of institutions and traditions. The very exception of the refugee will serve to enforce the ontology that Arendt advocates in terms of plurality, forms of becoming, and the principle of natality as new beginnings. The law in Arendtian thought does not have the character of an absolute imperative but, like art, it serves as an instance of permanency that helps define a community. The law is an invisible framework.12 It serves as boundary, continuity, and sustenance—creating and preserving a community. The law, at best, serves the freedom of thought, releasing thought from obscurantism and aiding judgment.13 At its worst, however, a law may also be endowed with a nihilating character, serving to absorb rather than to generate differences.14 The biblical commandments expose us to the hearing of the law in a way that fully exposes our frailty. Their commanding tone was later exchanged for philosophical conceptions of natural law. They remain in place as the establishment of a form of submission; they are absolute and arrive from nowhere, but their transcendental origins claim a ground for society beyond any commune of people or ethnicities.15 This

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is a problematic legacy. In contrast, the mimesis of tragedy points to the contingent nature of human action and lawmaking itself. For Arendt, the legitimacy of the modern nation-state has been undermined by its own exclusionary mechanisms ever since its inception. This can be contrasted to Habermas, for whom a discursive model of public space, or “public opinion,” serves the legitimization of law.16 In Arendt’s ontology, the legitimization of the law finds no origin or end point in discourse. The law is one of many institutions that condition and serve the visibility of life as appearance.17 Roman law is an institution of tradition in which political life is negotiated. But there are other institutions and other traditions that offer contrasting, conflicting, or converging forms of conditioning. One of them is art, and among many forms of art, tragedy. In The Human Condition, tragedy is discussed in conjunction with two terms of action: archein, the beginning of something new, or the achievement of an already existing project.18 Archein may displace and destabilize known features of the community. Tragic action shows the danger of the new beginning; the horrifying frailty of eudaimon, the good life, is disclosed. It is to be read not in terms of its outcome but rather in terms of the necessity from which it springs and through the unpredictability that it embraces—unpredictability being “the price for reality and plurality.”19 In her notes, Arendt connects the wisdom of Silenus from Oedipus at Colonus with the Kantian question, To what end do people exist?20 It cannot be, she argues, that only knowledge gives life a meaning. The Sophoclean quote “Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words” points to the fact that the unknown, the gaps, and the unforeseen are aspects of life that point to the fact that action rather than knowledge offers meaning. Tragedy points to the conditions under which forms of life become visible and empowered. Evoked in the examination of the prewar and postwar aesthetics in Men in Dark Times, tragedy is called on as a form of “suffering and recognition,” operating through acts of repetition. Tragedy, Arendt argues, makes memory political, calling on silenced representations to reappear.21 As we will see in a reading of Oedipus at Colonus, this has a direct bearing on the way she figures the relation between the law and the political. Perhaps the extent to which visibility is bound to the political in Arendt has not been fully observed. Judith Butler has asked what we are to make of Sophocles’ heroine Antigone within a philosophy that strictly sets up

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marks of demarcation between the public and the private. Considering that Antigone is relegated to an outside in which she has no given right to act, she points to the problem with affirming a notion of the political that so fully relies on a notion of public space. From such a point of view, Butler has pointed to the fact that parts of history are doomed to remain in what she calls the melancholy of the public sphere, or what Arendt herself calls “the shadowy sphere.”22 As we have argued, however, Arendt does not define the demarcation between public and private in terms of discourse, but through phenomenological analysis. Therefore, she is more interested in Oedipus at Colonus than Antigone. It is Oedipus at Colonus that points to the problems that are most acute to Arendt: the exiled, the refugee, the nonvisible. Situated in the hiatus between exclusion and freedom, the political aspect of the refugee has less to do with the way he or she performs or acts than with the way in which he or she is made visible at all. We must therefore look not only at the meaning of specific actions or appeals in tragedy but also at what is made to appear on stage.

OEDIPUS AND THE WISDOM OF SILENUS Tragic mimesis, Arendt argues, displaces political life into art.23 This means that tragedy is not only about the specific actions of characters. The mimetic rendering must be seen in its entirety, including the poetry of the chorus, where the Stimmung of tragic thought is embodied, in the literal sense. 24 The chorus is the mimetic rendering of the city and its citizens. The lyrics give significance. They offer a backbone for events. They also speak of the unraveling of truth, the destruction of false beliefs, and the undoing of illusions. In The Human Condition and her “Introduction to Politics,” Arendt quotes the end of Antigone: “The great words of boasters are always punished with great blows, and as they grow old teach them wisdom” (line 1350).25 These lines show that speech is action. They can be directly related to reflections on Oedipus from her unfinished treatise on the political; here, King Oedipus is evoked as someone who discovers truth as the ruination of doxa (opinion): truth can destroy doxa, which means that it can destroy the “political reality” of the inhabitants of a city-state.26 This means that imaginary functions, such as opinions, splendor, fame, and the like disappear, perhaps at the cost of what is holding a community

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together. If we look closer at Arendt’s conception of public space and the fate of Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus, we find a metaphorical relation between invisibility and exile. The flight of the refugee is a consequence of the corruption of public space. Whether that flight is discussed in terms of inner or outer exile, the result is disappearance and invisibility. This points to a crucial aspect of Arendt’s political thought: the relation between appearances and political society. If tragedy is a mimetic depiction of political action, it is because it exposes the relation between visibility and political life. The public space of the polis creates appearance and reality; what is real and visible, however, is always threatened by disappearance and annihilation. The tragic play unravels that which is suppressed and invisible, hiding in the oikos, or home, cut off from public affairs. What is excluded, invisible, and cut off from public life is as relevant as that which is made visible. Tragedy, therefore, conveys the precarious status of political life, a life that we must nevertheless strive to uphold.27 Antigone is often referred to in current philosophical and theoretical debates as the heroine of “divine laws.” This is, however, not the only politically and philosophically poignant figure that Sophocles has offered us. Arendt does not herself perform a reading of Antigone or comment upon the political readings of that tragedy made by, for instance, Hegel and Heidegger—readings that each discuss political space and what is marginalized in relation to it, in various ways. Antigone, however, comes across as a voice. After seeing Carl Orff ’s Antigone, which uses Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation, Arendt writes, “As if everything was put in place so as to atone for us” (“uns zum Ertönen zu bringen”). As we are closed to ourselves, we become quiet and do not complain. Antigone breaks the silence—she is the whining, sounding, and human voice in which everything becomes offenbar (obvious). The sounding unravels not so much human emotion as injustices of the law, abuses of power, and the forces of submission that threaten all human voices with silence.28 This is also where the political power of the piece lies: in the question of who is to be seen and how, who is to be heard and how. Therefore, Arendt’s philosophy of the polis and of the sensible aspects of public space, on the one hand, and her ideas about the position of the refugee in modernity, on the other, indicate a way of rereading Antigone along with Sophocles’s later work, Oedipus at Colonus. Oedipus at Colonus poses questions about the conditions and definitions of political life. Sophocles’s

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final work inquires into the dialectics between invisibility and appearance, intimate space and public space, and thinking and acting. Oedipus at Colonus was left incomplete—or at least it was found that way. It has an interesting place in Sophocles’s body of work; whereas no trilogy on Oedipus is left to us, properly speaking, Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus form a kind of trilogy, even if they were written in the “wrong” order and were not performed together.29 Oedipus at Colonus describes what happened in the royal house of Thebes after Oedipus cut out his eyes in Oedipus the King, but before Antigone defies the laws of Creon and buries her brother’s body in Antigone. This means that we may choose to read it as if it is filling in the blanks and giving us a background for the events of Antigone. In addition, Oedipus at Colonus is the tragedy in which Sophocles’s political vision comes across most clearly. Indeed, Oedipus at Colonus stands out as the tragedy which more than any other points to the political consequences of the hiatus between human law and divine law, between the avant-garde freedom of exile and the freedom created in a political community. What is the relation between political life and “life”? In The Promise of Politics, Arendt sees that the most important antagonism in contemporary politics is to be played out between freedom and life: “Contemporary politics is concerned with the naked existence of us all.”30 The best image of what is at stake is to be found in tragedy. The philosophical readings of Sophocles, from Hegel to Luce Irigaray, have largely considered tragedies in terms of isolated plots, looking at Antigone or Oedipus the King in their own right. Oedipus at Colonus, in turn, has rarely been made the object of a philosophical reading, except for a brief mention in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work.31 And yet Oedipus at Colonus puts together pieces from Antigone, laying them out in a new pattern and making a “retroactive” reinterpretation possible.32 Reading Oedipus at Colonus with Hannah Arendt brings to the fore certain powerful aspects of her political philosophy. The tragedy points to an intrinsic relation between lawmaking and the conditioning of political life. Lawmaking enforces the simultaneous exclusion and inclusion of a body. The lawmaker is not intrinsic to the state, as in a modern concept of sovereignty. The lawmaker appears from the outside. In the model of sovereignty, law installs the exception and the foreclosure of the refugee. Sophocles’s tragedy, however, points to the fact that only the refugee may found the law. This is where it becomes congenial with Arendt’s

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philosophy. The refugee not only suggests that states, nations, or people are contingent formations. The existence of refugees also invalidates a system of states and citizenship in which the sovereignty of nations supersedes that of individuals. Oedipus at Colonus is a tragedy of the arche of politics. What is intrinsic to the state and what must remain outside? Outside the city of Athens, in the place from which the Eumenides (the female spirits of the underworld) come, Antigone guides her exiled and blinded father. Having brought a plague to Thebes, he calls himself a ghost, a shadow of his former self. Blindness, in Greek tragedy, is often used as a figure with reversed implications: the blinded cannot see but have the capacity of inner sight and access to inner wisdom. But Oedipus is not just affected by lack of vision; his physical body is deteriorating. Physical disappearance is a figurative transposition of his state in flight. Antigone becomes his eyes, heading toward Athens. We face here an image that reverses Antigone, in which Antigone is challenging the law of Creon, king of Thebes. In Oedipus at Colonus she is guiding her father to the polis of Athens. Rather than challenging a human order, as in the former tragedy, she represents the laws of the city. Dissipating at the horizon, Oedipus reveals his insight into the mythical ground on which the power of Athens will stand: the grave of Oedipus the blind king.33 Oedipus is the foreign body that will found the law, and his self-burial is the prepolitical foundation on which the city of Athens will stand. Antigone returns to Thebes, and the events of Antigone ensue. We are here given some clues to these events. We often interpret Antigone’s reverence for divine laws as if she stands for a principle connected to ancient customs, protecting the family, or respecting the dead. But her sacrifice of her life occurs in the light of a gesture that protects Athens, the city that has received her father. Thebes is an intolerant city, ridden with conflicts. It is not the principle of human law as such that Antigone is turning against, but the raw life of Thebes. Athens stands for a higher political dignity, whereas Thebes is marked by abuse of power and internal conflicts. No dignified life is possible in Thebes. This is heard through the wisdom of Silenus: “not to be born.”34 This is a reading underscored by Arendt’s understanding of Greek law. The relation between Greek and Roman law offers two poles in the identification of political life. For the Romans, lawgiving was a political action,

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praxis, and a part of political culture. Political action is bound up with a concept of legislation and foundation—mythologized through Virgil, which shows that men are “equipped” to reestablish, restore, and remake new beginnings.35 The Roman conception of lawgiving as politics follows the promise of politics in modernity. Through acts of lawgiving, a republic may function without the sanction of a higher law, or a prepolitical establishment.36 If lawgiving must be sanctioned by higher powers, politics is undermined. In substituting political lawgiving for abstract principles derived from Marx or Darwin for instance—principles that may speak of class enemies, natural selection, and so on—certain regimes annihilate the frames that condition political life. The law as seen through its Greek etymology, on the other hand, is a border and has a spatial connotation. For the Greeks, the construction of the law was a question of architecture, of making action. The law was figured as a wall, staking out the limits of the political community.37 Offering the sense of a frame, a law is an institution that may nourish the sense of the present as the past.38 To Arendt, laws may be seen as a construction that helps condition political life, part of the culture of making, or poiesis.39 For Aristotle, politics was a form of making (poiesis) rather than acting (praxis), because in that way “there could be a remedy for the frailty of human affairs.”40 Producing the space that makes politics possible, laws enclosed a city of bodies that in turn produced a plurality of appearances. Arendt was a believer in the political use of lawmaking.41 However, a Greek architectural conception of law underlies Arendt’s phenomenological analysis of plurality. As she famously indicated in The Human Condition “the polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.”42 The architecture of the law produces the space of the in-between. To this extent, laws fulfill a function similar to that of works of art and cultural institutions. When laws are understood as boundaries of the visible, political life is played out in terms of visibility and invisibility. In tragedy, divine laws are the mythical foundations of human law. Antigone calls into question how it is instituted. This calls for a closer examination of the spatial and temporal implications of law.

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THE SPACE OF LAW: INCLUSIONS, EXCLUSIONS Public interaction, ironically, has historically only been open to select groups. As Arendt herself notes, in ancient Greece the artists themselves (with the possible exception of the poet) were excluded from political participation. They were not recognized as citizens.43 In ancient Athens, women or slaves were not able to move freely in the open, nor were they politically represented. The Greek polis, and the Roman res publica, were physical spaces firmly placed within walls and limits, gathering people in enclosed locations. The walls that cut out the public square are both spatial and legal. Public space has always been a selective institution rather than an open res publica. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, women were barred from appearing not only in politics but also on the streets.44 Public space, then, is an institution of selection rather than an open community. This means that the public realm is immersed in an aporia: neither the inclusion nor the idea of publicness and freedom that it promises will ever be realized.45 Even as the public sphere has become virtual, through the use of new technologies, the barriers remain. Publicness constricts its own borders, construing communities with an inside and an outside at the same time. Every form of exclusion correlates to a constitutive deficiency of the political possibilities of public space.46 Arendt’s model of public space has often been criticized for being agonistic, for presuming the participation of equally strong protagonists.47 It appears as if her faith in public space lacks a critical assessment of its history. Who has been excluded, who has been neglected? Who has made his voice heard, who has been silenced? If public space is to assure the conditioning of freedom, must one not also discuss the conditioning of the excluded? However, Arendt’s concept of freedom does not depend on the social conditioning of the public sphere. The notion of the political can never be relegated to social forms of being. The unintended consequence of her stance, however, is that she ontologizes the question of who is to be allowed in the political sphere and who is to be excluded. For instance, since women have historically been mostly dedicated to the labor that maintains life, the division between animal laborans and zōon politikon becomes gendered.48 All that belongs to the maintenance of life seems to be excluded from the political domain.49

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The question of slavery can be seen in this light. Slavery, for Arendt, is not a social but a political condition—understood by the Greeks as a form of victory over corporeal needs. The struggle between slavery and mastery is transposed into labor and action. The laborer is a slave, contrasted with the public sphere of free men.50 Slavery, therefore, is not only a question of repression of individuals and groups or the creation of a subjected being. It is also the making invisible of labor. The conflict lies in the impossibility of defining labor as freedom. Someone who is “free,” then, is someone who is capable of action. This means that the struggle between labor and freedom may be inscribed in the same body. Arendt closes On Revolution with the wisdom of Silenus: “not to be born.”51 Many have remarked on the fact that Arendt is using the wisdom of Silenus in this context.52 Outside of the polity, life fails to acquire its sparkling lights (“ton bion lampron poieisthai”). In encountering a suffering Oedipus, Theseus, the founder of Athens, sees that there are lives that are in fact closer to death. In political life, our actions are tied to the life and actions of others, affecting and moving them.53 There are, however, lives that never touch the political. Sophocles bewails the doom of Oedipus’s family, resounding with the same poeticizing of human, uncanny powers that we encounter in Antigone’s “Hymn to Man”: they are mere life, and thereby also closer to death. In Between Past and Future, Arendt returns to the same places that are addressed by Heidegger in “Hymn to Man,” in which the uncanny dimension of techne is revealed: “Many things are formidable, and none more formidable than man!” The chorus sings that man unravels his own power of destruction in conquering sea and earth with his technology.54 For Arendt, like Heidegger, Greek culture resided on the backbone of both techne and poiesis, recognizing the violence inherent in the techne of agriculture of which the lyric sings. Seen from a Greek perspective, it is difficult to dissociate the question of making from a metaphysical idea of violence.55 Whereas from the perspective of the Romans, culture was a product tended with loving care, for the Greeks it was ridden with violence—because violence was an original life form. Techne and poiesis, whether in the form of politics, art, or agriculture, are accompanied by a form of violence through which man becomes estranged from himself.56 Both Arendt and Heidegger see this.57 But what separates Arendt from Heidegger is that she looks at the Greek conception of culture not from the

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perspective of the violence of metaphysics but rather from the restraint of the law. It was the law and its depiction in art, and not poetry itself, that offered the frame of self-definition of the Greeks.58 The invisible in Antigone appears as “windswept thought” that makes men uncanny.59 However, it is not art as such but the mimesis of lawgiving that conditions the way they see themselves. Whereas all human creation is uncanny to Heidegger, Arendt wishes to distinguish those creations of techne that have a direct bearing on political life. The life of nature is cyclical; it flourishes, fades, and dies. Human beings are not only zoe, or biological life, but also bios, individual life.60 Bios can never be ruled by laws of nature. There is no given definition of what bios might be, what it looks like, or what it will lead to. This is also what makes it the life of politics. In its open character, it is determined by other kinds of law. These are the laws of arche, or new beginnings. This aspect of Arendtian thought, the belief in new beginnings or natality, may sound creative and humanist. However, tragedy brings out what is problematic with bios. Natality and the archein of action is not just a productive factor but also a destabilizing one. The uncanniness of tragedy does not lie in the lyrical exposure of death but in the exposure of new beginnings. The circumvention of law, contrary to what one might believe, does not always protect human beings; it may also serve to expose them. The spatial connotation of Greek lawmaking inevitably leads to a form of exposure of certain individuals as being outside of the law. This not only creates a situation of submission and slavery. It also creates an exposure of certain lives that are not invisible in the literal sense—they appear, but they appear as otherwise, without the value of bios.61 This could be seen not least in the exclusionary politics of the polis, relegating labor to a place secluded from the freedom of political life. As Arendt herself points out in The Human Condition, Aristotle showed human life to be characterized not just by necessities but also by what stretches beyond, toward an irreducible aspect of freedom.62 Bios is qualified life, zoe is apolitical life. However, Antigone and Oedipus prove the potential power associated with zoe. From the position of exile, they will become the protectors of the city of Athens and of the political community. When Arendt chooses to quote Oedipus at Colonus at the closure of her book On Revolution, Oedipus stands not only for the naked life of the exile but also as a protector of political space. When Antigone sacrifices herself

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in the name of divine laws, these laws are not the protectors of the “ethical sphere” or the family, as Hegel has argued. Rather, they are the laws that belong to the city. Political space is instituted by the stranger; the blinded Oedipus sanctions the laws of Athens, presenting us with a myth of a political foundation in which the foreigner is both the origin of the law and its object.63 The tragedy invokes the refugee in the institution of law itself.

THE VANGUARD OF FREEDOM “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man,” which brings up the idea of human life in its abstract form, or as “naked,” further develops “We Refugees,” a short article written for The Menorah Journal in 1943.64 The discussion of the Rights of Man, which was made part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, demonstrates the historical reality of a chilling paradox: the establishment of human rights of the Enlightenment has not served to protect the individual but rather to expose her, beyond the protection of the laws. Human rights and universalist laws were formulated during the same period as the sovereign state, and the capacity of the sovereign state to create and protect its own laws has proven to be more successful than the universalist ideas on human rights that are left outside of the protection of the state.65 The idea of sovereignty has been overtaken by the state. Although the nation-state has proven to be a powerful organization when it comes to protecting its own citizens, those who have not enjoyed the protection of the nation-state have come to be doubly exposed. The human being who is exiled by force and is not recognized as a citizen of any state lacks nationality, and he or she is also exposed as “naked life.” There is a direct link between the suspension of citizenship of the German Jews and the Holocaust.66 However, there is another lesson to be learned from this, which seems to unravel the conflict between citizenship and freedom. Famously, “We Refugees” describes the refugee as the vanguard of the peoples from Europe. Those who are exiled have understood that the history connecting a people with a country or a nation is not written in stone but is changeable and susceptible to revision. Therefore, history can never serve to safeguard a people within the confines of a nation-state. A people may have been protected by a nation’s borders, but this does not make that people’s citizenship

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a natural facet of that nation. The refugee who was forced away during the European crisis of the 1940s merely gave a preview of a condition that was to strike other people. Undoing the ties between sovereignty and the nation-state, between people and history, between destiny and origin, the exiled unraveled the contingent nature of relations that had hitherto appeared to be naturalized.67 Whereas the idea of sovereignty inscribes freedom in the idea of the state, the nation-state redefines that idea according to certain restrictions with regard to its inhabitants. Whereas the idea of a people is tied to a history that often binds it to a certain place or nation, the nation-state may easily undo that bond according to its own constitution. And whereas the nation-state may understand itself in mythical terms of creation, that myth may easily be undone or evaporate due to political will. Tragedy points to these contingencies. Oedipus at Colonus points to the hiatus between the avant-garde freedom of the exile and the freedom offered by law. In her book on totalitarianism, Arendt shows that the Rights of Man do not define the essence of humanity. Humanity cannot be essentialized. Instead, the undoing of rights has produced a conception of what is not human. Arendt talks about these lives as “rightless.” There is no law that would acknowledge their existence.68 This applies to the refugee, or the stateless person that we would call “without papers” today. Slaves had a place in society, although this place was relegated to the invisibility of labor. The slave was not exposed as “abstract nakedness.”69 The condition of the refugee has disproven the assumption that human rights have the capacity to protect humans in a state of exposure: “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”70 What the rightless lose in their statelessness is not freedom but a right to live: “If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and the inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the same situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”71 This quotation points to the problem: a human being deprived of humanity is something that the idea of sovereignty, which equates citizenship with rights, has helped produce. In Germany of the 1930s, the Jewish population was deprived of citizenship so that it was also possible to haunt

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and annihilate them. They were exposed, beyond their identity as citizens, as naked. This shows that natural law, or the idea that the political community may be founded on a basic law such as the prohibition of killing or stealing, is incapable of facing the challenges surrounding modern lawmaking.72 Any state that founds its law on a “superlaw”—evoking nature, God, or the rule of an abstract concept such as the proletariat—may reduce the human who is “just” life to naked life. This in turn serves the creation of appearances that become reduced to reified categories of difference. Therefore, in The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt formulates the principle that human rights ought never to be founded on a specific content but rather on “the right to have rights,” the right to belong to an organized political community.73 The effort here is to construe a notion of the political that is independent of humans. In the end, also, one sees the logic in Arendt’s refusal of any notion of specific subjectivities, identities, or groups as the ground of the political. In Homo Sacer, Agamben has proven Arendt right by showing that biological life has been separated from politics and in turn made into the very aim of politics. His conclusions are, however, wholly different from Arendt’s. Bare life, to Agamben, is the object of politics in modernity, captured in a zone between zoe and bios, between natural and human life. Bare life is not the life of the subject of oppression, nor is it the same thing as Arendt’s “naked life”—a life without rights, excluded through the principles of sovereignty.74 It is precisely this exceptional state that has perpetuated itself in modernity: the camp as the end model of biopolitics and the extermination of life as its object. The ambivalent status that human life has with regard to the law-creating exception—the law will both include and exclude—will, in the end, give rise to the strategies of biopolitics as an inevitable consequence of the logic of sovereignty.75 In Agamben’s view, Arendt was not aware of the biopolitical implications of her own philosophy. So why did she not end her critique of modernity with the somber prediction of the victory of biopolitics over the open life of the polity? Agamben speculates that it would perhaps be too horrifying to draw the conclusions that he himself does towards the end of Homo Sacer. Jacques Rancière, in turn, sees the reason as philosophical: Arendt is, if not a biopolitician in disguise, then at least an essentialist through her insistence on equating “the political” with “the human.” In “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” he denounces what he calls Arendt’s

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“archipolitical” position. In ontologizing the question of the political, by equating the political subject with the subject of the public realm, Arendt fails to recognize that democracy is a kind of subjectivation. Democracy lives through the kind of dissensus that creates subjectivation. It arises in processes through which new political subjects come into being. Rancière argues that in ontologizing a radical difference between public and private and in refusing the relevance of the social, Arendt constructs her public realm in the vein of consensus rather than dissensus. As his example, he takes the discussion of “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where Arendt deplores the emergence of the rightless beyond the boundaries of the city-state. Arendt’s logic is a vicious circle in which the idea of the Rights of Man relies on an ontological understanding of the human animal. We must instead de-ontologize the human in order to think another political subject, who is also the subject of the Rights of Man.76 But if democracy is defined as subjectivation, how can we avoid relegating the political to a social sphere in which subjects are identified according to gender, ethnic group, class, and so on? This is precisely what Arendt wants to avoid. Her definition of the public sphere serves to exceed that aspect of agency.77 The public sphere does not define subjectivities but serves to produce appearances. The categorization of these appearances as subjectivities, identities, or social groups is secondary to their production. Arendt does not put into focus the making of political subjects but the conditions under which appearances interact with thinking and acting. Public space offers the conditions for the making of political subjects. This can be done in better or worse ways, ways that are more truthful or more just, ways that are more egalitarian or less so. What matters here is less the ideals of democracy than the making real of reality—the differentiation, individuation, and creation of individuals and objects that appear, that take on weight and texture. This is why Iris Marion Young’s suggestion that we need stories to accompany identities makes sense. Political identities are formed according to a certain demand for rights, and these demands can only arise if one takes the story of specific experiences into account. In Young’s deliberative model of public space, a political identity can only be represented through a language that describes its particularity.78 Only in public space can antagonisms arise in the form of appearances or rights be claimed. This does not mean that invisible kinds of antagonisms are left

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unaccounted for. The political is not ontologized through a specific definition of “the human.” Political agency can only be talked about in terms of differentiation. Again, the concentration camp is the extreme end of a political techne that brings out the radicalization of Arendt’s anti-essentialist political ontology. The camps encompass an all-or-nothing logic that undoes all previously known moral or political standards. On the one hand, the camps incorporate an “undetermined infinity of forms of human living together.” On the other hand, the lives in the camps are headed toward an “inexorable doom” that has much vaster consequences than the death count of bodies. The concentration camp “stands outside of life and death.”79 It is a consequence of the objectivation of human life instituted by Enlightenment thought—defining human life and immobilizing the production of plurality. In postwar Europe, politics has shown itself as an exterminator of life, demonstrated not least with Auschwitz, the atom bomb, and other forms of genocide that took place without intervention by the international community.80 Arendt may well have been shying away from biopolitical visions because they were too horrifying, but to her, the notion of naked life is irreducible to victimhood or oppression. A life stripped of rights is a consequence of the ideological universalism of the Enlightenment. This means that the notions of “the human,” “life,” and “the political” need to be reworked and renegotiated. Famously, the argument of The Human Condition is that we need to reconsider these concepts according to the categories made available to us by the Greeks and the Romans. This means that the function of the law is central. The law sets out the borders of the political, but the law in itself is not what politics is about. Rights are also not what politics is about. Politics, rather, is about making visible. The subjection processes of politics are secondary to the processes creating spaces of appearance.81 Again, one must read Arendt retroactively on this. Beginning with her writings on Zionism, and continuing through The Origins of Totalitarianism, she has proceeded step by step in her understanding of the phenomenological conditions of politics. Laws produce spaces. The exile or refugee is the witness to this, as well as the proof, the promise of another space to arise. The divine laws, which Antigone famously claims, are not laws that are compatible with human ones. They do not compete with other principles,

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in the sense that one could claim merely one or the other. Instead, they are the laws protecting the laws. They do not claim the human as their object. This does not mean that they are natural laws, superlaws, or metaphysical principles. The laws protecting the laws, or divine laws, would adhere to the same principle as “the right to have rights,” the principle replacing the notion of human rights. Both refrain from making claims about the content of laws. Instead, they speak of the necessity of lawmaking, making it a political act.

THE MYTHICAL HIATUS OF COLONIZATION If one looks at The Life of the Mind, a piece is added to the idea of exile as a kind of historical potentiality, provocative, through a kind of mythical colonization. The potentiality connected to the state of exile is a new freedom, created beyond the Enlightenment idea of sovereignty. Those who are exiled serve not only as an avant-garde but also as the vanguard, a group that appears to be naked and deprived of their home country. They also are carrying the promise of a new order in this condition. The refugee, sent into exile, must develop another principle for rights than those of the sovereign nation-state. For Arendt, the exiled, the refugee that nobody even wants to oppress, is not only a victim but also the avant-garde of his or her people, and a potentially revolutionary force. If we read her text on human rights together with Oedipus at Colonus, we are offered another key to this discussion.82 The refugee is not only appealing to ready-made laws; he is also a lawgiver. Here, the foundation of law produces a double view of the refugee. On the one hand, the exiled refugee is exposed and unprotected, living a naked existence that is threatened by annihilation. On the other hand, Arendt sees a politically powerful force connected to the state of exile, a kind of resistance to empire. Imperialism—later developed into what Arendt calls totalitarianism—is proven in its threat to extinguish the plurality and differentiation that, for Arendt, is the very core of political society. Life outside of the polity is not simply the life of the victim but rather is another life, a life foreclosed from the ruling definition of what is to count as human. It reveals a contingency that opens for futures of other kinds of humanity, and other kinds of life.

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Roman lawmaking is a political act, properly speaking. Roman laws are conceived of as part of the negotiations of the polity, conceived in a context of culture, plurality, and other laws. Greek lawmaking, at least as Arendt conceives it through the tale of Oedipus at Colonus, lacks body and lacks res publica. It is conceived of in a prepolitical modus as the production of space, through the presentation of a wall or barrier, and it is conceived of in a form of a new beginning; the law is presented by the foreigner. Oedipus and Antigone are not bodies excluded by the law. They are foreign bodies, bringing the law to the city into which they are entering. It is clear that Arendt saw Sophocles’s account of Oedipus as an example of Greek lawgiving, nomos. Thus, it is not the case that the exiled are simply excluded from the law, in the Greek perspective. Instead, the foreign body makes the law, performing a simultaneous act of inclusion and exclusion.83 This concept of law makes the process of colonization a naturalized part of lawmaking, creating a much more fluid relation between colonizing processes and exile than modern conceptions of sovereignty would ever recognize.84 One could perhaps see this fluid relation, and the Greek relation between law and space, in the shadow of the politics of Roman law. It offers, if not an alternative, then at least a perspective on constitutional foundationalism. The event of Roman lawmaking, which was also the model for the constitutio libertatis of the American Revolution, is a founding act in which the authority of the law “develops its own stability and permanence”—the Roman word for founding is derived from conditor, which is “preserving” and “funding” at the same time.85 The American Revolution derived from its colonizing history—the search for a new land and new forms of community. Such colonizing movements did not travel with theoretical maps of new constitutions in hand. The need for a Greco-Roman perspective on founding laws also can be seen in Arendt’s engagement with Zionism. Vigorously defending the need for a Jewish army in the early 1930s, Arendt later began to doubt the self-evidence of a sovereign Jewish state. This, however, had less to do with a lack of belief in the possibilities of a Jewish state than with the victory of nationalism over the necessity of reaching a broad understanding with the multiple Arab states that were to accommodate a new state. Relying instead on foreign powers from outside the region, the new Jewish state forfeited its chances to achieve such an understanding on its own accord. Certain that a new Jewish state that was forced into a nationalist position

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would spark a new wave of anti-Semitism, Arendt’s alternative may have seemed naïve, but her observations were still prophetic: instead of one “tragic conflict,” she argues, we will see as many as there are nations.86 Her understanding of founding laws and new beginnings, then, is to be contrasted both with principles of sovereignty and with the legacy of nineteenth-century nationalism. Indicating an intrinsic relation between exile and foundation, tragedy points to the hidden logic of Arendt’s argument on new beginnings, in which the exile forces new foundations and new forms of life. In tragedy, action knows no consequences.87 This is the spirit of archein: the freedom of our actions lies not in constituting the new, but in not knowing. The tragic agent is also a person beyond limits and beyond control, as we can see at the end of Antigone: “Our downfall can become a deed if we hurl words against it even as we perish.”88 Tragic action, in this sense, is clearly to be read against the backdrop of political freedom, indicating both its necessity and its destabilizing potential. However, action is not the free beginning of just anything, anywhere. The Life of the Mind, as well as the chapters on law in On Revolution, end with two myths of state founding, proclaiming that these define the political life of the West. These are the Hebrew myth and the Roman myth, the biblical story of the exodus of the Israeli tribes from Egypt and Virgil’s story of Aeneas’s wanderings until the establishment of Rome. Both of these founding legends bear witness to the birth of a political community through the formation of a “we,” born from a love of freedom that is inspired, on the one hand, by the liberation from oppression, and on the other, by the establishment of a new kind of stable, tangible reality.89 Both of these founding legends depict an exodus from slavery and a move into a new world of freedom. But there is no continuity between the escape from oppression and the founding of a new state. “The founding legends, with their hiatus between liberation and the constitution of freedom . . . point to the abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect.” The founding legends that end The Life of the Mind do not tell only the story of liberation, such as Aeneas coming to the Tiber and founding Rome. They also tell of a hiatus between the state of exile and colonization, which is symptomatic of the story of Western politics. Liberation and freedom are asymmetrical categories: “Liberation,

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though it may be freedom’s conditio sine qua non, is never the conditio per quam that causes freedom.” Liberation abolishes oppression but does not cause freedom: “There is nothing left for the beginner to hold on to.” At this point, we are facing the unthinkable core of natality and archein, which both reflect the tragic impossibility of instituting freedom through acts aiming toward liberation. The temporality of such action is as “unthinkable” as that of an “absolute end,” since the idea of creating a political landscape of freedom as a creatio ex nihilo would need to do so without world, without tradition, without culture, and without any preexisting laws.90 From this point of nothingness we begin to understand the paradoxes of freedom inherent in Arendtian thought: freedom is not existential, it is not to be thought as a creatio ex nihilo. It is thought through a horizon of plurality, through which things, objects, laws, and other lives necessarily impinge upon our choices, thoughts, and actions. For that reason, the mythic conceptions of lawmaking, as found in the references to tragedy, the tales of Virgil, and the Bible are telling. The Aeneid, Arendt argues, is particular in that it does not tell of colonization, unlike the tales of Homer; the foundation was there to remain.91 Homer’s epics tell of a foundation free of tyranny.92 In tragedy, however, there is no “pure” conception of lawmaking; the idea of state foundation not only represents a new beginning but also is tied to experiences of loss and degradation, not to mention the violence of colonization. Exile and colonization complement each other in mythical accounts of state foundation. The refugee represents an “avant-garde”—confronted with the threat of a permanent homelessness, but also with possibilities that open up beyond the borders of existing nations. The moment of colonization opens up an abyss of freedom. The abyss, however, is sometimes cracked open through violence, through the suppression of another people or another land. The violence of this suppression is made invisible in the mythology of the “avant-garde.” In myths of state foundation such as the Aeneid we are rarely offered the scenes of violence that must forge every new state foundation. This is what separates tragedy from accounts that merely flatter the “avant-garde.” The abyss of freedom also opens up in the “actions in concert” of the age of revolution.93 Here, Arendt speaks more freely of the relation between violence and new beginnings. In the necessity of recreating freedom, we are forced to confront, over and over again, the shock inherent in the politics of archein. It is a kind of ground zero in space and time, a “no-longer”

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and “not-yet,” a hiatus and a rupture. This is also where we see the relation between revolution and tragedy. In a tragedy such as Oedipus at Colonus, the foundation of the law is only ever to be understood through a recuperative, retroactive invocation of the divine. In revolution, we see the same moment of arche repeated. A revolution realizes itself in and through a constitution that is never simply repeating an “old” dream of freedom. The act of the constitution founds a new kind of freedom.94 But this can barely ever come to pass without a legacy of violence that will continue to haunt the new republics. Resorting to the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Herman Melville, Arendt illustrates the fate of the “good” revolution: Billy Budd, the Christlike hero, introduces the metaphysical principle that will enforce the tragedy of the failure of the “good” to prevail against “evil.”95 The truly revolutionary power of arche, then, does not simply lie in the possibility of the abyss of freedom instituting a new republic. Instead, it lies in a transformative power. In this, Arendt’s argument is similar to that of Rousseau: what is important is not the kind of constitution that is founded but the transformative power of the act of constitution itself. For Rousseau, man becomes free in and through a plural society in which we are also declared as free; this will create another consciousness, another judgment, another kind of thinking that will also see us radically transformed.96 For Arendt, however, the acts of lawmaking and of founding are not in themselves guarantees of freedom, as her critique of sovereignty shows, as does her critique of the belief in the institution of a wholly new freedom through acts of colonization or revolution. Here, we find again the inexorable aesthetic strain in Arendt’s thought: neither law nor state foundations are wholly thought through abstract models. They are conceived, instead, through tragedy and literary myths. The literary sources are not only there to supplement her theory. They also are more than pedagogical tools. In referring to Oedipus, Antigone, Aeneas, and Moses, Arendt’s account of lawmaking makes apparent the hiatus that other accounts of state foundation serve to hide.

COLONIZATION AS CRIME Arendt gave voice to racist attitudes in many respects, denigrating Black Power, Frantz Fanon, the struggles of the African American

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population, and so on.97 She showed little appreciation for Fanon’s writings and little understanding of postcolonial issues. As Richard King has shown, it is remarkable that Arendt bypassed the Haitian Revolution. King points to the ambivalent status of Arendt’s account of the relation between imperialism and racism. On the one hand, Arendt is one of the few traditional Western thinkers to have seen a connection about which only postcolonial critics such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire were clear. On the other hand, Arendt fails to recognize the importance of the Haitian Revolution, which also would have illuminated the importance of race for the other revolutions.98 Her mythical tales of foundation and exile tend to brush over with a swift hand the actual consequences of colonization at the other end. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, there is but one mention of the cost in human lives of American colonization. In a footnote, Arendt asserts that in America and Australia colonization resulted only in “short periods of cruel liquidation,” because the original population was so weak.99 If we go through Arendt’s work, we notice a differentiated concept of colonization. There is a “bad” colonizer—the imperialist—for whom race operates as the natural law instituting a new foundation, and a “good” colonizer, operating in the hiatus of freedom. Not all human beings forced into exile will confront the abyssal event of foundation. Not all exiles are refugees. In Arendt’s writings, we also find those who willingly left their homeland in order to find a brighter future, sometimes bringing with them all the resentment of those who used to count as “pariahs” in their land of origin. The disaster of African colonization does not fit the mythical foundation tales. The tale of imperialism that fills The Origins of Totalitarianism, and which shows us that colonialism is the beginning of modern ideological terror, is told mainly through the atrocity of the Boers, who represent the violence of colonization in general. It is unlikely that Arendt thought that other forms of colonization were more benign. However, she sees a crucial difference between the American colonizers and the Boers. The Boers lack experience of the hiatus of the archein, or freedom, or the originary quest for liberation that marks the Americans. Thus the Boers, in Arendt’s account, are not political exiles, or refugees, but are intent on nothing but exploitation. The atrocities in Africa are explained in a terminology beyond politics. In Arendt’s story, the Boers never built any political society but only settlements for those who “escaped the reality of civilization.”100 They quickly became a useless and parasitic group, installing a Kurtzlike rule

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under which Darwin’s teachings were transformed into natural law—a law which meant nothing but the deprivation of freedom for everyone.101 Conditioning, in Arendt, takes place not only through objects and things, or monuments or cities, but also through laws. Whereas the mythic tales of exile and colonization pass through the hiatus set between liberation and freedom, imperialism replaces founding laws with natural laws. The law of the imperialist colonizer, like the law of the exiled in Greek tragedy, is represented through a foreign body. But rather than implementing a law that both includes and excludes, which is the logic of the founding law in the ancient Greek mode, imperialist laws instituted distinctions between human and subhuman.102 Imperialist violence operated in the form of a naturalization of distinctions, such as racial ones. Racism was a prerequisite for colonization. In Arendt’s account, colonial violence legitimized itself through a violent separation between nature and culture that must be understood as metaphysical. It imploded in the face of its makers.103 There is an intrinsic relation between a racism based on natural law and the imperialist reluctance to accept a plurality. If we read Arendt’s account of imperialism against the background of the Holocaust, the posited relation between violence and metaphysics becomes clearer. As we have seen, the goal of dictatorial regimes was built on “superlaws” set in place in order to represent human beings “as if all of humanity were just one individual.”104 The same naturalization of “the human,” combined with racial differentiation, is at work in imperialist movements. Arendt sees a relation between imperialism and racism precisely through an inherent, shared metaphysical urge. Philosophy’s reluctance to accept facticity has produced philosophies of human self-conditioning, from Hegel to Marx to Georges Sorel, which belie the factor of plurality. They all invoke a certain violence, because their conception of man is inherently metaphysical. For Arendt, philosophies that believe in a metaphysical self-conditioning of man carry within that belief a remnant of original violence. Therefore—in distinction from Jean-Paul Sartre or, in a certain manner, Fanon—Arendt will not demand the death of Western man as a simultaneous form of retaliation and liberation from racism and imperialism. It may well be that Western man, if we look upon him in his imperialist mode, embodies an ideology that has caused not only the destruction of others but also the destruction of a dignified idea of man himself.105 But for Arendt, any kind of homogenous conception of man must be decomposed.

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It must be replaced by a radical, antimetaphysical stance of plurality. Sartre’s seeming radicalness only confirms an overarching political dogma shared by, for instance, Carl Schmitt: “Man is not but makes himself.”106 Here, man, in a certain way, must be remade—and yet the same “man” comes back as “himself.” Such circular logic must be disrupted. It is clear that in The Origins of Totalitarianism the demarcation between culture and nature is set between what is to count as political or apolitical. Oedipus’s law is political; Kurtz’s in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is not. Kurtz is the representative of a settlement rule that sets itself up through the arbitrary demarcation between nature and culture—extinguishing the parts of the population that were too close to “nature.” Here, the word race becomes operative; it is a concept used in the service of annihilation, and it is used in order to obliterate forms of life that were not recognized as such by the colonizers.107 The law is no longer about politics or about forms of human life but about what is to count as human life as such. It is interesting to read Arendt’s ambiguous colonial history through its logic of political appearances; the tactics of the colonizers were to make invisible, dehumanize, extinguish, and make perish. In Heart of Darkness, a colonial story revealing as a mythical delusion the abyss of freedom involved in state foundation, Kurtz is a “pariah,” creating not a new beginning but an imaginary despotism in a new environment. These colonizers are “hollow to the core” and nihilists to their bones.108

RITES OF ART: THE POSTPOLITICAL Let us recall Arendt’s assertions, noted at the beginning of this chapter, that the political originates in the “prepolitical data of biological life” and finds its end in the “postpolitical, [the] highest possibility of human destiny,” which is freedom.109 We have used tragedy in order to illuminate the core of these claims—pointing to the fact that in tragedy, as in Arendt’s philosophy, there is no metaphysical core. Tragedy serves to produce the appearances of lives, whether they are exposed and excluded through the lawmaking of the city and whether they belong to the subjugated citizens or to the rulers. In order to understand the nature of Greek lawmaking as a possible account of how lives are produced and made visible in tragedy, we have to forego the philosophy of tragedy that has clung to ideas only.

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In the writings of Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, and other exponents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the philosophy of tragedy has focused on text rather than on bodily appearances. With Nietzsche as the great exception, philosophy has observed the dialectics of ethical and political conflict and rarely has considered the kinesthetic or musical qualities in tragedy, or the relation between appearances and the nonappearing. However, the political impact of performance cannot be dissociated from aesthetic qualities. Originally, tragic play was conceived of as moving and sounding. For the chorus, tragic scripts were made for singing, and sometimes also for dancing.110 There is anecdotal evidence that this applied also to individuals. The chorus and the actors played in relation to each other, so that song and dance emphasized tension. It appears that Sophocles intended dramatic moments to be highlighted through sound and movement, not just through spoken verse. For example, when Antigone contemplates her own death, this may have involved her dancing. In the final part of Antigone, Creon and Antigone appear to have been dancing as she is led away to the tomb, because this is a combination of a funeral and a bridal procession.111 We do not know what such a dance actually looked like. But there is reason to recall that the performance of tragedy was part of its conception; the relation between appearance and nonappearance that is set into play is conceived not only through lyrics but also through bodily action. The impact of action is underscored through onstage movements that create a tension between the visible and the invisible. A burial rite, for instance, involves the questioning of several lines of demarcation: between life and death, and between citizenship and exile, but also the determination of gender, which in tragedy is rarely a question of biology but rather one of social status, symbolic value, theatrical style, theatrical emotion, and so forth.112 In this way, the question of appearance is crucial. The dead body cannot appear, but it is made part of the invisible ground through which tragic action will emerge. Nicole Loraux has defined tragedy as “antipolitical,” not in the sense that it is not concerned with politics but rather in the sense that it refuses the ideology of the city-state, striving to be an order “at peace with itself.”113 It is precisely in the tensions created in the scenic aspects of tragedy that Loraux observes such antipolitical aspects. The chorus is neither part of the citizenry nor wholly separated from it, as can be seen from the way it moves between theater and orchestra. In

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many ways, tragedy works through divisions and antagonisms rather than the acceptance of democratic norms. This is not least true in the display of corpses, which are situated at the intersection between tragic representations that appear repugnant and religious practices with which the audience can identify. According to Loraux, tragedy never produced any form of civic consensus.114 If tragedy points to the prepolitical conditions of political space, then contemporary art points to aspects that, for Arendt, would perhaps be postpolitical. Rite as an action that challenges the demarcation between individual and society is also explored in the contemporary tradition of performance art.115 In the early 1970s, Ana Mendieta created her “earthbody” sculptures, exploring exile as mode of being in relation to earth. Mendieta showed works that, in a variety of versions, including photography and film, depicted her buried body being slowly uncovered from beneath soil and stones. In some images, the burial takes place in a desert landscape, the female body appearing as an object of a symbolic sacrifice. The rite is performed at the demarcation line between life and death but also at the crossing between the status of exile and that of citizenship. On the one hand, Mendieta used her own body to enact the violence of her art. Squeezing herself against pieces of glass, covering herself with the blood of slaughtered birds, burying herself under stones, she used a sacrificial and ritual aesthetic to elaborate the social, economic, and political status of exile. Mendieta’s fascination with soil, with the body as part of the earth, with burial and resurrection all had to do with the status of the exiled body. For her, that exile was double. First, the female body can be regarded as victimized through a kind of social exile. Her own status, having arrived in the United States as a refugee, was also an intrinsic part.116 Mendieta’s work created an uncertainty about how we are to understand the line between belonging and not-belonging, death and resurrection. In this way, her work acts at the same oscillating point of destabilization as the tragedy of Antigone. Her art is a modern-world exploration of the limits within Sophoclean tragedy.

5

COMEDY IN THE DARK ARENDT, CHAPLIN, AND ANTI-SEMITISM

CHAPLIN AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY CONSCIOUSNESS TRAGEDY DEALS

with suffering. Comedy does too. The difference, to Arendt, is that comedy is more serious. The most traumatic moment in modern European history, the Nazi takeover of Germany, could not have been made a subject of tragedy; it needed the deflation of comedy. Perhaps Arendt is not known as a philosopher of fun. But the power of laughter and comedy comes to the fore on numerous occasions in her texts. Her appreciation of comedy is, in fact, one of the things that sets her apart from Martin Heidegger. Laughter, she says in the famous speech that took apart Heidegger’s failed politics, is more powerful than truth.1 This is why Arendt considers Charlie Chaplin’s cinematic artwork to be “one of the most singular products of modern art.”2 So where does its power lie? It is perhaps not by chance that Arendt invokes laughter as a way of countering ideologies of terror, analyzed already in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her comment on Chaplin is an intriguing exception to an otherwise stern attitude toward the analysis of particular works of art—a case in which she actually engages in an ongoing discussion. Chaplin has played a pivotal role in twentieth-century consciousness, not just as a representative of Hollywood or as a comedian but also as a figure incorporating the antagonisms between anti-Semitism, class struggle, Nazism, and communism. In Modern Times (1936), escaping work in the factory, Chaplin finds

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himself (by chance) leading a workers’ demonstration and is subsequently thrown into prison. Chaplin is a revolutionary by default. In City Lights (1931) Chaplin plays a failing worker and subsequent tramp, mistaken for a wealthy man by a blind girl. And in The Great Dictator (1940) Chaplin uses his signature moustache and all to transform himself into Hitler. Here, there is at least some truth to the Marxist idea of tragedy turning into farce: in The Great Dictator, the funny-looking little man becomes Hitler, although we are no longer sure, perhaps, where the comedy went. In Modern Times Chaplin incarnates with visual acuity what Arendt would subsequently call animal laborans; his is a factory worker turned by force into an extension of technology. It is not by chance that she perceives Chaplin as one of the greatest artists of our time.3 The images have stuck; they symbolize human life as a function of technology, an automaton of repetitive movements. Chaplin is the visual incarnation of Arendt’s critique of a life spilt through labor, in which action is transformed into maintenance and the time of arche is immobilized, caught in a wheel of labor with no escape. Force-fed by a machine and stuck under the gaze of an industrial board that wishes to maximize efficiency at the plant, Chaplin is humiliated and injured. Returning to the factory belt, he is caught in its clockwork and becomes a soft human figure battered by the internal mechanisms of a machine. Chaplin’s body, revolving through the cogwheels, offers a tragicomic image of the predicament of animal laborans: determined by repetition, instrumentalization, automatization, and loss of agency. As a conditioned being, animal laborans is transformed by a development of technology that has taken over more and more of his or her tasks, and then finally, as is literally the case with Chaplin, his or her body. Rather than attempting to keep the line of demarcation between nature and culture at all costs, man has begun “creating” or mimicking natural processes through automatization. It is not simply an industrial process; it is a whole new kind of predicament. In this predicament, the “world” of appearances has been replaced by the nonappearing, and the time of action has been replaced by the cyclical. This means that the world of action and appearances has been extinguished by the second nature that is developed through the increasing governance of machines. Rather than offering permanence, usefulness, or perhaps even beauty, things are now made for consumption. The product has become inseparable from the process of production. From offering the

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kind of permanence that conditioned culture and human life, things have now come to promote the indifference of a cyclical machinery. Automatization carries with it all the known insignia of alienation—a loss of meaning, sense of time, and familiarity. In a consumer economy, consumption and the process of production obliterate the core that has safeguarded the possibility of “world”—the value of permanence. This gives a new role to the kind of things that do partake in the sphere of permanence: artworks. As we have seen in chapter 2, aesthetic works are constituent of culture rather than a reflection of it, and they offer a kind of permanence. This is so not only because of their material steadfastness (because not all works are material), but also because of the way in which they inform and help shape everyday practices of judgment. In “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt makes it clear that art resists consumer society by providing sustenance.4 This is not a reflection that brings us back to conservative ideals of cultural values. Sustenance in itself is an “empty” value that does not promote either nationalism or conservatism. Cultural objects are altered in mass production, “rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies.” The result is a kind of destruction. Many artists survive the oblivion that may come with death, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”5 Such sarcasm has more to do with the conservatism of Arendt’s own taste than with the consequences inherent in her theory of art. Arendt’s reflections on Chaplin link up with the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Walter Benjamin had already written a couple of short texts on Chaplin in 1929.6 Benjamin’s reading, in turn, relies on that of Philippe Soupault, for whom Chaplin is the image of an English office worker, a new kind of flaneur.7 Chaplin, Benjamin says, is the living embodiment of Goethe’s aperçu: a kind of flash in which a totality is seen in a small phenomenon. The aperçu does not necessarily convey a truth, but the impression nonetheless sticks.8 Benjamin makes it an aspect of Chaplin’s comic genius: Chaplin is not simply a funny character; he is also mankind, noble in his poverty, somehow revealing man in his humility. In the words of Goethe, “Man would not be the noblest creature on earth if he were not too noble for it.”9 Benjamin has discovered the signifying power of Chaplin in appealing to the concept of the aperçu. It does not matter whether the analysis of Chaplin is valid; what matters is the power of the figure of Chaplin.

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The idea that Chaplin’s cinematic art revolves around the aperçu of the funny-looking little man, as a figure of mankind, was widespread. In the Weimar Republic, Chaplin’s reception was both anticipatory and enthusiastic; they perceived Chaplin to be much more than a comedian.10 Siegfried Kracauer, in his reviews of Chaplin from the early 1930s, saw the figure of the Little Tramp as human in his attempts to grapple with a world that protrudes in its most grim inhumanity.11 The laughter provoked by this was a subject of contestation in a famous exchange between Adorno and Benjamin. Benjamin regarded the laughter of the audience at Chaplin’s films as the result of a positive, collective experience in which the guilty feeling of laughing at others is overcome. For Benjamin, “Chaplin has turned to the most international and revolutionary affect of the masses, laughter.”12 Adorno, in turn, retorted that the laughter of the audience at the cinema is anything but revolutionary. It is bourgeois sadism. Whereas Kracauer celebrates Chaplin, Adorno sees Modern Times as anything but avant-garde: “One need only have heard the laughter at the film to know what is actually happening.”13 Chaplin’s comic genius derides the revolutionary aspect of the film. Laughter, Adorno and Horkheimer complain in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” is stealing our happiness; the culture industry is constant derision.14 Laughter is the stock by which we measure the littleness of our lives, where cheap comedy replaces aesthetic sensibility. Ironically, Adorno was one of the few intellectuals ever to be the object of Charlie Chaplin’s mimicry. When they met at a dinner party in Malibu (where they both lived in the 1940s), Adorno unknowingly attempted to shake the hand of a war hero, which turned out to be prosthetic. Chaplin immediately saved the situation by mimicking Adorno’s astonishment at feeling cold metal instead of warm flesh.15 The description of Chaplin, Jürgen Habermas explains, is about Adorno himself and not about Chaplin. Not attempting to “jump over his own shadow,” Adorno was quite aware of the remnants of bourgeois subjectivity that had stuck to him.16 But the anecdote illustrates something more serious as well. Adorno finds Chaplin a menacing genius. There is something in Chaplin that suggests “not that he is a victim but rather, menacingly, that he would seek victims, pounce on them, tear them apart.”17 What Adorno saw was the thin line that could only be discerned when the Little Tramp metamorphosed into Hitler. The little man all too easily became the Führer. When Chaplin made The Great Dictator, no one was laughing at Nazism. But the thin line remained to be explored.

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THE REMEDY OF LAUGHTER In “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” from 1944, authored close in time to her text “We Refugees,” Arendt’s interpretation of Chaplin uses Jewish experience to counter and resist racist attitudes (the Jew as “pariah”). Chaplin’s way is one of four examples. The other ways are represented by Bernard Lazare, an anarchist deploying the method of “conscious pariah” in the Dreyfus affair, and the originator of the phrase “J’accuse”; and Franz Kafka, whose fatalism Arendt inserted into a context of guilty innocence. “The Jew as Pariah” is a text that in many ways seems to deflect from the Arendtian path. Like The Origins of Totalitarianism as well as “We Refugees” it indicates how the universalist ideal of assimilation has collapsed. But two things are invoked that stride away from “We Refugees.” First is the notion of identity—the Jew is not overtly invoked in “We Refugees.” In the text, Arendt describes a form of collectivity that is based not on identity but rather on the contingent arche of polis. Second, we find art. Whereas beauty—the form of pleasure that offered the measure of universality in Kantian aesthetics—has failed, art still remains, though displaced to another level. In Chaplin’s comedy we find, after all, the remedy of laughter. In Kafka’s tales, after all, we find the remedy of escape. It is not the case that art has failed on all accounts. It has only failed to the extent that it has attempted to “assimilate,” or adapt to ideals of universality. Before entering on the analysis of Arendt’s attitudes toward “schlemielhood” and her reflections on identity and art in “The Jew as Pariah,” we must revisit Gershom Scholem’s accusation that Arendt showed a lack of love for the Jewish people. One of the moist poignant moments in the biography of Hannah Arendt occurs in this exchange of letters. After reading her book on the Eichmann trial, Eichmann in Jersualem, Scholem explains what he finds so offensive: the heartless tone in which it is written. You show nothing, he says to Arendt, of the love for your own people that the Jews call Ahabath Israel. Like so many leftist European intellectuals, you know nothing about it.18 This is a famous passage, and it captures the mood surrounding the publication of the book. Arendt’s response, also, is famous. To be Jewish is, for Arendt a given fact, a matter of physei. It is meaningless to love a feature of oneself, or for that matter, to simply love oneself. But more important, perhaps, is that Arendt

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declares the love of a people to be, indeed, meaningless.19 This is based on an insight that is declared quite often in her work: love is never to be used for political purposes.20 For Arendt, there was every reason to be wary of symbols of political love. In his eighteenth-century tractate, The Education of the Human Race, Gotthold Lessing, argued that love is not the end point or the goal of the being of a community. It is rather the beginning, the original point through which one can see the circles of history develop, from individual education toward communal revelation. However, such love cannot be conceived of in affirmative terms. It must always be related to its origins. It is no coincidence, he writes, that Christianity was born out of Judaism, a faith whose historical foundation he sees in the very prohibition against religion. The Egyptians forbade their slaves to believe in any gods, because in this way they could suppress them with reference to a higher justice. The belief in One God was in this way the immediate result of suppression. Having been excluded from the communal belief system in plural gods, the Jews rose as a people in the belief in one only. In other words, rather than rising as a people loved by God, the people rose against a prohibition. Lessing wrote his text as modern anti-Semitism was awakening, and he was a stern critic against what he saw as the reification of the Jew as external to a community that saw itself based on a transcendent love. If love is to form the basis of a community, it can never align itself with an exclusionary politics. This also captures the problem of love in politics as Arendt sees it; it is transposed from the domain of religion and is thereby attached to the exclusionary powers of belief or nonbelief. Referring to a conversation with Golda Meir, Arendt argues that there is a moment in the history of the Jewish people where its greatness came to the fore—in the love of God.21 One can perhaps read this passage together with her analysis of the concept of love in Augustine: a community conditioned by love is not joined by a communal belief system. It is conditioned by fate, a fate that is irreducible to the belonging or nonbelonging of a group or people.22 The paradox that Arendt sees in the Augustinian tradition is that, on the one hand, it erects a community based on a notion of love that embraces human relations, but on the other, it makes that community void of bonds in the positive sense. The love of God does not guarantee the formation of a human community. Instead, the faith in an

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all-encompassing love must be abandoned. From an Augustinian viewpoint, man has a double heritage, both social and spiritual.23 It is from such a perspective that Arendt recapitulates a famous quote taken from Augustine, to which she returns many times in her writings: “I have become a question to myself.”24 If I am to love my neighbor, I can only do so in relation to a love that has something to do with myself. One must avoid a pseudo-Christian position of self-deception.25 The idea of a love that is simply spread over the world is a “selbstverleugnende Liebe,” a love that implies a denial of the self. In order for love of the neighbor not to be misunderstood, as a variety of self-deception, we must seek the source of love in the world. To Augustine, humans are both singular and part of the human, as a category of generalizing. People are united not by likeness or by a religious belief. If there is godly love, it serves the purpose of attuning what at first sight would appear to be the dissonance of individual destinies. We need to transpose it into a concept of attunement. This is perhaps more easily figured in a work of art than in a religious belief or political doctrine. At the level of politics, love cannot be reduced to the identification with a group, a people, a flag, or an idea. If love is to be a factor in politics, it must serve to undermine the separation between the belonging and the nonbelonging. It is in such a context that the comedy of Chaplin comes to the fore: it helps condition a community through a kind of identification that can neither be affirmed nor denied, based not on limits or borders but on attunement—a listening to, a reception, and an integration that suspends the limits of alterity. In the reflections on the Jew as pariah, we encounter first Heinrich Heine, a “schlemiel” and “lord of dreams,” a poet who was first universally celebrated in Germany and then crushed as the Nazis came to power. Like Chaplin’s suspect, Heine’s schlemiel spoke to the common people. This was, however, also what provoked the anti-Semites. Heine, by all accounts, appears to have been “assimilated” before Nazism showed that assimilation was impossible. As a poet he was standing aside, looking at things, telling people how it was rather than participating. In this, he inadvertently took the stance of the schlemiel, the Jew who stands aside. However, this stance did not serve to ward off the growing anti-Semitism at the beginning of the twentieth century. If Jew and poet had been two aspects of the same

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celebrated dreamer before, they now appeared as two faces of the same “pariah.” Arendt, who had studied the Jewish bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries closely in her book on Rahel Varnhagen, considered the idolization of art as a symptom of the bad faith of assimilation. When the tradition of the schlemiel was upheld, poets and intellectuals upheld their voices. In the end, however, the Jew was ousted, and art, in the guise of “beauty,” became the retreat of the “pariah.”26 To the Jewish middle class of the twentieth century, Arendt argues, art appeared as an escape, as a way of assimilating through cultural values. But the attempt to assimilate through art would only come back to haunt the European Jew. As anti-Semitism becomes systematized, schlemiels are transformed from members of a formerly respected middle class, “who have exchanged the generous gifts of nature for the idols of social privilege and prejudice,” into outcast pariahs.27 The life of Heine is a case in point. Although they are not dealt with in this particular text, one could also include here Varnhagen, Benjamin, and many others, because to Arendt the Jewish intellectual represents the agency of art in a way that is particularly revealing of modernity. With the modernism of the twentieth century, a new form of escape presents itself: a simultaneous form of nonsociety inflicted within society into which the individual could escape. Ironically, the forerunners of mass man, such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill, were great individualists, rebelling against society. However, when society was restricted, the pressures on the individual were not so great. As social pressure increased, the novel became the site into which individuals could escape. In Arendt’s intersectional analysis, such escape is not only the expression of man wanting to escape himself, an ironic twist in which mass society offers no public space, only an escape into the interiors of self-reflection or the laughter of cinema. Hermann Broch shows the exclusion from reality through the pangs of an intensified experience of beauty, as if the one can no longer contain the other.28 In Men in Dark Times, Arendt celebrates the writer in exile in various ways; the state of inner exile becomes intertwined with outer exile. The writer in exile withdraws from the world into a state of inner exile. To what extent, she asks, does the world still deserve our attention? “To what extent do we remain obligated to the world even when we have been expelled

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from it or have withdrawn from it.”29 Philosophy, like literature, appears to be the answer to a historical situation in which the flight into interiority corresponds to an escape into exile, as an answer to the destitution of public space. Such an escape is not merely a voluntary action, performed in order to reach a comfort zone. It is not a question of armchair radicalism, developed according to the same logic in which it is the fate of revolutions to disappear in the search for the consciousness of freedom in the bourgeois home.30 The escape into interior worlds has political significance; it is a necessary flight or expulsion, which turns the significance of the work around, from being intimate to being political. In fact, what is expressed by the escape is “the world’s reality.” Persecution enforces a certain drive toward an escapism that enforces a sense of reality at another level than a consensual and collective one.31 It is this inverted sense of realness that comes to the fore in the blueprint tales of Kafka, for instance. Kafka, refusing beauty but still upholding the illusion of the freedom of the “pariah,” the “lord of dreams,” is a new form of refugee. He is, if one likes, an “avant-garde” that came well before the “vanguard” of political refugees referred to in “We Refugees.” In modernity, the refugee of art, in fact, preceded the refugee of political thought. Kafka, unlike Heine, attempted to undo the false idol of beauty. In his world of blueprints, he erected a world of “realness” that in many ways appeared to be the reverse of how we are used to conceiving of the real. Undoing the ties between appearance and reality, he only considered real those things “whose strength is not impaired but confirmed by thinking.”32 Kafka’s The Castle, in Arendt’s reading, is the only of his works to openly deal with Jewish identity. It is, to Arendt, a fable of failed assimilation, telling of K., who wants to be one of the villagers languishing under the threat of arbitrary laws and punishments inflicted by the invisible authorities at the castle. In her account of the story, the castle of authority is a symbol of simultaneous threat and possibility that cannot be detached from K.’s ways of being Jewish. He cannot escape its closure, even when he is on the outside. This gives the story an allegorical structure that has been interpreted in a multitude of ways, not least psychoanalytic ones. The castle seems to stand for a punishing superego that releases no one from its grip, neither K. nor any of the other villagers. It is telling that Arendt leaves all other possibilities of interpretation out of her account.

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ARENDT, CHAPLIN, AND ANTI-SEMITISM Anti-Semitism is a symptom that cannot be read in isolation from class struggle, racism, and colonialism. It must also be seen in conjunction with a contemporary rightslessness that informs not only political but also aesthetic forms of struggle. Chaplin succeeds with the impossible: he construes an aesthetics of rightslessness, an aesthetics of the refugee, that raises laughter rather than fear. In her essay “The Jew as Pariah,” Arendt, like Kracauer and Benjamin before her, interprets the popularity of Chaplin in terms of a timely revival of “the entrancing charm of the little people.”33 There is no condescension in the appeal to little people here, and her argument is not to be confused with populism; she is after something much more specific. Arendt moves from the more general interpretation of Chaplin as depicting mankind to Chaplin as depicting the Jew. Her analysis of Chaplin, therefore, aligns itself with the questions to be posed about what she considers one of the most acute problems of modernity, anti-Semitism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that totalitarianism begins with anti-Semitism. Indeed, racism begins with anti-Semitism.34 The very phenomenon of anti-Semitism is something of a touchstone for antidemocratic ideologies haunting Europe. It not only has given rise to the most violent processes of persecution but also has enmeshed itself deeply in ideologies that are complicit with mechanisms of paranoid capitalism. Arendt sees the growing anti-Semitism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of the contradictory status held by the Jewish population in modernity. Within the context of German and Eastern European culture and philosophy, the Jewish tradition of philosophy has been doubly challenged. The ideals of universality and reason that were promoted by Enlightenment thinkers may well have served to undermine a belief in plurality and particularity that could have better served the Jewish population. In the end, it was Johann Herder’s historicism and concept of a Jewish race that won, over Moses Mendelssohn’s conception of reason based on the Old Testament.35 Whereas the Jewish population was, in principle, dependent on the values of the bourgeoisie, it was also deplored by that same class. Jews were emancipated through the development of a new kind of state. At the same time, they were caught between the rise of the social sphere and the failure of the new, modern state to serve as the primary

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model of identification.36 Before Hitler, anti-Semitism disappeared from the political scene—that is, from the official function of the state. It was, however, overtaken in the social sphere by those who would identify the weakness of the state with its acceptance of plurality: “Jews became the symbols for Society as such, and the objects of hatred for all those whom society would not accept.”37 In the National Socialist state, anti-Semitism acquired a whole new face. From having been considered a mere opinion, it now became a principle of self-definition. It now touched the inner core of people and became an “intimate concern of every individual in his personal existence.”38 However, the analysis of anti-Semitism does not explain why we see some groups or individuals as other. Why even perceive the alterity in another group or individual? Is it not the case that fantasy is produced already at the level of perceiving something other as other? The Origins of Totalitarianism gives a genealogical account of anti-Semitic ideas. More importantly, however, Arendt contributes to a new kind of analysis of anti-Semitic sensibility, completely detached from economic, historical, or social models of explanation. Not only is it to be analyzed at the level of ideas, but also it must be thought at the level of perception. Anti-Semitism did not involve only racist theory. For Arendt, the new anti-Semitism was the result of propaganda that managed to distort people’s sense of reality. With the use of powerful visual media such as film—which approaches, perhaps, an aesthetics of “realness” without encompassing it—propaganda managed to deconstruct reality. It did so while enforcing an identification of the subjects with their leader; perception, therefore, became ingrained not only with disgust but also with fear. The imaginary powers of the leader pierced through the ambivalent spectators.39 The symptomatic character of anti-Semitism has been suggested not least in conjunction with what many today would call intersectional issues, such as violence, misogyny, or social antagonism. 40 Arendt, along with Adorno, detached anti-Semitism from simplistic sociological or political explanations. As Adorno argued in The Authoritarian Personality, anti-Semitism is not a question of class. Workers and middle-class people alike describe the same kind of stereotype, the “misfit bourgeois,” although from different angles. Caught in an automatism of stereotyping, it becomes a structural problem; anti-Semitism is the spearhead of antidemocratic forces.41 For Arendt, likewise, anti-Semitism is structural. It is to be found

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at the origins of racist ideologies. But it could just as well be seen a symptom of liberalism. Anti-Semitism, she argues, is in the end a product of a humanist Enlightenment in which the Jew was always the exception—the sufferer, or the alternative.42 Arendt recognized that cultural industry, state, and capital intersected in the creation of the anti-Semitic state. It is not the case that anti-Semitism is sustained by the belief that Jews are bad. Rather, the whole structure of anti-Semitism is based on a logic in which it becomes an aspect of subjectivity.43 In The Origins of Totalitarianism she recognizes a lack of relation between experience and anti-Semitism and sees that the construction of anti-Semitism relies on fragmentation, a structural exclusion of any kind of narrative that would invoke realness.

HITLER THE BARBER Arendt’s reading of Chaplin is interesting in this regard: she is not interested only in why we identify with the “little Yid”; she is interested in why we laugh at the same time. In this, she is performing something different from Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer, and the others in the Frankfurt School. She moves from the more general interpretation of Chaplin the apercu as mankind to that of Chaplin as a Jew. Chaplin, she says, transformed a conscious lack of political sensibility into an art form—a cheap trick hated by Adorno, who made stereotyping into the common denominator of Chaplin’s comic films and of anti-Semitism.44 But to Arendt, the most important feature of Chaplin was precisely his ability to capture the vanguard of modernity—a state of statelessness—through such a turn.45 Chaplin made comedy not of the features of “Judeity” in particular but of the subjects of the sovereign state become repressive nation. Chaplin’s popularity, Arendt argues, has to do with the absolute acuity with which he points to the mismatch between individual beings and the laws that sovereignty has produced; he is always under surveillance, always fleeing, always at fault. There is no proportion between the crime and the punishment; the police will go after him for whatever he does. Always acting the suspect, a schlemiel, or a “conscious pariah,” Chaplin points to the discrepancy between state and individual. In this way, he ends up depicting a kind of refugee, or a stateless person. On the other hand, he will always

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manage to slip away or reverse fortunes so that he comes out unscathed. And this is precisely why he manages to catch the delight of his audience, even though he points to the “dangerous incompatibility” between the state and its subjects. We laugh because we manage to escape the state. The figure of Chaplin, persecuted, manages to turn events around and highlight the superior qualities of the little man, who succeeds in getting away. Chaplin’s popularity, then, has to do with the way in which he portrays the schlemiel strategy, the way of being Jewish as a comedy of a certain cathartic release, offering a path of identification between those who are not Jewish and those who are. The capacity of the audience to identify with Chaplin would then consist in the little Yid becoming the little man, affronting the gap between state and individual. In transforming that gap into art, Arendt dryly notes, Chaplin created wonderful works out of a sheer “lack” of political sense—out of an unwillingness to identify with the state. Such a lack, in fact, corresponded well with Arendt’s idea that political communities must sometimes be created in contrast to, in spite of, or in the margins of the nation-state and its laws. The European belief in the sovereignty of the nation-state had produced a reversal of the intended outcome of its foundations. Rather than protecting citizens and bestowing upon them such rights as freedom and equality before the law, certain nation-states had deprived groups of citizenship and produced stateless people. Chaplin was the epitome of such a “refugee” in his nondescript state, forever fleeing the law.46 Kafka’s The Castle depicted the rightslessness in front of an invisible law that determined the question of belonging and nonbelonging, and unraveled its product—the refugee. The idea that something such as “little people” should even exist is in fact a creation, caused by the ideology of the nation-state. We may interpret the little man as a symptom of a broader ideological movement if we are to follow the kind of argument that Arendt pursued in the last chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism. What signifies the systems of exploitation is that they succeed in creating a society in which people are less meaningful than the ideology that creates them. Ideologies such as Marxism and racism, when applied to the logic of a systematic grid of fragmentation, disproportion, and propaganda, suppresses plurality in favor of an abstract idea of mankind, suppresses experience in favor of an infallible method of explanation, and suppresses common prejudice in exchange for a foolproof method of predictability.

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For Arendt, that destruction of experience hinges on the mass industrialization and use of technology that Chaplin is also making fun of in Modern Times. One must, in this context, recall the analysis of ideology from The Origins of Totalitarianism. It has its own “mood,” or what Heidegger would call Stimmung. Whereas Arendt’s sensus communis of judgment construes a sense of realness, the mood of terror builds on an apparatus of derealization in which judgment is suspended. Around her, Arendt saw intellectuals sacrifice basic ideals of freedom and justice in the name of more abstract ideas, prepared to “offer a helping hand to every political system” but unable to see the acute need to solve a real conflict.47 Subjectivized in a system that serves to undo plurality, the subject ingrained with the mood of fear loses his or her sense of measure.48 There is no longer any place for initiatives; the subject is no longer the origin of his or her actions. He or she is chosen by the machine of the authorities, randomly. Executioner or victim, both are picked to fit a role. Ideology becomes the substitute for agency.49 After the war, racism and Marxism may have failed as dominating ideologies in state systems on a broad scale, but they are still alive and well. What Arendt’s critique of the nation-state from the 1940s has demonstrated is that there is nothing in the idea of the nation-state that could protect us from the failure of sovereignty. In the end, the state may even turn against itself, as described by Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Hitler-state killing its own citizens, a thanatopolitics. Nothing may protect us from a nationalist ideology that begins eating its own subjects. The idea of little people or a little man in conflict with the system is an expression that has been co-opted by populists from all camps. For instance, right-wing extremism has appealed to the little people as victims of a too-generous immigration policy. What distinguishes such rhetoric from Arendt’s understanding of the little man is that the latter is inseparable from a little Yid. Here, a curious detail must be observed: Chaplin was a great critic of Nazism. But he was not Jewish. He may have created a character that appeared Jewish, and at the time when Arendt wrote her article, he was generally claimed by Jewish cinemagoers. To Nazi Germany, he was a symbol of Jewish decadence. But Chaplin, in fact, was not Jewish. In Arendt’s reading—and this is something that she will state overtly later on—his actual origins are of no importance. Chaplin’s work is to be inserted into a Jewish tradition

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of schlemielhood.50 In this way, her argument about the little people is constructed in the vein of the argument on the vanguard-refugee. It is not only Chaplin who is to be considered a little Yid or a little man. If he is one, then we are all little people and therefore all little Yids. Arendt’s observations about refugees are constructed in the same way. It is not only the stateless Jew of the 1940s who is a refugee. The refugee, like Chaplin, indicates a destiny to come for many Europeans, a scenario even darker than that provided in Sophoclean tragedy. It is inconceivable that statelessness would constitute a ground for a new beginning, unless a new, Jewish state was to be constructed, an event that was as promising as it appeared complicated to Arendt in the 1940s. Arendt, therefore, saw possibilities of new times both come to an end and open up in Chaplin’s cinematic art. When the cinematic ideal of the little man became less appealing to the general audience, Chaplin had to change his ways. The art of the refugee changed into that of The Great Dictator. This was a development to be deplored, not only for artistic reasons. The ethical and political possibilities of the critique of Nazism were more workable in the guise of the little man. If we are all suspects, or all refugees, then who gets to dictate? If we are all Jews, where are we to stick anti-Semitism? Nothing scares the “tyrannical” philosopher, or a dictator, more than laughter, Arendt says in her speech to Heidegger on his eightieth birthday. Laughter is more powerful than truth.51 The stance, then, so often repeated after Arendt, that we are all refugees, or all Jews, is possible only in the guise of laughter. But we cannot stay laughing. In Arendt’s analysis, Chaplin’s films depict a time for laughter that came and went. When the time for laughter ended, so did the time for solidarity. There may well seem to be a populist streak in Arendtian politics that comes to light in her reverence for Chaplin. Her populism emerges as an appeal to come together and create new political communities and new popular spaces, and to uproot state power. Her views on Chaplin can be seen as a kind of populist aesthetic that has less to do with the narrative or visual qualities of Chaplin’s films and more to do with the possibilities of identification.52 The possibilities of identification, however, are restricted to the time of laughter. Her reverence for Chaplin must be read as a point d’ancrage. His films incarnate her hopes for a new future for a persecuted minority. But as the laughter stops, they also provide the image of those dreams coming to an end.

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For Gilles Deleuze, Chaplin is consciously emphasizing the similarity between dictator and Jewish barber in The Great Dictator, unveiling the thin line that runs between executioner and victim.53 This is an observation already made by Arendt, who sees the parallel lines inserted in the contrast between the little man and the dictator—making the dictator, of course, into an aspect of the little man.54 In Adorno’s analysis, the most terrifying aspect of the Führer is not that he incarnates power but that he appears to act the part, all too exaggerated. He wears a mask. Through the mask of Führer Hitler we see an ordinary person, and the similarity to the ghetto barber. Chaplin is taking him down to scale.55 But this makes him, in effect, more terrifying, as if the crack in the machinery reveals its efficiency. Both Arendt and Adorno identify the spot at which the signifier cracks, and where the random face of the state apparatus is blown wide open: Hitler appears not as the face of evil but as an ordinary little man. We identify with the lack in the other rather than with strong, heroic representations. This is also where the power of Chaplin’s farce hinges: set between horror show and comedy, between Hitler and the little Yid, he works in the ambivalent lacunae of identificatory mechanisms. Arendt also comments in her notes about the eerily comic, exposed face of Hitler: “The great political criminals must be exposed, especially exposed to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who committed great political crimes, which is something entirely different.”56 Here, Arendt’s reverence for comedy comes to the fore again; it works with the political—action, community, and solidarity—rather than with ideology, the belief systems that affect perception. Chaplin pursues the line of exposure of repression in several of his films. To Slavoj Žižek, the splitting of the gaze of the audience is a kind of bad faith; they believe themselves to be seeing something truly funny, without realizing the quest of the haunted man on the run: “The origin of comedy is to be sought precisely in such cruel blindness, unawareness of the tragic reality of a situation.”57 Arendt’s analysis is the exact opposite. The split of the gaze implied in The Great Dictator shows not unawareness but the opposite; the point at which comedy begins is not innocence but rather the extraordinary burden of guilt: “If the ruling classes permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. And generally speaking, one may state that tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.”58 Chaplin

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was aware both of the structures of power and the laughable effects of clownery that uses the sadist laughter (which may well be unwitting), and of the warmhearted outbursts that follow the emancipatory potentials in the struggle of the little man. Both may well be present at the same time. And it is precisely this enmeshed relationship that makes comedy stand on the side of the political—we see the face of ideology and we laugh at it, whether we want to or not.

THE ART OF DIFFERENTIATION Rather than accepting the Paulinian position of universality that does not distinguish among peoples, do we not perhaps need a more radical notion of plurality? A symbolic plurality, generating differentiation? Perhaps one could read Arendt’s aesthetics for a suggestion of how this could be conceived. It aligns itself with her Jewish writings. In “The Jew as Pariah,” Arendt recognizes the failure of the Enlightenment to incorporate a Jewish form of alterity. Her discussion about what happens when the state itself becomes persecutor reflects that failure. The text shows how all instances that aspire to universality fail to accept alterity, or plurality: the state, the law, ideas of the people as part of the state. Art also has failed in the forms where it has been reduced to ideals of beauty or to escapist subjectivism. This explains the normative ideal inherent in Arendtian aesthetics that we have explored elsewhere: art must impose itself as plurality and call for solidarity, forwarding plural ideas and ideals. This may happen when it presents itself as the story of the marginalized, the outcasts, the schlemiels or pariahs. Judith Butler has argued that Arendt’s concept of plurality is intertwined with an injunction for cohabitation: “The unchosen character of earthly co-habitation is, for Arendt, the condition of our very existence as ethical and political beings.”59 As has been underlined many times in the present discussion, Arendt’s concept of plurality has strong ontological implications that are transposed into an aesthetics.60 The very fabric of differentiation—the in-between in the form of a web of stories, things, and artifacts—makes out the core of political society. For Arendt, following her reading of the refugees, the logic of universality as an abstract ideal is reversed in the laughter provoked by Chaplin, a figure of a little man

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that we both are and are not, a point of identification that at the same time points to the exclusionary demarcation on which that identification is constructed. If we are to consider the forms of art that were of interest to Arendt, we find that Homer and Virgil are her avid companions, as is Sophocles. But there are other recurrent companions among her contemporaries or near-contemporaries. Here we find an intersectional form of reflection: Arendt saw in the writings of Marcel Proust, for instance, that being a homosexual or a Jew were two faces of schlemielhood; society had not absorbed them.61 In Proust’s work, she observed a layering of the text in which one position enforced the other.62 In Arendt’s notes, as well as in The Origins of Totalitarianism, we find extensive reflection on this matter, looking closer at precisely the question of Jewish identity in Proust. She observes not so much the metaphors, the memories, or the description of perception in the text; what she observes is that Jewishness is interwoven with homosexuality. Preparing a text on Within a Budding Grove, Arendt sees also the complete interweaving of orientalism and anti-Semitism. In Proust’s novel, Bloch is made into an orientalist, racist painting. He enters a room like an ancient body come to life, like a two-dimensional image that has suddenly taken on three-dimensional life—a creature that “the forces of necromancy must have called to life.” Bloch is described as the foreign body, a stranger, as he appears to put on a show of everydayness in the French saloon. This is essential: the Jew does not really appear until he is actually “in” society. Bloch thereby incarnates the impossible assimilation that only art can uncover, through the kind of spectacle that it puts onstage in the bourgeois salon. The question is not “to be or not to be” but “to belong or not to belong.”63 The same kind of “orientalism” is used in the depiction of homosexuality in Proust’s novel. Even more importantly, the stigmatization of Jewishness and homosexuality are intertwined and made part of a simultaneous desire for the exotic and hatred of the nonbelonging. Charlus is leered at in the same way as Bloch, and is seen with the same ambivalent gaze. These characters are made colorful rather than interesting, odious rather than strong, dubious rather than intelligent. Arendt’s discussion of Proust is neither admiring nor revolted; she is simply using him as the “eye” that makes the appearance of the Jew and the homosexual present. She reads this appearance as a construct of social prejudice. In Proust, we see racist

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and heteronormative ideology come to the fore in the fictional painting of alterity. In the exaggerated colors of this fictional painting, the spectacle of prejudice and racism present themselves as an inherent part of the social sphere of modern middle and upper-class society. The characters of Bloch and Charlus are not only depicted as marginalized in the social sphere in which they move. They also are depicted as the kind of beings that keep the normative patterns of the social sphere together, precisely by being marked as other—too exaggerated, too much. For Arendt, the normative patterns of ostracism, intentionally or unintentionally depicted by Proust, are typical of a European middle-class that saw itself as the nave of a social sphere in which identificatory mechanisms have become more important than the freedom of political agency. The question of identity, irrevocably attached to and made master of the social sphere, has given the appearance of identity a whole new meaning. The appearance of identity, in modern society, is attached to the appearance of alterity: “Jewishness,” as well as “homosexuality,” was invented at a moment in time when it suited the bourgeoisie to attach certain identities to moral norms.64 This history is inscribed in philosophy as well. Socrates also was a homosexual and was aligned with a way of being that became marginalized only as new identificatory patterns became an issue. In the novels of Proust, Arendt sees the appearance of identity come alive through shocking and exaggerated streaks of alterity. In his work, some of the main characters are depicted with the deep ambivalence of exoticism that exaggerates the relation to normative ideals. Bloch and Charlus are given a boisterous and overworked form of appearance that does not fit the social sphere in which they move. One would even have expected these characters to be extinct. They are in a certain way leftovers from another, more ancient world. But the almost satirical form in which they are depicted highlights the mechanisms through which their identity has been construed through the alienating gaze of what Arendt calls the social. Her critical readings of Proust may well serve to explain her contempt for the alienating standards that are set up in the social sphere of modern life. It is impossible to detach the prejudicial imaginary and the exclusionary ideology that has led to serious forms of racism and persecution in Europe from a narrow set of nineteenth- and twentieth-century bourgeois norms. These, in turn, determine the core of the values set up in the social sphere.

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In contrast, Arendt recognizes an impulse toward voluntary marginalization in art as such, as well in the history of philosophy. Modernism, represented by Benjamin, Kafka, and Proust, gives proof of an aesthetic in which the antagonistic relation between works of art and bourgeois values come to the fore, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Benjamin, Kafka, and Proust give voice to those who are ostracized or viewed with contempt in the midst of the European middle class. William Faulkner, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), and Joseph Conrad weave the story of colonialism while unraveling the flesh of the oppressed and the shadows of oppression. A filmmaker like Chaplin plays with the exclusionary mechanisms of perception itself in the play with stereotypical ideas of Jewishness. All of these would have in common, at least to Arendt, if not a resistance to cultural norms then at least a mark of alterity. Rather than departing from a universalist frame of identity and ethics, they would use the Jew, the homosexual, the flaneur, the abuser, or the slave as focal points of the narrative. Creating dubious characters, Proust, Kafka, and Chaplin all resisted the commodification of art, even while enjoying tremendous success.65 It would be wrong to assume that Arendt’s celebration of the rendering of individual fates, whether in novels, poetry, film, or any other form of art, served merely as captivating examples of something she wanted to theorize in other terms. All the novels she quotes, the films by Chaplin she laughs at, are interwoven in the great web of agencies that make up the fabric of plurality. These are not to be understood merely in the abstract, as forms of action. Beings are aesthetic; appearances show themselves. The writers and artists that follow Arendt on her philosophical path are not examples that she grasps, letting them succumb to her version of philosophical plurality. They are companions, adding, illuminating, sometimes displacing and replacing the work of philosophy. We began this book by asserting that there is an aesthetics hidden in the work of Arendt. As we have pursued the inquiries into the nature of that aesthetics, it has become clear that it is very much integrated into her politics. Without her curiosity for and avid engagement with works of art, Arendt’s philosophy would not have come out the same. Does art, then, offer new possibilities and new beginnings, a relocation of the political from action to aesthetics? Not necessarily. But art points to forms of freedom that arise spontaneously, presenting itself to our sensibility and perception—a kind of reverse of the banalizing effects

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commodification. Plurality is pursued through the impulse of living beings to appear through action and speech.66 All art is turned toward the public sphere and therefore is representative of agency.67 In public space, art negotiates reductionism and exploitation, although this does not necessarily happen as an aspect of its intention. It has to do with its ontological status as an object of appearance in a world of appearances.68 Art produces differentiation as a nonhuman element of plurality, the in-between of stories, artifacts, or created events that in Arendtian terms settles the “world” as the function of durable appearances.69 Arendt’s aesthetics invokes objects that counter destruction of political life; she speaks of art as a means towards solidarity, collectivity, and remembrance. For that reason, it must be appreciated as an essential aspect of her work.

NOTES

I NTROD U CT I O N

1. See, for instance, Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the GermanJewish Experience (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 2. Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 3. Peter Euben, Platonic Noise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Robert Pirro, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). 4. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Kimberley Curtis, Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 5. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996); Max Deutscher, Judgment After Arendt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Paul Trachmann, Künstler und kritiker, akteure und zuschauer: Hannah Arendts urteilslehre im spannungsfeld zwischen vita active und vita contemplative (Munich: Grin Verlag, 2008). 6. Linda Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005): 158–188.

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1. “Nowhere in Being and Time—except for a peripheral remark of poetic speech as ‘possible disclosure of existence’—is artistic creativity mentioned. In volume I of the Nietzsche, the tension and close relationship between poetry and philosophy, the poet and the philosopher, is twice noticed but not in either the Nietzschean or the Bergsonian sense of sheer creativity” (Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing [London: Secker & Warburg, 1978], 184).

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2. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4:242. 3. On Adorno, see Arendt, “Paper and Reality,” April 10, 1942, in The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 153. The comment refers less to aesthetics than to the question of anti-Semitism. The claim that Arendt is referring to Adorno here can be seen in Eva-Maria Ziege, “Arendt, Adorno und die anfänge der antisemitismusforschung,” in Affinität wider willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W Adorno und die Frankfurtschule, ed. Liliane Weissberg (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011), 42. On Heidegger, see Hannah Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1978), 293–304. 4. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968), 216–218. The Greeks, Arendt argues, were suspicious of artists because artists fabricated things for ends, but free men did not want notions of instrumentality to spill over in the political domain. 5. Martin Heidegger, “Die kunst und der raum” (1969), in Gesamtausgabe 13 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983), 203–210. Heidegger reflects on the difference between the space in which art is shown and performed and the space objectified in science; the particularity of the space of art, Heidegger implies, is the way in which art embodies space rather than being placed in it. 6. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 1:20. 7. Arendt also discusses “a community of things” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 55, 167). 8. The ontological character of Arendt’s plurality can be compared with Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of the plural nature of being. To Nancy, alterity is inherent already in the question of being. See Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 6. 9. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 152–153. 10. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 23. In Rancière’s definition, historically determined regimes classify art according to certain ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging, and they imply, above all, a certain governance of perception. The aesthetic regime singularizes art and makes it autonomous and, in a certain way, “foreign” to itself, thus linked to ideas. 11. Where everything is beautiful, Welsch argues, nothing is beautiful: “Strangeness, disruption, irruption, and alterity appear to me to be mandatory categories for art in public space today” (Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics [London: Sage, 1998], 122). 12. One can read Robert Pippin’s ardent critique in this light as he deduces totalitarian ideology out of the stale vindictiveness and individualism of bourgeois subjectivity. Plurality cannot rescue us from the evil of these ideologies. See Pippin, “Hannah Arendt and the Bourgeois Origin of Totalitarian Evil,” in The Persistence of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 146–167. 13. See the constructive critique in Seyla Benhabib, “Feminist Theory and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Public Space,” in American Continental Philosophy: A Reader, ed. Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 372–390. 14. On a cosmopolitan notion of human rights, for instance, see Kristian Klockars, “Plurality as a Value in Arendt’s Political Philosophy,” Topos: Journal for Philosophical and Cultural Studies 2, no. 19 (2008): 62–70.

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15. Richard Bernstein has argued that Arendt’s concept of plurality implies a normative politics that she does not fully acknowledge, claiming an egalitarian social distribution where everyone is given the means to participate. See Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 182–223. It is clear that Arendt was highly appreciative of Habermas’s rethinking of Marxist categories such as class struggle and ideology, such as can be seen in a footnote in Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 96n. For a normative reading based on a Kantian concept of reason, see David Rasmussen, “Reasonability, Normativity, and the Cosmopolitan Imagination: Arendt, Korsgaard, and Rawls,” Continental Philosophy Review 36, no. 2 (2003): 97–112. 16. To Seyla Benhabib, this assumption is erroneous. Arendt’s discussion of public space must be set apart from the theorization of democracy, since the one does not necessarily follow from the other. See Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996), 205–206. 17. Ibid., 195. 18. Dana Villa, “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” The American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 (1992): 712–721. 19. Dana Villa, Public Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 253. 20. See Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identify,” in Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1995), 159–60. Claudia Hilb insists on the relation between singularization and action as a break from the premises of equality. See Hilb, “Equality at the Limit of Liberty,” in The Making of Political Identities, ed. Ernesto Laclau (London: Verso, 1994), 109. The suggestions of the primary role of the public sphere for plurality in Margaret Canovan can also be read in a similar way. See Canovan, “Arendt, Rousseau, and Human Plurality,” The Journal of Politics 45, no. 2 (1983): 286–302. 21. Judith Butler has argued for a mode of cohabitation between Palestinians and Israelis. See Butler, “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation,” paper delivered at the Nobel Museum, Stockholm, May 2011; and Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 151–180. 22. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:19. 23. This is a way of interpreting Arendt’s argument of the two-in-one, used in The Life of the Mind (1:19–20, 179–191); individuals are both subject and object, which means that philosophical questions of being and appearing are intertwined. In The Promise of Politics, Arendt argues the same thing: humans are two-in-one, both subject and object, which means that they are “plural also within themselves” (Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn [New York: Schocken Books, 2005], 22). This in turn means that “I can experience a friend as another self ” (20). 24. “The public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised” (Arendt, Human Condition, 57). 25. Ibid., 50. Dana Villa has pointed out that this double function of public space undermines an agonistic understanding of it (Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999], 133–134). 26. Arendt, Human Condition, 52. Cf. Arendt, Promise of Politics, 12–20. 27. This can be inferred, for instance, through Arendt’s discussion of tragic mimesis; in tragedy the political sphere is transposed into art (Arendt, Human Condition, 188).

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28. This is what Martin Heidegger talks about in terms of “idle talk,” a way of closing-off that is an established way of perception in the alienated aspect of Dasein that Heidegger talks about as public opinion—the they. “The they prescribes one’s state of mind, and determines what and how one ‘sees’ ” (Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [London: Blackwell, 1992], 170). 29. See Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 114–136. Villa’s extensive work on the relation between Arendt and Heidegger has pointed to similarities as well as differences. He shows that Heidegger’s influence on Arendt can be identified in terms of its existential-ontological method and certain key concepts: finitude, contingency, worldliness, Mitsein, etc. I will not linger on Heideggerian concepts. Suffice it to note that Arendt’s notion of the plurality of appearances is to be distinguished from the existential notion of Mitsein. 30. The quotation is found in Being and Time and is repeated in Benhabib’s discussion of Mitsein and plurality (Reluctant Modernism, 54). In her notes, Arendt has also observed §48, where Heidegger states that the escape into public space, der Öffentlichkeit, is an escape from the uncanniness of thrownness (“Heidegger, Martin, and Friedrich Nietzsche,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 1898–1977, 68/11 024883, Library of Congress, Washington, DC). Hauke Brunkhorst has argued that there is a resistance against Heidegger’s individualism in Arendt’s insistence on the primacy of public space over the analysis of being (Brunkhorst, Hannah Arendt [Munich: Oskar Beck, 1999], 21–22). Arendt sees Heidegger coming to close to the “will to will,” the “will to power,” rather than offering himself to the Gelassenheit, the marvel and wonder of the simple and the everyday that mostly inspires philosophy (Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” 303). Many philosophers have been attracted to the tyrannical—something noted also in her notebooks—but few have let go and instead decided to “accept wondering as their abode,” in Heidegger’s words. 31. Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 2:664. 32. This will be discussed in depth in chapter 4. 33. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 210. 34. Arendt shows that she is quite aware of this as she notes that Aristotle, in his discussion of man as a zōon politikon, did not attempt to define man as a political animal as much as to indicate the current values of the polis, where slaves and barbarians were not included in the idea of man as a political being (Arendt, Human Condition, 27). 35. Tony Bennett’s history of the modern museum indicates that museums were created in order to “civilize” citizens in public space—teaching them how to dress, act, and judge according to the moral and conduct codes of the bourgeoisie. See Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 89–109. 36. This has been noted in Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981): 327–352. Pitkin notes, further, that this blurring is witnessed not least by literature (Proust) so that “society” becomes a category devoid of political concerns, populated instead by individuals for whom class and religion, such as Jewishness, become private concerns. Also see Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 74.

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37. Arendt, Human Condition, 50. Dana Villa (Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 133–134) has pointed out that this double function of public space undermines an agonistic understanding of it. 38. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 57. 39. See for instance Jonathan Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 198. Hess summarizes: “Enlightenment constructs a subject it cannot construct, retrieves a freedom it cannot retrieve, and promotes an ideal political order it cannot realize” (202). 40. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:570. 41. As Seyla Benhabib has shown, the book was inspired by Arendt (Benhabib, The Rights of Others [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 190). 42. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (London: Polity Press, 1989), 49–51. 43. Ibid., 56. The discourse of the public sphere is in part an expansion of intimate details. The novel of the eighteenth century invented a new language of emotion and intimacy. This novel was, in turn, discussed and reflected in the public spaces that were constructed around it, such as coffeehouses or publications. Public space, in this regard, is the bourgeoisie reflecting upon itself. Both are conditioned by social and economic structures. 44. Arendt sees modernity as a decline of “free” speech in favor of market economies (Arendt, Human Condition, 220, 222). From this perspective, Sheldon S. Wolin has argued for an intrinsic evaluation of democracy in Arendt’s work (Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Critical Essays on Hannah Arendt, ed. Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman [Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1994], 289–307). Richard Bernstein, although critical of Arendt’s devaluation of the social sphere, has shown that Arendt’s concept of judgment implies a fundamental notion of equality that comes close to Habermas’s egalitarian ideals of discourse (Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism, 218–222). 45. See Hannah Arendt, “Society and Culture,” Daedalus 89, no. 2 (1960): 279. Here Arendt’s description of the individual in general is much in line with her description of Jewishness attempting to assert itself against assimilation, and society “getting the better of him.” 46. Arendt discusses political life as a form of praxis that is to be kept separate from everyday necessities, but does not use the Greek counterparts of poiesis or techne. Art is only accounted for with regard to Homo faber (Arendt, Human Condition, 13–15). Whereas Heidegger sometimes collapses politics and art, Arendt keeps them apart: art is made to appear in public space, and politics arises through it (Arendt, Between Past and Future, 217–218). 47. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 198. 48. Sonning Prize speech, 1975, Hannah Arendt Papers, 77/19 013987. 49. This is suggested in Margaret Canovan, “Politics as Culture: Hannah Arendt and the Public Realm,” History of Political Thought 6, no. 3 (1985): 620. 50. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:184. 51. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:20. 52. Arendt, Human Condition, 176. 53. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:23. 54. Ibid., 50–83, 183–187.

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55. Arendt, Human Condition, 46; Life of the Mind, 1:183. 56. “Nothing perhaps is more surprising in this world of ours than the almost infinite diversity of its appearances, the sheer entertainment value of its views, sounds, and smells, something that is hardly mentioned by the thinkers and philosophers” (Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:20). 57. In her notes on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Arendt comes across this problem in the third antinomy; man is appearance, and appears through action, but reason is not itself appearing as the cause of action. “Kant, Immanuel,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 68/16 032396. 58. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:660. 59. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:72. 60. Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Robert Bernasconi, Simon Critchley, and Adriaan Peperzak (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 142. 61. One can compare this with the Heidegger-inspired discussion of appearances in Günter Figal’s work on Erscheinungsdinge, “things of appearance” (Figal, Erscheinungsdinge [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010], 208). Here, aesthetic issues are primarily concerned with appearances that are not part of our everyday lives. 62. Ibid., 210. 63. The discussion of doxa indicates it to be set in between knowledge and ignorance, as something that partakes in both that which is and that which is not. Beauty and ugliness, as the objects of “the lover of spectacles,” partake in the state in between (Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey [London: Loeb Classical Library, 1930], 5:478e–480a. 64. Plato, Republic, 10:607b, 5–6. 65. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:240. 66. See Sam Ijsseling, Mimesis: On Appearing and Being, trans. Hester Ijsseling and Jeffrey Bloechl (Amsterdam: Kok Pharos, 1997), 20–21. Ijsseling has argued for an ontological understanding of mimesis, which makes it a presupposition of difference rather than a rendering of a difference—mimesis as the displacement of representation with regard to ontological difference. Both Adorno and Hegel give mimesis a central position in their dialectics, although in opposing manners: failing to see the dialectical moment of otherness in art and its form, and instead discussing the alterity of art in terms of content, Hegel helped “transform art into an ideology of domination” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 7). For Adorno, “Art is modern art through the mimesis of the hardened and alienated” (21). For Arendt, there is no coercive demand of mimesis involved in the making of art; on the contrary, art produces agents rather than objects of mimicry. 67. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:141–151. 68. Plato, Republic, 10:598a–598b. Socrates asks whether painting is an imitation of reality as it is or of appearance as it appears. 69. Plato, Republic, 10:600a–604e. 70. Plato: Ion, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1925), 421. 71. Homer contributes neither military tactics, scientific discovery, nor philosophical thought (Plato, Ion, 421). This is also why Plato dismisses poetry from the city; otherwise, “pleasure and pain will be lords of your city instead of law and that which shall from time to time have approved itself to the general reason as the best” (Plato, Republic, 10:607a). 72. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:237–238. This can also be seen in a passage that could be understood as Arendt’s reading of the hymn to Eros in Antigone: desire can escalate into the crazy will to rule over men and gods alike (1:239).

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73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88.

89. 90.

91.

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Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:238, 1:241. Arendt, Human Condition, 227. Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” 293–304. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:237–238. See “Kant, Immanuel,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 68/18 032143, in conjunction with issues of judgment. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:133. Arendt, Human Condition, 57–58. “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves” (ibid., 150). See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32. Unconcealment is conditioned by concealment; the shine of beauty is a way through which art unconceals itself as an unresponsive Thing, irreducible to a tool. From Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, as quoted in Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:25. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:133–134. “Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance (Arendt, Between Past and Future, 149). Arendt, On Revolution, 29. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 164–165. In her essay “What Is Freedom?,” from the same book, Arendt describes sovereignty as the purchase of the freedom of the body politic at the price of every one else’s will. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 148. Ibid., 220. See also Arendt, Life of the Mind 1:183. Merleau-Ponty also discusses plural relations as producing differentiation as an in-between, in the same manner as Arendt discusses the world arising as an in-between. However, the chiasmus is presented as a product of the senses rather than as singularities. cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 131–133. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 153–154. Freedom arises as a form of theater: politics, like music and theater, is in need of a publicly organized space and depends on the presence of others. Ibid., 149–150. Ibid., 148. Arendt shows that the roots of the philosophical conception of freedom lies not in the metaphysical tradition of dialogue but in the political realm, “as a fact of everyday life.” Arendt, Human Condition, 206; Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 67. Villa (Arendt and Heidegger, 122) has argued that the conditioning of man can be seen in relation to Arendt’s reading of Heidegger, who introduced Dasein in order to eschew ideas of human nature. Villa looks at Arendt’s concept of plurality in term of thrownness and grounds a “groundless” freedom in the public sphere (141). In contrast, Benhabib (Reluctant Modernism, 53) shows plurality to be developed in a fundamental Auseinandersetzung, with Heidegger. She considers speech fundamental for plurality, whereas this is not the case with Heidegger’s Mitsein. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 167. Arendt, Human Condition, 9. See discussion in The Truth of Žižek, ed. Paul Stamp and Richard Bowman (London: Continuum, 2007), 223–225. Critical of an attitude that he defines as liberal, Žižek

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considers Arendt to have been unable to break out of the bourgeois obscurantism inherited from Heidegger. Jean-François Lyotard, Lectures d’enfance (Paris: Galilée, 1991), 69. Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 146–167. Arendt, Human Condition, 9; Promise of Politics, 95. “The nature of man is his only to the extent that it gives him the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man” (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harvest, 1979], 455). Peg Birmingham has noted that the disessentializing of man is a key to the Arendtian political ontology. See Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 127. “Kant, Immanuel,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 68/18 032143. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40. Action is the “actualization of the human condition of natality” (Arendt, Human Condition, 178) and an activity through which man reveals his distinctiveness, which presumes plurality (176). Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 139–140. Arendt, Human Condition, 210. Pitkin, Attack of the Blob, 1–19. For Pitkin, the “real-world problem” reveals political, social, and economic problems of modernity. Arendt is calling for new ways of understanding political agency and attempting to unblock the postwar paralysis haunting political philosophy. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 217–218. Arendt, Human Condition, 186. “Nowhere else [than in the work of art] does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the nonmortal home for mortal beings” (ibid., 168). Ibid., 188. Ibid., 186, 210. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 198. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), 188, 199, 346, 424. Mary McCarthy fed Arendt with news on the agenda of the committee. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 339. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 252–278. Ibid., 255. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 438. Arendt, Promise of Politics, 202. Arendt concludes that every detail was thought out to dehumanize its victims, from the transport to the first shock of arrival in the camps (ibid., 453). Hitler dreamed of creating a condition in which all individuals would live and die for their species (ibid., 438). Ibid., 453. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 466. She describes this in a literal sense—totalitarian regimes destroy all possible space between men by pressing them against each other, thus producing the “desert of tyranny.”

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120. Cf. note 4. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 216–228. 121. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 475. Quoting Goethe, she wrote, “You can never avoid the world better than with art, and you can never relate to the world better than with art” (Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:398). 122. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism xxxvi–xxxvii. Seyla Benhabib discusses Arendt’s claim that the weakening of Stalinism in the Soviet Union is mirrored in the “amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts” (Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 73–75). 123. In her reading of Arendt, Seyla Benhabib has argued that politics demands community as well as plurality. In her notebooks, Arendt equates it more or less with “presence of others” (Denktagebuch, 1:570). Public space, argues Benhabib, is Arendt’s conceptualization of world. Only when world and community cooperate can public space appear. However, I would consider this a too literal reading of the idea of “world,” which is dependent on the ontological notion of plurality but not on the function of a community, which is social. Whereas world and plurality belong to the contingent production of appearances, community is a social formation. See Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 62–76. 124. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 198. 125. Ibid., 211. 126. Margaret Canovan (“Politics as Culture,” 617–642) has observed the stress on performativity in Arendt’s work, through references to architecture, theater, and art as metaphors for political life. 127. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 200. 128. As Dana Villa has shown (“Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” 714), there is a spatial quality assumed in Arendt’s concept of the public sphere. Were it not that we occupy specific places in that space, interaction would not be possible. The concept of “world” in Arendt presumes a three-dimensional quality. 129. Arendt, On Revolution, 140. 130. Here, an analogy can be drawn to the philosopher. The fate of the thinker, split in two, is to be called back to the world of appearances; the thinker finds himself intruding in and through the plural existence of solitude (Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:184–185). This is also why Plato philosophized in dialogues (Arendt, Human Condition, 76). 131. When man is deprived of the freedom to communicate his thought in public, he is deprived of “the only treasure left to us in our civic life” (Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 41). 132. Julia Kristeva argues in a contrary manner. She describes the domain of intimacy as the very core of an intellectual engagement that has marked the twentieth century. Intimacy, in Kristeva’s language, is not susceptible to commodification but rather is a protection against it. See Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 43–63. 133. “The world’s reality is actually expressed by . . . [the] escape” (Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times [New York: Harvest, 1968], 22). 134. Arendt, Human Condition, 55. 135. Rosalyn Deutsche has taken this conditioning to heart in showing the inherently conflictual nature of public spaces in both an architectural and political mode. She is quoting Arendt in showing that plurality helps keep the “real” nature of the world. See Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 310.

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136. Clement Greenberg, for instance, argued that the excitement with modernism lay in the “pure occupation with spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors” (Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays [Boston: Beacon Press, 1989], 7. 137. See the discussion of Schneemann’s work in Kristine Stiles, ed., Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2010), lvi. 138. Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2002), 163–165. 139. Ibid., 163. 140. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964), 581. 141. As noted in Mary Dietz, “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1995), 17. 142. Arendt, Human Condition, 51,188, 198. 143. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 154. Svetlana Boym (Another Freedom [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010], 226) has given attention to the aesthetic character of Arendt’s concept of freedom. Arendt bestows on it qualities of “incalculability, luck, chance, hope, surprise, and wonder.” Boym shows that Arendt’s differentiation between liberation and freedom is of consequence to the arts, where liberation plays less of a role than freedom. 144. Iris Marion Young has argued against the ideals of enlightenment that pervade the public space as constituted by Arendt (that is, objectivity and disinterestedness). Instead, she is arguing for perspectivism and embodiment as a more carnivalesque form of space. See Young, “Feminism and the Public Sphere,” Constellations 3, no. 3 (1997): 340–363. 145. Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press), 171. 146. Ibid., 178. 147. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has pointed out that Arendt links the social with economy and household work. Labor, also, is household work. Her construing the social as a “feminine” sphere may also be behind her general resentment against it. Pitkin links Arendt’s conception of the parvenu, or assimilated Jew, with a stereotypical feminine role. See Pitkin, “Conformism, Housekeeping, and the Attack of the Blob: The Origins of Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig, 78. 148. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 453. 149. Arendt, Human Condition, 176. The appearance of a unique being is to be distinguished from its mere bodily existence—singularity is expressed in words and action. 150. Amelia Jones (Body Art/Performing the Subject [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998], 203) has compared early performance art to developments in phenomenology, feminism, and poststructuralism, construing new forms of subjectivity. See also Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, trans. Saskia Iris-Jain (London: Routledge, 2010), 38–75.

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1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest 1979), 196. 2. In fact, Arendt called African literature a “nonexistent subject” (Hannah Arendt, On Violence [New York: Harcourt, 1970], 96). 3. See Anne Norton, “Africa and African Americans in Hannah Arendt’s Writings,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1995), 247–264. Norton lists Arendt’s attititudes against, not least, African American students as contrasted to those of European descent. As Norton notes, however, the racist attitudes conflict with Arendt’s sympathy for the African American cause (254–255). 4. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 190. 5. Cf. Richard King, “On Race and Culture: Hannah Arendt and Her Contemporaries,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113–137. King notes that Arendt’s admiration of European culture blinds her to her own racist views. 6. Elisabeth Gallas has done extensive research into the work on archives of Jewish cultural treasures, and highlighting the active part of Arendt. For Arendt as for Gershom Scholem, who was also engaged in the process, the work with objects made it possible to reunite with a tradition threatened by liquidation. See Elisabeth Gallas, “Das leichenhaus der bücher (Dresden: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 256. See also Elisabeth YoungBruehl, Hannah Arendt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 244, which points to the impact on Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. 7. See field reports 12–18 and final report by Arendt, in Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt/ Gershom Scholem: Der briefwechsel, ed. Marie Luise Knott (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 2010), 485–533. 8. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest, 1968), 202. 9. See Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), xi–xii. Like Gottlieb, Arendt’s interest in literature subtly deals with questions of loss as she approaches authors that write in the void after political disasters or after religious worlds are lost, writers such as Kafka or Brecht. 10. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 187–194. 11. Ibid., 52. 12. Ibid., 167–168. 13. See Arjun Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 13. Appadurai argues that commodities are primarily defined by their exchange value and should be distinguished from products, objects, and other things. Commodification, to Appadurai, is a phase, and not a material state; it is socially defined and can be transformed and reversed. 14. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Barbara Hahn, Hannah Arendt: Leidenschaften, menschen, und bücher (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2005); Barbara Hahn and Marie-Luise Knott, eds., Hannah Arendt: Von den dichtern erwarten wir den wahrheit (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2007). Gottlieb also produced the anthology of Arendt’s writings on culture, Reflections on Literature and Culture.

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15. Emerson-Thoreau Medal lecture, 1969, Hannah Arendt Papers, 1898–1977, 67/5, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. See also her interview with Günter Gaus, in Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains,” Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 1–24. 16. See Arendt’s discussion of the Boers’ commodification of slave labor as a direct consequence of their loss of culture (Origins of Totalitarianism, 191–195). 17. Sketches from 1970 show that she was going to include a chapter on art in The Life of the Mind—on art as making the invisible visible (Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann [Munich: Piper, 2002], 2:785). 18. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 49, 77–78, 132. 19. Hannah Arendt, “Society and Culture,” Daedalus 89, no. 2 (1960): 280. 20. Hannah Arendt, Within Four Walls, ed. Lotte Kohler (London: Harcourt, 1996), 342–343. 21. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968), 202. 22. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1962), 271, 275. For Macpherson, there is no moral justificatory ground for liberal democracy because there is no basis for cohesion; liberal democracy was founded on a certain concept of cohesion that can no longer be seen as valid. Colonial history has invalidated it. The substitute, Macpherson argues, is war (276). 23. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1999), 183–84, 189. Adorno describes a split inherent in the concept of subjectivity: the I that thinks cannot conceive of itself outside of a certain inherent objective status. 24. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 193. The formula is intended to overthrow any belief in natural genius. 25. Ibid., 169. 26. For instance, Arendt makes the observation that the revolutionaries in general knew little about the Roman cultural models to which they were appealing. Nevertheless, such cultural sentiments were vital to the revolution (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [London: Penguin, 1990], 121–124). 27. “It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art” (Arendt, Human Condition, 128). 28. In Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 181. The text was written in the 1950s and discussed at a symposium in Munich. 29. Quoting Rilke’s poem “Magic,” Arendt affirms the thought that art is transfigured so that “the fire of life can be reversed from its state of fading” (Arendt, Human Condition, 168). 30. Arendt, Human Condition, 169; Life of the Mind, 1:49, 184–185. 31. See Arendt’s reading of Carl Schmitt’s Political Romanticism in “Excerpt and Notes: Hidden Tradition,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 68/12 025537. See also Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 86. For Schmitt, the primary question of “the real” was that of legitimation: Who asserts the quality of the real beyond metaphysics or religion? For Schmitt, this is a political rather than a philosophical question, and he points to two instances: man and history. Man conditions his own reality and thereby himself. 32. Aristotle, Metaphysics, books 7–9. Cf. also Kant’s claim that the noumenon, or thing-initself, becomes knowable only in the shape of the phenomenon.

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33. Martin Heidegger holds violence to be an integral part of the work of art, conducive to the thought process that shapes it (Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 25–26). Arendt extends this violence to apply to all forms of fabrication, as violence against nature (Arendt, Human Condition, 139–140). 34. She writes to Blücher in 1950, about Holzwege, that it is impressive and amazing as well as wrong and crazy (Arendt, Within Four Walls, 137). 35. Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 5–12. The thing-character of the work of art, then, does not derive from matter and form, according to Heidegger. Its “thingly” character derives from the “work” rather than from a resistant matter presenting itself as a mute substance. Rather than making the thing integral to the work, Heidegger reverses the relation. 36. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 209. 37. Arendt, Human Condition, 168. 38. Arendt, Human Condition, 169–171. The artist is an exception in the goal-oriented world of Homo faber; the reification that takes place in the work of art is rather a transfiguration of memory and of thought. Arendt makes it clear that art resists consumer society in the role of providing substance that cannot be fully commodified (Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future [New York: Viking, 1961], 210). 39. See letter to Scholem from 1946, where she also recognizes its importance to the thendeceased Benjamin (Arendt, Hannah Arendt/Gershom Scholem: Der briefwechsel, 129). To Arendt, mass culture was less of a problem in itself. She is not against the Vergnügungsindustrie, but she likes to see a difference between entertainment and pleasure (“Kultur und Politik,” discussion, 1958, Hannah Arendt Papers, 72/3 022766.) 40. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 205–207. 41. As Annika Thiem has shown, Arendt’s “Auseinandersetzung” with Marx was in fact the result of an intended book, which was then transformed into The Human Condition. Originating in the idea that politics must be opposed to economics, Arendt’s resistance to Marx was directed less against his historical analysis, which she often shared, and more against the fact that political life was turned into economic life. See Annika Thiem, in Liliane Weissberg, ed., Affinität wider willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno und die Frankfurtschule (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011), 137–150. Marx’s theory of fetishism implied the depoliticization of public space. In this analysis, Arendt followed Benjamin (172–173). In Thiem’s analysis, the Marxist analysis of capitalism resembles Arendt’s “social” sphere. To Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, in contrast, “the social” in Arendt cannot be equated with “the economic,” because it poses questions of behavior, responsibility, and ethics. See Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 197–207. 42. See Karl Marx, Capital (1867), vol. 1, ch. 1, part 4, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” http://www.stanford.edu/~davies/Symbsys100-Spring0708/Marx -Commodity-Fetishism.pdf. 43. Cf. the exchange of letters between Adorno and Benjamin in which they discuss the simultaneous transformation of artistic media and sense-perception in terms of commodification (Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson [London: Verso, 2007], 124, 140). 44. See Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” 44, 48. Commodities are made valuable through the social modes of exchange. Therefore, mass production, for instance, can change the value of a commodity, as can the stories that surround it.

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45. It is certain that Arendt highly treasured the manuscript and saw herself as a close friend to Benjamin, and therefore also responsible for the treatment of his writings; this led to an animosity between Arendt and Adorno, who was officially responsible for the publication of Benjamin’s Nachlass. See Hannah Arendt, Arendt und Benjamin: Texte, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Dettlev Schlöttker and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 161–175. Arendt was keen to publish her own collection of Benjamin essays, an endeavor that finally resulted in Illuminations, to which she wrote an introduction (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, 1968]). 46. Quoting from Benjamin, she notes that wonder replaces the fascination with beauty in Benjamin (Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 164). 47. Ibid., 154. See also Arendt, Arendt und Benjamin, 197–198. 48. See Walter Benjamin’s investigations into the concept of reflection inherent in the artworks themselves in the early romantics. Positing a break with Kant on the limits of reflection inherent in a work of art, the romantics claim it to be a systematic thought in itself. Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999–2006), 116–200. 49. Art and the political are discourses of judgment rather than of knowledge and truth; therefore, they belong together. This is argued throughout Arendt’s lectures on Kant as well as in Between Past and Future (224). By that same logic, she notes, aesthetics is more political than rhetoric (“Kant, Immanuel,” Hannah Arendt papers, 68/18 032143). 50. In an interesting reading, Liliane Weissberg (Affinität wider willen?, 177–208) sees Arendt’s essay on Benjamin in Men in Dark Times as an attempt to “rescue” Benjamin from the Frankfurt School and to instead read him against the shadow of Heidegger and Kafka, with whom Arendt was more affiliated. That claim might be questioned with regard to Heidegger, but it is certain that Kafka’s impact cannot be underestimated. 51. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry Reconsidered, trans. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 100. 52. As Christoph Menke has remarked, aesthetic pleasure in Adorno can only be understood “at the price of being subsumed under moral judgment,” whether it is rejected for “obscuring the true task of art” or is regarded as a promise of reconciliation (Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Salomon [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999], 8). 53. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 199. 54. This presumes that the work of art is autonomous. For Arendt, the autonomous status of the work of art is simply given, whereas Lydia Goehr has discussed the ambivalent status of the work of art in Adorno in relation to Artur Danto, showing how both point to the possibilities of continuation with regard to the work of art. In Adorno and Danto, those possiblities are intrinsically linked to the philosophizing of art itself, in which the autonomy or liberation will transpire. See Goehr, Elective Affinities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 107. 55. Arendt, Human Condition, 163–164. 56. Ibid., 188. 57. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 201. 58. See, for instance, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (San Francisco: University of California Press, 2011), an exhaustive account of the

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63. 64.

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66. 67.

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relation between the development of American performance art and protests against the Vietnam war. As can be noted in “Vietnam War,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 61/4, where a file with petitions dated between 1965 and 1973 is kept. Letter from Blücher in Arendt, Within Four Walls, 29. Ibid., 33. She also wrote catalog text for a New York exhibition of Carl Heidenreich, a close friend and artist who was accused in Germany of entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”). See Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 203–206. Letters to her husband portray her as an avid museumgoer with a great interest in art before modernism (Arendt, Within Four Walls, 28–30, 69, 165, 302). “Whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched” (Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:29). Arendt, Within Four Walls, 33. Not only in Bathsheba at Her Bath but also in the paintings of Titus, seen over the shoulder by the Evangelists, and in Saul and David, age subsists. Many years later, returning to the museum and Saul and David, Arendt was disappointed, preferring Rembrandt’s drawings (302). Here, Arendt actualizes a phenomenological conception of perception, in which the gaze is mediated through the object. This idea can be seen in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for instance, or in Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Denoël, 1981), 60–64. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 105. Arendt is here referring to Karen Blixen’s “philosophy” of storytelling. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsey Wing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 189–191. For Glissant, the tradition of understanding inherent in the Western notion of transparency involves a reductionism in which the very reception of alterity involves a judgment based on more or less conscious norms. Jean Genet, “Le secret de Rembrandt,” in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 5:34–35. Cf. Genet’s question, “What remains of a Rembrandt after it has been torn to pieces and flushed down the toilet?” (4:20–31). That is Genet’s question as read by Derrida in Glas. Genet’s obsession with Rembrandt has to do with the way his paintings embody the idea of a masterpiece. Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 216. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:658. Arendt’s suspicion of psychoanalysis derived from the fact that she saw it as a counterpoint to Kant’s idea of freedom and therefore untied to responsibility. For Arendt, psychoanalysis undermined ethical responsibility in attempting to find explanations, causes, etc. (Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:769). She jokingly makes Freud a cultural symptom of Judaism—the son killing the father as a symptom of Jewish patriarchy, rather than an unconscious impulse of desire (Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 179). Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:39–40. Arendt calls psychoanalysis an “iceberg theory,” because it creates the idea of consciousness as the tip of an iceberg without proving the existence of anything underneath (1:113). In this regard, Lisa Disch is right in arguing against a reading of The Life of the Mind that places too much emphasis on its contemplative turn toward spectatorship rather than agency. Judgment, as Disch argues, is in itself a demanding act that requires a use of the imagination that has decisive political impact. Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 141–171.

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74. Deploring that the lust for stories has been replaced by self-analysis, Arendt contrasts the universality of the Oedipus complex with the story of Sophocles (Hannah Arendt, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, ed. Carol Brichtman [London: Harcourt, 1995], 295). Arendt argues against any idea that emotions are transposed sensations: “The soul, where our passions, our feelings and emotions arise, is a more or less chaotic welter of happenings which we do not enact but suffer (pathein)” (Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:72). 75. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:119. 76. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 160. 77. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Paul Kegan (London: Routledge, 2002), 376. 78. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 14–18. 79. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:354. Arendt is here referring to Heinrich Blücher’s interpretations of Cézanne. 80. Arendt, Within Four Walls, 137. 81. Ibid., 243. 82. Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger Briefe 1925 bis 1975 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), 316–317. Curiously, Arendt is defending Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in a letter addressed to Hugo Friedrich; Heidegger is even regarded as a greater poet than Trakl himself. 83. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:24. Here Arendt is referring to Critique of Pure Reason. 84. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:29, 1:33. 85. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 135–136. 86. Ibid., 139. 87. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1: 24–30. Cf. Arendt, Human Condition (199), where she has a less elaborated view of the relation between reality and appearance, quoting Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1172b36): “What appears to all, this we call Being.” 88. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:33. 89. Ibid., 1:179. 90. Ibid., 1:133. 91. Ibid., 183. 92. Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 204. 93. See Immanuel Kant, “Natural Dialectic of Human Reason,” in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), A669/B697–A704/ B732. Smith uses the translation “thought-entities,” which is the standard one. Kant uses Gedankendinge or Gedankenwesen intermittently, usually referring to the same thing. 94. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A670/B698. Kant uses the expression when he argues that we must be able to perform a transcendental deduction not only of the categories but also of the ideas of pure reason, or a priori concepts. Otherwise, they will be leere Gedankendinge. 95. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:41. 96. Ibid., 1:77–78, 201.

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97. Art is “transforming sensual objects into thought-things, [and] will rip these out of context and submit them to a process of de-realization where they are prepared for a new and different function” (Ibid., 1:49). 98. Ibid., 25, 132. 99. Ibid., 141–145. As Arendt notes, wonder is not astonishment but the encounter with the simple and the everyday (Hannah Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray [New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1978], 299). 100. Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 191. 101. See Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:141–152. In his book on Arendt and Heidegger, Jacques Taminiaux shows that Arendt’s critique of Plato’s inability to intellectually “endure” the multiplicity of wonders is in fact of critique of Heidegger’s history of Being. Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 168–198. 102. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:184–185. 103. In Jean-François Lyotard’s reading of Kant, aesthetic judgment is equivalent to the limits of thought. Aesthetic reflection is the simultaneous act of perception and feeling. Lyotard regards this as a form of delay observed in Kant: the subject is what is forced to reflect on what the thinking subject feels as it is thinking. Lyotard, Lessons of the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1–15. 104. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 18. Heidegger discards traditional aesthetics in favor of the “being of beings,” to which the farmer’s shoes, painted by van Gogh, is first witness. 105. There is a hard price to be paid for art, Arendt argues: “life itself ” (Arendt, Human Condition, 169). Returning to the end of Oedipus the King and to Herod, she notes that all things have shadows. Deeds are things without shadows; only when they are talked about do they acquire a shadow, become heimisch (Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:505). 106. Otherwise it will be counterproductive. There is an interesting parallel between Arendt’s haunted figures of the uncanny and Heidegger’s, but Heidegger’s concealment and unconcealment strive to establish a figure of ground that relies more on an aesthetic collective (das Volk) than Arendt’s does. For that reason, to Heidegger, the essence of art is poetry, which is not the view of Arendt. Cf. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 40–47. 107. In “Art after Philosophy,” from 1969, Joseph Kosuth claims that conceptual art does not need philosophy and that it signals “the end of philosophy and the beginning of art” (Koseth, Art after Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990, ed. Gabriele Guercio [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991], 14). Danto, in return, remarked that art had finally become capable of superseding itself, following the prediction of Hegel: ”Only when it became clear that anything could be a work of art could one think, philosophically, about art” (Arthur Danto, After the End of Art [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 14). There is little relation, however, between Arendt’s notion of art and what Danto has called its “posthistorical” nature, which developed in the 1960s and 1970s, with a radical philosophical turn accompanying its expression, display, and social role (135–151). 108. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:85–86. This is discussed by Max Deutscher, who argues that thinking is figured as a “little death” in this regard; thought by definition is concerned with invisibles (Deutscher, Judgment after Arendt [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007], 32–33).

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109. Arendt, Human Condition, 186–187. 110. Artworks, Arendt notes, are examples; they offer a form of knowledge that is not cognition. To Kant, humans stand out in their individuality in works that are, at the same time, abstract generalizations at some level. Here, Arendt implies both the political and moral impact of aesthetic agents (Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 76–77). Cf. Paul Guyer’s interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics, pointing to the moral implications inherent in it (Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 192–208). 111. Sonning Prize speech, 1975, Hannah Arendt Papers, 77/19 013987. 112. Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 65, 85. Her reflections on the “who” are interwoven with her readings of Augustine and St. Paul. 113. Arendt, Human Condition, 175. 114. Placing the quest for narrative within Arendt’s insistence on the importance of bios, all in all, Julia Kristeva regards this interest within the context of a “philosophy of life” and as a response to Heidegger’s “essentializing” of Being. One might question, however, how well this corresponds to Arendt’s resistance to any kind of metaphysical pretensions— there is no concept of life in her writings that is not historically or culturally imbued. Cf. Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative, trans. Frank Collins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 27. 115. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 40. 116. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:65, 85. This is a quote that Arendt associates with Augustine as well as with St. Paul. 117. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 155. 118. Referring to the disbelief of the court, as they found nothing abnormal about anything in the psychological constitution of Eichmann, Arendt makes the appearance of his normality into a foundation for her argument about what made his conduct possible—his lack of reflection. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963), 21–36. 119. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:663, 2:769. For Arendt, psychoanalysis simply inscribed an eviction of responsibility. 120. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 109. 121. Ibid., 154–155. 122. “If the individual is organic organized matter, then its relation to its environment (to matter in general, organic or inorganic), when it is a question of a who, is mediated by the organized but inorganic matter of the organon, the tool with its instructive role (its role qua instrument), the what. It is in this sense that the what invents the who just as much as it is invented by it” (Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, vol. 1, The Fault of Epimetheus [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998], 169). 123. Stiegler argues that the unitary consistency of the human self is always to come, but it never appears to be set in place (ibid., 1:259). The relation between the who and the what is determined by traces produced through technology, or the sign system. Moreover, the technology of the sign system is also present in the individual’s relation to himself. 124. Arendt, Human Condition, 184. As Seyla Benhabib has shown, Arendt did not just think the concept of action as deconstructed from teleological goals. She thought that action,

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126. 127.

128. 129.

130.

131. 132.

133. 134. 135.

136.

137.

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narrative, and interpretation must be considered together. In her analysis of cultural institutions, Arendt saw the need of polyphony, of gathering several voices. This explains her simultaneous interest in Heidegger, the Greeks, civil movements, and the Holocaust. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996), 97–98. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:85. In her dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine, Arendt associates this with the idea that man has a double heritage, both social and spiritual, creating a certain conception of reification of the self. Hannah Arendt, Love and St. Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Julia Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 41–43. This logic is what Arendt refers to as “daimon life” (Arendt, Human Condition, 179). See Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, Heloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg (London: Norton, 2006), 800. The signifier “I” designates the speaking subject at the level of enunciation. At the same time, the subject can never be signified beyond the discursive split between enuncation and signification, since that would presume that it existed outside of language. From a Lacanian point of view, subjectivity is a form of subjectivation under the sign, tied to imaginary forms of recognition in the social sphere. Arendt, Human Condition, 184. See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 67, on misrecognition as a result of the Lacanian logic of the definition of the signifier as representing something to another signifier. Arendt, Human Condition, 184. For Foucault the question is “What can I become?” For Arendt the question is “Who am I?” For Judith Butler, following Adriana Cavarero, the question is “Who are you?” (Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself [New York: Fordham University Press, 2005], 31). This question sets a limit on the metaphysical model of reciprocal recognition, avoiding simple content. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 145. Arendt, Human Condition, 167–175. As Dana Villa has remarked, the perversion of political techne lies in the fact that its completion becomes physis; the material used is that of human elements, and the principle of completion is that of natural law. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 255. Arendt, On Revolution, 212. Arendt, On Violence, 44. The play was mounted at the Comédie-Française in 1789 and was then buried after a tumult at the theater. See Olympe de Gouges, introduction to L’esclavage des nègres, ou, L’heureux naufrage, ed. Sylvie Chalaye and Jacqueline Razgonnikoff (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), xxv–xxviii. In Arendt, On Revolution, for instance, it is clear that the notions of “public freedom” and “public happiness” of the American Revolution depended on new forms of political space in which men were declared free and equal (126–132). Hannes Bajohr has rightly seen that the spontaneous character of Arendt’s public space is often overlooked (Bajohr, Dimensionen der öffentlichkeit, politik und erkenntnis bei Hannah Arendt [Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2011], 60–63). In the reports written after her death, de Gouges was accused of having overstepped her role as mother and wife by having taken a step into public life. After the death of

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139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144. 145. 146.

147. 148.

149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

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de Gouges and other female revolutionaries, the rights of women were heavily circumvented in France. See Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 169–201. Arendt argues that the self-purges that follow any revolution take place as a consequence of appearances being primary to any notion of an ideology inserting itself as the order of life: “It was always a question of uncovering what had been hidden, of unmasking the disguises, of exposing duplicity and mendacity” (Arendt, On Revolution, 100). As Jay Bernstein has pointed out, the exemplary validity that artworks may hold is comparable to events in politics: just as the constitution is an act of founding, so an art work may have a following and a historical impact. Bernstein, “Political Modernism: The New, Revolution and Civil Disobedience in Arendt and Adorno,” in Arendt and Adorno, ed. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 69. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 453. Ibid., 339. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 214–215. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 10–11. See Melvyn Hill, “The Fiction of Mankind and the Stories of Men,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979). Hill considered the social aspect of action as the main point in Arendt’s notion of storytelling. Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 104. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 10. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 290. (First printed in Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2, April 1944.) Quoting from Benjamin, she notes that wonder replaces the fascination with beauty in Benjamin (Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 164). Arendt wrote three versions of essays on Kafka in the forties: one in English in 1944, published as “Franz Kafka: A Reevaluation,” originally published in The Partisan Review (reprinted in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 69–80); another in German, in the review Die Wandlung (1946), translated as “Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew” (in Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 109); and a third, also in German, 1948, called “Franz Kafka,” published in Sechs Essays. This version is translated as “Franz Kafka: The Man of Goodwill,” in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 288–297. See also other extensive discussion of Kafka elsewhere; for instance, in the preface to Between Past and Future, 7–14. Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew” in Reflections on Literature and Culture, 95. Ibid., 108. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 10–11. Franz Kafka, “Er,” in Gesammelte schriften, vol. 5, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1946), 187. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:202. See also Arendt, Between Past and Future, 7; Denktagebuch 2:667, 671, 746, 766. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:206. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 12. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:208. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 96.

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158. Arendt, Human Condition, 175. 159. Ibid., 183.

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1. “Kant, Immanuel,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 1898–1977, 68/18 032143, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 2. Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 2:671, 2:746. Arendt returns to this aphorism in her chapter on thinking (Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future [New York: Viking, 1968]) and in a letter to Heidegger (Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger briefe 1925 bis 1975 [Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999], 159). Arendt consciously uses this image to understand time, rather than resorting to Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (Denktagebuch, 2:669). In her notebooks, however, she remarks that this image can only be used for thought; action is more futural (2:766). 3. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Arendt und Benjamin: Texte, briefe, dokumente, ed. Dettlev Schlöttker and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 161–175. 4. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257–258. 5. Franz Kafka, “Er,” in Gesammelte schriften, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1946), 5:187. 6. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 9. 7. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, “Arendt’s Theory of Judgment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 245–261. Yasco Horsman also has noted the aesthetic aspect in the relationship between spectatorship and judgment. See Horsman, Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 2011. 8. See, for instance, the discussion of the orphic character of Arendt’s theory of judgment in Max Deutscher, Judgment After Arendt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 33. 9. See Bonnie Honig, ed., Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); David Ingram, “The Postmodern Kantianism of Arendt and Lyotard,” The Review of Metaphysics 42, no. 1 (1988): 51–77; Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 102, 107, 219–221, 253; “Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action,” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (May 1992): 276, 288; “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” The American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 (1992): 712–721. 10. See Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Linda Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005). 11. Lisa Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 80; Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 112. 12. Kimberley Curtis, Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 23–67.

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13. See, for instance, Ronald Beiner, ed., “Preface,” in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), vii–viii. In the notebooks, from 1958, the Critique of Judgment has an important role, as does Kant’s work on anthropology. See, for example, the paragraphs on Apologie für die Sinnlichkeit (Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:602–603). 14. Thinking was first published in The New Yorker. Thinking and Willing were then published as separate volumes, before being published as one book. The intended Einführung in die politik was begun in 1959 and came out after Arendt’s death as Was ist politik? 15. As Dana Villa has pointed out (Arendt and Heidegger, 63–69), the focus on plurality answers to the criticism that Arendt fails to take Kant’s actual politics into account. Moreover, her unwillingness to inscribe the second Critique into her examination of the third unravels the demarcation line between Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. Arendt consequently abstains from placing rationalist and universalist forms of deliberation at the core of public space. This is “rooted in Arendt’s profound suspicion of any attempt to rise above the realm of plural, conflicting opinion (doxa), to ground political action or judgment in truth” (71). 16. Kant, allegedly, loved the world more than life, appearances more than being (Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:575). 17. This can be seen also in her notebooks: according to Arendt, Kant was not interested in aesthetics at first, only politics (ibid., 1:570). 18. “Wie nahe verwandt Kunst und Politik sind, weil sie beide es mit der Welt zu tun haben, kann man auch daran sehen, dass Kant die Bedeutung der Urteilskraft im Bereich des ästhetischen zuerst aufstiess” (ibid., 1:571). 19. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 32. 20. Ibid. 21. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:571 (my translation). 22. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 65. 23. As Arendt herself notes, Nietzsche complains of the Cartesian belief in the certainty of reality, and then becomes a master over reality through a more radical antimetaphysical turn. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 151. 24. An aesthetics of the sensible, to Jacques Rancière, must be considered primarily through what he calls a “partage du sensible,” meaning at the same time a commonality of sharing and a commune split into parts. This simultaneous sharing and splitting will serve to produce new commonalities and new splits. An aesthetics of the sensible is to be understood as forms of time and space, or as the conditions of experience. Rancière, Le partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique (Paris: Broché, 2000), 13–14. 25. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:602. 26. This is of course a contested area. For many, Arendt has gone wrong in assuming that Kant’s judgment has nothing to do with universality. See, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons of the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 18. To Arendt, however, it is clear that the Kantian project is irreducible to the subsumption under a universal law. Concepts such as pleasure and displeasure, as well as worthiness and happiness, must be connected to reason lest it appear as “empty figments,” to quote Kant himself. Cf. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 25. As a reader of Baumgarten, Kant sometimes operated with a distinction between “higher” and “lower” forms of knowledge, with the “lower” faculties elaborating

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27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

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sensual impressions. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 12–13. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 83. Jay Bernstein has discussed judgment in terms of life-world, arguing that the difference between determinative judgments (cognition) and reflective judgments (judgment) is not one of kind but of degree. Bernstein, The Fate of Art (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 44–55. Ibid., 61–63; 262–63. In his reading of Lukácz’s realism, Theodor Adorno makes it clear that he regards any normative claim toward realism in art as an ontological mistake; art is appearance and is characterized by its distance vis-à-vis anything that might be considered reality. Rather than mimicking the actual world, it presents a “negative knowledge” in which “art can become reality only if art crystalizes out its own formal laws” (Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson [London: Verso, 2007], 175). See, for instance, Theodor Adorno setting accounts with Lukácz’s realism (ibid.). It is not obvious that Arendt ever read Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which was posthumously published in 1970. Adorno argues that art produces a form of resistance in that it “reproduces social development in aesthetic terms without directly imitating it” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor [London: Continuum, 2002], 321). To Arendt, the aspect of negativity that is inherent in art has less to do with its production than its reception, and in the sensus communis that is implied in aesthetic judgment. In her notebooks, Arendt draws the title “Apologie für die sinnlichkeit” from Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:602–603). In her notes on Kant, also, she gives more attention to aesthetic issues than in her lectures. So, for instance, she writes, “Art and politics are closely intertwined since they both have to do with the world; this is something we can see also since Kant first advocated for the importance of judgment within the domain of aesthetics” (1:571; my translation). Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), §§ 8–11, 34–37. Cf. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:602–603. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 113–114. Senses, all in all, are “world-giving,” but touch and taste are private, in contrast to vision. As we feel pain, we tend to withdraw rather than immersing ourselves in matters. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 52–55. “Kant, Immanuel,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 68/18 032136. Sensibility is to be considered different from affects. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, for instance, has shown how affects such as sorrow, anxiety, and melancholia color the thought of Arendt (Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003]). “Jews and the State,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 68/16 032124–032136. Ibid., 68/16 032126. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 119. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, ed. Nicolas Walker, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), § 41. The interest that people tend to show in

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42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

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objects of beauty and experiences of pleasure in general is an empirical fact and derives more from the fact that man is a social being than from an inherent interest in beauty as such. In his Anthropology (§§ 67, 137), Kant characterizes taste as a faculty of making social judgments about external objects within the power of imagination. As Paul Guyer has argued, this is a central aspect of the aesthetic experience in Kant: art engages imagination as well as pleasure; it communicates a feeling of content and purpose, and at the same time, pleasure and freedom. Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 192–208). Cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment § 37: The only a priori assertions we can make regarding taste is that everyone experiences beauty as something pleasurable, but we cannot determine what objects are pleasurable for everyone. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 66–68. It is important to note that, for Arendt, the opposite of the beautiful in Kant is not the ugly but the disgusting. Thus, in his reading of Kant's transcendental aesthetic in Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger sees a new grounding of thought in “intuition as the supporting fundamental moment of human knowledge,” an intuition of the sensible which affects thought (Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. Vera Duetsch and W. B. Barton [South Bend, IN: Gateway, 1968], 144–148). Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:79, 2:793. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 66. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:636. In Arendt’s words, they are a kind of Nahsinn (ibid., 2:793). Ibid., 2:636. Ibid., 2:679. The critique of aesthetics as an inherently bourgeois pastime has been wrought out by Terry Eagleton, who considers Kant’s transcendental subject an attempt to repair the damage done to a middle-class subject of taste. Eagleton, The Ideology of Aesthetic (London: Blackwell, 1998), 72–73. As many people have pointed out, the biography of Rahel Varnhagen became a covert narrative of her own life as an assimilated Jew, unable to find paths other than assimilation offered in prewar Europe. See Antonia Grunenberg, Hannah Arendt (Freiburg: Spektrum), 2003; Martine Leibovici, “Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen,” Social Research 74 (2007): 903–922; Liliane Weissberg, ed., “Introduction: Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, and the Writing of (Auto)biography,” in Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1997. Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 222. See Albrecht Wellmer, “Hannah Arendt on Judgment: The Unwritten Doctrine on Reason,” in Hannah Arendt, Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 34–35. As Wellmer has pointed out, the existing common sense is a sphere of inauthentic being, corrupted by a history that, in its most extreme, can be seen in the form of totalitarian movements. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, who considers Arendt to be “anthropologizing” sensus communis (Lyotard, Lessons, 18). Lyotard stresses the modification of the as if. In the analytic of the beautiful, we may look at the object as beautiful as if the beauty was a direct

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sensation produced by the object as such. But the sensation is nothing but the result of the claim that is ever-present in judgment—the as if of agreement, the ought with which the universal voice of judgment tends to speak, the expected agreement of everyone, as if the beauty was inherent in the quality of the object. For Kant, sensus communis can only be understood as the as if of everyone agreeing: “However, by the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense, i.e., a faculty of judging which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgment. This is accomplished by weighing the judgment, not so much with actual, as rather with the merely possible, judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own judging” (Kant, Critique of Judgment § 40, 5:293–294). For Jean-François Lyotard, the suprasensible character of the sensus communis comes to the fore in the sublime enthusiasm, where the community is never realized but rather is engaged through the promise of freedom. Lyotard, “Sensus Communis: The Subject in Statu Nascendi,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 217–235. Lyotard, “Sensus communis,” 63. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 44, 52. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 72–73. Arendt, Human Condition, 209. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 182–183. Seyla Benhabib considers this idea “one of Arendt’s fundamental contributions to the history of twentieth-century philosophy” and suggests “web” to be a metaphor for the phenomenological concept of horizon: a transparent, multifaceted context that precedes and follows our individual existence (Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt [London: Sage, 1996], 112). Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:51. Ibid., 1:50; Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:595, 600, 2:766; Human Condition, 208; The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest 1979), 51. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 14–18. “Great Friend of Reality,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 70/21. Seyla Benhabib has pointed out that an “enlarged mentality” requires sharing a sense of the real in order to avoid projection, idealization, and distortion in the engagement with others (Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 190–191). Kimberley Curtis has elaborated the aesthetic implications of this sense beautifully, arguing for the immanent aesthetic pleasure emerging in the way we conceive of a public world (Curtis, Our Sense of the Real, 28–66). As Curtis notes, the possibility that Arendt is “aestheticizing” politics, or that she is a “poet of political life” has raised concern among a lot of critics (Curtis, “Aesthetic Foundations of Democratic Politics in the Work of Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 28–29). I would concede that Arendt’s notion of the political relies on poetic and/or aesthetic concerns. This, however, is radically different

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67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

74.

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76.

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from the “aestheticization” or “poeticization” of politics which Arendt herself, by the way, implicitly criticizes in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Jay Bernstein, Fate of Art, 52. Reflective judgment builds on a world that appears to have a meaning, which in turn is ingrained through habit rather than complicity with the laws of reason. What appears does so beyond the boundaries of the law. Determinate judgment, on the other hand, builds on the constructs of reason. Reflective judgment is made through communicability and the prospective of the collective. If we were to perceive a world only made out of reason, the world we experience as meaningful would disappear. Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 20. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:571. In her notebooks, Arendt equates the free play of the faculties with the “sense of the senses,” or the sensus communis. Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 41. It is, Kant writes, as if our agreement was dictated by an original contract. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:571. Kant, Anthropology §§ 24, 53–54. Kant discusses inner sense as a function of thought affecting itself. For Kant, inner sense is a problem of psychology; we believe we are sensing ourselves inwardly, when in fact we are retiring into an illusion of an experience that we are taking on ourselves. Kant’s discussion of inner sense resembles Hegel’s on the schöne Seele, or “beautiful soul”; to rely on inner sense is to mistake a fiction for the play of experiential ideas, to believe oneself to be discovering hidden truths when in fact one is giving up on the external world and retiring into depression or illusion. This aspect makes sense if one reads Arendt’s philosophy, as Miguel Abensour has done, as a continuation of Kant’s critical project, the target of which was philosophy’s access to reality beyond appearances. For Abensour, Arendt’s notion of plurality is enhanced by her lectures on Kant. I would argue that Arendt places more focus on the senses than may be acknowledged if one places her within a critical tradition (a tradition that, after all, appeals to the limits of human knowledge). Arendt is affirmative and abundant in her notion of what the political may be, rather than critical. Therefore, I would agree with Abensour that Arendt looks for another tonality, another Stimmung, in the philosophical discourse on the political. See Miquel Abensour, Hannah Arendt: Contre la philosophie politique (Paris: Tonka, 2006), 230. Kant, Critique of Judgment § 40. Jay Bernstein has argued that judgment, not being knowledge, corresponds to Hegelian Sittlichkeit, an intersubjective sphere of everyday knowledge, which can be communicated but never fully spoken. In Bernstein’s reading, therefore, aesthetics is as much about erecting a community as it is about signifying objects. Bernstein, Fate of Art, 54–55. As Linda Zerilli has shown, Arendt transposes the pleasurable experience of judging, which Kant has described in an aesthetic domain, into a political domain; whereas politics does not derive from judgment, judgment creates communities as acts of freedom (Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom,” 158–188). See, for instance, Patricia Moynagh, “A Politics of Enlarged Mentality: Hannah Arendt, Citizenship Responsibility, and Feminism,” Hypatia 12, no. 4 (1997): 27–53; and Maurizio Passerin d’Entréves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), 111. See, for instance, Anthony Cascardi, “Communication and Transformation: Aesthetics and Politics in Kant and Arendt,” in Calhoun and McGowan, eds., Hannah Arendt, 99–132. Cascardi argues that Arendt elides the moral tension inherent in Kant.

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77. Arendt sees this in Kant, rightly or wrongly: “The condition of possibility of judgment is the presence of others, the public sphere. With this Kant means, and only Kant, that freedom of thought cannot exist without public space” (Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:570; my translation). 78. Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 14. Kant describes this coercion on formal grounds; we perceive forms in the same manner (§ 22). 79. Ibid., § 5. 80. “We may safely state that the external power which deprives man of the freedom to communicate his thought publicly also takes away his freedom to think, the only treasure left to us in our civic life and through which alone there may be a remedy against all evils of the present state of affairs” (quoted in Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 41). 81. Ibid., 62–63. 82. Ibid., 43. 83. Ibid., 69. 84. Kant has made clear in the Critique of Pure Reason that the self can only present itself indirectly, through a flux of appearances. In order to form a self we need a criteria, which Arendt takes from Kant: that we think in accordance with ourselves—that is, coherently (Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 71). Cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 40. 85. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:765. 86. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 42. 87. Arendt talks about prejudice in terms of prejudgment, thereby indicating its validity for social and political life (ibid., 42). See also Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 102–103. 88. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:74–75. 89. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 71. 90. Emmanuel Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Robert Bernasconi, Simon Critchley, and Adriaan Peperzak (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 167. The face, however, symbolizes not so much individuality as the singularity that conduces exposure to death, accompanying the singular aspect of being. 91. Arendt, Denktagebuch 1:570. Linda Zerilli has also noted this, adding that Arendt’s theory of judgment is not a copy of Kant’s but is supplemented with imaginative powers, which also makes it a force of freedom (Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom,” 173–174). 92. Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art and Research 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007); Mouffe, ed., On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 9. 93. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest, 1968), 122. 94. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 470–471. Here, she is reflecting on the successful use of propaganda machinery in the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. 95. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 353. Here, Arendt’s notion of ideology and the imaginary are the same: ideology shuts the masses in “the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world” that only reveals its imaginary character through sudden lacunae, such as unexpected silences. Here, her notion of ideology comes interestingly close to Lacan’s notion of the imaginary, a concept fundamental to psychoanalysis, in describing it as a kind of speculum mundi that can only be split and undone through a kind of stain. For Lacan, this is a normal state of the alienation of consciousness and perception, and not, as in Arendt, a produced state of alienated consciousness. Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Norton, 1998), 74–75.

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96. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 288. Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world. 97. In the final chapter of Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben argues that the concentration camp is the epitome of biopolitics, the achievement of the politicization of life itself. To Agamben, this is suggested by Arendt, though she fails to draw the full consequences of her suggestion. See Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 79–93. Michel Foucault also sees the close relation between the politicization of life and the option of extermination. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 133–161. Neither Agamben nor Foucault remarks on the aesthetic or perceptual implications of Arendt’s description of the camp. 98. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 417–418. 99. Ibid., 438. 100. Ibid., 471. 101. Ibid., 474. 102. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 78–109. 103. The most quoted description of the imaginary is given in Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, Heloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg (London: Norton, 2006). Lacan describes the coherence between self-perception and social order, through the formation of an imaginary ideal ego: “The specular I turns into a social I” (98 [79]). 104. Slavoj Žižek claims that what we perceive as reality is not appearances but rather the appearances of appearances; reality is always framed by an invisible frame that makes other perspective incompatible with it, rather than capable of completing it. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 29. 105. Slavoj Žižek has argued that the weakness of Arendt’s philosophy consists in a lack of a concept of what would correspond to the real in a Lacanian sense. Arendt becomes like the right-wing intellectual “knave,” who is only capable of confirming what is already present, serving and submitting to a symbolic order. The knave is happy serving and content to be rewarded with the enjoyment that comes from any kind of servitude (Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies [London: Verso, 1997], 182). However, to Arendt, the real is a production, not submission. 106. As many commentators have noted, one can see Arendt’s own narrations in this vein, not least through her comments on the Eichmann trial or in Men in Dark Times. Arendt’s concept of narrative, as Julia Kristeva notes, links “the destinies of life, narrative, and politics; narrative conditions the durability and the immortality of the work of art; but it also accompanies as historical narrative, the life of the polis” (Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative, trans. Frank Collins [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001], 7). 107. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 9–10. 108. Arendt, Human Condition, 173. 109. Ibid., 184. 110. Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow, 137–140. Cf. Gottlieb’s comparison between Heidegger’s and Arendt’s ideas of Ruinanz (Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, “Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Ruin,” in New Formations 71 [2011]: 100–124).

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111. This is also why, during the Eichmann trials, Arendt sees the distortions of reality that Eichmann presents not just as particular to Eichmann but as general to the defense of the Nazi criminals as a whole; the trials proceeded as though the experience of the holocaust had in fact been foreclosed as the outcome of their actions (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil [New York: Viking, 1963], 57–58). As Agnes Heller has noted, Arendt used the strategy of narrative herself in illuminating new aspects of the trial, a strategy that contributed to making her report highly controversial (Heller, “Hannah Arendt on Tradition and New Beginnings,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001], 19–33). Dagmar Barnouw also has noted that Arendt’s strategy of narrating the trial was controversial, but that it incorporated Arendt’s own perspective of judgment: it allowed for Eichmann’s voice to be heard and judged at the same time (Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990], 238). 112. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 417–418. 113. Eichmann, for instance, is unable to connect thoughts to experience, or to encompass other perspectives (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 44). What may make ideologies work is also a depressive unwillingness to care (Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 352). 114. This was noted in Arendt’s catalogue text on her friend the painter Carl Heidenreich, who fled from Germany to the United States. Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 203–204. 115. Arendt, Promise of Politics, 102–105. As we engage in judgment, Arendt writes, we are brought out of compulsory standards offered by, for instance, prejudice. 116. Jacques Derrida, “The University without Condition,” in Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 42. 117. Arendt, Human Condition, 198. 118. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 475–476. 119. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 117. 120. Arendt, Human Condition, 242–243. This is a trait it shares also with love and forgiveness. 121. “Kultur und Politik,” discussion, 1958, Hannah Arendt Papers, 72/3 02271–02272. See also Arendt, Men in Dark Times, where she says that the “chronic misbehavior” of poets has been a problem since antiquity (211). 122. Arendt takes his reaction as an example of his “empty talk” and thus of his inability to abandon a stiff morality that consists only of empty praise (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 44). 123. Hannah Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1978), 293–304. See also Goethe’s call for tolerance with poets (Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 211). 124. Brecht presents, she argues, a kind of “case history” for the uneasy relation between poetry and politics (Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 209). 125. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 215. 126. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 339. 127. As Slavoj Žižek indicates in his discussion of the antagonism between art and politics in The Parallax View (London: Short Circuits, 2009), the sheer semiotic confusion of an abstract painting may appear torturous to an onlooker who nonetheless shares the ideology of the painter. Žižek exemplifies this with the tale of abstract art being used

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128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139.

140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

146.

147. 148.

149.

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as tools of torture in Franco’s Spain, with the prisoner being made to stare at it day and night (Žižek, First as Tragedy, 29). Arendt, Human Condition, 51. Cited in Arendt, Denktagebuch 1:215. Ibid., 1:215, 1:279. Here, Arendt’s argument has something in common with Heidegger’s reading of poetry. To Heidegger, it is only when language becomes “the flower of the mouth and its flowering,” when language becomes tonal, that it reveals a world. Heidegger describes how the “world” changed when Pindar’s and Hölderlin’s hymns were reintroduced into German literature, around the time of World War I (Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Joan Stambaugh [San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1982], 101). Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:690. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 14. Hannah Arendt, Within Four Walls, ed. Lotte Kohler (London: Harcourt, 1996), 314. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:208. Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 14. “Writings: Notes and Excerpts,” folder 7, Hannah Arendt Papers, 1898–1977, 45/3 033019–033020. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:215, 2:690. Here Arendt has Kant, Anthropology in mind, namely §§ 39, 86, in which Kant asserts that thinking is both speaking and hearing oneself, as in the saying of the Tahitians that thinking is “speech in the belly.” Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:38. “Writings: Notes and Excerpts,” folder 7, Hannah Arendt Papers, 1898–1977, 45/3 033019–033020. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:563. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:112. Hearing, therefore, challenges the Western construction of subject and object, which implies a certain distance between the two entities. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 445–446. In such a language, we may also “objectify” the other as our alter ego, using language as a tool of power rather than speaking in and through a “thinking” language (Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:215). This is why the dog begins his enquiries, “All nonsensical appearances of our life, and the most nonsensical in particular, are, as it were, out of reach for our reflection” (Kafka, Gesammelte schriften, 5:253; my translation). As Barbara Hahn has shown, Arendt’s interest in Kafka’s story of the scientist dog also has to do with the unearthly and irrelevant nature of his inquiries; in his solitude he has little contact with the real. The story might then indicate that solitude is less of a physical than a mental state (Barbara Hahn and Marie-Luise Knott, eds., Hannah Arendt: Von den dichtern erwarten wir den wahrheit [Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2007], 88). “Jews and the State,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 68/16 032136. Heidegger discusses Stimmung in terms of anxiety in particular, in the form of the uncanny (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [London: Blackwell, 1992], § 40, 229–235). “Kant, Immanuel,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 68/18 032209. She is quoting Kant’s Reflections on Logic, dating from the period before he wrote the Critiques: “Beautiful things indicate that humans fit into this world and that they tune their perception of things

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151.

152. 153.

154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160.

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with the laws of perception themselves” (Immanuel Kant, “Reflexionen zur logik,” in Akademie–Ausgabe [Berlin: Reimer, 1914], XVI, 127, no. 1820a; my translation). See Heidegger, Being and Time, § 40. In Heidegger, the question of Stimmung must also be conceived of as intraphilosophical and related to philosophy’s conception of itself, historically, and with regard to the history of Being. See Hans Ruin, “The Passivity of Reason: On Heidegger’s Concept of Stimmung” SATS 1, no. 2 (2000): 143–159. According to Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre’s investigation of nausea is, in turn, a false understanding of mood as an aspect of the self-conditioning of man (“Excerpt and Notes: Hidden Tradition,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 68/12 025537). Jean-François Lyotard discusses Arendt’s “melancholy” in his critical chapter on Arendt in Lectures d’enfance (Paris: Galilée, 1991, 63); she never reverses appearances into the question of Being, but neither does she escape the moment of return into nothingness. “Writings: Notes and Excerpts,” folder 7, Hannah Arendt Papers, 1898–1977, 45/3 033019–033020. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 133–134. Agnes Heller also has noted the relation that Arendt sees between the possibilities of revolution and the narratives that, woven together, made it possible (Heller, “Hannah Arendt on Tradition,” 19–33). Arendt, On Revolution, 120. Cf. Arendt, make us feel “at home” in the world (Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 76). Erik Wallrup, Musical Attunement: The Concept and Phenomenon of Stimmung in Music (Stockholm: Department of Musicology and Performance Studies, 2012), 309. Abensour, Hannah Arendt, 230. On collective agency, see Arendt, On Violence, 44, 52, 82. Through actions in concert, collectives may achieve power, but they may not always sustain it. Arendt, On Revolution, 75, 135–137. Arendt, On Violence, 55.

4 . TE NS IO N S O F L AW: T R AG E DY A N D THE VISI BILIT Y O F L IVES

1. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 83, 125. 2. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 281. This is also quoted in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23; and Denktagebuch, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 2:791. 3. See Mary Dietz, “Arendt and Feminist Politics,” in Critical Essays on Hannah Arendt, ed. Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1994), 258. 4. Carl Schmitt saw the concept of sovereignty as the empty formula that made modern conceptions of the political possible. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 16–17. 5. Margaret Canovan has seen that Arendt’s republican legacy brings her back to Rousseau, where the formula of general will is recast in the form of plurality. Canovan, Hannah

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 226. See Robert Pirro, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001); and Peter Euben, Platonic Noise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); and Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004). See Eva Geulen, “Gründung und gesetzgebung bei Badiou, Agamben und Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt und Giorgio Agamben: Parallelen, perspektiven, kontroversen, ed. Eva Geulen, Kai Kauffmann, and Georg Main (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008); Christoph Menke, “Die ‘Aporien der menschenrechte’ und das ‘Einzige menschenrecht’: Zur einheit von Hannah Arendts argumentation,” in Geulen, Kauffmann, and Main, Hannah Arendt; and Marco Goldoni and Christopher McCorkindale, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012). Arendt, On Revolution, 186. This has often been remarked upon in recent times. See Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” The Menorah Journal 1–2 (1943); and Cecilia Sjöholm “Naked Life: Arendt and the Exile at Colonus,” in Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, ed. Stephen Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 48–67. On Arendt’s Jewish writings, see Judith Butler, “I Merely Belong to Them,” London Review of Books 29, no. 9 (2007): 26–28. This is also what is at stake in Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1–5), although Agamben emphasizes the foundational function of law to an extent that Arendt does not. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 64, 191. Hauke Brunkhorst, Hannah Arendt (Munich: Oskar Beck, 1999), 50. As Brunkhorst has seen, the inquiries into the forms of thought in The Life of the Mind, for instance, have a political bearing and can be connected to Arendt’s republicanism, opposing above all the obscurantism of Heidegger. Arendt’s conception of law is set up in order to relieve it from sovereign powers, detaching the political from the law. This sets her apart from Agamben, for instance, who sees the political and the legal as conflated entities, which also serves to overcome the kind of “inclusive exclusion” that he aims to undo in Homo Sacer. See Vivian Liska, “A Lawless Legacy,” in Hannah Arendt and the Law, ed. Marco Goldoni and Christopher McCorkindale (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012), 97. Arendt, On Revolution, 189. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (London: Polity Press, 1989), 235–251. The idea of using human nature as a model for lawmaking has been a modus operandi for totalitarian regimes. Instead, however, man must be subsumed under the law (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harvest, 1979], 461). This suggests a theory of subjectivization inherent in Arendt. Arendt, Human Condition, 223. Ibid., 244. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:791. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest, 1968), 20–21.

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22. In Judith Butler’s reading, Antigone is perceived as less than human in the tragedy; that is, she is barred from the state. In claiming the law, she begins to talk, which means she also claims to be part of political space. Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 81–82. 23. Arendt, Human Condition, 188. 24. Thinking is described as a “curse” that swipes like an “awe-inspiring wind” through the events of tragedy (Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking [London: Secker & Warburg, 1978], 174). 25. Arendt, Human Condition, 25; Promise of Politics, 125. 26. Arendt, Promise of Politics, 25. 27. Fanny Söderbäck has noted that the public/private distinction made by Arendt can be used to approach the figure of Antigone as a political protagonist; we may observe that she reverses the traditional concepts of our time about what is to be held as private and what is to be considered political. Söderbäck, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Antigone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 65–83. 28. Arendt knew Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation of Antigone, having seen it performed live in addition to the orchestration of Carl Orff. Arendt writes about this in letters to her husband, as well as in her diary (Hannah Arendt, Within Four Walls, ed. Lotte Kohler [London: Harcourt, 1996], 292, 299; Denktagebuch, 1:563). 29. Antigone was the first of the Theban plays and was written around 442 BC. Oedipus at Colonus was the last and was performed only after Sophocles’s death, in 401 BC. 30. Arendt, Promise of Politics, 145. 31. Friedrich Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Clifton Fadiman [New York: Dover Publications, 1995], 8) uses the quote, called “the wisdom of Silenus,” in order to introduce the suffering essence of the Greek. The quote is also present in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961], 180), where it illustrates what a life-denying ethic would look like. Hegel, in turn, admired Oedipus at Colonus as a pivotal work in the history of Greek culture, reconciling Greek consciousness with aspects of modern subjectivity that continued to develop in the other arts, as he stated in his lectures on aesthetics (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975], 2:1219). 32. See Sjöholm, “Naked Life,” 48–67. 33. “I myself, with no guide to lay a hand on me, shall now show you the place where I must die. Do not reveal to any human being either where it is concealed or the region in which it lies; for its perpetual nearness renders you a protection stronger than many shields or spears brought in from outside!” he says to Theseus. Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus,” in Antigone, Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 2), ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), lines 1520–23. 34. Quoted in Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:791; Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 23; On Revolution, 281. 35. Arendt, On Revolution, 211. 36. Ibid., 189. Arendt’s well-known critique of the Marxist revolution was that it attempted to achieve an order beyond politics rather than to create a political society of citizens governing themselves. As Albrecht Wellmer has shown, her critique of a liberal revolution was no less severe, even if it is less well known. Arendt’s return to the Greek concept of law indicates that it speaks for the realization of freedom in a “fenced in” community;

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37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

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i.e., Arendt goes against the universalist tradition of liberalism and shows that basic civil rights are a condition for, but not the content of, political freedom. See Albrecht Wellmer, “Hannah Arendt on Revolution,” in The Hannah Arendt Companion, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 222–223. “This wall-like law was sacred, but only the enclosure was political” (Arendt, Human Condition, 64; see also 194–195). “The boundaries of positive laws are for the political existence of man what memory is for his historical existence: they guarantee the preexistence of a common world, the reality of some continuity which transcends the individual life span of each generation, absorbs all new origins, and is nourished by them” (Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 465). Arendt, Human Condition, 194–195. Arendt, Human Condition, 195–196. For this reason, Arendt distinguishes the relative success of the American Revolution, in which constitution-making was the foremost revolutionary deed—as constitutio libertatis—from the French and Russian revolutions, which were a combination of “national revolutions and revolutionary nationalism” (Arendt, On Revolution, 158–169). Arendt, Human Condition, 198. “Cybernetics,” 1964, Hannah Arendt Papers, 1898–1977, 63/1 012198, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 169–201. As Dana Villa has shown, Arendt notes this not least in her reading of Gotthold Lessing, where she shows that the retreat to intimacy is a fairly modern response to the perversion of public space. Lessing used friendship in order to engage in the “worldliness” that helps produce a sense of the real. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 130–134. The colonial exploitation of the bourgeoisie, for instance, and the racism that followed in its path, were directly responsible for the rule of the “mob” and for Nazism as a populist movement (Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 152–157). See for instance Chantal Mouffe, “Art and Democracy,” in Open 14: Art as a Public Issue: How Art and Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension, ed. Liesbeth Melis and Jorinde Seijdel (Amsterdam: SKOR, 2008); and Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996), 125. Mouffe sees Arendt’s plurality as a form of perspectivism erected on Kant’s concept of beauty. Arguing against such a perspectivism, Mouffe celebrates the sublime and Lyotard’s différend, the notion of irresolvable conflict. However, as we have seen in the first chapter, plurality does not simply indicate a variety of individuals and/or perspectives; it refers to the way in which perception becomes embedded and impinged through the diversity of things and the variety of perspectives. In resorting to the concept of sensus communis, Arendt does not seek a way out of conflict but gives political depth to the function of sense-perception as such. Arendt notes this herself: women and slaves were kept outside of the polis, as described in Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals (Arendt, Human Condition, 72). This is the case also in Arendt’s readings of “tribes” in Africa. Arguing against that critique, Seyla Benhabib reads Arendt within a feminist-emancipatory tradition in which political questions are more concerned with “empowerment” than with rule. Benhabib,

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“Feminist theory and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Public Space,” in American Continental Philosophy: A Reader, ed. Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 374. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:237, 1:329. Arendt, On Revolution, 281. Peter Euben has argued that tragedy in general, and Oedipus at Colonus in particular, appears to mark Arendt’s way of thinking without being explicitly discussed in her work. Arendt’s own vocabulary makes us think of the theater because she is particularly interested in questions of identity, appearance and spaces of appearance, theoria and theater (Euben, Platonic Noise, 42). Euben (“Hannah Arendt at Colonus,” 40–63) dedicates a chapter to Oedipus at Colonus because he sees strong affinities with Arendt on the theme of exile. In Euben’s book, tragedy is above all affecting Arendt’s idea of how the political world appears: it stands for an “enlarged mentality,” it allows us to see from a variety of perspectives, it helps us to understand the concepts of plurality and judgment. Robert Pirro remarks that Arendt does not refer to Oedipus in exile, or to Theseus, the founder of the democratic state, or to Odysseus, who returns home after his travels (Pirro, Hannah Arendt, 11). For Pirro, the reference to Theseus is what is important: Theseus shows that political authority cannot be based merely on foundations, similar to Rome. It must also be linked to the project of political freedom (73–89). The same is argued by Albrecht Wellmer (“Hannah Arendt on Revolution,” 223), who reads the quote in conjunction with Arendt’s resistance against liberal universalism. “Action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (Arendt, Human Condition, 9). This very quality of action distinguishes it from metaphysical thought and is evoked, in The Human Condition, as the temporality specific to the political. See Sophocles, Antigone, 332–333. Martin Heidegger reads this in the following way: “What is so frightening in human beings is that which appears to go against the cycles of nature. Man is uncanny because of his will to domesticate nature, and his tendency to erect himself as a finite projection in this endeavor” (Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1959], 159). Already, in an interpretation of Faust from 1937, Arendt stresses the link between a science “made by man” and the fear of being engulfed. Arendt, Within Four Walls, 37. See the reference to the “Hymn to Man” in Antigone (Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future [New York: Viking, 1961], 212). The same reference is used in the article “Culture and Politics,” with the quote, “Numberless wonders/terrible wonders walk the world but none the match for man” (Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007], 185). As Dana Villa has argued, the comparison between Arendt and Heidegger on this point lies in the way in which the conception of techne is to be regarded at the level of disclosure. Technology is not just instrumentalization in the sense of mechanization. It affects a loss of world, because things are no longer capable of offering a world. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 200–201. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 210–214. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:174.

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60. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 42. 61. Arendt’s infamous objection to the schooling of black children at formerly white schools as a policy of integration must be seen in this light. What she objected to was the use of children as political objects. In Arendt’s reading, these children were exposed as the result of a policy over which they had no influence. See Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 194–195. As Eva Geulen (“Gründung und gesetzgebung,” 73–74) points out in her comparison of Badiou, Agamben, and Arendt, the three thinkers responded to this kind of exposure in different ways. For Arendt, origination of laws is always connected to violence—a form of violence that must be translated into law. Agamben makes the relation problematic with his figure of the Homo sacer, the one who is always exempt from all law. 62. Arendt, Human Condition, 22–28. 63. Arendt, On Revolution, 186. 64. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 10–14. 65. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 295–299. 66. Ibid., 280. Arendt finds the bond tying the definition of humanity to the state also in Adam Mueller’s Elemente der Staatskunst from 1808–1809. Quoting from the second lecture, she writes, “Man cannot be conceived outside of the state . . . there is nothing human outside of the state” (“Racial Thinking,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 69/17 026620; my translation). 67. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 10–12. For Arendt, it was clear that the German or Russian fate could have occurred in any part of Europe. In her notes we find a quote from George Bernanos, Les grands cimetières de la lune, Paris 1938: “Chaque nation d’Europe avait déjà au fond des entrailles un petit état totalitaire bien formé. Quiconque eût pose l’oreille à la hauteur de l’ombilic auraît sûrement entendu sauter son Coeur” (“Racial Thinking,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 69/17 026614). While receiving the Sonning Prize in 1975, Arendt noted with interest that Denmark was the only country to give sanctuary to stateless Jews, whereas it had not offered asylum to refugees before the war. Moreover, Denmark was the only country to openly attempt to save its Jews, which also made the Germans change their tactics (Sonning Prize speech, 1975, Hannah Arendt Papers, 77/19 013982–83). 68. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 295–296. “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality of the law and freedom of opinion . . . but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them.” 69. Ibid., 297. 70. Ibid., 299. 71. Ibid., 300. See also the discussion in Arendt, On Revolution, 148–149. 72. Origins of Totalitarianism, 350, 361. Totalitarian regimes used their own varieties of natural laws. 73. Ibid., 296–297. There is an enormous amount of literature on this concept. One may quote the interpretation of Richard Bernstein (Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question [Oxford: Polity Press, 1996], 85–86), who argues that the concept can be seen in the light of Arendt’s criticism of Jewish history; only then does it acquire a more specific political

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75. 76.

77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

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content in that it implies a demand for equality. Christoph Menke (“Die ‘Aporien der menschenrechte,’ ” 131–149), in turn, has pointed to the consistency of this concept within Arendt’s own political ontology: the idea that “the right to have rights” should be tied to a certain conception of “the human” must be undone. Arendt has seen the problem of “naturalizing” the human in the understanding of rights, which is also what has led to their crisis. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 179–193. Bare life is “cared life,” a life brought within a state of exception where laws no longer apply. In Agamben’s ontology, the human placed beyond the law is the model for modern biopolitics. In that sense, the concentration camp has become the nomos of modernity, implying that the status of bare, undifferentiated life is the aim of power in postwar politics. Victim and butcher belong to the same body in the state of exception, where any claim to rights is caught in the biopolitical trap. Ibid., 26–27. “The identification of the subject of the Rights of Man with the subject deprived of any rights is not only the vicious circle of a theory, it is also the result of an effect of the reconfiguration of the political field, of an actual process of depoliticization. This process is what is known by the name of consensus. . . . [which means resorting to identity politics, identification of interests, and so on]. Consensus means closing the spaces of dissensus by plugging the intervals and patching over the possible gaps between appearance and reality or law and fact. . . . Consensus is the reduction of democracy to the way of life of a society, to its ethos—meaning by this word both the abode of a group and its lifestyle” (Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” 306). Arendt, Human Condition, 32. Arendt notes that the Greek conception of freedom was linked to space rather than to social standing. Only in public space may free men act as “equals”—a concept that relieves individuals from all kinds of social marks such as, for instance, money and power. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 111–112. Young relies on Arendt in order to conceive of a collectively constituted public domain that does not collapse into the formation of a public will. She also uses Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance in order to point to the fact that representation, in a democratic order, relies on differentiation rather than on the voice of the single will of the people (127). Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 443–444. As Michel Foucault has shown, the racism of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s ended in a thanatopolitics in which Nazism ended up as a politics of everyone killing everyone. Whereas Hitler’s racism initially was intent upon the killing of one race, the escalation of a politics of death lead to an obfuscation of the idea of racial difference and installed a rule of death as such (Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, ed. Mauro Bertanin and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey [New York: Picador, 2003], 258–263). This has been observed also in Johan van der Walt, “Law and the Space of Appearance in Arendt’s Thought” in Hannah Arendt and the Law, ed. Marco Goldoni and Christopher McCorkindale (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012), 63–89. Walt carries out a reading of the splitting of law and literature, remarking quite rightly that Arendt sees that both produce appearances based on performative actions.

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82. The critiques of Arendt have failed to look closer at the complex relation between what is “life,” what is “human,” and what is to be ontologized as “the political” in her philosophy. As Peg Birmingham has shown, Arendt’s idea of the right to have rights is based on the principle of natality and not on a metaphysical foundation. The right to have rights is the right to appear. For Birmingham, this is not based on the public sphere but rather on “the fundamental event of human existence—natality” (Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006], 57). I would argue, however, that appearance is based on the differentiation of the public sphere. 83. This is a different conception from the one presented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, where it is held that the lawmaker should not be included in the body of the Republic, lest he make the laws into arbitrary tools for his own operations. See Rousseau, The Social Contract and the Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: David Campbell, 1992), 209–216. As Seyla Benhabib has noted, democratic self-legislation installs exclusion in a paradoxical move that can only solved through a stringent detachment of sovereign laws and individual rights, a demand seen but not fully explored even by Arendt herself. Benhabib, The Rights of Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66–69. 84. Arendt, On Revolution, 169–178. This is also inherent in Arendt’s description of the early American colonists, who created the conditions of “public happiness” upon which the constitutional revolution came to rest. 85. Ibid., 202–203. As Marcus Twellman has shown, Arendt’s belief in the American Revolution reveals a certain “contractualism” with a performative character, through which the authority of the American Constitution is upheld and modeled on the Roman notion of law. Her reevalution of the American Revolution, at the expense of the French, is to be regarded as an intervention in itself (Twellman, “Lex, nicht nomos: Hannah Arendts kontraktualismus,” in Geulen, Kauffmann, and Main, eds., Hannah Arendt, 77). 86. Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” in The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 344–345. 87. Arendt, Promise of Politics, 125; The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 42, 59. 88. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 1350–51. 89. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:203. 90. Ibid., 2:208. Eva Geulen has discussed the double notion of action as beginning and achievement in Arendtian thought, reading these two concepts through her discussion of revolution. Geulen shows that Arendt shares with Agamben and Alain Badiou the insight that sovereignty and tyranny are founded in the same kind of act. What Badiou and Agamben see in the founding act of a political society in Paulus, Arendt sees in the revolution. Geulen, “Gründung und gesetzgebung,” 67. 91. Arendt, Promise of Politics, 48–49. 92. Ibid., 124. 93. Arendt, On Revolution, 142. Arendt discusses colonization as a prerogative for the American Revolution, but never in terms of the bloodshed it gave rise to; she sees only the Constitution in terms of freedom. 94. Ibid., 143–144. 95. Arendt, On Revolution, 82–85.

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96. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 216–220. 97. See Anne Norton, “Africa and African Americans in Hannah Arendt’s Writings,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1995), 247–264. 98. Richard King, “Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Revolution in the 1960s,” New Formations 71 (2011): 30–45. 99. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 187. 100. Ibid., 190. 101. It is undoubtedly the case that Arendt’s writings are full of racist remarks, not least in these chapters. Richard King (“On Race and Culture,” 113–137) has argued that this was commonplace in her time. What I find most extraordinary, however, is the way in which Arendt molds her colonial stories on mythical models of what is to count as apolitical societies. Richard King has shown that Arendt, unlike most other Jewish émigrés of her time, was concerned with race relations in the United States and Australia. Reading Arendt, however, one cannot fail to notice the stereotypical manner in which non-Europeans are depicted. Suggesting that we separate Arendt’s position from her discourse, King shows the merits of her work on anti-Semitism and imperialism in the genealogy of modern European racism, the intellectual source being primarily Eric Voegelin. See King, “On Race and Culture: Hannah Arendt and Her Contemporaries,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113–134. 102. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 192. 103. Ibid., 189–195. Arendt’s reading has much in common with Fanon’s Hegelian understanding. The process of violation turned against the colonizers. The Boers left all forms of work to the Africans, thereby handing over any kind of conditioning to a population that could see themselves as subjects, whereas the colonizers themselves became useless. 104. Ibid., 438. 105. Arendt, On Violence, 12–13. 106. “Racial Thinking,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 69/17 025503. 107. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 192, 195. 108. Ibid., 189. 109. Arendt, Promise of Politics, 83, 125. 110. Graham Ley, The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy: Playing Space and Chorus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 87. 111. Ibid., 96. 112. Katrina Cawthorn has made an extensive search into the complexities of the relation between theatrical gender and ancient tragedy, showing how the fluidity between gender roles might be construed and coded in a variety of ways. Primarily, however, the tragic body is male, “becoming female” through suffering. See Cawthorn, Becoming Male: The Male Body in Greek Tragedy (London: Duckworth, 2008). 113. Nicole Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 26. 114. Ibid., 85–90. 115. It is perhaps through the double movement of expulsion and revolt that the figure of Antigone remains open, less of a text and more of a legacy, transposed also into a context in which the appearance of the female body is consciously politicized. As Tina Chanter has shown, Antigone has been transposed into a variety of different political orders.

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Given her status as abject and, at the same time, challenging in relation to these orders, she has embodied the possibility of another order. “Antigone’s duty to mourn a future that should never come to pass is thereby construed differently each time the play is reborn.” Chanter, “Antigone’s Political Legacies: Abjection in Defiance of Mourning,” in Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, ed. Stephen Wilmer and Audrone Zukuskaite (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 39. 116. See Coco Fusco, Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (London: Routledge, 2000), 145. Ana Mendieta’s work articulates what Fusco has called “the negative dialectics of exile”: the place of exile is defined by what is missing.

5 . COM E DY I N T H E DA R K : A R E N DT, CHA P LIN , A ND A NT I -S E MI T I S M

1. Hannah Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1978), 301. 2. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 286. (First printed in Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2, April 1944.) 3. Ibid. 4. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968), 210. 5. Ibid., 207–208. 6. See “Chaplin” (2:199–200; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime) and “Chaplin in Retrospect” (2:222–224), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999–2006). 7. Benjamin, “Chaplin in Retrospect,” 2:223. 8. See the discussion of Goethe’s aperçu in Dennis L. Sepper, Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 96. 9. Quoted in Benjamin, “Chaplin,” 2:199. 10. See Sabine Hake, “Chaplin Reception in Weimar Germany,” New German Critique 51 (Autumn 1980), 87–111. Hake demonstrates that Chaplin was seen by his contemporaries as revolutionizing the discussion of art, ideology, and politics. The interest in Chaplin was not restricted to members of the Frankfurt School. 11. See Siegfried Kracauer, “Chaplin’s Triumph,” (176–179) and “Lichter der Grosstadt” (173– 176), in Kino, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). 12. Benjamin, “Chaplin in Retrospect,” 2:224. 13. Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 2007), 134. 14. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1999), 140–141. 15. See the English translation of “In Malibu,” in Theodor Adorno, “Chaplin Times Two,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 1 (1996), 60.

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16. See Jürgen Habermas, “Urgeschichte der subjektivität und verwildete selpstbehauptung,” in Philosophisch-politische profile (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 191. Habermas describes how Adorno shudders in feeling the cold, metal hand; the coldness strikes him as something which he himself has used to describe the mentality of the bourgeoisie that has caused the Holocaust. Adorno knew that the concept of nature is created as a contrast to reason; however, one could also say that nature is the realization of reason. Habermas recounts the paradoxes inherent in Adorno’s idea of freedom: freedom lies in the identity of the self, and as nature, one is not free. When the bourgeois subject recognizes the double forces that stick to the self, it is also truth itself. Certain bourgeois subjects, however, are stuck in the belief that there is a false kind of freedom in nature that one has to fight. Adorno was aware of the falsity in this belief but could not jump over his own shadow. 17. Adorno, “Chaplin Times Two,” 59. 18. Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt/Gershom Scholem: Der briefwechsel, ed. Marie Luise Knott (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 2010), 465–467. 19. Ibid., 466–467. 20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52. 21. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 467. 22. Hannah Arendt, Love and St. Augustine, eds. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Julia Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 109–111. There is a double move in Augustine: humans are both singular and part of humans as a genus. The other, the neighbor, is part of humans as genus but is also a singular being. Only in tying these concepts together do we understand the concept of “other” in the Christian community. 23. Ibid., 41–43. 24. Ibid., 5. 25. Ibid., 53 26. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 289; Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. Liliane Weissberg, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 151. 27. Ibid., 279. 28. See Arendt’s text on Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil in Hannah Arendt, “No Longer and Not Yet,” in Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 124. 29. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest, 1968), 22. 30. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 140. 31. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 22. 32. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 289–290 33. Ibid., 286. 34. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest 1979), 170–175. Arendt argues that Arthur de Gobineau came up with a theory of race that is independent of climate, institutions, beliefs, and habits and is therefore irreducible, and that this is more detrimental to Europe than class conflict. 35. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 10–12. 36. The reading of Marcel Stoetzler, “Anti-Semitism, the Bourgeoisie, and the Self-Destruction of the Nation-State,” in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide, eds. Richard King and Dan Stone (New York: Berghanh Books, 2007), 130–147, is illuminating in this regard, pointing to the way in which the Jews were

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42. 43.

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51. 52. 53.

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caught in the contradictory relations between the social and the political (the state), among the working class and the bourgeoisie alike. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 53. Ibid., 356. Ibid., 375 Slavoj Žižek makes anti-Semitism into the most poignant issue of our time, “the zerolevel (or the pure form) of ideology, providing its elementary coordinates: social antagonism (‘class struggle’) is mystified/displaced so that its cause is projected onto the external intruder” (Žižek, Living in the End Times [London: Verso, 2010], 136). Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950), 638–639, 653. See also Adorno, “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment,” in Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 168–171. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 8–9. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 473–474. See also Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, eds. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005), 113–114; and Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 206. The primary fantasy sustaining the logic of racism and anti-Semitism is the idea that “they” (the Romas, the Jews, the immigrants) are stealing our jouissance. The mechanism of racism is then fueled by the fear that “they” have access to forms of enjoyment that we cannot obtain, and even worse, that they are attempting to steal the enjoyment we do have—which is located precisely in this fantasy of being bereft. Adorno, Authoritarian Personality, 664–667; Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 187. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 286. Richard Bernstein has commented on this, remarking that humor became a “weapon” to neutralize a hostile world (Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question [Oxford: Polity Press, 1996], 36). Arendt, Jewish Writings, 286–287. Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 153. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 461. Ibid., 468. Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” 297. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin consequently uses the term parvenu in order to point to inauthentic life, which can be contrasted to “schlemielhood.” It is a development of das Man. Pitkin sees, however, that the parvenu is a consequence of the way society has produced conformism. Pitkin reads this development in conjunction with Arendt’s look at the situation of the Jew at various moments in time, and relates it to the demands of assimilation. Arendt’s understanding of the social, in Pitkin’s reading, is a consequence of her reading of das Man in conjunction with her analysis of Jewishness, together with that of femininity. The social becomes a collectivity that acts not for change but individually, precluding any possibility of change. It describes, then, a form of impotent collectivity, in contrast to solidarity and politically active collectivity (Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 60, 168–171). Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” 301. According to Richard Bernstein (Hannah Arendt, 61), the populist streak of Arendt’s politics emerged as a response to state organized anti-Semitism. Gilles Deleuze, The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 273. Slavoj Žižek is quoting this in Enjoy Your Symptom (London: Routledge, 1992),

5. COMEDY IN THE DARK: ARENDT, CHAPLIN, AND ANTI-SEMITISM

54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

197

2, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 75. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 288. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 236–237. “Notes and Excerpts,” folder 2, Hannah Arendt Papers, 1898–1977, 45/3 032835, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. The note continues, “The failure of his enterprises does not indicate that Hitler was an idiot, and the extent of these enterprises does not make him a great man.” Žižek, Looking Awry, 4. Chaplin’s comic strategy consists in variations of this fundamental motif: the tramp accidentally occupies a place which is not his own, which is not destined for him—he is mistaken for a rich man or a distinguished guest. On the run from his pursuers, he finds himself on a stage, all of a sudden the center of attention of numerous gazes. “Notes and Excerpts,” folder 2, Hannah Arendt Papers, 45/3 032835. Judith Butler, “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation,” paper delivered at the Nobel Museum, Stockholm, May 2011. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 20. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 200. Morris B. Kaplan has noted that Arendt, although acute in her critique of Proust’s racializing strategies, misses the way in which Proust’s own text reveals deeper layers of how racializing works, including the subordination of categories such as nature and femininity (Kaplan, “Refiguring the Jewish Question,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig [Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1995], 116–123). “Proust, Marcel,” Hannah Arendt Papers, 69/16 025314. Cf. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 85. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 83. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 200. In her notes on reading Proust, Arendt is particularly interested in what we today would call the intersectional aspects: Jewishness and homosexuality enforcing a common theme of marginalization. Arendt, Human Condition, 176. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 52. Cf. 136–139 for an account of the relative independence of things. Arendt’s world evokes a Judeo-Christian idea that implies a particular space and time. As Jacques Derrida has shown, there is no neutrality embedded in this concept; the idea of world, the idea of sharing, implicates a notion of universality that is hegemonic in practice (Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002], 203, 223).

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INDEX

Abensour, Miguel, 102, 180n72 abstract expressionism, 23, 42 Acconci, Vito, 28 Achebe, Chinua, 31–32 action: attuning, 100–104; political, 18; in On Revolution, 100 Adorno, Theodor, 1–2, 36, 44, 143; aesthetics, 75; Chaplin and, 136; commodification and, 40–41; conflict with, 69, 168n45; Frankfurt School, 144; on Hitler, 148; writings, 4 Aeneid (Virgil), 126 aesthesis, 3, 10, 12, 23, 60 aestheticization of politics, 2, 4, 180n65 aesthetics, x, 2; of Adorno, 75; aesthetic activism, 92; aesthetic freedom, 22–27; aesthetic pleasure, 2, 75, 85, 87, 168n52, 179n65; aesthetic reflection, 17, 27, 171n103; aesthetic sensibility, x, xi, 3, 10, 27, 71, 136; aesthetic taste, 77, 80; in Critique of Judgment, 73; Critique of Pure Reason introduction, 74; of Heidegger, 52; judgment and, 72; in The Life of the Mind, 53; Men in Dark Times examination, 109; for our time, 1–4; of sensible, 176n24 aestheton, 41, 78 African Americans, 127–28, 165n3, 190n61

Agamben, Giorgio, 107, 120, 182n97, 191n74 agency, xi, xii; art as form of, 33; in The Human Condition, 71; in The Life of the Mind, 54–55; narrating, 54–58; political, 122, 162n103; spectator and, 107; transcendent, 34 alterity, 139, 149, 151–52, 156n8 American Committee for Cultural Freedom, 22–24, 42 American Revolution, 102–3, 124, 173n136, 188n41, 192n85 Angelus Novus, 68 animal laborans, 134; cycle of, 82; Homo faber and, 39; zōon politikon and, 115 antagonisms, 121–22, 132 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant), 74 Antigone, 109–10; dancing in, 131; divine law, 122; invisible in, 117; law and, 113, 114; reinterpretation, 112; voice, 99, 111 antihumanism, 17–22 anti-Semitism, xiv, 125, 133, 196n40; awakening of, 138; Chaplin and, 142–44; Enlightenment and, 144; of Heidegger, 95; Hitler and, 143; orientalism and, 150; in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 142–44; warding off, 139

INDEX

212

Appadurai, Arjun, 40 appearances, xii, 3, 8; art and, xi, 43–49, 51; objects in, 153; plurality and, 12–16; publicness and, 20; transcendent, 13, 16 appearancing, 13 archein, 109, 117, 125–26, 128, 134 Arendt, Hannah. See specific topics Aristotle, 114, 117 art, x, 1, 130–32; as agency form, 33; appearances and, xi, 43–49, 51; as beginning, 58–61; co-existing with human life, xii; commodification of, 152; in “The Crisis in Culture,” xiii, 34, 135; Critique of Judgment and, 75; culture and, 8–9; Habermas on role of, 10; Heidegger and, xi–xii; in The Human Condition, xiii, 34; in “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” 137; in The Life of the Mind, 34; literature and, 11; living body problem in, 27–30; marginalization in, 152; as model of world, 14; modern and postmodern, 92; modernism and, 22–24; other viewpoints and, 87; performance art, 28–29; permanence and, 33; politics and, 4, 21; public space and, 33; reality and, 14; realness engaged by, 83; sensible qualities, 12; space of, 7–12, 156n5; as thought-thing, xii, 33, 38, 49–53; transcendent, xiii. See also cultural objects “Artworld, The” (Danto), 29 assimilation, 137, 139–41, 150, 178n51, 196n50 attunement, 78–79, 84, 100–104, 139 Auden, W. H., 11, 33, 92 Augustine, 138–39 Auschwitz, 4 Authoritarian Personality, The (Adorno), 143 automatization, 39, 134–35 avant-garde, 1–2, 10; abstract expressionism as, 42; bourgeois values and, 25; CIA and, 22; commodification and, 26; liberation tendencies, 27; politically aware, 11 Bathsheba at Her Bath, 43–44 Baumgarten, Alexander, 77

beauty, 140–41; ideals, 149; judgment and, 75, 179n54; pleasure in, 85, 137, 178n41; sensus communis and, 89 Being, 14; Heidegger’s philosophy of, xi, 2, 12, 20, 65, 172n14; metaphysics and, 20, 38; plurality and, 8; revealing, 101 being-with (Mitsein), 7–8, 158n29, 161n91 Benhabib, Seyla, 6 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 8, 20, 39, 140, 142; on Chaplin, 135–36; commodification and, 40; Frankfurt School, 144; friendship with, 168n45; ironic turns, 55–56; messianic angel, 68; modernism, 63, 152; thought-image, 69 Benn, Gottfried, 94 Bergson, Henri, 11 Bernstein, Jay, 75, 84 Bernstein, Richard J., 5 Between Past and Future (Arendt), 65–66, 116 bios, 55, 58, 117, 120, 172n114 bios politikos, 11, 19 Birmingham, Peg, 70 Black Power, 127–28 Blixen, Karen, 56, 66–67, 152. See also Dinesen, Isak Blücher, Heinrich, 43 bourgeois values, 19, 35, 142, 195n16; avant-garde and, 25; dislike of, 80; Marx and, 40 Brecht, Bertolt, 60–61, 95–96 Broch, Hermann, 33, 64, 140 Burke, Edmund, 59 Butler, Judith, 4, 5, 109, 149 capitalism, xii, 2, 10, 167n41; alienating, 4; paranoid, 142; raw, 25 Castle, The (Kafka), 141, 145 censorship, 24, 92, 93 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 22 Césaire, Aimé, 128 Cézanne, Paul, 46–47, 83 Chaplin, Charlie, xiv; Adorno and, 136; anti-Semitism and, 142–44; Benjamin on, 135–36; conditioning and, 139; exclusionary mechanisms of perception, 152; Habermas on, 136; interpretation

INDEX

213

of, 137; in “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” 142; as little Yid, 144, 146–47; Nazi critic, 146–48; as refugee, 144–45; schlemiel strategy, 145; split of gaze and, 148–49; twentieth-century consciousness and, 133–36 Char, René, 92 Chicago, Judy, 29 Christianity, 138 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Cicero, 77 City Lights, 134 class struggle, xiv, 95, 133, 142, 157n15 cohabitation, 149 collective memory, 41, 92 collectivity, 18, 33, 36, 153; celebration of, 91–92; collapse of, 41; identity and, 137 colonialism, xii, xiv, 128, 142, 152 colonization, xiv; of Boers in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 31–32, 128–29; as crime, 127–30; mythical hiatus of, 123–27 comedy: art of differentiation, 149–53; Chaplin and anti-Semitism, 142–44; Chaplin and twentieth-century consciousness, 133–36; in Hitler as barber, 144–49; remedy of laughter, 137–42; split of gaze, 148–49 commodification, xi, xii; Adorno and, 40–41; of art, 152; avant-garde and, 26; Benjamin and, 40; of culture, 34; as ontological disaster, 40; from permanence, 37–42; public sphere and, 9; reification and, 33; of society, 24 commodity fetishism, 39–40 common sense, 73, 78, 82, 93, 178n53 communism, 2, 133 community, 3, 71–73, 80–85, 103–4, 163n123 concentration camps, 23–24, 30, 91, 93, 122. See also Holocaust; Nazism Conrad, Joseph, 32, 130, 152 conscious pariah, 137 consensus, 5, 103, 121, 132, 191n76 consumerism, xiii, 26 consumer society, 25 core of object (hypokeimenon), 38 creativity, Heidegger and, xi–xii

“Crisis in Culture, The” (Arendt), xiii, 22, 24, 25; art in, 34, 135; cultural heritage in, 34–35; European class society in, 28 critical theory, xiii, xiv, 10, 36 Critique of Judgment (Kant), ix, xiii, 1; art and, 75; lectures, 71–72; as political treatise, 72; questions of aesthetics in, 73; tone in, 98 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 19, 71 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 50–51, 53; transcendental deduction in, 81 cultural objects: in The Human Condition, 31–32; individualism and, 36–37; mass society eating, 39; realness and, 92; suppression of, 90; value of, 34–35 culture: art and, 8–9; commodification of, 34; cultural conservatism, 42; cultural heritage, 34–35; society and, 11. See also “The Crisis in Culture” “Culture and Politics” (Arendt), xiii, 34, 37 “Culture Industry, The: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Adorno and Horkheimer), 136 Curtis, Kimberley, 70 Dadaism, 92 dance, 28–29, 53, 131 Danto, Arthur, 2, 29 Darwin, Charles, 114, 129 das Man, 7–8, 11, 196n50 degenerate art (entartete Kunst), 93, 169n62 De Gouges, Olympe, 59–60 Deleuze, Gilles, 148 democracy, 121 d’Entrèves, Maurizio Passerin, 70 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 94 Deutscher, Max, 70 differential plurality, 4, 6–7, 157n20 Dinesen, Isak, 55, 152 directedness, 14 Disch, Lisa, 70 disinterestedness, 5, 76, 85–86; judgment and, 77; Kant on, 9 diversity, 13, 19 divine law, 111–14, 118, 122–23 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 127 doxa (opinion), 14, 110, 160n63, 176n15

INDEX

214

Education of the Human Race, The (Lessing), 138 Eichmann, Adolf, 56, 93, 95, 137, 183n111 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 137 Enlightenment, 9, 18, 136; anti-Semitism and, 144; “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” and, 149; thought, 122; universality and reason, 142; view of freedom, 29 entartete Kunst (degenerate art), 93, 169n62 “Er” (Kafka), 62, 65–66, 68–69, 81 ethical sphere, 84, 118 Euben, Peter, 107 eudaimon (good life), 109 exclusions, 115–18 exile, xiv, 1, 122, 128–29; The Life of the Mind and, 123; in Men in Dark Times, 140 exploitation, 4, 32, 128, 153 “Explorations of a Dog” (Kafka), 95, 184n146 Fanon, Frantz, 127–29 Faulkner, William, 55, 152 film, 28, 54, 132. See also Chaplin, Charlie; specific films Foucault, Michel, 5 Frankfurt School, 10, 39, 135, 144 freedom: aesthetic freedom, 22–27; American Committee for Cultural Freedom, 22–24, 42; antihumanism and, 17–22; Enlightenment view of, 29; The Human Condition and, 117; initium and, 18; Kant and, 19; liberation and, 125–26, 129, 164n143; life seeking, 105; Oedipus at Colonus and, 119; publicness and, 115; public space and, 22; in On Revolution, 17; tragedy and, 106 French Revolution, 86, 102, 115, 188n41 Freud, Sigmund, 36, 44–45 fundamental self, 11 Fürsorge (solicitude), 7 Gaus, Günter, 38 generation, 20 Genet, Jean, 44 genocide, 122 German Jewish treasures, xii, 33, 165n6

Gestimmtheit, 101. See also Stimmung Geulen, Eva, 107 Glissant, Édouard, 44 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 16, 40, 95 good life (eudaimon), 109 Gottsched, Christoph, 77 Great Dictator, The, 134, 136, 147–48 Greek law, 107, 113–14, 117, 124, 130 Greenberg, Clement, 2, 23, 61 Gris, Juan, 49–50 Habermas, Jürgen, 5; on Chaplin, 136; on humans as property owners, 9–10; public space and, 109; public sphere and, 73; on role of art, 10 Hahn, Barbara, 33–34 Haitian Revolution, 128 Hamann, Johann Georg, 77 Hamsun, Knut, 94 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 32, 130 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 38, 84, 111–12, 129, 131 Heidegger, Martin, 44, 57, 98, 111; aesthetics, 52; aestheton, 78; antiSemitism, 95; on concealing, 16; creativity and art, xi–xii; Gestimmtheit and, 101; letters to, 65; Nazism and, 95; philosophy of Being, xi, 2, 12, 20, 65, 172n14; poetic sensibility, 47; politics, 133; Stimmung and, 101; techne and, 116; on work, 38. See also Mitsein (being-with) Heidenreich, Carl, 49–50 Heine, Heinrich, 139–40 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 77, 142 Hitler, Adolf, 136; Adorno on, 148; as barber, 144–49; new face of antiSemitism, 143 Hobbes, Thomas, 106 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 111 Holocaust, 118–20, 129 Homer, 15, 126, 150 Homo faber, x, 37–39, 159n46, 167n38 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 120, 182n97, 191n74 homosexuality, 150–51 Honig, Bonnie, 5, 29, 70

INDEX

215

Horkheimer, Max, 136 human artifice, 6, 9 humanism, 19, 35; antihumanism, 17–22 human nature, 20 human rights, 5, 118; in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 120; replacing, 123 Human Condition, The (Arendt), x, xii, 26; acting in, 6; agency elaborated in, 71; argument in, 122; art in, xiii, 34; common sense in, 82; cultural objects in, 31–32; curiosity in, 76; freedom and, 117; Homo faber in, 37; law and, 114; presuppositions, 83; public sphere in, 9; tragedy in, 109; web of relationships in, 67 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 98 hyperaestheticized public space, 4 hypokeimenon (core of object), 38

J’accuse, 137 Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, 32 “Jew as Pariah, The: A Hidden Tradition” (Arendt), 62; art in, 137; Chaplin in, 142; Enlightenment and, 149; schlemiel in, 139–40 Judaism, 32, 58, 138, 142, 169n71. See also German Jewish treasures; Holocaust judgment, ix, x, 33, 68, 169n73; aesthetics and, 72; beauty and, 75, 179n54; determinate and reflective, 75, 177n28; disinterestedness and, 77; as encroachment of others, 85–89; in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 6; perception and, 69, 88; plurality and, xiii; political, 70; prejudice and, 74; shared knowledge and, 75. See also Critique of Judgment

identification, xiv, 7, 139, 145, 147, 150 identity: collectivity and, 137; in Proust, 150–51 ideology, 90–92; imaginary and, 151, 181n95; Nazism, 93; of Picasso, 95–96 idle talk, 158n28 imaginary, 16, 80; ideology and, 151, 181n95; Lacanian, 91, 182n103; organization of, 93 imperialism, 123, 193n101; law and, 129; in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 128; racism and, 128–29 inclusions, 115–18 individualism, 73; cultural objects and, 36–37; passivity and, 91 Ingram, David, 70 initium, 18, 22, 29, 59 inner life, 27, 45–46, 99 inner self, 13 inner sense, 73, 84, 180n71 inner truth, 45, 50 intimacy, 10, 96, 163n132 Introduction to Politics (Arendt), 74 invisibility, 48–49, 111–12 Ion (Socrates), 15 Irigaray, Luce, 112 isolation, 24, 86

Kafka, Franz, 55–56, 68–69, 81, 92, 95, 184n146; blue-print tales, 141, 145; fatalism, 137; modernism, 152; protagonists, 62; thought-event and, 61–67 Kant, Immanuel, 84; aesthetic pleasure, 85; apology for sensibility, 68–77; on disinterestedness, 9; existence question, 109; freedom and, 19; lecturing on, xi; on public sphere, 17–18; reading, ix–x, xiii, 1, 71–74, 85–86, 171n103, 178n43; on thinking, 86; thought-thing from, 50–51, 53; on tone, 98; transcendent, 54, 81; Übereinstimmung, 89 Kierkegaard, Søren, 64 King, Richard, 128 kitsch, 42 Klee, Paul, 68 Knott, Marie-Luise, 34 Kosuth, Joseph, 53 Kracauer, Siegfried, 136, 142, 144 Kristeva, Julia, 4 Lacan, Jacques, 36, 57; Lacanian imaginary, 91, 182n103 language, 34, 98, 121, 184n131; formal, 60–61; of love, 96–97; metaphors, 78, 99. See also On the Way to Language

INDEX

216

law, 186n14; Antigone and, 113, 114; divine law, 111–14, 118, 122–23; foundation of, 127; founding, 125; Greek, 107, 113–14, 117, 124, 130; The Human Condition and, 114; imperialism and, 129; natural law, 120; Oedipus at Colonus and, 130; permanence and, 108; Roman, 108, 109, 113–14, 124; Sophocles on, 124; space of, 115–18; tragedy and, 107 Lazare, Bernard, 137 Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Arendt), 6 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 77 L’Esclavages des nègres, 59 “Le secret de Rembrandt” (Genet), 44 Lessing, Gotthold, 138 Levinas, Emmanuel, 14, 89 liberation: avant-garde and, 27; freedom and, 125–26, 129, 164n143; in On Revolution, 17 Life of the Mind, The (Arendt), xi–xii, 1, 3, 48; aesthetic turn, 53, 74; agency in, 54– 55; art in, 34; double status of humans in, 12; exile and, 123; hierarchy of senses in, 77–78; myth of state founding, 125; plurality in, 6, 12; sixth sense and, 82; spectatorship in, 71; thinking in, 6, 49, 65; thought-thing in, 34, 51 literature: art and, 11; philosophy and, 141; senses and, 44. See also poetry; tragedy living body problem, 27–30 Locke, John, 106 Lolita (Nabokov), 95 Loraux, Nicole, 131–32 love, 138–39, 173n129; language of, 96–97 Lyotard, Jean-François, 5, 19–20, 81, 89 making of art (Verdinglichung), 38, 58 marginalization, xiv, 152, 197n65 Marx, Karl, 36, 39–40, 76, 114, 129, 167n41 Marxism, 145–46 mass man, 140 mass society, 25, 39, 41, 140 materialism, 38, 76, 96 Matisse, Henri, 45 McCarthy, Mary, 22, 33 McQueen, Steve, 103–4

Meir, Golda, 138 Melville, Herman, 127 Mendelssohn, Moses, 77, 142 Mendieta, Ana, 132 Men in Dark Times (Arendt), 25, 89, 95; aesthetics examination, 109; exile in, 140; inner exile in, 26–27 Menke, Christoph, 107 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 16, 17, 46–49, 83 messianism, 20, 92 metaphysics, xiii, 98; antimetaphysical, 130; Being and, 20, 38; history of, 49; inquiries, 59; resistance to, 50, 172n114; truth, 45; undermining, 69; violence of, 117, 129 Mill, John Stuart, 140 mimesis, 14, 57 Mitsein (being-with), 7–8, 158n29, 161n91 modernism, 1, 60; art and, 22–24; of Benjamin, 63, 152; function of, 27; of Kafka, 152; of Proust, 152 modernity, xiv, 11, 25, 106 Modern Times, 133–34, 136, 146 mood, 99, 101–2, 146, 186n150 Morris, Robert, 27 Mouffe, Chantal, xiii, 89 music, 40–41, 53 Nabokov, Vladimir, 95 naked life, 19–20 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 156n8 narrative, 34; narrating agency, 54–58; position of thought, 66; realness and, 90–96; thought-event and, 61–67 natality, 19, 20, 59, 67, 192n82; belief in, 117; core of, 126; principle, 108 natural law, 120 Nazism, 22, 133, 139, 191n80; Chaplin as critic, 146–47; Heidegger and, 95; ideology, 93. See also concentration camps Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 36 New School, 71 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 32 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 64, 74, 112, 131 normative plurality, 4–6, 9, 10, 21, 70, 157n20

INDEX

217

objects: in appearances, 153; objecthood, 38; plurality and, 4–7; restoring, 13. See also cultural objects Oedipus at Colonus, xiv, 106; foundation of law and, 127; freedom and, 119; law and, 130; refugee and, 123; in On Revolution, 117; sacrifice in, 107; wisdom of Silenus, 110–14 Oedipus the King, 112 One and Three Chairs, 53 Ono, Yoko, 28 On Revolution (Arendt), 106; action in, 100; liberation and freedom in, 17; myth of state founding, 125; Oedipus at Colonus quoted, 117; violence in, 59; wisdom of Silenus, 116 On the Way to Language (Heidegger), 98 opacity, 44 opinion (doxa), 14, 110, 160n63, 176n15 Orff, Carl, 111 orientalism, 150 original gaze, 48 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 24, 118, 121, 150; anti-Semitism in, 142–44; Boer colonization in, 31–32, 128–29; human rights in, 120; imperialism in, 128; politics in, 122; sovereignty in, 106 “Origin of the Work of Art, The” (Heidegger), 38 ostracism, 151–52 Pamela (Richardson), 11 Parmenidean claim, 14 Pascal, Blaise, 77 Passagenwerk (Benjamin), 40 Peace and Proximity (Levinas), 89 Penal Colony, The (Kafka), 64 perception, 2, 46; alternative positions, 87; Chaplin and exclusionary mechanisms, 152; judgment and, 69, 88; reality, 85, 88 performance art, 28–29 permanence, xi; art and, 33; to commodification, 37–42; law and, 108; as temporal, 41 “Perplexities of the Rights of Man, The” (Arendt), 118, 121 persecution, 23, 141

Phenomenology of Perception, The (MerleauPonty), 46 philosophers, 3, 11, 15, 64, 72, 106 “Philosopher and His Shadow, The” (Merleau-Ponty), 46 philosophy, 99, 129; literature and, 141; of tragedy, 131 Picasso, Pablo, 22, 47, 60–61, 95–96 Pippin, Robert, 19 Pirro, Robert, 107 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, 21 Places of Remembrance: Isolation and Deprivation of Rights, Expulsion, Deportation, and Murder of Berlin Jews in the Years 1933 to 1945 (Stih and Schnock), 58 Plato, 14–16, 78, 83, 86 pleasure: aesthetic pleasure, 2, 75, 85, 87, 168n52, 179n65; in beauty, 85, 137, 178n41 plurality, x, xi, 188n47; antimetaphysical, 130; appearances and, 12–16; Being and, 8; cohabitation and, 149; differential, 4, 6–7, 157n20; entertainment value, 3; existentialist feature, 5; fabric of, 152; facticity of, 21; factual state, 85; judgment and, xiii; in The Life of the Mind, 6, 12; normative, 4–6, 9, 10, 21, 70, 157n20; objects and, 4–7; public space and, 7–12; pursuit of, 153; reality and, 109; of senses, 13, 83; transcendent, 25; universalist, 4, 6; voices, 54 poetry, 15–16, 34, 88; poets and, 94–95; sounding of, 96–99; tone and, 98–99 poiesis, 24, 47, 114, 116, 159n46 political animal (zōon politikon), 18–19, 115, 158n34 politics, 72, 74, 112; aestheticization of, 2, 4, 180n65; art and, 4, 21; Heidegger, 133; making visible, 122; in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 122; political action, 18; political activism, 92; political agency, 122, 162n103; political imagination, x; political life, 19–20; political modernity, 106; slavery as political condition, 116 “Politics and Truth” (Arendt), 94 Pollock, Jackson, 23

INDEX

218

polyphony, 173n124 populism, 142, 147 postpolitical, 105, 130–32 Pound, Ezra, 94 praxis, 24, 114, 159n46 prejudice, 87–88 privacy, 26 Promise of Politics, The (Arendt), 72, 112 Proust, Marcel, 63, 64; identity, 150–51; modernism, 152 psychoanalysis, xiii, 46, 169n71 publicness, 3, 8–9; appearances and, 20; freedom and, 115; function of, 12; working through, 26 public space, x, xii, xiii, 3, 153; art and, 33; freedom and, 22; Habermas and, 109; humans in, 54; as hyperaestheticized, 4; models of, 121; plurality and, 7–12; suppression of, 24; transcendent, 5 public sphere, xii; commodification and, 9; Habermas, 73; in The Human Condition, 9; Kant on, 17–18 racism, xiv, 23, 32, 145–46; imperialism and, 128–29; spectacle of, 151 Rancière, Jacques, 4, 120–21 reality, 62, 67; argument, 16; art and, 14; concentration camps and, 93; disclosing, 70–73, 82; distorting, 47; experience, 91; perception, 85, 88; persecution and, 141; plurality and, 109; social, 76; tangible, 17, 20 realness, xi, xiii, 70, 143, 146; art engaging, 83; cultural objects and, 92; narrative and, 90–96; of Nietzsche, 74; sensus communis and, 81–85 reason, 19, 142. See also Critique of Practical Reason; Critique of Pure Reason reductionism, 55, 153, 169n67 refugees, 108, 113, 117, 119, 122, 137; Chaplin as, 144–45; Oedipus at Colonus and, 123 reification, 33, 38, 138 Rembrandt, 43–44, 52 remembrance, 101, 153 Republic, The (Plato), 14 Richardson, Samuel, 11

rightslessness, xiv, 142, 145 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 97 Roman law, 108, 109, 113–14, 124 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41, 106, 127, 140 Russian Revolution, 188n41 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 140 Sarraute, Nathalie, 44, 80 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 129–39 Schelling, Friedrich, 131 schlemielhood, 137, 196n50; Chaplin strategy, 145; faces of, 150; in “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” 139–40; tradition, 145–46 Schmitt, Carl, 38, 91, 130 Schneeman, Carolee, 27, 28 Schnock, Frieder, 58 Scholem, Gershom, 137 senses, 180n72; common sense, 73, 78, 82, 93, 178n53; hierarchy of, 77–81; inner sense, 73, 84, 180n71; literature and, 44; plurality, 83; sight, 78; sixth sense, 78, 82. See also taste sensibility, ix; aesthetic sensibility, x, xi, 3, 10, 27, 71, 136; apology for, 68–77 sensus communis, xiii, 178n54; beauty and, 89; interpreting, 82; inverted, 100; realness and, 81–85; unfolding, 89 Seven Gothic Tales (Blixen), 66 shared knowledge, 75 signifier, 57–58, 62, 173n129 situationism, 92 slavery, 115; abstract nakedness and, 119; political condition, 116 society, 34; commodification, 24; consumer, 25; culture and, 11; European class, 28; mass society, 25, 39, 41, 140 “Society and Culture” (Arendt), 34 Socrates, 14–15 solicitude (Fürsorge), 7 solidarity, 36, 53, 92, 148, 153, 196n50 solitude, 99, 184n146 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 103 Sophocles, xiv, 107–8, 111; body of work, 112; dramatic moments, 131; on law, 124. See also Antigone; Oedipus at Colonus

INDEX

219

Sorel, Georges, 129 sovereignty, 106–8, 118, 161n87; European belief, 145 Soyinka, Wole, 31 space: of art, 7–12, 156n5; of law, 115–18. See also public space spectator, x, 8, 45, 47; agency and, 107; ambivalent, 143; position of, 86; reception of, 51 split of gaze, 148–49 spontaneity, 59–60 Stiegler, Bernard, 57 Stifter, Adalbert, 83 Stih, Renata, 58 Stimmung, 96, 100–103, 110, 146, 185n150. See also attunement; mood Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The (Habermas), 9–10 surrealism, 92 taste, 178n40; aesthetic, 77, 80; becoming taste, 78–79; functions, 79–80; social aspect, 80–81 techne, 24, 57–59, 116–17, 122, 159n46, 189n57 thanatopolitics, 146, 191n80 Theses on the Philosophy of History (Benjamin), 40, 68–69 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 31 thinking: Kant on, 86; in The Life of the Mind, 6, 49, 65 thought-event, 61–67 thought-image, 69 thought-thing: art as, xii, 33, 38, 49–53; from Kant, 50–51, 53; life for the many, 41; in The Life of the Mind, 34, 51 totalitarianism, xii, 23, 30; totalitarian state, 90, 94. See also Origins of Totalitarianism, The tragedy, xiv, 189n52; ancient tragedy, 41–42; colonization as crime, 127–30; freedom and, 106; in The Human Condition, 109; law and, 107; mythical hiatus of colonization and, 123–27; Oedipus at Colonus and wisdom of Silenus, 110–14; overview, 105–10; philosophy of, 131; rites of art and, 130–32; space of law and,

115–18; vanguard of freedom, 118–23. See also Antigone; Oedipus at Colonus Trakl, Georg, 47 transcendent: agency, 34; appearances, 13, 16; disinterestedness, 9; German transcendentalism, 50; idea types, 50; of Kant, 54, 81; plurality, 25; public space, 5; reason, 19; subject, 47 Trial, The (Kafka), 63–64 Twelve Years a Slave, 103–4 ugliness, 15, 160n63 universalist plurality, 4, 6 universality, 5, 82, 137, 142, 149, 197n69 Van Gogh, Vincent, 52 Varnhagen, Rahel, 80, 140 Verdinglichung (making of art), 38, 58 Vietnam War, 42 Villa, Dana, 5, 70 Virgil, 114, 126, 150 visibility, 43, 45, 48–49, 109, 111, 114 Wallrup, Erik, 102 Wellmer, Albrecht, 81 Welsch, Wolfgang, 4 Weltanschauungen, 93 “We Refugees” (Arendt), 118, 137 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant), 9 “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” (Rancière), 120–21 Wilke, Hannah, 28 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 77 Within a Budding Grove (Proust), 150–51 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 39 worldview, xiii Young, Iris Marion, 70, 121 Young-ah Gottlieb, Susannah, 20, 33, 92 Zerilli, Linda, 70 Zionism, 122, 124 Žižek, Slavoj, 4, 19, 148 zoe, 19, 55, 117, 120 zōon politikon (political animal), 18–19, 115, 158n34

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS LY D I A G O E H R A N D G R E G G M . H O R O W I T Z , E D I T O R S

Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds., The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, edited by Santiago Zabala, translated by Luca D’Isanto John T. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions Richard Eldridge, Life, Literature, and Modernity Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett, translated by James Phillips György Lukács, Soul and Form, translated by Anna Bostock and edited by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis with an introduction by Judith Butler Joseph Margolis, The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism Herbert Molderings, Art as Experiment: Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, Creativity, and Convention Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media, translated by Carsten Strathausen Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism Elaine P. Miller, Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of Radical Contemporaneity John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations