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ABSTRACT
The article contributes to current theoretical debates about the political significance of narrative imagination by drawing on Camus’s and Arendt’s existential aesthetic judging sensibility. It seeks to displace the prevalent tendency to probe literature for its moral-philosophical insights, and instead delves into the experiential reality of our engagement with literary works. It starts from Martha Nussbaum’s recognition of the literary ability to account for the fragility of human affairs, yet finds her reduction of narrative imagination to the role of furthering moral lessons wanting politically. Against this background, the article reclaims Camus’s and Arendt’s dialogical-representative judging orientation and its insight into the narrative ability to respond to the intersubjective character of politics. As such, their aesthetic sensibility reveals the potential political significance of literary imagination in its capacity to open a public space where the contradictions of our situated existence can be confronted through politics between plural equals.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Mihaela Mihai and Patrick Hayden for their very helpful comments, their persistent encouragement and support. I would also like to thank the editors of The European Legacy, whose valuable suggestions have made this a much improved paper. Earlier versions were presented at the Political Theory Research Group at the University of Edinburgh, and the 2016 ECPR Joint Sessions’ workshop on “Imagining Violence.” I am grateful to all participants for their constructive recommendations. Last but not least, Mathias Thaler, Gisli Vogler, Angelica Thumala, and Astrid Jamar have generously read and offered important insights.
Notes
1. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 293–94.
2. Hämäläinen, “Sophie, Antigone, Elizabeth,” 8–9, 12.
3. In line with the existential-phenomenological approach, this essay’s main concern is with narrativity as a way of understanding our experiential reality. It shies away from the “epistemological” focus grounding both the traditional, historiographical view of narrative as objective representation of outside reality, and the postmodern emphasis on instituting narrative text as the endless deconstruction of all referentiality. The exploration of the political value of narrative voice also merits an acknowledgement of the important differences between various narrative forms and genres as they have developed in particular historical periods. I focus on the general features of narrative voice that Camus and Arendt have identified as politically fruitful, which may be manifested in varied ways through different forms and genres. The central concern, however, is not to engage in literary criticism of how a particular narrative is constructed as text, but how an engagement with narratives can kindle our capacity of political judgement. Following Nussbaum, my account focuses specifically on works of literature, but does not exclude non-literary aesthetic mediums. On different theoretical understandings of the role and purpose of narrative discourse with regards to real life and politics, see Bruner, “Narrative Construction of Reality”; White, “The Question of Narrative.”
4. Schiff, Burdens of Political Responsibility, 141–63; Stone-Mediatore, Reading Across Borders; Thiele and Young, “Practical Judgement, Narrative Experience.” I engage with the political significance of narrative form and the process of narrative interaction in greater detail in Mrovlje, Rethinking Political Judgement.
5. Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals”; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 3–53.
6. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 8, 3.
7. Ibid., 156; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good.
8. Kearney, States of Mind, 121–22, 124; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 24.
9. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 23–53.
10. Kearney, States of Mind, 121–22; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 43.
11. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 38–40, 44.
12. Kearney, States of Mind, 128.
13. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 48; Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 83; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 48; see also Booth, The Company We Keep, 72, 252–72.
14. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 87, 91–92, 96–98, 34. See also Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, xiv–xvi, 1–12.
15. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 31, 44.
16. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 92, 110.
17. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 72–76; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 162.
18. Vasterling, “Cognitive Theory and Phenomenology,” 84.
19. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 166; Newton, Narrative Ethics, 66–67.
20. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 7–8.
21. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 46.
22. Newton, Narrative Ethics, 65.
23. Vasterling, “Cognitive Theory and Phenomenology,” 90–92; Wrighton, “Reading Responsibly,” 159–60, 164.
24. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 48; see also Wrighton, “Reading Responsibly,” 159–61.
25. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 142, 23, 27, 43, 17; see also Vasterling, “Cognitive Theory and Phenomenology,” 91.
26. These political implications of Nussbaum’s narrative ethics anticipate the author’s later turn to a sustained engagement with and refinement of John Rawls’s political liberalism, especially evident in her work on the political cultivation of emotion. While Nussbaum remains critical of the overly rationalistic elements of Rawls’s theory, the focus of concern shifts from facing up to “the fragility of goodness,” towards exploring how the loving attentiveness to the particularities of human life characteristic of narratives can nurture the political culture of equal respect, encourage an overlapping consensus on fundamental principles and ensure the stability of liberal democracies. See Nussbaum, Political Emotions, 1–24; Nussbaum, “Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” 19–23.
27. The article builds on the rich literature that has examined Camus’s and Arendt’s critical engagement with the tradition of existentialism, and discerned in their visions of political judgement and action a distinctly worldly sensibility. For an illuminating portrait of Camus as political thinker of limits, see Hayden, Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought. For accounts of the worldly character of Arendt’s existential orientation, see Hinchman and Hinchman, “Existentialism Politicized”; Hinchman and Hinchman, “In Heidegger`s Shadow”; Biskowski, “Practical Foundations for Political Judgement.” For an insightful reading of Camus’s and Arendt’s shared guiding orientation with a view to political engagement, see Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion.
28. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 14, 307–27; Camus, The Rebel, 11–12; Camus, “The Human Crisis.”
29. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 6.
30. Ibid., 28, 21, 49, 8.
31. Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 58.
32. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 65.
33. Arendt, Lectures on Kant, 76, 13.
34. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 41.
35. Arendt, The Human Condition, 140–44, 181–83.
36. Ibid., 188–92, 226; Arendt, Between Past and Future, 150.
37. Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 216.
38. Arendt, The Human Condition, 182; Arendt, Lectures on Kant, 66; Arendt, Life of the Mind: Thinking, 131–35. In Ronald Beiner’s influential interpretation, Arendt’s turn to Kant denotes a shift in her understanding of political judgement from that of a political actor to that of a disengaged spectator. I depart from this interpretation and instead build on the scholarship that has examined how the perspectives of actor and spectator are intertwined in Arendt’s account of political judgement and explored the political significance of Arendt’s narrative imagination These works include Hayden, “Arendt and the Political Power of Judgement”; Buckler, Hannah Arendt and Political Theory, 12, 45–5, 57–58, 107; Fine, “Judgement and the Reification of the Faculties”; Herzog, “Marginal Thinking or Communication”; Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’”; Disch, “More Truth Than Fact.”
39. Arendt, The Human Condition, 55–58; Arendt, Between Past and Future, 257.
40. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 205–6; Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 307–8; Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power,” 167–96; Buckler, “Coming out of Hiding,” 618, 623.
41. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 257; Kearney, On Stories, 132–33.
42. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 408. The existential orientation echoes the emergence of the politics of recognition as a distinct approach to understanding politics. See Taylor, Multiculturalism; Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?
43. Hayden, “The Human Right to Health,” 575–78.
44. Ricoeur, Course of Recognition, 90–96, 101–3.
45. Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 268–69.
46. Camus, The Rebel, 29–31, 72–75.
47. Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 268, 261–62; Aronson, Camus & Sartre, 56–60.
48. Jeanson, “To Tell You Everything,” 174.
49. Camus, The Rebel, 254–55.
50. Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 266; Zaretsky, Albert Camus, 86–87, 155–59.
51. Camus, The Rebel, 27.
52. Camus, The Plague, 232–37; Gatta, “Suffering and the Making of Politics,” 339–40, 346–51.
53. Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 70; Camus, Camus at Combat, 251.
54. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 208, 22, 219, 206–8, 199–200.
55. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 105, 109.
56. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 180–81.
57. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 200.
58. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 176–85.
59. Arendt, Lectures on Kant, 43; Arendt, Between Past and Future, 217, 237.
60. Arendt, Lectures on Kant, 67–69.
61. Ibid., 43; Arendt, Between Past and Future, 51.
62. Arendt, Lectures on Kant, 70, 74; Arendt, Between Past and Future, 218.
63. Zerilli, “Value Pluralism,” 21–23.
64. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 78–80, 85.
65. Newton, Narrative Ethics, 65.
66. Kruks, Retrieving Experience, 57–61.
67. Black, Fiction Across Borders, 2–3, 24.
68. Markell, Bound by Recognition, 3–5.
69. Camus, The Rebel, 130.
70. Arendt, Life of the Mind: Willing, 200.
71. Markell, Bound by Recognition, 3–5.
72. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 135, 138, 148.
73. Ibid., 126, 127–29, 132.
74. Ibid., 133–34, 132–35, 128–31, 135, 137–38.
75. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 29–30.
76. Booth, The Company We Keep, 270–71.
77. Beausoleil, “Mastery of Knowledge,” 16–18; Mihai, “Epistemic Marginalisation;” Mihai, “From Hate to Political Solidarity.”
78. Ricoeur, Course of Recognition, 154.
79. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 50–51, 55; Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 32.
80. Ricoeur, Course of Recognition, 236–37, 225–30.
81. Camus, The Rebel, 133–42.
82. Camus, The Just, 174–76.
83. Ibid., 214, 213–14, 215, 214–15, 208–10, 219–20.
84. Zaretsky, “The Tragic Nostalgia”; Sprintzen, Camus: A Critical Examination, 131.
85. Camus, The Just, 226, 220–22.
86. Ricoeur, Course of Recognition, 230.
87. Cavarero, Relating Narratives.
88. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 44.
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Maša Mrovlje
Maša Mrovlje completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow working on the ERC-funded project “Illuminating the Grey Zone.” Her research interests include international political theory and the history of political thought, with a specific focus on twentieth-century philosophies of existence, poststructuralist and critical theories. Her publications appeared in Philosophia and Law, Culture and the Humanities.