Critiques of Violence: Arendt, Sedgwick, and Cavarero Respond to Billy Budd’s Stutter

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how Adriana Cavarero extends and offers an alternative to Hannah Arendt's understanding of speech and its relationship to politics and violence through a re-reading of Herman Melville’s, Billy Budd, Sailor (1891). The novella was examined by Arendt in On Revolution (1963) where she considers the apolitical character of the French Revolutionary Terror and establishes a link between violence, mimetic contagion, and the failure of articulate speech. I suggest that whereas Arendt’s reading only offers two possible responses to violence—forgiveness or punishment (perpetuating violence)—a reading of the novella inspired by Cavarero’s work shows a third alternative, the prevention of violence, while equally revealing the blind spot of Arendt’s argument. The blind spot is Arendt's privileging of articulate speech and her failure to consider the embodied character of human expression. Cavarero’s ethics of inclination, however, allows for a response to, and responsibility for, the uniqueness of the human voice, and for the intention to convey meaning. To mediate between Arendt and Cavarero, the paper also reconsiders Nidesh Lawtoo’s understanding of mimesis, evokes Eve Sedgwick’s paradigm-setting queer reading of Billy Budd, and engages with Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s contrary takes on the relationship between violence and language.

KEYWORDS:

• Arendt
• Cavarero
• Sedgwick
• violence
• inclination
• Billy Budd

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Cavarero evokes Primo Levi’s relating of the story of Hurbinek (from Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Summit, 1986) in For More than One Voice, 211.

2 Ibid., 195.

3 Arendt, The Human Condition, 176.

4 Arendt, Between Friends, 243.

5 Cavarrero, For More than One Voice, 199.

6 Arendt, The Human Condition, 179.

7 Ibid., 26.

8 Ibid., 26.

9 Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 190.

10 Many thanks for the anonymous reviewer for this succinct phrasing.

11 Melville, Billy Budd, 376 (italics added).

12 Ibid., 389.

13 Arendt, On Revolution, 82.

14 cf: Timár, “Against Compassion, Post-traumatic Stories in Arendt, Benjamin, Melville, and Coleridge”.

15 Arendt, On Revolution. 89.

16 Ibid., 86–7.

17 Huzar, “Apprehending Care in the Flesh”.

18 See among others: “Arendt’s work On Violence owes a large debt to Benjamin’s essay of similar title”. Birmingham, “On Violence, Politics, and the Law,” 5.

19 Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence, 48.

20 Arendt, On Violence, 56. On Arendt’s concession to the contrary claim, i.e. that violence is necessary to the institution of the political see, among others, Ashcroft. But Ascroft still admits that “for Arendt […] violence is only politically justifiable and reasonable when it is combined with an understanding of political power and the kind of nonviolent discursive action that underpins it instead of, as is so often the case, that action of power being replaced by violence”. Ascroft, Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, 190.

21 Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence, 50.

22 Arendt, “Truth in Politics,” 214.

23 Arendt, On Revolution, 50.

24 Ibid. 83.

25 Lawtoo, Nidesh, “Viral Mimesis,” 155. In this respect, I take issue, however, with Lawtoo’s interpretation of Eichmann, which reframes Hannah Arendt’s evaluation of the “banality of evil” in light of Eichmann’s mimetic psychology, which Arendt intuited but did not fully articulate. Rather than considering the banality of evil as symptomatic of Eichmann’s “inability to think,” the essay foregrounds the affective, contagious, and, in this sense, mimetic tendencies at play in Eichmann’s personality. Lawtoo, “The Case of Eichmann,” 1.

26 Lawtoo, Nidesh. “Viral Mimesis,” 162–3

27 Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet, 92.

28 Melville, Billy Budd, 387–8.

29 Ibid., 393.

30 Ibid, 373–4.

31 Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet, 111.

32 Timár, “Against Compassion”.

33 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 818.

34 Arendt, The Human Condition, 183–4.

35 Arendt, “What Is Permitted to Jove  …  ,” 257.

36 cf: Arendt’s similarly “heartless” treatment of a concentration camp survivor’s inability to speak at the trial of Adolf Eichmann: “‘Mr. Di- noor, please, please, listen to Mr. Hausner and to me’. In response, the disappointed witness, probably deeply wounded, fainted and answered no more questions. This, to be sure [. . .] did not prove the rule of simplicity or of ability to tell a story”. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 224. This scene was interpreted by Soshana Felman to show how trauma(tic silence) reveals the gap between justice and language.

37 Agamben, “On the Limits of Violence,” 104.

38 Ibid. 104, italics added.

39 Ibid. 105.

40 Melville, Billy Budd, 376.

41 Cavarero, Adriana, and Nidesh Lawtoo, “Mimetic Inclinations,” 185.

42 Arendt, On Violence, 64.

43 Levi, The Truce in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, I. 226.

44 Judith Butler also goes back to this essay by Benjamin in The Force of Non-Violence.

45 Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence, 50. The complex relationship Benjamin establishes between language, affections, and nonviolence, as well as the ways in which these are related to divine and mythic violence, are beyond the scope of this paper.

46 Cavarero, Inclinations, 186–7. This is also akin to what Arendt herself means by “in-betweenness”: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time”. The Human Condition, 52. Yet, as opposed to Cavarero, Arendt does not mean “in-betweenness” between people themselves, but rather the common world by which people are mutually related, in which all the members of the community are interested: “Billy Budd's stammer indicate the same, namely their incapacity (or unwillingness) for all kinds of predicative or argumentative speech, in which someone talks to somebody about something that is of interest to both because it inter-est, it is between them”. On Revolution, 86.

47 Levi, The Truce in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 227.

48 Melville, Billy Budd, 376.

49 See e.g. Barbara Johnson, “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of ‘Billy Budd.’”

50 Levi, The Truce in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 1. 227. italics added

51 Cavarero, Inclinations, 104.

52 Arendt, The Human Condition, 97.

53 Cavarero, Relating Narratives.

54 Levi, The Truce in The Complete Works of Primo Levi vol. 1. 227.

55 Arendt’s On Revolution is also evoked by Cavarero “Arendt briefly focuses her attention on the vocal masses, in her book On Revolution. It happens in a passage—mostly unwelcome to her commentators— in which she describes the dramatic theater of the poor and hungry who rose up shouting ‘Bread!’ during the French Revolution. It was certainly not a plurality, argues Arendt, but rather a multitude”. Cavarero, Surging Democracy. 67.

56 Lawtoo, “Eichmann Restaged”.

57 Cavarero, Surging, 68.

58 Ibid., 73.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Timár

Andrea Timár is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. She spent considerable research periods at KULeuven, at Royal Holloway, University of London, and, more recently, at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Central European University. She is the author of A Modern Coleridge. Cultivation, Addiction, Habits (Palgrave 2015; paperback: 2017). Her latest publications include “Dehumanization in Literature and the Figure of the Perpetrator” The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, ed. M. Kronfeldner (Routledge, 2021), and “Against Compassion: Post-traumatic Stories in Arendt, Benjamin, Melville, and Coleridge”. Arendt Studies, 20232/6.