Resisting Bodies: Between the Politics of Vulnerability and “We-Can”

ABSTRACT

This article presents a critical phenomenology of embodiment in radical democratic struggles, focusing on racialized citizens inhabiting and navigating public spaces and on anti-racist protests. It contrasts the notion of the precarious body, central to critical theorists like Judith Butler, with an alternative phenomenological understanding, locating the political significance of the body in spontaneous movement (Arendt) and competence (Merleau-Ponty). Attending to either precariousness or mobile-capable bodies reveals distinct dimensions of radical democratic struggles. While precariousness addresses the unequal distribution of social-material conditions, it tends to overshadow the shared lived experience of freedom among citizens countering inhibitions of free movement, often motivated by their disproportionate exposure to precarious conditions in the first place. From a phenomenological perspective, public action is permitted by capable and mobile bodies. It is argued that public space opens the power of “we-can” bodies by soliciting citizens' movement among others and their engagement in shared projects, according to their bodily capacities. Pluralistic interaction, aiming to maintain or create free spaces of movement, is presented as the political practice of freedom par excellence, exemplified by radical democratic walking practices in the Black civil rights movement.

“Body-talk” has become prevalent among critical theorists and activists alike when discussing protest, radical democratic struggles, and civil disobedience in recent times. Judith Butler’s work, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), undoubtedly played a pivotal role in this shift towards considering protest and resistance in corporeal terms. In this book, Butler draws inspiration from the radical democratic energy released by revolutionary movements in the Arab world and the activism of social movements during the early 2010s (such as the Arab Spring, Occupy, Indignados, etc.), which ignited passionate responses from many left-leaning spectators worldwide, akin to Kant’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Butler conceptualizes a politics of assembly that is performative in nature, presenting the idea that bodies coming together in streets, squares, parks, and other public “spaces of appearance” hold political significance purely by virtue of their act of assembling. They argue that these gatherings should not be viewed solely as pre-discursive conditions, i.e. as merely setting the stage for vocalizing claims. Instead, the act of assembling itself carries political meaning. Embracing Butler’s performative theory alongside Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology, Adriana Cavarero has more recently referred to this gathering of bodies as vital for what she terms “surging democracy” or “democracy-in-the-making.”¹

What conception of the body is assumed in democratic resistance? For Butler, it is quite clearly that of the precarious or vulnerable body. Disparate groups of people such as women, queer, disabled, and racialized people, refugees, and (undocumented) migrants, who “do not otherwise find much in common”², may be united through their challenge to the unequal distribution of vulnerability, or “grievability.”

Notes is part of a series of publications in Butler’s body of work in the present century that focuses on vulnerability and violence. This focus was sparked by the US war on terror unleashed in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.³ Despite slight modifications and refinement of terminology, as well as varying emphasis on ontological, ethical, or political aspects and implications, these writings share a common concern for humans’ “primary”⁴ or constitutive vulnerability. Butler contends that vulnerability is a basic feature of human existence because as embodied beings we are exposed to others.⁵ In their work Frames of War (2009), Butler introduced a conceptually and normatively significant distinction that had previously been implicit—namely the differentiation between precariousness and precarity. The latter term highlights the socially and politically induced differential distribution of precariousness.⁶ While all humans are inherently precarious, some are rendered more precarious than others due to unequal power relations. As a result, only some lives are deemed “grievable” and thus considered fully human, while others are not.⁷

From the outset, endowing corporeal vulnerability with an ontological status has stood as a critical gesture for Butler, serving primarily to confront liberal notions of the subject. According to Butler, such notions, built upon autonomy, neglect (or “disavow”) our fundamental and mutual corporeal dependence on others for survival and our primordial susceptibility to violence. The distinction between precariousness and precarity, in a second vein, serves as a tool to expose oppressive social relationships born from the uneven distribution of vulnerability under the conditions of neoliberalism and individualism. Most importantly, the ontology of vulnerability forms the foundation for an unwavering critique of violence, especially state violence. Examples include the war on terror⁸, femicide, and instances of anti-Black racist police violence in the US, along with state-sanctioned violence against and letting-die of migrants crossing the Mediterranean in Europe.⁹

For Butler, vulnerability carries profound ethical implications. Our corporeal vulnerability and interdependency bestow upon us an ethical responsibility towards others and lay the groundwork for an ethos of non-violence. Starting with Notes, Butler has also turned to exploring the explicitly political import of vulnerability. They contend that precarity can work as a “mobilizing force”¹⁰ for resistance, opening pathways for new forms of coalition politics and alliances within radical democratic struggles that take on the task of challenging the unequal distribution of grievability.

In this contribution, which delves into a comprehensive phenomenological conception of embodied radical democratic action, I juxtapose the vulnerable body as presented in Butler’s work and in critical phenomenology with an alternative political-phenomenological understanding of the democratically resisting body—namely, the mobile-capable body.¹¹ In exploring the latter perspective, I will draw upon the work on action, revolution, and civil disobedience of the political phenomenologist Hannah Arendt¹², who has increasingly become an interlocutor to Butler, which I will supplement with insights into agency found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment.¹³

While both Butler’s and Arendt’s work on radical democracy and performative politics draws inspiration from Arendt’s concepts of civic action-in-concert and the “space of appearances,”¹⁴ Butler explicitly distances themselves from Arendt’s stance on the role of “life itself,” and the vulnerable body with its pressing needs within public space. This is due to Arendt’s alleged rigid divisions between social and political, as well as public and private issues and domains.¹⁵ Criticizing Arendt for dismissing social struggles—encompassing collective identity claims and poverty—as a- or anti-political, Butler accuses her of neglecting the necessary material conditions for the emergence of the space of appearance.¹⁶ This critique echoes a common objection against Arendt, particularly prevalent in feminist theory, claiming that she marginalizes the body’s political relevance by treating it as an extra- or even anti-political phenomenon. Arendt seems to disqualify the body as a coercive or tyrannical force due to its always-urgent and compelling needs and interests, thus presenting it as an impediment to the exercise of political freedom.

Nevertheless, while the vulnerable body—characterized by mortality, neediness, and labour-boundness—qua body cannot appear in public space for Arendt, this should not lead us to disregard the body’s presence and even significance within her political phenomenology. I will argue that the body, particularly in its capacity for spontaneous movement, plays a pivotal role in Arendt’s framework.¹⁷ In fact, cases of political action in her sense of the word, such as revolution and civil disobedience, are deeply rooted in bodily freedom. While her conception of the body remains somewhat underdeveloped, her implicit understanding of the mobile body and explicit concepts of action-in-concert and power clearly requires an account of the capable body. This is where Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological exploration of the relationship between spatiality, motility, and agency, as features of the “I-can” body, can enrich her thought and contribute to a more comprehensive notion of the capable-mobile body, which can be referred to as a “we-can.”

This article is organized into four sections. Sections 1 and 2 are devoted to retrieving an understanding of the democratically resisting body as mobile and capable. In the initial section, I will reconstruct the concept of the human capacity for spontaneous movement in Arendt’s work and demonstrate its significance for political freedom and civic action. The subsequent section will complement this understanding with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the “I-can” body. The third section will then engage with an argument presented by figures such as Butler, early phenomenologists of race and feminist phenomenologists, as well as contemporary critical phenomenologists. This argument suggests that such an account of embodiment ignores the material preconditions of the “we-can,” the absence of which rather reflects and generates a “we-cannot.” In the final section, I will evaluate the two conceptions of the resisting body and argue that they highlight different aspects of radical democratic struggles, while also revealing areas of overlap. Throughout this analysis, my focus will be on movement in public spaces, racialization, and historical and ongoing struggles against anti-Black racism.

1. Spontaneity and the Mobile Body

Scattered throughout Arendt’s work, we encounter cursory remarks about elementary corporeal free movement as fundamental to political freedom. She asserts that not freedom of choice, will, conscience, religious belief, or thought, but spontaneous bodily movement is “the most elementary,” but also “historically the oldest” and “greatest” form of human freedom.¹⁸ Arendt traces the origin of the Greek pre-philosophical concept of freedom, ἐλϵυθϵρία, to the idea of “to go as I wish.”¹⁹ Through a genealogical analysis of the concept of freedom, she relates the story of ancient, pre-philosophical Greek political freedom in the polis, where, according to her, it emerged as a spatial, dynamic, phenomenal (i.e. as appearing on the surface) and negative phenomenon. Furthermore, she claims that the early Christian and modern notions of freedom as an experience seated in the will, thought, or conscience²⁰ have replaced and distorted the ancient understanding of freedom as rooted in movement. She even suggests that inner freedom is derivative of the primordial embodied experience of free movement.²¹

To comprehend the relationship between motility and political freedom, we must delve into Arendt’s description of free movement. Elementary corporeal freedom is inherently dynamic, existing only when enacted through physical movement. Furthermore, it is entirely phenomenal, manifesting only when appearing in the world, rather than being confined to an “inward domain” like the will.²² Given its dynamism and phenomenality, elementary movement is inherently spatial, requiring space for its occurrence. This leads to a further feature: its entirely negative nature.²³ “Going as or where one pleases” signifies the ability to leave anywhere and at any time that suits one. “Being able to depart for where we will is the prototypical gesture of being free.”²⁴ Another reason why motility signifies a negative capacity is that moving about freely involves avoiding coercion by external forces, such as subjection to a “master” or by internal forces, such as the body’s own needs, private material interests, and even self-chosen projects.²⁵ Freedom of movement is not an attribute of the will, choice, or conscience; it lies in spontaneous movement itself.²⁶ Simply strolling along, without motivation nor driven by necessity or purpose, solely because one can or feels like it, might be the most primary, ontogenetically even primal, human experience of freedom. It is in moving that most of us first experience freedom; consider a toddler learning to crawl. This elementary experience of freedom is echoed later in life, like the sense of joy familiar to many, while cycling down a steep slope, or the freedom felt by physically disabled or elderly people with limited mobility when they acquire a wheelchair or Zimmer frame.

The major difference between free bodily movement and political freedom is that the latter assumes a positive and interactive significance. Political freedom is associated with the human condition of natality, embodying the capacity for improvisation, initiative, of starting something new in the world acting in concert—an indispensable element of political action.²⁷ This underscores the key concept that informs Arendt’s work and her understanding of politics, freedom, and action: plurality. Political freedom lacks meaning unless it involves interaction with others who are both equal and distinct at the same time.²⁸ In contrast, elementary spontaneous bodily movement remains a negative phenomenon, and the presence of plural others is not necessary for its exercise as a principle and might even constitute hindrances. Furthermore, while elementary movement may be boundless, political freedom, according to Arendt, is spatially bound. Political freedom needs a public space, and space needs delimitations. Limits, both in the physical sense of boundaries and borders and in the legal sense established by positive laws, enable the equalization of those within its confines.²⁹ The “presence and equality of others” is precisely what allows for plurality and consequentially multi-perspectivism that Arendt endows with profound political significance. By enabling the equality of fundamentally different citizens and thus ensuring plurality, limits foster political freedom, which for Arendt, as we have seen, is interactive, public, and positive.³⁰ Therefore, liberation struggles remain at the pre-political level for Arendt, while only interactive and public practices of freedom are truly political.

As previously mentioned, Arendt regards elementary bodily freedom as a dynamic, phenomenal (thus spatial), and negative capacity. Despite the noted differences, several of these attributes also apply to political freedom: its dynamism, phenomenality, and spatiality. Like the freedom of movement, political freedom in Arendt’s view is dynamic because it refers to “action,” in the sense of interaction, improvisation, and initiative. “Freedom” operates more as a verb than as a noun. It is not an attribute or disposition but rather a practice, thus a surface phenomenon—an occurrence that can only be experienced and realized through its enactment or performance. Political freedom exists only as far and as long as it appears within the world³¹ (it is easy to see why Butler draws inspiration from Arendt³²). More particularly, publicity is the spatial manifestation of political freedom. For political freedom to emerge, citizens need access to public space, often referred to as a “space of appearances” or “the space of movement between men” by Arendt.³³

The pre-political quality of the bodily capacity for spontaneous movement manifests in three distinct ways. Firstly, because of our elementary experience of being capable of moving freely we already have a sense of the space that freedom requires. Arendt’s description of public space as the space of appearance necessarily signifies a space of movement. Secondly, the absence of coercion permits spontaneous, non-rule-bound action and the freedom to start something new, that is, what Arendt calls natality and considers the principle of public freedom. Additionally, our freedom of movement acquaints us with the experience of encountering diverse perspectives, in other words, with the facticity of plurality. The world is fundamentally perspectival; it is not simply there but demands disclosure.³⁴ Furthermore, disclosing the world requires a multiplicity of irreducibly different and simultaneously equal (i.e. plural) viewpoints.³⁵ These viewpoints may take the form of actual perspectives, exchanged through discourse, or of potential perspectives, conceived through imaginative efforts to see the world from others’ vantage points. This involves the attempt to place ourselves in their shoes, albeit with the realization that we can never know for sure how the world—a specific matter, thing, situation, or event—appears to those people.³⁶ This becomes particularly pronounced when their social situations differ significantly, further amplifying the need for exercises in imagination. Arendt describes such exercises as “visiting” the possible perspectives of others, or “enlarging” one’s “mentality.”³⁷ Thus, our mental freedom of movement—referred to as “thinking” and “judging” by Arendt—“parallels” our embodied freedom of movement in the external world.³⁸

The liberty to depart or venture out, to leave “home,” step into the open, walk the streets (that is, entering the public world), and to move around as one pleases appears as an indispensable condition for public freedom for Arendt.³⁹ While not classifying free movement as political freedom proper, Arendt mostly seems to regard unchecked mobility as a the necessary though not sufficient condition for political freedom due to its negative and non-pluralistic nature. Even if someone enduring severe limitations on freedom of movement can never partake in the public and interactive exercise of political freedom, possessing unrestricted freedom of movement does not guarantee public freedom. Lessons gleaned from twentieth-century experiences of mass statelessness and totalitarianism led Arendt to the realization that a person deprived of citizenship, i.e. someone de jure or de facto stateless, might not face constraints on her capacity for spontaneous movement. However, this freedom remains politically inconsequential since lacking rights, citizenship, and legal identity precludes the enjoyment of political freedom proper.⁴⁰

Diverging from the predominant trend in Arendt’s work that underscores how unchecked motility merely paves the way for civic action, we occasionally encounter suggestions that the body’s motility and political freedom are both modalities of freedom of movement. For instance, when Arendt posits that “both action and thought occur in the form of movement and […] therefore, freedom [of movement] underlies both [action and thought].”⁴¹ At some point, she even establishes an equivalence between the negative freedom to leave the private sphere—“the freedom to depart and begin something new and unheard-of”—and the positive freedom to enter the shared public sphere—“the freedom to interact in speech with many others and experience the diversity that the world always is in its totality.”⁴² This notion would imply that bodily freedom to depart already encompasses a political dimension.

2. The “I-”/“We-Can” Body

I believe that this ambivalence about whether spontaneous movement is already political or not arises from Arendt’s reluctance to radically think through the implications of her account of the corporeal nature of free movement—the “gesture” and “movement” of bodies. Once “freedom of movement” is transformed into political freedom proper, it seems to become a mere metaphor for speech on the one hand—i.e. for citizens talking in the presence of others and being heard, bringing forward their viewpoints, and receiving others’ approval or disapproval—and for the movements of the mind on the other, including thinking, imagination, and judgment. This shift in focus moves away from corporeal freedom of movement to the mental freedom to visit other perspectives.

To be sure, “speech” for Arendt is certainly not the same as language or rational expression but refers to debate and contestation. Likewise, the mind that “visits” others’ perspectives is not the self-enclosed intellect, cognition, logical deduction, or Kantian lawgiving practical reason, but refers to the faculties of imagination (representative thinking) and judgment. Thinking and judging in her understanding are as restless and mobile as action. In other words, these mental activities are truly discursive, in the original sense of the Latin dis-cursus: the act of running about or running to and fro.

Having said so, along the way, the moving body seems to slip away from the “space of movement,” which is public space. Freedom of movement seems to get internalized—which is, of course, exactly the opposite of the conception of public freedom that Arendt pursued. This critique differs from Butler’s criticism of Arendt’s body-aversiveness. What concerns me here is less the absence of the vulnerable body—the “I-need” or “I-suffer”—although this is a problem, too, as I will discuss in the next section. More importantly, it is Arendt’s underdeveloped notion of the capable and resisting body, the “I-can” or, better still, “we-can,” which renders her account of political freedom and her notion of power inconsistent or at least incomplete.

In this respect, her thought may be fruitfully complemented with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment.⁴³ Arendt might have been onto this herself in the last book published during her lifetime. In Willing she takes up the phenomenological notion of the “I-can” in relation to freedom, in order to rephrase her earlier argument that freedom is essentially a worldly, not an inner reality or faculty. Freedom is a quality of the “I-can,” not the “I-will,” she now writes.⁴⁴ Perhaps not coincidentally, Arendt discovered Merleau-Ponty’s work during this period.⁴⁵ However, she never elaborated upon these cursory remarks (or did not live to do so).

Therefore, I believe it is precisely Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body that could take us a step further, more particularly his account of the co-constitution of embodiment, motility, and spatiality. As we have seen, Arendt held that without open, public space, we cannot engage in free movement and, consequently, political freedom is foreclosed. Merleau-Ponty reverses this argument or, to be more precise, he investigates the prior existential or experiential structures of space. If it were not for our motility, or more concretely, our movements, we would not “have” space in the first place. This is the case because of our embodied existence. It is by virtue of our bodies that we have a particular perspective on or in the world.

For Merleau-Ponty, the body and the world are ambiguously intertwined. The subject or self in the traditional metaphysical sense does not precede the object or world, or vice versa, and precisely so by virtue of our embodied existence. The body, according to Merleau-Ponty, is not “merely an object in the world,” but rather “it is our point of view in the world.”⁴⁶ They are co-original. It is through the body that we have access to the world.

Additionally, the world is spatial as a matter of course. In fact, “there would be no space at all for me if I had no body,” Merleau-Ponty writes.⁴⁷ We perceive the world, including its spatial dimensions, as, and to the extent that, it offers us possibilities for action, or rather, as it solicits our skilful responses, flexible bodily competences, i.e. what “I can” do, given the particular projects I am involved in. The “I-can” refers to our pre-reflective or pre-discursive embodied knowing how to do something. It is our everyday ability or power to cope with whatever the world and our projects—more precisely: the interplay between the two—present us with, without the need for any mediation by explicit intentions or the will. The “I-can” is, according to Merleau-Ponty, our basic mode of being in the world and the condition of the body’s constitution of space. Perception is a matter of “I can” instead of “I think that,” of “knowing how” rather than “knowing that.”⁴⁸ Our environment shows up, reveals, or discloses itself, relative to our practical projects and our bodily capacities to engage in them. So, perception takes place in an ambiguous interplay between our environment, our projects, and our bodily capacities.

Complementing Arendt, Merleau-Ponty allows us to see that it is because of the body’s situation that perception is perspectival. One way to explain the perspectival nature of perception and the roles that spatiality and motility play in it is by demonstrating the horizon or figure/background structure of perception, as illuminated by the image of a Gestaltswitch.⁴⁹ Perception means picking out something—the thing that we attend to, or a particular aspect of it—from a less differentiated background, a horizon, that itself does not appear, and being able to switch between different figures that reveal themselves to us depending on the perspective that we take. This simply means that a particular thing slips back into the background as we shift our attention elsewhere. In other words, perception has a dynamic presence/absence structure.

It is precisely the body that allows us to do so. For it is because of our bodies that we can hold something before ourselves—that is, have a “here” with respect to which a “there” can be experienced, while in the process getting a sense of the particular place of these objects of attention and the relations among them. We and the things around us are “implaced.”⁵⁰ The things or the aspects of them that disclose themselves to me are dependent upon my bodily situation.⁵¹ Consequently, space in Merleau-Ponty’s account is always already “oriented” or “lived” space because it requires us to perform certain actions. The world in general and its spatial features in particular—including distance, dimension, depth, size, shape, and movement—are always meaningful to us, that is, of a particular kind and relevant to our practical projects and corporeal capacities. For example, “distant” is that which is far away from me, out of my body’s immediate reach, and “proximate” is what is close to me, within my body’s reach.

To sum up, the body’s motility is the key to the horizonal structure of perception. It is precisely because our body is mobile, i.e. that we can move our bodies, that we can shift attention from one thing to another and switch between perspectives, making some things, or some of its aspects, light up and letting others slip back into the background. The “I-can” is, as a principle, also always an “I-move”.

Taken together, I believe Arendt’s conception of public space is not dynamic enough due to her underdeveloped notion of the capable body. Reading Arendt and Merleau-Ponty together allows us to see that perception is always perspectival, due to our capable and mobile bodies. For space to be public, in addition, we need mobile and dynamic others who are differently situated and hence provide different perspectives. If it were not for the spontaneous bodily movements of a plurality of people, the many perspectives that are key to political action and freedom would simply not show up. Multi-perspectivism presupposes our bodily capacities.⁵² If we have a perspective and space by virtue of our irredeemably embodied existence, as Merleau-Ponty argues, then there is no reason to deny the embodied political subject its political character once it “leaves home” and enters public space. We simply cannot leave our bodies at home. In other words, freedom of movement is not just negative but could have a positive political meaning as well. It underpins both freedom from coercion, as in elementary spontaneous movements, and as a goal of liberation struggle on the one hand, and civic action, the freedom of assembly, on the other. Appearing and the disclosure of the shared human world do not just happen through speech, but they rely on our bodies with their perspectives and I-cans.

3. “I-”/“We-Cannot”

Applying the phenomenological approach that I have proposed in the previous two sections to the question of the political relevance of the body that is engaged in radical democratic struggles suggests that its significance lies not only in its fundamental vulnerability but also in its spontaneity and competence. However, critical theorists of embodied differences, space, and movement argue that such a phenomenological account tends to obscure the material preconditions of the “I-can” and spontaneous movement. The unequal distribution of movement opportunities allows dominant groups to enact the capacity for spontaneity while limiting or even prohibiting these opportunities for others. One’s sense of bodily agency, of what one “can do,” and, by extension, what “we can” and what “we cannot” do as a group, depends on one’s situation, which encompasses embodied differences such as gender and race. These differences inevitably introduce unequal power relations into the equation.

Butler, for example, brings up the notion of a “politics of mobility,” which arises from humans’ constitutive vulnerability and corporeal interdependence, in terms of the infrastructure or material supports that must be in place to enact the freedom of movement and assembly.⁵³ The “operative sense of mobility” that is presupposed in mobilization, they write, cannot be taken for granted by many people.⁵⁴ As indicated in the Introduction of this article, it is exactly this sensibility which Butler finds lacking in Arendt’s political thinking.

Resonating with Butler’s criticism of Arendt, critical phenomenologists such as Iris Marion Young and Frantz Fanon have criticized Merleau-Ponty for ignoring the social preconditions of an alleged universal way of moving one’s body in space—in other words, the unequal distribution of movement opportunities and the enactment of the “I-can.”⁵⁵ Merleau-Ponty posits that the body, in as far as it is competent, establishes an immediate link between the spatiality of one’s body and the surrounding outward space, creating a connection between a “here” and an “over there.”⁵⁶ However, in her seminal 1980 essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” Young demonstrates that Merleau-Ponty presents a falsely universalistic picture that generalizes a particular, typically male, way of moving one’s body in space. For women (and I add, other marginalized subjects, such as racialized people and people with disabilities), the continuity between “here” and “over there” is more likely to be severed. This severance transforms what is considered everyday open space into a confining one, inhibiting their movements and projects, resulting in an “I-cannot”.⁵⁷ (Stereo-)typically feminine bodily movement often displays what she calls “inhibited intentionality.” Young's phenomenological analysis of how girls and boys perform physically challenging but doable tasks, such as throwing a ball, reveals differences in the way they “live and move their bodies in space”. As Young writes: “[G]irls … tend to project an enclosed space, and boys to project an open and outwardly directed space.”⁵⁸ What is most significant for my purpose is that Young demonstrates the possible disruption of the link or continuity between the spatiality of my own body and the outer space, with everyday open space potentially becoming enclosed.

Frantz Fanon had already observed something quite similar regarding Black bodily agency in 1952. No less critical about certain falsely universalizing tendencies in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the lived body than Young after him, Fanon observes that for Black people, the “natural” (actually naturalized) dialectic between body and world breaks down under (post-)colonial conditions.⁵⁹ Both Young and Fanon thus highlight the social and historical world as the source of “dual subjectivity” for women and Black people, respectively. In sexist and racist societies, their bodily agency is split because they often live their bodies simultaneously as things and agents, objects and subjects, “I-cannot” and “I-can.” White and Black embodiment come—among other features—with particular ontological situations vis-à-vis space and movement: ways of inhabiting and taking up space, as well as particular habits or styles of moving within and between spaces. Our racial situation is evident in the specific way in which our bodies are “oriented” in the world, as Sarah Ahmed argues, following Husserl.⁶⁰ Perry Zurn, in developing a critical phenomenology of walking, explores the “differential distribution of walking chances.”⁶¹ Orientation in open space or moving about as one sees fit may be a symptom of privilege rather than an indication of competence. Particular non-discursive (“unconscious”) habits illustrate this orientation. One such habit is what Shannon Sullivan has called “white ontological expansiveness”—the embodied projection of an open public space, which is typical for privileged people, often white, middle-class, male, and able-bodied.⁶² White ontological expansiveness is not only evident in the freedom to go wherever one fancies but also in the possibility to leave any place or withdraw from public spaces into private spheres at will.

Racism may also work “in the register of bodily gesture and response,” as Helen Ngo argues. These racist gestures become “habituated” and are enacted spatially.⁶³ One such example is the phenomenon referred to as the “elevator effect” by George Yancy. He recounts an instance where, as a Black man, he entered an elevator with a white woman as its sole other occupant. Upon seeing him, her body tensed: she clutched her bag, started to tremble nervously, and her hand palms became sweaty, among other reactions.⁶⁴ Furthermore, in an opinion piece in The New York Times, approximately one year after Trayvon Martin “was killed walking while black” in 2012, Yancy wrote that “black men in this country know what it is like to be followed while shopping and how black men have had the experience of “walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.” (…) Black bodies in America continue to be reduced to their surfaces and to stereotypes that are constricting and false, that often force those black bodies to move through social spaces in ways that put white people at ease. We fear that our black bodies incite an accusation. We move in ways that help us to survive the procrustean gazes of white people.”⁶⁵

4. Between the Politics of Vulnerability and the “We-Can”

Drawing an analogy between radical democratic politics and drama, with the stage as the space of appearances—the public scene where democratic struggles take place—and the play as the civic exercise of freedom, it seems that, according to the vulnerability conception, bodies leave the stage too early: after, ideally, a level playing field or supportive world has been secured, while never getting to the start of the play. Conversely, according to the “we-can” conception, bodies enter it too late (only when the play begins, without acknowledging the uneven starting position of the actors). In other words, what we see here would be the enactment of liberation in the former, and of freedom in the latter case. Yet I do not believe this is altogether true.

Reconsidering the relation between the two conceptions of the political body, I would argue that even if they come from different intellectual traditions and represent distinct notions of both embodiment and politics, they are more proximate than may seem at first sight, and they even partly overlap. A particular radical democratic struggle may disclose itself as embodied differently when viewed from the perspective of either the vulnerable or the capable-mobile body. An understanding of embodied democratic struggles that is based on vulnerability seems to take the unequal distribution of social-material conditions of movement through public space more seriously than an approach starting from spontaneity and “we-can” bodies. Yet, the political-phenomenological understanding of embodiment that I have attempted to construct in sections 1 and 2—that of the capable and mobile political body, premised on spontaneity, natality, and the power of the we-can—may also be applied to address the unequal distribution of vulnerability and movement opportunities, albeit in a more indirect manner. It raises the idea that radical democratic struggles might be prompted by receiving a disproportionate share of precariousness in the first place, while simultaneously suggesting that the “surging” of democracy, in Cavarero’s words, only truly takes off when bodies assemble, such as in marches, and in this very act bring about an open, free space of appearances. “Although rare and fragile, temporary and transient, the opening up of a space of appearance, according to Arendt, is and remains the exemplary occurrence by which politics as such discloses itself.”⁶⁶

However, if precarity is seen not only as the “condition” of political action but also as its very “content,”⁶⁷ what becomes obscured is the shared lived experience of practices of freedom among groups of citizens who mobilize to counter inhibitions of free movement in public spaces. While it may not be entirely clear whether Butler regards precarity as more than just the context or incentive to radical democratic political action⁶⁸, it seems safe to say that the notions of the mobile-capable body and the vulnerable body are related to different normative claims or ideals: the foundation of freedom and radical equal grievability,⁶⁹ respectively. Paying attention to the mobile-capable body opens up a notion of democratic struggles as practices of freedom and the embodied power of the “we-can,” premised on the human condition of natality—the capacity to bring about new states of affairs by acting together among a plurality of others, as distinct from practices of “public (…) militant grieving.”⁷⁰

Even if Butler criticizes Arendt for ignoring the social and material preconditions of political action, they, in fact, provide many powerful examples of precarious people, who sometimes, with great effort and personal risk, do manage to mobilize and claim public space, despite the absence of a supportive infrastructure. One such notable example is Black people in the US and elsewhere.⁷¹ To illustrate the contrasting conceptions of embodied politics, I will now briefly discuss the example of radical democratic struggles against institutional anti-Black racism in the context of the “norming” and “racing” of spaces⁷² that I discussed in §3. Butler presents contemporary Black Lives Matter protests against racist police violence as a politics of vulnerability and grievability. For a different take on a historical predecessor of this movement, namely the African American civil rights movement in the southern states during the 1950s and 1960s, I draw from Arendt’s 1970 essay “Civil Disobedience.”⁷³

Initially, in her notorious 1959 essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” Arendt had considered the then-nascent civil rights movement a social struggle. That is, she saw it as a struggle for recognition of collective identity claims, seeking social climbing even. In “Civil Disobedience,” she implicitly revised her former stance and deviates from the disparaging and racially prejudiced remarks about Black activism that she frequently makes throughout her work (including the very same essay).⁷⁴ By presenting it as a form of civil disobedience, she raised the idea that the civil rights movement was a political struggle: a struggle for recognition as citizens, for access to public space, and for political freedom. In this essay, Arendt emphatically defends civil disobedience, at least in the American constitutional order, as the democratic right to organized, non-violent collective dissent. What made the civil rights movement such an eminent example of civil disobedience was that it exposed and attempted to correct for what she calls the “original crime”⁷⁵: the institution of slavery, and its disavowed afterlife, namely the “tacit exclusion from the tacit consensus”⁷⁶—the consensus universalis upon which the American republic allegedly was founded—of indigenous people and of formerly enslaved people of African descent in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and subsequently in the US Constitution (1788).⁷⁷ Arendt insists that it was not the law that undid this exclusion. The federal government was “unab[le] or unwilling” to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) that guaranteed citizenship rights and equal protection under the law, by allowing the Southern states to pass laws, the so-called Black Codes, that legalized the racial segregation and discrimination of African Americans (“Jim Crow”).⁷⁸ Instead, Arendt suggests it was the radical democratic political action of African American (second-class) citizens that “remedied” the crimes of slavery and legalized exclusion. Through organized action, the civil rights movement invoked the Fourteenth Amendment to challenge positive law. In doing so, it concretely shaped the principle of equal protection, Arendt writes.⁷⁹

These protests should not just be seen as liberation struggles, but most of all as exercises in political freedom.⁸⁰ Attending to motility and competence is helpful in making sense of embodied experiences of freedom of movement and the generation of new public spaces, where they were previously absent, as inherent in radical democratic action. These features of practices of freedom—embodiment, movement, and generation of public spaces—may be nowhere as manifest as in the collective practice of walking in protests, both past and present. Marches may not just be accidental to radical democratic struggles but could be politically meaningful in themselves. They are often the very embodied practices that brings about new spaces of appearance.⁸¹ Significantly, marches belong to the register of shared plural embodied “we-can.” It is doubtful if walking by vulnerable individuals who are not supposed to walk in a particular way, in a particular place, at a particular time, is in itself already a practice of democratic resistance, as Perry Zurn suggests.⁸² It was not by chance, I believe, that when Yancy wrote his piece on “Walking while Black in the ‘White Gaze’,” he spoke to the Black Lives Matter movement that was then in its germinal stage in the aftermath of the killing of Martin.

5. Conclusion

Butler is indeed correct when they argue that radical democratic political action not only happens through speech but also, and perhaps even more fundamentally, through embodied collective performances. Assemblages of bodies in public space are not merely pre-political, as Arendt thinks (but implicitly challenges); they may be in themselves already politically meaningful. Butler is concerned that Arendt’s conception of public space as a “space of appearances” neglects the physical location required for public protest to take place and the bodily dimension of action.⁸³ If the power of “we-can” bodies is taken seriously, such concern should be unwarranted. From the phenomenological perspective, it is our capable and mobile bodies that enable us to engage in public action. Public space opens up a different “I-can,” the power of “we-can,” and in the process makes possible the particular type of interactive freedom that Arendt calls “political.” Public space is the space that solicits our encounter and moving among others and our engagement in shared projects, according to our bodily capacities. Pluralistic interaction that aims to keep open or even carving out a free space of movement is, moreover, the political practice of freedom par excellence. The freedom of assembly is conditional, not just on the vulnerable and grievable body, but also on the capable and mobile body.

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and audiences at the following academic gatherings where I presented versions of this article for their helpful comments: “Critical Phenomenologies: Inequity, experience, and the human” (Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy March 30, 2023), “The struggle for attention in the public sphere: A perspective of critical phenomenology” (Technische Universität Dresden, 23–29 July 2023), “Phenomenology of Refuge and Belonging” (Technische Universität Darmstadt, 4 July 2022), “Cultural Perceptions of Safety” (21-22 January 2021, Open University Netherlands), British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2020: “Engaged Phenomenology” (3-5 September 2020, University of Essex) and The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt Research Workshop (26 February 2020, Leiden University).

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Cavarero, Surging Democracy and idem, “Rethinking Radical Democracy with Judith Butler.”

2 Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 27. Cf. idem, 58.

3 Notes is preceded by, among others, Precarious Life (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State? (2007, with Gayatri Spivak), Frames of War (2009), Parting Ways (2012), Dispossessions (2013, with Athena Athanasiou), and followed by the edited volume Vulnerability in Resistance (2016), and the monographs The Force of Non-Violence (2020) and What World is This? (2022).

4 Precarious Life, 28.

5 Frames of War, 1-8.

6 Frames, 25-26; also see Notes, 33-34.

7 Precarious Life, 20; Force of Nonviolence, 58.

8 In Precarious Life.

9 In Notes and Force of Nonviolence.

10 Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 14; cf. Force of Nonviolence, 192.

11 The “capable body” is by no means synonymous with able-bodiedness. Phenomenologically, the disabled or impaired body is just as much (and just as little) an “I-can” as the non-disabled body (for more on the notion of the “I-can” body, refer to §2 below). Additionally, impairment does not inherently preclude mobility.

12 Arendt’s work is increasingly acknowledged as being part of the phenomenological tradition. References to this can be found in various sources, such as Loidolt’s Phenomenology of Plurality, Vasterling’s “Hannah Arendt,” Borren’s, “Plural Agency, Political Power, and Spontaneity,” as well as multiple contributions in Herrmann and Bedorf’s Political Phenomenology.

13 Butler’s engagement with the phenomenological tradition is ambivalent. In a highly critical piece from 1989 concerning Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality, they argued that Merleau-Ponty tacitly assumes a male, European, and heterosexual subject. Not only would he “devalue gender as a relevant category in the description of lived bodily experience,” but he would also marginalize women (Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description,” 98; italics added; further criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s work in this vein will be discussed in §3). Until very recently, Butler has maintained a cautious distance from phenomenology. However, contemporary feminist phenomenologists are increasingly drawing on their work, both regarding gender performativity and their explorations of vulnerability. By showcasing the proximity, continuity, or at least compatibility between Butler’s theory and feminist phenomenology, these phenomenologists are challenging the previous portrayal of Butler’s performative theory as limited by linguistic reductionism (see Stawarska, “Subject and Structure in Feminist Phenomenology”). Some even go as far as qualifying Butler as a feminist phenomenologist without much hesitation (for example, Weiss, “Feminist Phenomenology”). In What World is This? (2022), Butler explicitly, albeit in their own words “unwittingly” (74), engages with critical phenomenology. They employ Merleau-Ponty’s concept of "the intertwining" to address interdependence within the context of “our pandemic times” (74).

14 Most notably in Who Sings the Nation-State?, Parting Ways and Notes.

15 For an excellent systematic exploration of the relationship between Butler’s and Arendt’s work, see Ingala, “From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler.” Other scholarship includes Pulkkinen, “Judith Butler’s Politics of Philosophy;” Taylor, “Butler and Arendt;” and Thonhauser, “The Power of Public Assemblies.”

16 Thonhauser, “The Power of Public Assemblies,” 208.

17 My project therefore differs from Hyvönen’s (“The Value of the Surface”) interesting “reappreciation” of the political relevance of the labouring, vulnerable body in Arendt’s thought.

18 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 9; Arendt, Willing, 200; Arendt, On Revolution, 275.

19 Willing, 19; Arendt, Promise of Politics, 121–122.

20 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 143–172.

21 Idem, 146–148.

22 Idem, 145.

23 On Revolution, 275.

24 Men in Dark Times, 9.

25 Willing; Men in Dark Times, 9; On Revolution, 19.

26 Spontaneity underpins natality, the principle of public freedom for Arendt (Arendt, The Human Condition, 175–181 and 478-479; Between Past and Future, 143–172). Arendt suggests that spontaneity is already inherent in human embodied existence, i.e., in “life itself,” however limited: “Spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not only with human freedom but with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping alive” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 438).

27 Human Condition, 175–181; Between Past and Future,143–172; Origins, 578–479.

28 Promise of Politics, 169. Note that interaction includes not just action in concert, but contestation, dissensus and disagreement as well.

29 Origins, 460–468; Human Condition, 190–191.

30 On Revolution, 275; Origins, 465; Promise of Politics, 169-170.

31 Between Past and Future, 145, 152-155. Human Condition, 234-235; Willing. On Hannah Arendt’s enactive phenomenology, see Loidolt, Phenomenology of Plurality, especially chapter 3.

32 Ingala, “From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler”; Pulkkinen, “Judith Butler’s Politics of Philosophy.”

33 On Revolution, 32; Human Condition, 198–207.

34 Promise of Politics, 167, 169; Human Condition, 75–58.

35 Promise of Politics, 167.

36 As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman argue, Arendt acknowledged that it is impossible to adopt someone else’s perspective because of the human condition of natality. The attempt to enlarge one’s mentality implies finding a “third perspective” that neither coincides with the other’s, nor simply with one’s own perspective (Hannah Arendt and Politics, 55-56).

37 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 43.

38 Men in Dark Times, 9; Promise of Politics, 168.

39 “Movement” and “walking” do not necessarily imply bipedal and prosthetically unsupported self-movement, but Arendt does not consider this.

40 Origins, 269.

41 Men in Dark Times, 9. See also Promise of Politics, 168.

42 Promise of Politics, 129.

43 Helen Fielding (“Multiple Moving Perceptions of the Real”) also reads together Merleau-Ponty’s and Arendt’s phenomenological accounts of movement, perception and perspective, but in a different context (works of art) and with an ethical rather than political aim.

44 Willing, 19; 200.

45 Arendt does not seem to have read the Phenomenology of Perception, but only the unfinished and posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible.

46 Merleau-Ponty, “A Prospectus of his Work,” 5.

47 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 117.

48 Phenomenology of Perception, 159.

49 For Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body’s relevance to the figure-background structure of perception, see: Phenomenology of Perception, 117-118.

50 Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, x.

51 Phenomenology of Perception, 116.

52 For an interesting account along these lines, see Mensch, “Public Space and Embodiment.” Also see Fielding, “Multiple Moving Perceptions of the Real.”

53 Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 19.

54 Idem, 15. Cf. Force of Nonviolence, 198.

55 Feminist philosophers, critical race theorists, and scholars in disability studies have criticized Merleau-Ponty for falsely universalizing a male, white, able-bodied perspective. Yet today, there is almost no phenomenologist whose work is as widely (though not uncritically) adopted in critical phenomenologies, particularly in gender and disability studies, as his. For more on this, see, for example, Weiss in “The Normal, the Natural, and the Normative.”

56 Phenomenology of Perception, 162.

57 Young, On Female Body Experience, 40.

58 Idem, 40.

59 Fanon, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man.”

60 Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.”

61 Zurn, “A Critical Phenomenology of Walking,” 9.

62 Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness.

63 Ngo, “Racist Habits,” 851.

64 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism.”

65 Yancy, “Walking while Black in the ‘White Gaze'.” In-text citation of then-president Barack Obama.

66 Cavarero, “Rethinking Radical Democracy with Judith Butler,” 152.

67 Nicola McMillan, “Review of Notes.”

68 They write, for example, that “it would not be a sufficient politics to embrace vulnerability” (“Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 25) and, elsewhere, “What seems clear is that, as important as it is to revalue vulnerability and give place to care, neither vulnerability nor care can serve as the basis of a politics.” (Force of Nonviolence, 186).

69 Force, 24 and 56.

70 Force, 106.

71 Other examples Butler returns to time and again include undocumented migrants (in Europe in particular), women and trans people.

72 Charles Mills, The Racal Contract, 41-89.

73 It is well-known that Arendt held racist prejudices. My reading of “Civil Disobedience” does not aim to absolve Arendt from this charge, only to demonstrate that she showed an acute awareness, in parts of this essay, of institutional or systemic anti-Black and anti-indigenous racism, despite her personal prejudices. 

74 For a different reading of “Civil Disobedience,” alongside Arendt’s contemporaneous essays On Violence (1970) and the interview “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution” (1971) that stresses its continuity with “Reflections on Little Rock” in perpetuating the same highly problematic view of Black politics, see Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, 112, 120-122. For a rather unconventional interpretation that affirms Arendt’s views on Black politics in “Reflections” in a way that seems close to my reading of “Civil Disobedience” (but not of “Reflections”), see LeSure, “The White Mob.” For a reading of “Civil Disobedience” along lines like my own, see Plaetzer, “Refounding Denied.”

75 “Civil Disobedience,” 90. Earlier, in On Revolution (1963) Arendt had called the institution of slavery “the primordial crime upon which the fabric of American society rested.” (71)

76 “Civil Disobedience,” 90-91.

77 idem, 88-91.

78 Idem, 91.

79 Idem, 80-81. It is well-documented that as a result of the protests of the civil rights movement, major federal legislation was passed in the 1960s that prohibited racial discrimination and segregation in public education and several other public services, voting, immigration, and housing. This legislation included the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), Immigration and Nationality Services Act (1965), and Fair Housing Act (1968).

80 See King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom.

81 The most prominent marches include the March on Washington (August 28, 1963) and the March from Selma to Montgomery (March 7, 1965). As previously mentioned, walking and marching do not necessarily involve bipedal, prosthetically unsupported movement, as, for example, rallies of disability rights activists show. Interestingly, overlaps exist between disability rights activism and African American civil rights activism, as seen in figures like Brad Lomax.

82 Zurn, “A Critical Phenomenology of Walking.”

83 Butler, Notes, 71-74.