It happens ‘in-between’: on the spatial birth of politics in Arendt's On Revolution

Abstract

This paper proposes a reading of Arendt's On Revolution that focuses on the spatial nature of the revolutionary phenomenon. It advances an understanding of political foundation as the ‘opening’ of a topos for political existence. I draw on the key notion of the ‘in-between’ that Arendt uses to depict the basic structure of the world as a space of coexistence and plurality. In the first part, I elucidate the anti-essentialist meaning of this term. Insofar as the ‘in-between’ refers to the constitutive distance that both separates and binds individuals together, it amounts to a social-ontological condition of political action. Yet On Revolution also shows that the grammar of the ‘in-between’ is a historical–political achievement that must be created and secured by human action on terms that are not given. In the second part, I reconstruct Arendt's account of the experience of modern revolutions and suggest that the political task of instituting and keeping such interstitial space open is enacted in the experience of rupture of time where the new can appear (the temporal abyss of freedom), and in the practice of establishing lasting institutions based on laws (the normative binding of foundation). The relation between these moments configures what I call the politics of the in-between.

Keywords:

• political foundation
• space
• in-between
• time
• law

Acknowledgements

I thank the participants at the conference Hannah Arendt's On Revolution after 50 years, held in October 2013 at Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago, Chile), for their comments and questions. A special mention goes to Robert Fine, Wolfhart Totschnig and Daniel Chernilo for their suggestions and criticism.

Funding

The completion of this paper was supported by the Chilean Council for Science and Technology, Fondecyt Iniciación [grant number 11121346].

Notes

1. The spatiality of politics is a key aspect of Arendt's thought which has mostly been overlooked. To be sure, her topological understanding of the world and human existence has been widely discussed in reference to the public realm or space (Benhabib, 2003/1996) and the phenomenon of world alienation in modernity (Janover, 2011; Villa, 1996). In recent discussions, the Heideggerian roots of this worldly spatiality have been highlighted with regard to the experience of appearance (Birmingham, 2013) and the question of the place of thinking (Malpas, in press). However, a more detailed and systematic investigation into the status of the ‘in-between’ itself is yet to be carried out. Such enquiry into the ‘in-between’ as the human production of a common world may prove relevant to Arendt's relationship to sociology. In the best tradition of Simmel, for instance, the social understood as sociation and as an emergent domain seems to be precisely the kind of general ontology that Arendt's notion of the ‘in-between’ seeks to capture. For a discussion of Simmel's sociology of the ‘in-between’, see Pyyhtinen (2009).

2. For a reading and assessment of Arendt's ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’, see Borren (2013).

3. Arendt's indictment of the social sciences, especially sociology, is mostly directed at their attempt to produce accurate social scientific explanations based on well-crafted theoretical models, ideal types and conceptual analogies divorced from the normative texture of human reality. In her view, these analytical tools deny human freedom the moment they reduce human action to predictable behaviour and transform the contingency of history into a chain of necessary causes. This critique, however reductive in its view of sociology as a positivist discipline akin to social engineering and decision-making, does not put Arendt at odds with sociology as a whole. It actually brings her closer to a long tradition of a philosophically informed form of sociology. For the development of the idea of ‘philosophical sociology’, see Chernilo (2014).

4. For further discussion and assessment of the issue of temporality in Arendt's political theory, see Hoffmann (2010), Marchart (2006) and Vásquez (2006).

5. On this point, Arendt is in agreement with Marx's depiction of the predilection of the French revolutionaries of 1798–1814 for mimicking Roman customs and words: ‘ … just when they appear to be revolutionizing themselves and their circumstances, in creating something unprecedented, … they nervously summon up the spirits of the past, borrowing from them their names, marching orders, uniforms, in order to enact new scenes in world history, but in this time-honoured guise and with this borrowed language’. Besides Marx's sarcasm, his comment aims to address the inescapable challenge of all revolutionary beginnings:

Like a beginner studying a new language [the revolutionary] always translates it back into his mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsakes his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently. (Marx, 1996/1852, p. 32)

In Arendt's view, this is exactly what all ‘professional revolutionaries’ (especially, the Marxist-Communist intelligentsia of the twentieth century) were never able to understand.

6. Despite the emphasis of the Greek concept of law on territorial limitations and boundaries, Arendt finds that its spatial connotation contains an ethical core that may be quite significant in the face of political excesses, namely the idea of ‘keeping within bounds’. In her view, this is the actual meaning of ‘the old virtue of moderation’, which ‘is indeed one of the political virtues par excellence, just as the political temptation par excellence is indeed hubris’ (1998/1958, p. 191).

7. The trouble with the lonely figure of the architect is the great emphasis it places on constitution-making as a process of ‘fabrication’. Within this framework, the foundation of a new political community is seen as a process of making in which the legislator is tantamount to a craftsman or artist (Arendt, 1998/1958, pp. 194–195; 2005, p. 179; see Markell, 2011).

8. For instructive discussion of this shift from nomos to lex in Arendt's work, see Birmingham (2011), Volk (2010) and the contributions to Goldoni & McCorkindale (2012).

9. According to Arendt, the destruction of the worldly space ‘in-between’ is the essential telos of totalitarian politics: ‘by pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them … It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion, which cannot exist without space’ (Arendt, 2004/1951, p. 600). The practice of putting certain categories of people outside the protection of law (‘rightless’, ‘stateless’) is one of the manifestations of this process.

10. The experiences of the French and Russian revolutions’ descent into terror provide Arendt with elements to substantiate her critique of the exaltation of moral inwardness in politics and the retreat of freedom into pure and unrestricted subjectivity, for they obliterate the aim of the revolution: the realization of right and freedom through the ‘objective’ configuration of social institutions regardless of the caprices of moral viewpoints. In this regard, the problem of ‘compassion’, as Arendt puts it, is that it

abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human intercourse, and if virtue will always be ready to assert that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, compassion will transcend this by stating in complete and even naïve sincerity that it is easier to suffer than to see others suffer. Because compassion abolishes the distance, the worldly space between men where political matters are located, it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence … it is incapable of establishing ‘lasting institutions’. (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 86)