References
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second Edition (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 144. [This book is henceforth referred to as HC in the text and is followed by relevant page numbers.]
- Hannah Arendt, Thinking, in The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1 (New York & London: Harvest Books, 1978), 56.
- Anne O'Byrne recognizes the phenomenological underpinnings of natality, all the while classifying them with a historical, rather than political, phenomenology [Natality and Finitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 90].
- It is questionable to what extent Arendt projected her own ideas regarding human beginnings onto Augustinian thought. Cf. Stephen Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of her Dissertation on St. Augustine (Cambridge, UK & Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 47.
- Emphasis mine.
- Julia Kristeva's take is directly opposed to the critical phenomenological reading of Arendt. Kristeva ignores the fracturing of logos even at the heart of the “self and, instead, attributes to it a unifying function, so that the Arendtian Selbst “welds together the phenomenon and the logos.” [Hannah Arendt. Trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 173.]
- Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics. ed.Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 24–5. [This book is henceforth referred to as PP in the text and is followed by relevant page numbers.]
- The difference between the two beginnings—roughly, the material and the ideal—goes a long way to assuage the worries of Adriana Cavarero, for whom “Arendt does not highlight the concept of birth as a coming from the mother's womb, but accepts the Greek meaning of birth as a coming from nothing.” [In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Re-Writing of Ancient Philosophy (New York: Polity, 1995), 6.]
- Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954. ed.Jerome Kohn (New York & London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994), 165. [This book is henceforth referred to as EU in the text and is followed by relevant page numbers.]
- On the violence of instrumentality in Arendt, see James Dodd, Violence and Phenomenology (Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2009), 63ff.
- This is probably what Elisabeth Young-Bruehl means when she write that “[f]or Arendt, temporality, far from having to be overcome for man to be, is the source of possibility for action, in which his being is intensified.” [Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 495.]
- According to Arendt's analysis in On Revolution, the Roman senate incarnated the authority of the ancestors who founded the City of Rome [Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London & New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 193. This book is henceforth referred to as OR in the text and is followed by relevant page numbers.]
- Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1978), 167.
- It is, therefore, inaccurate to claim, as Kampowski does, that foundation is “a paradigm of a new beginning.” Cf. Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning, 151ff.
- On Arendt's anti-foundationalism, see Serena Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 36ff.
- Arendt constructs this argumentative chain in Between Past and Future, 167. Cf., also, EU 322.
- Cf. the chapter on Arendt in Dodd, Violence and Phenomenology, as well as Dana Villa [“Introduction: The Development of Arendt's Political Thought.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. ed.Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)] who concludes that Arendt's “fears concerning the way this carefully built up world might be swamped by the forces of cultural barbarisM&Hellip;” (5)
- This is also the key point of Elaine Scarry's influential The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
- Noam Chomsky's “universal grammar” attests to this fact.
- On Arendt's suspicion of excessive “speechless wonder,” see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 20ff.
- Doxa designates, for Arendt, the way in which the world opens up for us (PP 23), the way things look or appear from a certain position in the world (PP 29) and, hence, something of eidos—not only the “Idea” but also the look or the image of things.
- On the question of sovereignty in Arendt and Schmitt, consult Charles Barbour, “Exception and Event: Schmitt, Arendt, and Badiou,” in After Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings. Eds.Charles Barbour and George Pavlich (New York & Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 83–96.
- See, for example, Margie Lloyd, “In Tocqueville's Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Liberal Republicanism.” The Review of Politics, 57, Winter 1995, 31–58.
- Two brief quotations from Hannah Arendt, “On Violence” [in Crises of the Republic (New York & London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1972)] are in order here. 1) “…to act is the human answer to the condition of natality” (179); and 2) “glorifications of violence are caused by severe frustration of the faculty of action in the modern world.” (180)
- Dodd, Violence and Phenomenology, 53.
- This is in line with the suggestion made by Michel Serres in his recent Temps des Crises (Paris: Le Pommier, 2009).
- Hannah Arendt, Willing, in The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2 (New York & London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1978), 109.
- This is what Jacques Rancière will later have in mind when he introduces the term “aesthetic regime” into his political philosophy.
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland & New York: Meridian Books, 1964), 409. [This book is henceforth referred to as OT in the text and is followed by relevant page numbers.]
- Hence, it is questionable whether one can talk about Arendt's “phenomenology of totalitarianism,” as Seyla Benhabib does, even allowing for the negative modification of phenomenological concepts in totalitarian “worldlessness” and “loneliness.” Cf. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Oxford & Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 69.
- The “invisible visibility” of the political resonates with the insights of the early Schmitt, especially in his Roman Catholicism and the Political Form (1923).
- For a background analysis of Arendt's thinking of revolution, refer to Albrecht Wellmer, “Arendt on Revolution,” In The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. ed.Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 220–244.
- Of course, Arendt did not subscribe to Husserl's transcendental method in toto. But neither did she swap transcendental philosophy for an uncritical “naturalization of thought.” Her rejection of speechless wonder does not automatically entail a dismissal of exceptional and quasi-miraculous events such as revolution and, indeed, thinking itself. It is, therefore, blatantly wrong to assert that in a “reverse normalization of Husserl's hyperbolic stance, Arendt has naturalized philosophizing itself. Philosophy is natural to us, like breathing.” [Max Deutscher, Judgment After Arendt (Hampshire and Burlington, 2007), 15.]
- “beginning is not the same as the beginning of the world; it is not the beginning of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself.” (Arendt, Human Condition, 177)
- On the bond between modern subjectivity and revolution, including in the political theory of Arendt, refer to Artemy Magun, La Révolution Négative: Déconstruction du Sujet Politique (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009).
- The coming-to-light of political phenomenality is not a passage between “the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds,” into which Anthony Cascardi [“Communication and Transformation: Aesthetics and Politics in Kant and Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics. Eds. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997)] transforms it under the influence of a Kantian reading of Arendt (110). A mediation between noumena and phenomena would, strictly speaking, correspond to a reconciliation of totalitarianism and radical democracy.
- This is the point of Jacques Derrida's “Violence and Metaphysics” (1967), as well as, more pertinently, of his essay “Declarations of Independence” (1986).
- Arendt, “On Violence,” 107.