Hannah Arendt 'After Modernity'

• Published in: New formations Vol. 71; no. 71; pp. 6 - 13
• Main Authors: Baum, Devorah, Bygrave, Stephen, Morton, Stephen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Lawrence & Wishart 22.03.2011; Lawrence & Wishart Ltd
• Subjects: Analysis; Arendt, Hannah; Belgian literature; Democracy; French literature; Identity; Kristeva, Julia (1941- ); Modernism; Modernity; Political philosophers; Political philosophy; Political theory; Social theory; Totalitarianism; United States; United States
• ISSN: 0950-2378; 1741-0789
• DOI: 10.3898/NEWF.71.01.iNtro.2011

In a short commentary on Hannah Arendt's chapter 'The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man' in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Agamben argues that 'the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come'.4 For Agamben, the figure of the refugee calls into question the universal claims of human rights declarations by 'breaking up' the assumption that the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen includes human subjects who are not citizens. 8The 'standard' view of Arendt that prevailed during this period, argues Seyla Benhabib, was of a 'political philosopher of nostalgia, an anti-modernist for whom the Greek "polis" remained the quintessential political experience'.9 In a similar vein, Slavoj Zizek describes a shift in the reception of Arendt's thought in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001): 'Until two decades ago, Leftist radicals dismissed [Arendt] as the perpetrator of the notion of "totalitarianism", the key weapon of the West in the Cold War ideological struggle: if, at a Cultural Studies symposium in the 1970s, one was asked innocently, "Is your line of argumentation not similar to that of Arendt?", this was a sure sign that one was in deep trouble'.1 "Benhabib (among others) offers a more nuanced reading of Arendt that challenges the 'standard' reading which both she and Zizek oudine. For Benhabib, it was Arendt's critical engagement with Heidegger and Marx that offered crucial insights into the political implications of uprootedness, statelessness, and homelessness - conditions associated with modernity which also enabled the rise of totalitarianism.11 Crucially, Benhabib suggests that Arendt's thought offers an alternative genealogy of modernity that complicates the prevailing identification of modernity with the 'spread of commodity exchange relations and the growth of a capitalist economy'.12 For Arendt, Benhabib suggests, modernity also brings with it 'new forms of social interaction' and identity politics that underpin modern forms of totalitarianism and racism.13 Arendt's reflections on 'The Jews and Society' in part one of The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, noted that it had 'been one of the most unfortunate facts in the history of the Jewish people that only its enemies, and almost never its friends, understood that the Jewish question was a political one'.14 Recognising this 'unfortunate fact', however, did not become the basis of her own identity politics. [...]in a positive if challenging contestation to the thinkers with whom she engages, Terada's essay argues for a toleration of the very meaninglessness in whose shadow Arendt had feared oblivion.