Hannah Arendt valued the unprecedented, the unexpected, and the new, yet in essays crafted at the end of the rebellious 1960s, struggled to square this valuation with a palpable desire for law and order. She lamented that criminality had overtaken American life, accused the police of not arresting enough criminals, and charged ‘the Negro community’ with standing behind what she named black violence. At once, she praised ‘the white rebels’ of the student movement in the United States for their courageous (...) acts of disobedience. This essay explores how differential Arendt’s treatment of lawbreaking action was in an effort to understand how ‘certain sections of the population’ in the United States could appear to stand for criminality rather than civil disobedience to her mind. It examines how Arendt’s reflections on the ostensibly non-racial subjects of civil disobedience and lawbreaking were underwritten by racial, when not racist, ways of thinking. The essay also raises a larger question: to the extent that the concept of civil disobedience involves limits, how are those limits drawn to the exclusion of certain kinds of actors and their particular claims in the public realm? Pondering this question through Arendt, it concludes that in her theorization of civil disobedience, Arendt was profoundly limited by the fabulous tale that the United States is an exceptional land of freedom and democracy in the world. (shrink)

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s concern for remembrance in political life in light of contemporary discourses regarding the memory of slavery and colonization in the African diaspora. Arendt’s blindness to questions of exclusion within this context has given way to a set of critical debates in Arendt studies concerning the viability of her political project. In this paper, I give further contour to these debates by considering Arendt’s discourse on revolution in light of an analysis of the Haitian Revolution. In (...) so doing, my aim is to deepen and challenge Arendt’s understanding of the revolutionary tradition that she believes we are responsible for remembering and appropriating anew in political life today. (shrink)

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the (...) “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre- or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes place—and thus the very possibility of politics. (shrink)

The scholarship on Frantz Fanon’s theorization of violence is crowded with interpretations that follow the Arendtian paradigm of violence. These interpretations often discuss whether violence is instrumental or non-instrumental in Fanon’s work. This reading, I believe, is the result of approaching Fanon through Hannah Arendt’s framing of violence, i.e. through a binary paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. Even some Fanon scholars who question Arendt’s reading of Fanon, do so by employing a similar binary logic, hence repeating the same either/or (...) paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. I aim to challenge such interpretations of Fanon by demonstrating that in the context of anticolonial armed struggle in which Fanon writes, the either/or framework of the instrumental/non-instrumental binary of violence cannot fully capture his perspective. Violence can indeed be conceived as having both constructive and instrumental aspects. My argument is supported by Fanon’s corpus, including his 1960 Accra speech, “Why We Use Violence” in Alienation and Freedom. This piece, I suggest, together with Fanon’s other writings, poses a direct challenge to the Arendtian binary of violence. My analysis resists positioning the difference between Arendt and Fanon through the instrumental/non-instrumental binary. By using Judith Butler’s notion of “frame” I complicate their difference and argue Arendt’s framing of violence prevents her from apprehending Fanon and – more importantly – interpretations of Fanon based on this Arendtian frame of violence inevitably lead to misinterpretations. (shrink)

In this research, the political relationality in-between life and expression is viewed on through Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic anti-methodology. In the first part, the methodological context is elaborated and brought into relation with Arendt and Agamben's work. After Part I Dispositioning a Milieu in which I dispose the conceptual and paradigmatic frameworks of thinking within politics of flight; in Part II Exposition of Milieus the diversity of practices within the politics of flight are mapped out. This provides a politico-philosophical diagnosis (...) in which the relationships between bodies and expression are always carried out in the same way in each chapter: from form of content to form of expression to matter of expression to matter of content. Form of content is the territorial setting in which bodies are assembled in a certain way; these assemblies are strengthened by form of expression. Yet, forms break and degrade, they never fully touch the unthinkable reality. They do not always give room to the voices, gestures and images that defy the absoluteness of these forms. Yet, I end each chapter with the matter of content; which simply indicates life itself in all its varieties and in all its possible connections to a discourse. Each chapter ‘concludes’ with matter of content, due to the fact that, as I argue, life is the most neglected phenomenon in politics. The ending is however not for the sake of finality; but for the sake of a process. As a feedback loop this ‘recapitulation’ bends back toward the start; toward enforced forms of content and forms of expression, in order to create another form of politics. How do we express endlessness? How do we approach a limbo as a topos of in-between that escapes our discursive vocabulary of here versus there? (shrink)