Refugee style: Hannah Arendt and the perplexities of rights
2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2010.510901
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938), in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas (Vintage: London: Vintage, 2001), p. 206. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), pp. 376–7, hereafter abbreviated as OT. Giorgio Agamben, 'We Refugees', trans. Michael Rocke, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben-we-refugees.html, accessed 23.6.09, published in English as 'Beyond Human Rights', Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 15. These writings have now been collected in full in The Jewish Writings, Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (eds.) (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). The most influential of these is Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) in which Agamben appropriates Arendt for his account of modernity's distinctive biopolitics. Important here also are Jacques Ranciere's, 'Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man', and Werner Hamacher's 'The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half-Remarks)', both in South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2/3) (2004), pp. 297–310 and pp. 343–356, and Paul Ricoeur's 'Who is the Subject of Rights?' and 'Aesthetic Judgment and Political Judgment According to Hannah Arendt', The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 1–10, 94–108. See Svetlana Boym, 'Poetics and politics: Victor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt' Poetics Today, 26(4) (2005), pp. 581–611, and Deborah Nelson, 'Suffering and Thinking: The Scandal of Tone' in Lauren Berlant (ed.), Eichmann in Jerusalem, in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. (London: Routledge, 2004). Although her intellectual origins were rooted in European modernism, by the late twentieth century, Arendt was more likely to be associated with the contracting of modernist horizons that accompanied the politics of the Cold War. Yet the markers of her early formation – Benjamin, Herman Broch, Kafka, and (always problematically) Heidegger – never faded. Hannah Arendt, 'We Refugees' (1943), The Jew as Pariah:Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, Ron H. Feldman (ed.) (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 55, hereafter abbreviated as 'WR'. Even Woolf's claim to 'have' no country 'as a' woman is suspended in reported speech, assigned to nameless 'outsider', not quite identical to the voice that hesitates to stake her claim to any category. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, 'Critical Cosmopolitanism and Modernist Narrative', Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 1–32. Denise Riley, 'Echo, Irony and the Political', The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 142–143. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: Life of a Jewess, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Hannah Arendt, '"What Remains? The Language Remains": A Conversation with Gunter Gaus' in Peter Baehr (ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt. (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 16. Arendt develops her arguments about thinking and judgment in the wake of the Eichmann trial in 'Thinking and Moral Considerations' in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment. (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), pp. 159–192, and her last unfinished work, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). I develop the connections between thinking, Arendt's style and the Eichmann trial in 'Hannah Arendt's Testimony: Judging in a Lawless World' New Formations, 67, summer (2009), pp. 78–91. Giorgio Agamben, 'Beyond Human Rights', 23. Lewis Fried, 'Creating Hebraism, Confronting Hellenism: The Menorah Journal and its Struggle for the Jewish Imagination' The American Jewish Archives Journal, LIII(1-2) (2000), pp. 147–174. Karl Marx, 'On the Jewish Question' in D. McLellan (ed.), Early Texts. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), pp. 115–129. Hannah Arendt, 'The Rights of Man: What are They?' Modern Review, 3/1, summer (1949), pp. 467–483. Hannah Arendt, 'The Public and the Private Realm' The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 24. Hereafter abbreviated as HC. There is an echo of this passage in a poem Arendt wrote in her native German later in 1943: They have risen from the standing pool of the past – these many memories Misty figures drew the longing circles of my enchainment around, alluring to their goal. Dead ones, what do you want? Have you no home or hearth in Orcus? The poem is reproduced in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 485–486, translation, 185. It was in the West Coast that refugees were also subject to the 'enemy alien' laws that put Japanese Americans in internment camps. For a compelling reading of how Arendt's language here takes her thinking to the limits of Eurocentrism, see Michael Rothberg, 'At the Limits of Eurocentrism: Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism', Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, California: Stanford California Press, 2009). Rothberg focuses on how the language of colonialism, read against a background of anti-colonial dissent, sets up what he describes as a 'boomerang effect' between colonialism and Nazi genocide in Origins. Arendt (like Agamben after her) can make the link between the 'abstract nakedness of being human' in the camps and the shocking bare humanity of Africa that shocked the colonial imagination, but cannot develop it. Hannah Arendt, 'A Reply to Eric Voeglin' The Portable Hannah Arendt, pp. 159–160. Sigmund Freud, 'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death' (1915), The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 12 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 62. Hereafter abbreviated as 'TT'. Giorgio Agamben, 'Beyond Human Rights', 16. Sigmund Freud, 'Zeitgasses uber Krieg und Tod' (1915), Gesammelte Werke 1913-1917 (Frankfurt: Verlag, 1967), p. 326. My thanks to Jean Boase-Beier for alerting me to this rendering of eingesprengte.
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