This article examines Jacques Derrida’s criticism of the significance Hannah Arendt attributes to her mother tongue in, “What Remains? The Language Remains.” I begin by developing Derrida’s claim in The Monolingualism of the Other that despite Arendt’s suggestion otherwise, the German language can and did go mad. I argue that his criticism, while powerful, overlooks the political concerns at work in Arendt’s commitment to her mother tongue. I turn to Arendt’s analysis of language in Eichmann in Jerusalem to show that (...) by distinguishing Eichmann’s “empty talk” from the mother tongue, she suggests that our primary language is integral to political life insofar as it reminds us of our radical singularity and our responsibility to the world. With this, I maintain that Derrida’s decisive intervention in this discourse does not settle the question of the mother tongue; instead it raises new questions concerning the political significance of our relation to language. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to recent debate concerning the urgency of Martin Heidegger’s original ethics. To this end, I turn to Arendt’s existential interpretation of birth as this takes shape in her discourse on the miracle. Though recent commentators have criticized Arendt’s emphasis on the miracle, I argue that she deepens a conversation about birth that Dennis Schmidt, following Jacques Derrida, has set in motion in his efforts to contribute to a more original ethics. Whereas Schmidt prioritizes the (...) helplessness of the newborn, Arendt’s interpretation of the miracle suggests that birth reminds us not simply of our responsibility to help the helpless, but also of our responsibility to prepare the world for the incalculable possibilities of the newcomer. In this, I argue that Arendt brings into focus the ground of our responsibility to make space in the world for what cannot be reduced and decided on in advance by calculative procedure, thereby opening new paths to thinking the task of original ethics. (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 essay surveys the theme of solidarity in the respective works of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt. Recent discourses in continental political philosophy have arrived at an impasse regarding solidarity. On the one hand, solidarities are important for galvanizing historically oppressed peoples against dominant discourses. On the other hand, solidarities that impose similarities in advance run the risk of absorbing difference and becoming exclusionary. Gadamer and Arendt, each in different manners, promise a distinctive approach to discourses on solidarity through their (...) emphasis on the existential concern for human finitude. Both suggest that insofar as we are finite, we are bound together not by familiarity and sameness but rather by shared vulnerability, finding help with this vulnerability by remaining open to the difference and otherness that is always at stake in communal life. In this, Gadamer and Arendt open new paths to theorizing collectives in ways that embrace and defend difference rather than rejecting it. Moreover, both remind us of the urgency of such a notion of solidarity for responding to what, in allusion to Arendt, we may be inclined to call the dark times in which we live. (shrink)

This paper critically engages the method that guides critical phenomenology’s approach to political praxis. While many in this field have emphasized the need to clarify critical phenomenology’s method of social critique, less attention has been given to how critical phenomenology establishes a distinct and rigorously phenomenological method of praxis. The aim of this paper is to enrich the calls to action in critical phenomenology by inquiring into the conditions under which transformative political praxis becomes possible. To this end, I draw (...) on Hannah Arendt’s political appropriation of Martin Heidegger’s factical turn in phenomenology to provide a methodological framework for undertaking this inquiry. By using this framework to clarify the scope, limits, and responsibilities of action, I argue that Arendt’s analysis gives rise to what might be described as a praxis of facticity that critical phenomenology, in its concern for the situatedness and intersubjective constitution of experience, is well-positioned to adopt. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to a conception of political life that remains vigilant of the foreignness that confronts us in our efforts to inhabit a shared world. To this end, I interpret Arendt’s less appreciated discourse on caritas, or love of the neighbor in Love and Saint Augustine, as a critical appropriation of Heidegger’s notion of care. In turning to caritas, I maintain that Arendt captures, perhaps more fully than Heidegger, the foreignness that care is destined to confront (...) in its native desire to belong to something outside of itself. This, I argue, leads Arendt to insist that the responsibility to care is not foremost a matter of individual existence, but rather of politics, grasped precisely as an openness to the foreign in communal life. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt's notion of citizenship with reference to her account of loneliness in the modern age. Whereas recent scholarship has emphasized Arendt's notion of the “right to have rights” in order to advance her conception of citizenship in the context of global democratic theory, I maintain that this discourse threatens to overshadow the depth of her critical relation to the liberal tradition. By turning to loneliness, I aim to show that Arendt's understanding of citizenship guides a prescient (...) critique of the basic assumptions that underlie notions of citizenship within liberal political theory. On her view, these forms of citizenship do not secure liberty, but instead reproduce the very loneliness that has made modern individuals susceptible to totalitarian domination. With this, I argue that Arendt poses her notion of citizenship as an antidote to loneliness and, thus, to the vulnerability of modern political life to totalitarianism. (shrink)

This paper challenges the assumption that John Dewey’s appeal to the philosophical significance of evolutionary theory serves primarily to legitimize the sciences. By contrast, I argue that a more careful examination of Dewey’s conception of growth reveals that his appropriation of the Darwinian worldview is fundamentally aesthetic. To give contour to the aesthetic Dewey extracts from Darwinism, I consider several aspects of his thought alongside Friedrich Schlegel’s conception of romantic poetry. This, in turn, helps to illustrate that, for Dewey, the (...) dramatic subsistence involved in evolutionary development yields a natural aesthetic that makes possible his notion of meaningful experience. (shrink)

Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding examines the loneliness that remains at work in modern life even as we find ourselves increasingly interconnected. While much has been said about this experience in the main currents of continental philosophy, this book opens new paths within this discourse by developing the problem of loneliness in a political register. The central claim of this book is that neoliberal subjectivity has rendered us lonely. Drawing especially on the work of Hannah Arendt, the author (...) suggests that the political structures we have inherited from the liberal tradition—such as the anonymity of the vote and the right to pursue one’s private self-interest as far as possible—have left us hidden from one another, unable to appear as members of a common world. The author further argues that it is precisely this experience of political loneliness that renders citizens in liberal and allegedly open societies desperate to belonging and willing, in turn, to surrender to delusional fellowships like totalitarianism. By developing the problem of loneliness in a political register, this book offers a framework for interpreting the rise of totalitarianism at the beginning of the twentieth century, no less than the ascendance of right-wing populism in Western liberal democracies today. It thus makes an important contribution to debates in current continental philosophy, liberal political theory, and critical theory regarding issues of alienation, political life, and community in the present age. (shrink)