The Origin of the Political

Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil?

Roberto Esposito, Vincenzo Binetti, Gareth Williams

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780823276288
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In this book Roberto Esposito explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad—that "great prism through which every gesture has the possibility of becoming public, precisely by being observed by others"— as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, Esposito examines the foundational relation between war and the political.Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt's and Weil's voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, The Origin of the Political traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of Esposito's notion and practice of "the impolitical."In Esposito's account Arendt and Weil emerge "in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light, " to "think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought." Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, Esposito unravels the West's illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.

 

1

PARTITIONS

The relation between Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil can be viewed through the sign of a double paradox. First of all, theirs is the sign of a missed encounter: Two of the most important thinkers of the century, both Jewish and both deeply touched by the experience of persecution and exile, never had the chance to meet, each one generating their thought in distinct and distant circles. Nevertheless—and this is the second paradox—it is precisely this conceptual distance that appears to constitute an imperceptible zone of contact, an invisible tangent, a form of mysterious convergence that is increasingly pronounced the more their explicit positions diverge. This strange impression of an approximating distance, of a distance that nevertheless connects, is not only the result of the identity of the object they both address (though, again, from within divergence) in their writings—namely, human community, being-in the-world.¹ It originates in the radical nature of their opposition. The differences in their perspectives broaden to the point of establishing the effect of a contrasting overlap in the same way two points extend along the line of a circumference and finally conjoin as each other’s negative. This is precisely the relationship that is established between Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Each thinks in the inverse of the other’s thought, in the shadow of the other’s light, in the silence of the other’s voice, in the emptiness of the other’s plenitude. To think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.

It is precisely this “remainder,” this “boundary,” this “partition” that divides while joining and separates while combining that is the object of my analysis. I seek to avoid the simplicity of a typological comparison generated through assonance and dissonance, neither of which—when considered discreetly, or, even worse, when placed in immediate juxtaposition—assumes true strategic or hermeneutic significance. Rather, what truly matters is their reciprocal coimplication: in other words, the breaches in meaning, the conceptual variances, the points of flight through which they generate each other. Let us consider the question for which, perhaps more than any other, the two thinkers appear to be most distant: the relation between action and work, between praxis and poiesis, between the political sphere and the social sphere.² It is an oversimplification to establish a counterpoint without specifying convergence: While Arendt’s entire opus can be characterized as an attempt to defend the contingency of political action from the instrumental repetitive nature of work, Weil considers the latter to be the only action capable of escaping the free will of a pure subjective choice exercised as a means of accessing the real. The distinction seems to be perfectly translatable in the antithesis between freedom and necessity. In fact, this appears to be an extremely simplified interpretation if we forgo the possibility of an alternative set of categorical variants capable of substantially complicating this contrastive scheme. In such a case, such variants would not address the affirmation or refutation of freedom, but rather freedom’s “definition” in the double sense of the expression. What is it that defines—indeed determines—freedom, if not necessity? It is from this perspective that Weil’s response once again enters the realm of Arendt’s question regarding freedom of action. Action is truly free not when it extends infinitely toward a horizon devoid of all necessity, but when it impacts with maximum force both necessity and the anticipatory capacity to minimize all menacing contingencies. This is the basis for Weil’s Spinoza-inspired conclusion, according to which our freedom derives from consenting spontaneously to that which necessity obligates. This step, though by no means insignificant, is always possible. What greater freedom can there be than to choose what cannot be chosen on account of its very nature, which is to say, the necessary (or even suffering itself)? Naturally, this does nothing to displace the profound divergence in Arendt’s view, which is characterized precisely by a decisive option for the unforeseeable, for the unprogrammable, for the contingent. Rather, Arendt carries us toward a different, problematic horizon that no longer addresses the abstract contradistinction between freedom and necessity, but addresses a category—“exteriority,” or, even more forcefully, the “world”—that is shared extensively by both philosophers. The world is that which includes but also resists the movement of the subject. It is true that in this case “being in the world” could be uncovered in relation to other men or things. However, the bind between the two modalities is quite evident. It is not by chance that labor in Weil acquires the same symbolic function examined by Arendt in the sphere of the political act, that is, it establishes a relation to the world that is different from that of the purely biological-natural sphere beyond the immediate facticity of “bare life.”³

In addition to our reintegrative procedure, which aims to reconstitute the common ground underlying apparently unrelated itineraries, we should supplement, or rather interweave, an equivalent yet contrary movement capable of identifying the different articulations that, throughout the two itineraries in question, render their conceptual unity possible. The most obvious case is that of totalitarianism or, in more general terms, of evil in politics, in which, in addition to the specular nature of biographical destinies forged by persecution, struggle, and exile, we encounter a surprising analytical symmetry. Considering that Arendt was familiar with the duration and full extension of totalitarianism’s curve, while Weil experienced it only in its Nazi-fascist variant (and did so only incompletely, since in fact she never imagined the Holocaust); and considering that as a result, Weil’s interpretation does not have the systematic architecture of Arendt’s great work (as is the case in much of her work), there is a convergence nevertheless that is surprising given the extensive heterogeneity of their sources in relation not only to the overall definition, but also to the individuation of the specific operational dynamics of the totalitarian machine. For both authors, this machine tends toward the annihilation of human presence via the double yet combined procedure of the derealization of that which exists, in conjunction with the ideological construction of a world that is so false that the real appears to be unbelievable. Once deprived of any notion of reality, men are ready for the experience of uprooting and subsequent deportation that consequently allows totalitarianism to reach its ultimate goal; that is, to treat them like things in order to render them “superfluous.” Both authors explain that this is made possible through the arrest of thought—Weil expresses it more specifically in terms of the faculty of attention—which brings about a collapse in the boundary between good and evil that is specifically designed to render each category the mirror image of the other. From this perspective, the concordances between the two analyses become even literal: there is nothing radical, profound, or monstrous in evil. It is “banal,” as Arendt puts it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, or, in Weil’s terms, it is superficial, “dreary, monotonous, barren and tedious” (Notebooks, Vol. I-B, 140–41), “a frightful desert” (Notebooks, Vol I-C, 205). It is always “normal” in the precise sense that it responds to a norm, to a law that evil itself has posited as a mundane simulacrum of the absolute.⁴ If we read Arendt’s pages on Eichmann’s “morals” in conjunction with Weil’s pages on totalitarian idolatry the categorical superimposition seems perfect.

However, even in this case—and precisely because of it—we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by the effects of an identification that might lead us beyond a given point, only to turn out to be unfounded and in the end even misleading. What is this point? I am not alluding here to the noteworthy historiographical divergences that are constitutive of the genetic reconstruction of totalitarianism, that is, to the differential roles assigned to mass society, imperialism, or nationalism.⁵ The most relevant issue here—precisely because it puts the entire physiognomy of the two conceptual apparatuses at stake—lies, rather, elsewhere. It is the specific nature of the totalitarian system in relation to both its most recent history—modernity—and its most distant past. This is the point at which the two interpretative itineraries diverge quite abruptly and, as already stated, reveal that they are oriented from the very beginning by deeply contrasting hermeneutical hypotheses. The underlying question to which they give radically divergent answers is the following: Does totalitarianism have a tradition, or is it born of destruction? How deep are its roots? Does it go back two decades, two centuries, or two millennia? And ultimately: Is it internal or external to the sphere of politics and power? Is it born from lack or from excess?

It is on this threshold that the two responses, in quite clear-cut fashion, diverge. Arendt reads the phenomenon of totalitarianism in terms of absolute exceptionality—it “differs essentially from other known forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny, and dictatorship” (Origin 630; also see “Understanding,” 328–60)—precisely because it does not strive to force men into obedience, but rather works toward their annihilation. It is true that this is in some way “prepared,” rendered possible (but not necessary) by all the twists and turns that exist between praxis and technics, nature and society, and politics and history, all of which oppose and bind modernity to the classical tradition. Totalitarianism is born from within the modern, but not as something originally inscribed in its chromosomes or as a finality predetermined from the outset. Rather, it is the product of different subjective choices taken at specific points that, from that very point, are consequently rendered inevitable by subsuming the overall context in which they were articulated. The fact that all these subjective choices consequently converge—as if in the form of a reversed funnel—through a contracting and flattening out of the “political” with respect to other modalities of practice, is for Arendt evidence itself of the extraneousness of totalitarianism to political life. This is precisely the point that Weil contests, and her reasoning is the perfect inversion of Arendt. It is true that the forms that the totalitarian state has assumed in our century are thoroughly unprecedented in terms of its instruments and objectives. But this is not necessarily the case in relation to its overall logic, which is exactly the same as that which is responsible for the mass destruction that stained both ancient and modern history. The examples utilized by Weil are taken mainly, in the case of modernity, from French imperialism, and, in the case of antiquity, from Roman imperialism. Nevertheless, they can be extended to the point of constituting a line of continuity that concurs ultimately with the dominant line of Western history, and, what is more important, with its constitutively political dimension. If this is the case, and command is not fundamentally different from power, that is, if it does not constitute the perverse outcome of an initially reasonable trajectory—the history of the political—but instead remains its original mark,⁶ then it would no longer be a matter of revitalizing the notion of origin or of generating a new one, as Arendt suggests, but rather of rereading that very same history from its dark side. It would no longer be a matter of reconstructing the space devastated by politics, but instead of bringing to light its hidden, “impolitical” soul.⁷ The issue with war presents us with the same divergence. While for Arendt war needs to be “dialectically” overcome through the political act, for Weil it needs to be reversed into the invisible communal face—of the enemies—in order to search for the torn “heart” beating from within extreme “discord.” If it is not possible to put an end to battle, we have no choice but to plant it, like an insuperable contradiction, within ourselves. And in this way we can entrust it to the hands of love.

2

TRUTH

It is precisely in relation to this order of inquiry that Arendt and Weil’s interpretations of the Homeric world—and of The Iliad in particular—assume singular importance. This is the case because it is a question to which they both return on a number of occasions, as if the return itself were decisive for the formulation of their own categories. But, above all, it is the case because their interpretations uncover, like nothing else, the aforementioned phenomenon of “concordant dissonance” or of “dissonant concordance.” It is not by chance that the most extensive reference that Arendt ever made to one of Weil’s texts—namely, La condition ouvrière (The Worker Condition)—hinged on a citation from Homer:

It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Simone Weil’s La condition ouvrière (1951) is the only book in the huge literature on the labor question which deals with the problem without prejudice and sentimentality. She chose as the motto for her diary, relating from day to day her experiences in a factory, the line from Homer: poll’ aekadzomene, kratere d’epikeisef anagke (“much against your own will, since necessity lies more mightily upon you”), and concludes that the hope for an eventual liberation from labor and necessity is the only Utopian element of Marxism and at the same time the actual motor of all Marx-inspired revolutionary labor movements. It is the “opium of the people” which Marx had believed religion to be.¹

Even disregarding the reference to Homer, the passage is relevant because it confirms the presence of a line of communication between the two authors that is established precisely in its relation to the very category that seems to distance them most, namely, the category of “necessity”—not only of material necessity but of labor, which is situated at the heart of Weil’s thought: “Only the intoxication produced by the speed of technical progress,” writes Weil in Oppression and Liberty, “has given birth to the crazy idea that work might one day become superfluous”(54). What Arendt accepts from Weil—and does so to such an extent that she even calls her as a witness in her own argument—is the rejection of the illusion by which the emancipation from labor frees homo laborans from other “superior” forms of activity. Arendt herself admits that it is true that even though the emancipation from labor was unimaginable in Marx’s times, it now appears to be possible on account of the emergence of technology and automation. However, the underlying question does not concern the amount of free time taken away from labor as much as its function, to such an extent that in an economically dominated society—that is, in a society lacking a true public sphere—free time can only orient itself ever more obsessively toward consumption: “A hundred years after Marx we know the fallacy of this reasoning; the spare time of the animal laborans is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites” (Human, 133). Simone Weil would never have endorsed such a passage, and her arguments against the mechanization of labor are so extensively documented that we need not mention them here. As has been noted elsewhere, it is true that the polemic against consumer society generated by both thinkers has turned out to be asymmetrical.² While Weil argues from the point of view of a diverse—that is, of a more spiritual—society of labor, Arendt considers the drift toward consumerism to be the perverse outcome of that very same society of labor. And yet the reference to an unbreakable “necessity” carving out the space of our own experience remains common to both: “The easier that life has become in a consumers’ or laborers’ society, the more difficult it will be to remain aware of the urges of necessity by which it is driven, even when pain and effort, the outward manifestations of necessity, are hardly noticeable at all” (Human, 135).

The value of the Homeric reference extends far beyond the singular occasion that gives rise to it. We have already seen how the latter binds the two philosophers negatively in their relation to the theme of necessity. However, for both of them Homer evokes another word, which this time binds them in an affirmative sense. This is the question of the justice, impartiality, or equity of the poet who unites both victors and vanquished in light of the dignity of two adversarial peoples. Arendt and Weil use almost identical terms. Following are Weil’s observations: “There may be, unknown to us, other expressions of the extraordinary sense of equity which breathes through the Iliad; certainly it has not been imitated. One is barely aware that the poet is a Greek and not a Trojan” (“The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” 26–27). Arendt, in turn, notes the following: “First, then, it is of decisive importance that Homer’s epic does not remain silent regarding the vanquished; it bears witness on behalf of Hector as much as it does of Achilles, and even though both the victory of the Greeks and the defeat of Troy had been irrevocably preordained by the decree of the gods, this does not make Achilles the greater man nor Hector the lesser, nor the Greeks’ cause more just or Troy’s self-defense less so” (Was ist Politik? 163). Finally, Weil again: “Only a just man made perfect could have written the Iliad” (First and Last Notebooks, 336). Homer’s greatest merit is that of restituting honor to the defeated, of distinguishing victory from justice, reason from success, and guilt from defeat, in strict accordance with Aren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Partitions
• 2. Truth
• 3. Principium and Initium
• 4. Beginn, Anfang, Ursprung
• 5. Polemos/Polis
• 6. The Third Origin
• 7. Nothingness
• 8. Forces
• 9. In Common
• 10. Imperium
• 11. Topologies
• 12. In the Grip of Love
• 13. The Final Battle
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Series Page