Enacting the right to have rights: Jacques Ranciére's critique of Hannah Arendt

European Journal of Political Theory

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 22-45

  Schaap, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Arendt; Bare life; Bios politikos; Citizenship; Human rights; Ranci re; Right to have rights; Sans papiers stateless persons; Undocumented migrants; Zo

Indexed keywords

EID: 79251552870     PISSN: 14748851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474885110386004     Document Type: Article

References (147)

1. Hannah Arendt (1958) The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition, p. 299. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace.
2. Agamben (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
3. Etienne Balibar (2007) '(De)Constructing the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on the Coherence of Hannah Arendt's Practical Philosophy', Social Research 74(3): 727-38.
4. Seyla Benhabib (2004) "'The Right to Have Rights": Hannah Arendt on the Contradictions of the Nation-State', in The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. Richard Bernstein (1996) 'Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights' in Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge: Polity.
6. Peg Birmingham (2006) Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. H.
7. Brunkhorst (2000) 'Rights and Sovereignty of the People in the Crisis of the Nation State', Ratio Juris 13(1): 49-62.
8. Jean Cohen (1996) 'Rights, Citizenship and the Modern Form of the Social: Dilemmas of Arendtian Republicanism', Constellations 3(2): 164-89.
9. Bridget Cotter (2005) 'Hannah Arendt and "the Right to Have Rights"', in Anthony F. Lang and John Williams (ed.) Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings across the Lines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
10. James D. Ingram (2008) 'What is a "Right to Have Rights"? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights', American Political Science Review 102(4): 401-16.
11. Jeffrey Isaac (1996) 'A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights', American Political Science Review 90(1): 61-73.
12. Jeffrey Isaac (2002) 'Hannah Arendt on Human Rights and the Limits of Exposure, or Why Noam Chomsky is Wrong about the Meaning of Kosovo', Social Research 69(2): 505-39.
13. Monika Krause (2008) 'Undocumented Migrants: An Arendtian Perspective', European Journal of Political Theory 7(3): 331-48.
14. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1993) 'The Other's Rights', in S. Shute and S. Hurley (eds) On Human Rights. New York: Basic Books.
15. Christoph Menke (2007) 'The "Aporias of Human Rights" and the "One Human Right": Regarding the Coherence of Hannah Arendt's Argument', Social Research 74(3): 739-62.
16. Frank Michelman (1996) 'Parsing "A Right to Have Rights", Constellations 3(2): 200-8.
17. Serena Parekh (2008) Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights. New York: Routledge.
18. Aristotle (1995) Politics 1.2, tr. Ernest Barker. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
19. See Hannah Arendt (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd edn, pp. 22-8.
20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
21. Arendt (n. 1), p. 296.
22. Ibid. 297.
23. Ibid. 293.
24. Ibid. 294.
25. Ibid. 297.
26. Arendt (1990) On Revolution, pp. 106, 107. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
27. Arendt (n. 1), p. 294.
28. Ibid. 302.
29. Ibid 301.
30. Arendt (n. 4), p. 175.
31. Balibar (n. 2), p. 734.
32. Arendt thus eschews the concept of human nature to the extent that she associates this with natural determination.
33. Yet (as will be shown in the following section), contrary to Serena Parekh (n. 2), she remains an 'essentialist' to the extent that she singles out one aspect of the human condition (plurality) and the corresponding activity of praxis as essential for actualizing freedom and hence for realizing a fully human life.
34. See James D. Ingram (2006) 'The Subject of the Politics of Recognition: Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancié re', in G. Bertram, R. Celikates, C. Laudou and D. Lauer (eds) Socialité et reconnaissance: Grammaires de í'humain, pp. 229-45.
35. Paris: L'Harmattan. Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault (2009) 'Democratic Agon: Striving for Distinction or Struggle against Domination and Injustice?', in Andrew Schaap (ed.) Law and Agonistic Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate.
36. Arendt (n. 4), p. 176.
37. Arendt (n. 1), p. 451.
38. See Mary Dietz (2000) 'Arendt and the Holocaust', in Dana Villa (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
39. Arendt (n. 4), p. 199.
40. Balibar (n. 2).
41. Ibid. 733
42. Emphasis in original.
43. Michelman (n. 2).
44. Arendt (n. 4), p. 23
45. see also Arendt (n. 12), pp. 30-2.
46. Balibar (n. 2), p. 725.
47. See Arendt (n. 4), p. 32, n. 22.
48. Balibar (n. 2).
49. Krause (n. 2).
50. Ibid. 335.
51. Ibid. 341.
52. Ibid. 343.
53. Jacques Ranciére (2004) 'Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?', South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2/3): 297-310, 306.
54. Ibid. 298.
55. Ibid. 357.
56. Jacques Ranciére (2001) 'Ten Theses on Politics', Theory and Event 5(3): para 3.
57. Ranciére (2003) 'The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics', unpublished manuscript written in response to papers presented at Fidelity to the Disagreement conference, Goldsmiths College, London, 17 Sept.
58. Ranciére (n. 38), para 23.
59. Ranciére (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, p. 23. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
60. Ranciére (n. 39).
61. Ranciére (n. 39).
62. Arendt (n. 1), p. 297.
63. Arendt (n. 4), pp. 175-6.
64. Ranciére (n.38), para 4.
65. Arendt (1994) 'What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with Günter Gaus' in Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954, pp. 408, 440. New York: Shocken Books.
66. Lewis P. Hinchmann and Sandra K. Hinchmann (1984) 'In Heidegger's Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Phenomenological Humanism', Review of Politics 46(2): 183-211, 184.
67. Arendt (n. 1), p. 455.
68. See Hinchmann and Hinchmann (n. 48).
69. Deranty and Renault (n. 19), pp. 44-5.
70. Arendt (n. 12), pp. 60-1.
71. See Andrew Schaap (2010) 'The Politics of Need', in Andrew Schaap, Danielle Celermajer and Vras Karalis (eds) Power, Judgment and Political Evil: In Conversation with Hannah Arendt.
72. Farnham: Ashgate. As we will see, far from constituting a threat to the political, for Ranciére, this social struggle is the core of politics.
73. See Jacques Ranciére (2003) The Philosopher and his Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
74. See also Hanna Pitkin (1981) 'Justice: On Relating Public and Private', Political Theory 9(3): 327-52.
75. James P. Clarke (1993) 'Social Justice and Political Freedom: Revisiting Hannah Arendt's Conception of Need', Philosophy and Social Criticism 19(3/4): 333-47.
76. Ranciére (n.38), para 26.
77. Arendt (n. 12), p. 69.
78. Ranciére (n.38), para 26.
79. Any 'counter-publics' that the poor might constitute would not count as properly political on Arendt's analysis since they would be concerned with liberation rather than freedom. As such, the form of togetherness that could be realized there would be based on fraternity rather than the properly political relation of friendship.
80. Arendt (n. 1), p. 293.
81. Ranciére (n.35), p. 299.
82. Indeed, Arendt suggests that even those slaves in ancient times who Aristotle did not count as human were in, in fact, in a relatively better situation than stateless people since they had not become entirely superfluous.
83. For 'even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labour was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity.
84. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society - more than the abstract nakedness of being human, nothing but human' (Arendt (n. 1), p. 297).
85. Beltran makes a similar point on the status of undocumented migrant labourers in the USA.
86. Christina Beltrán (2009) 'Going Public: Hannah Arendt, Immigrant Action, and the Space of Appearance', Political Theory 37(5): 595-622, 603-4.
87. Deranty and Renault (n. 19), p. 44, take the same view.
88. Arendt's reply to Ranciére on this point would likely be much the same as she gave when this criticism was put to her by Günter Gaus in an interview for German television: 'That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true. The tone of voice in this case is really the person. When people reproach me with accusing the Jewish people, that is a malignant lie and propaganda and nothing else. The tone of voice, however, is an objection against me personally.
89. And I cannot do anything about that' (Arendt (n. 47)).
90. Ranciére (n.35), p. 299.
91. Karl Marx (1977) 'On the Jewish Question', in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
92. Ibid. 46.
93. Ibid. 54.
94. Ibid. 52.
95. Ranciére (n.41), p. 83.
96. Ranciére distinguishes between three forms of political philosophy, which are neatly summarized by Luka Arsenjuk: archi-politics (Plato; the attempt to tie politics to a communitarian rule, i.e. to subsume politics under the logic of a strict and closed distribution of parts, a social space which is homogenously structured and thus leaves no space for politics to emerge); para-politics (Aristotle; the attempt to reduce political antagonism to mere competition, negotiation, exercise of an agonic procedure, i.e. to draw 'the part of those who have no part,' which is the subject of politics, into the police order as just one of the many parts); and metapolitics (Marx; the understanding of political antagonism as a displaced manifestation of 'true' antagonism, which is socio-economic, i.e. politics that can only happen with the promise of its self-abolishment, the destruction of the political theatre that is necessary for the direct administration of the socio-economic sphere).
97. Luka Arsenjuk (2007) 'On Jacques Ranciére', Eurozine (1 March): URL (consulted March 2009): http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-03-01-arsenjuk-en.html.
98. Given Arendt's appropriation of Aristotle and her hostility to Plato, Ranciére's characterization of Arendt's position as archi-political is surprising.
99. Why doesn't he see her political philosophy as 'para-political'? I think Ranciére sees Arendt as archipolitical due to her 'pure' conception of the political and her insistence on grounding the distinction between the social and the political in an ontological distinction rather than recognizing this distinction as inherently political. Consequently, for Arendt as for Plato, what threatens the political is the mixing of functions of which the social is emblematic (making public what ought to be a private concern). It is with this move that Arendt's political philosophy becomes complicit with the logic of police.
100. Ranciére (n.35), p. 306.
101. Jacques Ranciére (2006) 'Democracy, Republic, Representation', Constellations 13(3): 297-307, 301.
102. Ranciére (n.35), p. 302.
103. Cissé cited in Krause (n. 2), p. 343.
104. Arendt (n. 12), p. 29.
105. Ranciére (1992) 'Politics, Identification and Subjectivization', October 61: 58-64, 59.
106. Ibid. p.20.
107. Ibid. p.21.
108. For a discussion of Ranciére's 'ontology' see Jean-Philippe Deranty (2003) 'Ranciére and Contemporary Political Ontology', Theory and Event 6(4).
109. Cf. Ranciére (n. 41), p. 11.
110. Ibid. p.342.
111. Ibid. p.27.
112. Jacques Ranciére and Davide Panagia (2000) 'Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Ranciére', diacritics 30(2): 113-26, 115.
113. Chambers (2005) 'The Politics of Literarity', Theory and Event 8(3): paras 32-3.
114. Ibid. p.37.
115. Ranciére (2007) On the Shores of Politics, p. 51. London: Verso.
116. This interpretation is to true to the spirit though not to the letter of Rancié re's text in which he refers not to humans but democratic man and not as a literary animal but a poetic being.
117. Ibid. p.305.
118. Ibid. p.304.
119. Arendt (n. 47).
120. Wolin (1990) 'Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political', in Reuben Garner (ed.) The Realm of Humanitas: Responses to the Writings of Hannah Arendt. New York: Peter Lang.
121. See Emily Hauptmann (2004) 'A Local History of the "Political"', Political Theory 32(1): 34-60.
122. For instance, although Bonnie Honig interprets Hannah Arendt as what she calls a 'virtutheorist' (who celebrates agonistic politics), she recognizes that Arendt might equally be read, as Ranciére does, as a 'virtue theorist' (who displaces politics). Yet she insists it is possible to recuperate Arendt for a radically democratic politics because her 'politics beckons beyond itself to practices of disruption, augmentation and refounding that surpass the ones she theorizes and circumscribes'.
123. Bonnie Honig (2003) Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, p. 204. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
124. See Lawrence D. Kritzman (1997) 'The Nostalgia for the Subject: French Intellectual Thought of the 1980s', Romanic Review 88(3): 485-97.
125. Justine Lacroix (forthcoming) "Borderline Europe" French Intellectuals and European Integration', in Intellectuals in Europe.
126. Mark Lilla (ed.) (1994) New French Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
127. Reflecting on the French context in an interview with Davide Panagia Ranciére writes: the 1980s did announce themselves as a 'return to the political' but this return to the political and, more emphatically, to 'political philosophy' quickly became equated with a return to order perse.
128. The return to 'political philosophy' in the prose of Ferry, Renaut, and other proponents of what is referred to, on your side of the Atlantic, as 'New French Thought' simply identified the political with the state, thereby placing the tradition of political philosophy in the service of the platitudes of a politics of consensus; this occurring all the while under the rubric of wanting to restore and protect the political against the encroachments of the social.
129. Ranciére and Panagia (n. 82), p. 119.
130. Note, though, that the French reception of Arendt is slightly more complicated than this since Etienne Balibar, whose approach is close to that of Ranciere (i.e. within the tradition of Marxism/radical democracy), does recognize Arendt as an important influence in developing his idea of equaliberty.
131. Honig (2005) 'Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity', in Bonnie Honig (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt.
132. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania Press. I have sympathetically appropriated Arendt along these lines in my own work on political reconciliation.
133. Andrew Schaap (2005) Political Reconciliation. London: Routledge.
134. Ibid. p.598.
135. Ibid. p.604.
136. Ibid. p.604, 605.
137. Ibid. p.611.
138. Ibid. p.612.
139. Ibid. p.614.
140. See also: Harry C Boyte, (2010) 'A Commonwealth of Freedom: Response to Beltrán', Political Theory 38(6): 866-869.
141. Christina Beltrán (2010) 'Everyday Acts of Greatness: Reply to Boyte', Political Theory 38(6): 877-883.
142. Ibid. p.412.
143. Ibid. p.413.
144. Ibid. p.46.
145. Ibid. p.419.
146. Ibid. p.51.
147. Ibid. p.52.