The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil?

By Roberto Esposito

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780823276288

Roberto Esposito

Roberto Esposito is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. His many books in English include Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought (Fordham).

Book preview

THE ORIGIN OF THE POLITICAL

COMMONALITIES

Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

Copyright © 2017 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book was originally published in Italian as Roberto Esposito, L’Origine della politica: Hannah Arendt o Simone Weil? © 1996 by Donzelli editore, Rome.

The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS

SEGRETARIATO EUROPEO PER LE PUBBLICAZIONI SCIENTIFICHE

Via Val d’Aposa 7 - 40123 Bologna - Italy

[e-mail] - www.seps.it

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America

19  18  17     5  4  3  2  1

First edition

to Giancarlo Mazzacurati

in memoriam

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

PREFACE

In the twenty years that separate this new publication from its original, much has been written on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil as well as on the relation between them. Although I cannot reference the extensive critical literature that in Italy alone has enriched the understanding of their work in recent years, I will mention two editorial initiatives that have been of particular significance; I am referring to the texts gathered by Simona Forti in The Arendt Archive¹ and the complete edition of Simone Weil’s London Writings, edited by Domenico Canciani and Maria Antonietta Vito.² Both collections offer the Italian public partially unedited materials that are indispensable for the ongoing interpretation of Arendt and Weil’s thought. The collection of Arendt’s essays—which address the fundamental themes of knowledge and power, politics and technicity, and evil and conformism in a postwar world suspended between new hopes and ancient fears—restitute certain neuralgic moments to her thought. Simone Weil’s London Writings were written between the end of 1942 and the spring of 1943, when the defeat of Nazism was already foreseeable. They are not only of substantial documentary value, but also constitute a tool of extraordinary value for evaluating the still unresolved problems of a united Europe, as the main title of the collection itself, Una costituente per l’Europa (Constituent Europe), seems to anticipate.

The numerous essays addressing the relation between the two authors can be placed in the broader frame of a feminist thought that has encountered rigorous and impassioned interpreters in Italy. Within this horizon Arendt and Weil have not only been positioned in relation to each other, but have also been placed in a constellation involving other female thinkers of the caliber of Edith Stein, María Zambrano and Rachel Bespaloff. Two recent books by Giuliana Kantzà and Nadia Fusini delineate with particular finesse the contours of an exceptional relation in which their spiritual proximity recalls a wealth of difference rather than an improbable confluence of perspectives.³

Arendt and Weil’s real or missed encounters during the dark years of persecution and exile tell an existential, intellectual, and moral tale of rare intensity. At times crossing paths while at other times brushing unknowingly against each other, Arendt and Weil traversed the same spaces, read the same books (beginning with The Iliad), and lived the same emotions in times of upheaval and enthusiasm. Rather than specific perspectives, what unites them is a gaze turned toward a world that is unrecognizable in comparison to the world they inhabited in their youth in Germany and France. It is as if their doubly other gaze—as women and Jews—could grasp with extraordinary cohesion what men of great philosophical standing could not recognize with quite the same level of intensity. Perhaps it was because, as women and Jews, they had always been objects of potential violence that Arendt and Weil were capable of narrating the genesis and cancerous emergence of totalitarian power with a clarity that was lacking unto others. In this sense, notwithstanding their clear differences in frame and language, they end up converging frequently in their conclusions, and, in their moments of divergence, share the same original premises.

For this reason, The Origin of the Political analyzes various aspects of their relation that are attributable in particular to the tension between origin and history, between the originary war (that is, the Trojan War) and the constitution of the political city; or, in the words of Arendt and Weil, to the tension between polemos and polis. How does origin relate to what follows? Does it do so from outside or from inside, as a beginning or its opposite, as a genetic moment or as a point of contrast? War is part of a politics that always implies an agonistic dimension, or the negative it leaves in its wake. While always in dialogue with Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, the following pages outline a series of interpretative hypotheses that situate Arendt and Weil often on opposite sides of the same line. For both, we could argue, origin as such does not exist. This is the case not only because it is always preceded by another more remote origin, but because it is also split into the two nonsuperimposable elements, which are, to use Augustine’s language, initium and principium. As we will see, this shared intuition assumes different modalities in their work. In the case of Arendt it takes on a differential form, while in the case of Weil it assumes a modality of obsessive repetition from which Western history cannot free itself, but that opens out onto an alterity that appears to push history beyond itself.

As is natural, Arendt and Weil’s thought derives from the conceptualizations of the relationship between origin and history, which also produce specific consequences for the entirety of their thought. To such conceptualizations are bound differential valuations of the relation between freedom and necessity, authority and power, or action and knowledge, the overall contours of which the following pages strive to outline. While in Arendt these polarities tend toward extension, in Weil they overlap with antinomic effects. The Origin of the Political also refers to a notion of truth that is most definitely different for both thinkers, but that is rooted in both within a factual dimension that is irreducible to the realm of subjective consciousness. In this respect we should add something more: Neither Arendt nor Weil can be defined as thinkers of inner experience. While the former considers the retreat to intimacy to be an escape from the world—and the primary cause of the depoliticization that has afflicted us for quite some time—the latter even talks of "the temptation of inner life (all feelings not immediately absorbed by methodical thought and efficient action). We need to include all thoughts and actions that do not grasp the object."⁴

If I had written this book today, I would have paused longer on the meaning that both thinkers attribute to the dimension of thought. More precisely, I would have emphasized its nonsubjective character. In the case of Arendt, this is a question that traverses the entirety of her work, but that is addressed above all in her 1971 essay Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture, which later became the basis for the first part of her final work, The Life of the Mind. The idea that thought does not belong to a particular social class such as the intellectuals or professional thinkers, but to every human being, situates it within a general sphere that cannot be monopolized by anyone. From this point of view thought is so common to all (though not everyone makes good use of it) that it can be identified with life itself: Thinking accompanies life and is itself the de-materialized quintessence of being alive; and since life is a process, its quintessence can only lie in the actual thinking process and not in any solid results or specific thoughts. A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence—it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers.⁵ Even the question Where Are We When We Think? which concludes The Life of the Mind evades the facile response that thought is located in the mind. The location of thought—extrapolated from a parable by Kafka,⁶ in the point of tension between past and future, within a present marked by a perpetual struggle with everything that precedes and follows it—harkens to a plane beyond personal consciousness.

But there is another sense in which thought is a common activity that belongs to everyone it implicates. Without doubt thinking is in itself an impolitical and an unproductive activity. Like the sound of the flute, it is a part of those forms of life that do not leave any material residue on earth. Not only that, in a certain sense it takes us away from the world of appearances in which we become immersed in everyday life. However, it does so in such a way that, contrary to interiority, it moves from the inside outward: It is true that all mental activities withdraw from the world of appearances, but this withdrawal is not toward an interior of either the self or the soul.⁷ We could say, rather, that thought constitutes a bridge between the sphere of sensual experience and its limit, which raises us up to the horizon of ideas. How does it do this? How can an activity of the mind point to invisibles—to that which emancipates itself from the world—in such a way as to acquire a common, or even a political, dimension?

The answer to such a question belongs to the relation of thought to judgment. As is well known, Arendt did not have the time to write the volume on judgment, which would have constituted the third and final section of her work. Nevertheless, on more than one occasion she connects judgment and thought by making the latter almost the presupposition of the former. It is true that thinking belongs to the invisible, while judgment concerns what is at our fingertips. But both are bound to each other like awareness and consciousness. Thought, moreover, has a liberating effect on another human faculty, the faculty of judgment, which one may call, with some justification, the most political of man’s abilities.⁸ Judgment is the most