°zoon politikon
Continuing the discussions on human rights (and touching on the brief discussion on Ranciere, as well as Marx’s political anthropology), and so as to think through the complexities by which human rights discourses amount to a depoliticisation, but also are part of the politicisation of life - here are some of my notes on the depoliticisation aspect.
Arendt insists that it is false that “there is something political in man that belongs to his essence.”
She continues:
This is simply not so, man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships.
[Tronti echoes this in “‘Politik als Beruf: The End,” which Brett and I discussed elsewhere.] For Arendt, in some ways like Schmitt, politics is difference - univocity means the absence of politics, or depoliticisation.
Hence Arendt’s second argument for why the zoon politikon is false. Which is perhaps more suggestive of why it is possible to retain a sense of the political as difference while refusing its Schmittian existential/theological inscriptions, the depoliticising defense of a ‘way of life’ (mos maiorum) or, worse, self and identity.
The second is the monotheistic concept of God in whose likeness man is said to have been created. On that basis, there can, of course, only be man, while men come a more or less successful repetition of the same.
On this, Adriana Cavarero writes:
Arendt means to underscore the fact that, since it combines and neutralizes the plurality of all men (and all women, it must be added) in its concept, Man cannot be political because, within the horizon of Man, there is no plurality and, consequently, there are no relations. In the logic of the One, the mirror image of the logic of the Same, there is no in-between, no relational space generated by action. And consequently there is no politics. That which the Western tradition calls ‘politics’ is in reality a model of depoliticisation that, beginning with Aristotle and, even more so, Plato, expels the plural and relational dimension of politics: in fact, it reacts to the contingent and uncontrollable character of this dimension. According to Arendt, even the modern form of democracy is part of this depoliticisation. And in point of fact, it continues to decline the logic of the One through a notion of the individual that consists in the ‘more or less successful repetition of the same.’ Although it allows for a pluralism of opinions and the parties that represent them, the fundamental lexicon of equality negates plurality and, consequently, politics.
There is an important difference here between Cavarero on the one hand and Schmitt and Arendt on the other. Since for the former the Oneness of politics (conceived as the foreclosure of the feminine body) is constitutive of the Western tradition as such–i.e., ancient politics. While for Schmitt and Arendt the neturalisation is modern–hence, at least for Schmitt, the moment of theologisation.
I guess in citing Arendt, Cavarero points to a certain tightening. But part of the complexity of ‘depoliticisation’ and ‘politicisation of life’ you mention with respect to rights probably lies in the question of whether the fracture/end of politics is internal/conceptual or historical. Difficult also since concepts are always entwined in history.
Brett [November 30, 2006 @ 8:52 pm]
I was thinking you might remark that politicisation-depoliticisation complex parallels that of population-demos. On the conceptual-historical thing: I guess my provisional guess, in a nutshell, would be that the limits of the concept become (also) an historical limit at the moment when nation-states become globalised. Or is that too Hegelian? I will have to think on this.
Anyway, at this point in mulling things over, I wandered off into thinking about Arendt’s reformulation of logon echon as the condition of politics (which I don’t have much time for), and Cavarero’s discussion of the voice (which I’m not entirely convinced of, though it’s of some relevance to the next aspect) … All of which had me recalling the instance when detainees asked “Where are human rights?” (in writing) during a hunger strike where many of them sewed their lips together.
ps - if you’re still sorting those files, there’s some Eno in the sidebar.
s0metim3s [November 30, 2006 @ 9:54 pm]
Thanks for this. De/politicalization is a category I must get back to chewing on. I don’t know Arendt at all, does she use the terms politicize/depoliticize?
Also, I keep forgetting to say, I like the current look of the site a lot.
take care,
Nate
Nate [December 1, 2006 @ 5:18 pm]
Nate, to be honest, now that you ask, I’m not sure whether this is how I’ve always read Arendt’s argument, or whether she does in fact use those terms. I don’t have The Origins of Totalitarianism in front of me, which is where I’d guess the answer to your question might be found. That said, whether she uses these particular terms or not, I’m quite sure that her definition of politics as ‘plurality’ - and the criticism of a totalising politics as, in fact, the cessation of politics - comes down to that. Though, if you come across something that suggests otherwise, let me know.
s0metim3s [December 2, 2006 @ 2:00 am]
The other way to approach the question is in the Human Condition and the relationship between “the space of appearances” (=political) and “the rise of the social” (=apolitical). The social and, therefore, the ‘depoliticized’ rises at the expense of the political. But, as Agamben says, there’s a strange disjunction between Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition.
Craig [December 2, 2006 @ 10:54 am]
Yes, though I’m not a fan of Arendt’s Kantianisms (and doesn’t that distinction between the political and the social kind of reiterate Aristotle?). Anyway, Balibar has some interesting things to say about Foucault and Arendt.
(I forgot to add, Craig, that reading Foucault-Arendt in terms of Durkheim-Weber might be of some interest to you, if you haven’t already done that.)
s0metim3s [December 2, 2006 @ 12:50 pm]
That’s really interesting, thanks. I’ll try to add Arendt to my xmas reading, I’ve been meaning to read through some of her stuff for a while. For Arendt is there an actual achievement of non-politics, or is there an ostensibly nonpolitical/depoliticized condition as a political maneuver? The latter is how I read Schmitt on depoliticization, which is that depoliticization to an important extent isn’t depoliticization but still is ‘within’ the political.
Nate [December 2, 2006 @ 3:47 pm]
For Arendt is there an actual achievement of non-politics, or is there an ostensibly nonpolitical/depoliticized condition as a political maneuver?
I don’t think I understand your question, Nate.
s0metim3s [December 3, 2006 @ 12:15 pm]
Sorry, let me try again.
As I read Schmitt, technocracy doesn’t end politics (whether liberal technocracy or socialist “administration of things”). Rather, the claim to objective nonpolitical decision making is just as political (and at least if not more potentially lethal) as the decisions of sovereigns who are self-consciously political. The posture of being ostensibly nonpolitical, especially if sincerely believed, authorizes the most absolute of friend/enemy distinctions, the most zealous carrying out of politics. So, I read Schmitt as holding that depoliticalization is a political maneuver leading to some of the heaviest of political operations. For Schmitt, politics can’t end as long as there are people, since it’s something like an ineliminable existential condition (people being political animals means that if people exist then politics exists, though I can’t think of a Schmitt reference to Aristotle off the top of my head). My question is, does Arendt hold that politics _really_ ends or might end? Or does she hold to something like Schmitt’s sense of the end of politics, an end which is no end at all?
Nate [December 5, 2006 @ 9:40 am]
That’s certainly one way to read Schmitt. I may change my mind on this, but there’s something particular about German debates on the state that (as Craig indicated) style themselves as a question of the relation between society (or civil society) and state. Maybe, likely, it’s a Hegelian idiom at work. But I think it’s possible to read Schmitt in a Weberian register here - eg, the rise of technological rationality as the disenchantment of the political.
Though, to make your question clearer, it might be useful to outline what you think is at stake.
s0metim3s [December 7, 2006 @ 1:28 am]
The latter reading is, I think, the correct one (the Weberian one). There’s a sense in which Schmitt is a “radical Weberian” insofar as he takes, if nothing else, the political sociology, sociology of law, and sociology of religion to its extremes. Schmitt’s point about neutralizations and depoliticizations is that liberalism threatens to destroy the possibility of the political (even if that destruction is “virtual” - see my comments on Battlestar, if you will) through the global market and the universal state. Schmitt isn’t the only one to discuss depoliticization/politicization and theologization/detheologization - Sheldon Wolin does the same in Politics and Vision and it seems to have been an independent discovery of the depoliticizations of liberalism on Wolin’s part. There are no overt or subtle references to either Schmitt or Arendt in the book that I can detect, but there is an extensive polemic against Strauss in the notes. (Strauss being another concerned with liberalism and the end of politics.)
(Regarding Foucault, Arendt, Durkheim and Weber: I think someone needs to edit a collection on Foucault and Arendt. Not sure if I have the initiative for that, however.)
Craig [December 7, 2006 @ 9:39 am]
hi Angela,
I’m not sure what the stakes are. I think the ineliminability of the possibility of politics, as in Ranciere, is an important point for preventing a sort of liberal handwringing. Agamben is susceptible to readings like that. I’m thinking of a really bad talk on Agamben and Arendy I once sat through which amounted basically to “well, it’s a camp so they’re all bare life so nothing they can do” with regard to those interned in various camps. The defeat of collective agency, or where processes which work to prevent the formation of collective agency, is conceded as a foregone conclusion at the level of theory. That in turns prevents attending at all to those processes.
There’s another side of the argument, which is why I don’t like the claim that politics is permanent and don’t like the Weberian read. It seems to me that the “politics is really threatened with disappearance” argument is false in the way that many epochal declarations are (”one last push comrades, if you want to be revolutionaries!”). I remember thinking Nietzsche’s attack on the “last man” or “last generation” sensibility dealt well with this but I’d have to review the Nietzsche to support that. The end of politics thing also srikes me as quite amenable to a sort of catastrophism a la the worst of marxist crisis theory - wanting something cataclysmic to happen which will crack open the rotten and dead edifice of the present, after which point possibility will again flower, politics will be restored, etc.
None of this addresses the problem that for Schmitt the ineliminability of the possibility of politics entails the permanence of the state/sovereign or something very like it. To really make the argument I’d have to disentangle those, Schmitt’s right about the permanence of politics and wrong to reduce the political to the state. That’s a bit beyond me right now. I mean, I’m right, but I’m not sure I can demonstrate it. :)
take it easy,
Nate
Nate [December 8, 2006 @ 6:00 am]
Ok, I think I see what you’re saying. The problem of utter denudement or catastrophism, though - isn’t that, as you say, a problem of the theory? If I begin by assuming that agency or political action is conditional upon rights (or, I’ll add, logon echon), then the absence of rights entails the absence of politics. Isn’t it then a question of insisting that these are not the grounds of politics as such, but rather a specific political complex? (Here is where and why I think the question of democracy imposes itself, btw.)
That said, I do think it is right to talk about the triumph of economics over politics, for instance. But all of this requires posing a different sense of politics - hence my remark about retaining a sense of the political as difference while refusing its Schmittian existential/theological (and, as you note, etatist) inscriptions.
s0metim3s [December 8, 2006 @ 12:28 pm]
Depending on the context, I agree with the use of phrases like ‘the triumpho of economics over politics’. In a somewhat similar vein, in some circles here in the US it’s worth advocating economic action instead of political action, because the latter is defined as either parliamentary or (basically) public petition in the form of demonstration. In this sense of the term, it’s a matter of sites and modes of taking actions. Of course, economic action is in another sense still political. In that same sense, the triumph of economics over politics is also political (right?), the political triumph of a certain class over the rest of us (Or do I misunderstand?) and it’s a contingent and hopefully temporary condition as opposed to a sort of telos or irreversible epoch. My impression is that Schmit is or at least thinks he is polemicizing against people who want to say that they achieve a something which is not redescribable as political. Marx is doing the same, like in the attacks on so-called primitive accumulation as theological doctrine of classical political economy. (I’d love to do another symposium thing eventually on Karl und Karl - this polemic against depoliticization is one of their positive intersections, a much more negative one being their frequent convergence on a figure of the people.)
Another question and more musing - I take it you reject the conception of the human as zoon politikon, is that right? Thinking about one of the Arendt quotes you put up - “Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man.” - what if one displaces that, saying that people arise between people (reproduction in all of its senses is an intersubjective process), such that what Arendt calls the outside of the human is prior to the human. I think that would get around Arendt’s claim that humanity is a zoon a-politikon, by making politics or difference primary and the human secondary. That would also entail that the inscription of rights occurs after politics or difference, just before or just after (or perhaps you would say during) the composing of ‘human’ out of primary/political difference.
cheers,
Nate
Nate [December 9, 2006 @ 12:15 am]
I do think Arendt is right about the zoon politikon (but I don’t follow her toward the conclusions she comes to).
… people arise between people …
If I read you right, are you suggesting that the concepts of humanity and, in particular, the people does not express a unity, a univocity? If so, I don’t think that’s true or, rather, it might be true that this unity arises ‘intersubjectively,’ but univocity and unity of essence is still posited as an assumption (in the case of humanity) and aim (in the case of democracy).
s0metim3s [December 9, 2006 @ 1:05 pm]
I’m more of agnostic than you are about the univocity of every use of a concept of humanity, but that’s not what I meant. You quote Arendt, “man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships.”
What strikes me here is the temporal sequence. That which is between individuals seems to occur after the existence of individuals. There are huamns. Then there is a something which comes to lie between them. That something is established as relationships, some of which are or become political. But that temporal sequence doesn’t work. The existence of individual humans presupposes that something between individuals which either is politics or is the condition of politics. If there is to be a temporal sequence (I don’t think that there must be), then I think it makes more sense to say that humans arirse from this something in between, which is a context of relationships.
cheers,
Nate
Nate [December 11, 2006 @ 7:54 am]
I don’t think that’s right - you’re reading a temporal sequence where you might be better to read it through a distinction between economics and politics, as noted earlier.
For Arendt, individuals don’t simply exist prior to their relation. Individuation is a process. Individuation is apolitical in the sense that it’s an aspect of economics (atomisation). Politics, unlike economics, is not the subsequent aggregation of individuals but that which exists between people as difference. Indeed, Arendt will go to some lengths to describe the relation between atomisation and massification as the preconditions of totalitarianism. And, for her, totalitarianism is the cessation of politics. Nancy, in the essay above, turns around some of these questions.
s0metim3s [December 11, 2006 @ 3:20 pm]
That’s clearer, thanks. For now, I guess I don’t see the stakes in saying that only anti- or non-totalitarian practices or relations are political, while totalitarian ones are not. I prefer to say that there are different modes of politics. My investment is because I think of politics as implying contestation, while nonpolitics may not (such that there might be achieved a successful totalitarianism wherein politics is no longer going to be possible). Similarly, I take the aggregation of individuals, as you put it, in economics as itself a mode of politics, though one that needs to be undone. The bugbear here for me is always determinist marxism, taking economic forces for not political but objective (and I think something like univocal or unifying in the sense you take the concept of the human to have). I’ll check out the Nancy piece, thanks for pointing it out.
Nate [December 11, 2006 @ 6:37 pm]
Well, perhaps another way to consider this is that there may well be (or certainly is) always “contestation,” but that doesn’t mean it always assumes the forms of politics. Contestation can and does occur in registers other than political ones, that is: economics (as competition), or biology (as immunisation), or theology … Else there would be no sense in talking about de-politicisation.
Nancy’s piece is interesting, if difficult at times.
s0metim3s [December 11, 2006 @ 11:28 pm]
heya - I’m not going to be able to add much of anything else without reading the Arendt and the Nancy. I hope to get to the latter next week sometime. I’ll pop back by after I’ve read that. For now, I think whether or not it makes sense to talk about depoliticization is one of the main things we’re going round about. As read him, Schmitt implies that depoliticization is not, it’s more of a rhetorical figure.
cheers,
Nate
Nate [December 14, 2006 @ 1:32 am]
Sure. I think you’ll find them interesting. But if I can just press the point, because I doubt either make much sense without it.
They both have a very insistent sense of the distinction between economics and politics - and the former connotes not the kind of attentiveness to class or marxian approach you seem to imply above (and have elsewhwere), but rather technical rationality, calculation, measure, etc (bluntly, capitalism).
And I don’t think Schmitt’s sense of depoliticisation is rhetorical at all - but, then, I think you’re underestimating the ways in which he (and others) regards liberalism not as another kind of politics but as the neutralisation of politics by economics. (And that’s all pretty key to understanding the problems with zoon politikon, I reckon - but also Marx’s crit of Hegel’s theory of right, btw. cf. the Hamacher texts)
s0metim3s [December 14, 2006 @ 1:18 pm]