Notes

1 Introduction

1. Rorty (1989: 5).2. Kioupkiolis (2011: 702).3. It should be noted that Heidegger has been interpreted in often grossly

diverging ways. As this is not the place for arguing for a ‘correct’ reading ofHeidegger, my short exposition orients itself on readings of Heidegger thathave been influential for postfoundational and ‘weak ontology’ approaches.Here, I particularly draw on Simon Critchley. See Critchley (1999).

4. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger argues that Western philosophy from Platoonwards has always posited the notion of an ultimum subjectum, an absolutefoundation, from which the world as such can be understood. The subject,understood as the absolute foundation and starting point for all knowledge,is as such metaphysical. It is, as Simon Critchley remarks, ‘the very elementof metaphysical thinking’. In pre-modern thinking, the subjectum is externalto the human – the metaphysical source of knowledge resides in a form, asubstance, or a deity. In modern philosophy, from Descartes onwards, theultimate foundation for our understanding of entities is the human beingitself. Here Heidegger states that ‘Man has become the subjectum’. Critchleysums up this point as follows: ‘The human subject – as self, ego, or conscious,thinking thing – becomes the ultimate foundation upon which entities arerendered intelligible, that in virtue of which entities are understandable intheir Being.’ However, for Heidegger, the way the subject has been under-stood allowed its philosophy to forget or pass over the most importantquestion philosophy is supposed to ask, and that is the question about Being(Seinsvergessenheit). See Heidegger (1984: 46) and Critchley (1999: 52–54).

5. Critchley (1999: 56).6. White (2000a: 4).7. Raffoul (2010: 35).8. Heidegger (1989: 12).9. Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, remarks that Heidegger did not take his anal-

ysis of Mitsein far enough. As a result, his thinking remained committedto hierarchies: ‘The analytic of Mitsein that appears within the existentialanalytic remains nothing more than a sketch; that is, even though Mitseinis coessential with Dasein, it remains in a subordinate position’ (Nancy,2000: 93).

10. Heidegger’s understanding of inauthenticity is therefore starkly differentfrom concepts of alienation as, for example, prevalent in Marxist thought.The concept of alienation would imply that an external force (capitalism)has distorted the way people see the world, and in combating this force onecan achieve a true understanding of external reality and one’s place in theworld.

168

Notes 169

11. To express this in Heideggerian terminology, the inauthenticity of das Man,‘the they’ or ‘the one’, has the status of an existential, and authenticity arisesan existentiell modification of das Man. He thus states that ‘[e]veryone is theOther and no one is himself’ and in ‘Der Begriff der Zeit’ Dasein is defined asNiemand – ‘nobody’. See Heidegger (1984: 130, 128).

12. Ibid.: 188.13. Beardsworth (1996: 118).14. Ibid.: 130–131.15. See, for example, Bennett (2000); Connolly (2005); Daly (2008); Kioupkiolis

(2011); Marchart (2007, 2010); Markell (2003, 2006); Strathausen (2006); andWhite (2000a, 2000b, 2005, 2009).

16. White (2000b: 1). White contends that one could draw up a different list, butthese four ‘existential realities’ emerged as the most important characteris-tics for a successful ontological figuration from his reading of James Taylor,George Kateb, Judith Butler, and William Connolly. To explain his method-ology, White uses the metaphor of watching children playing in a ‘vacatedlot’. They play an unfamiliar game whose rules are still emerging. By payingattention to those players more competent at this new game, he, the spec-tator, can try to make the rules ‘more palpable’. If White, thus, would havechosen another sample of theorists or ‘players’, or read them in a divergingway, the existential realities of human existence could have become defineddifferently. For example, theorists like Peter Winch argue that all human cul-tures have a concept of rationality. As we will see, for Arendt plurality is adefining feature of authentic human existence, and Foucault or Butler mightbe read to advance the notion that relations of power are an ‘existential real-ity’ of human existence. Given that Arendt arrives at a potentially strongernotion of a public sphere and interconnected action, and the Foucaultianview allows for a stronger approach on how power relations in society definesubjectivity, one can easily see how a different list of ‘existential realities’ hasfar-reaching consequences. One might argue that some of the difficulties ofWhite’s endeavour are well represented by his metaphor of game-playingchildren and the adult who detects and then imposes certain rules on theirpreviously more open and fluid game. White’s conceptual closeness to anunderstanding of thinking and language as rule-following behaviour allowsfor an understanding of theoretical rules that can be applied in a right or awrong way and that are supposed to guide our thinking and argument. This,however, forecloses ethical and political thinking, as we will see in Chapter 5.See White (2000a: ix).

17. White (2009: 69).18. Ibid.: 51.19. Ibid.: 65.20. Ibid.: 72.21. Ibid.: 91.22. White (2000a: 131).23. The difference between their approaches also stems from the theorists

they consider as exemplary, where White, with Kateb, Butler, Tayor,and Connolly, concentrates on US academic debates, while Marchart’sbook Die Politische Differenz discusses Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, AlanBadiou, Ernesto Laclau, and Giorgio Agamben and thus focuses on Europe.

170 Notes

As Marchart points out, the notion of the political has been formulated dif-ferently in Europe than it has been in the United States where an Arendtianor associative notion was more prevalent. See White (2000a) and Marchart(2010).

24. Herzog quoted in Marchart (2007: 11).25. Butler (1992: 7).26. Marchart (2007: 2).27. Ibid.: 2, my emphasis.28. Marchart (2010: 16).29. Butler (1992: 7).30. See Daly (2008).31. Marchart (2010: 71).32. Ibid.: 67–69.33. Ibid.: 253.34. See, for example, Hetzel (2010: 237).35. Marchart (2010: 47).36. Ibid.: 38.37. For a fuller discussion of the various definitions of the political and political

difference (Politische Differenz), see Marchart (2010: 35).38. See also Bedorf (2010: 16–17).39. For discussions of Arendt and Butler by political theorists, see, for example,

Benhabib (2003); Cavarero (2000); Dean (2005, 2008); Dolan (2000); Carverand Chambers (eds.) (2008); Honig (2010); Kateb (1984); Lloyd (2007, 2008);Lorey (2012); and White (2000a). For the role of Cavell’s thinking for polit-ical theory, see, for example, Norris (ed.) (2006); Norval (2007); and Owen(2006).

2 Arendt on the Acting, Thinking and Moral Self

1. See, for example, Benhabib (2003), Cavarero (2000), and Zerilli (2005).2. See, for example, Pitkin (1981).3. In Arendt’s view, the tradition of political philosophy starts with Plato’s

renunciation of the world of appearances and human action and ends withKarl Marx who, she argues, ultimately retains the Platonic hostility towardshuman affairs and particularity. In the Hegelian notion of history Marxadopted, the Platonic contempt for political action is preserved by bestowingimportance and dignity not on the acts of individuals but ‘upon mere time-sequence’. That the tradition of political philosophy culminated in the 19thcentury does not mean for Arendt that its way of thinking has disappeared.On the contrary, instead of diminishing its power over our thinking, the‘power of well-worn notions and categories becomes more tyrannical as thetradition loses its living force and as the memory of its beginning recedes; itmay even reveal its full coercive force only after its end has come and menno longer even rebel against it’. It is the weight of dead tradition that leadsto ‘compulsory and formalistic’ thinking in the 20th century. See Arendt(2006c: 65, 2006d: 25–26).

4. Arendt (2003b: 29).5. Arendt (1998: 9).

Notes 171

6. For a close reading of the connection between Arendt’s and Heidegger’sthinking, see Villa (1996).

7. The term ‘world’ in Arendt’s writing refers to an artificial construct humanbeings create out of nature, by transforming nature through work. It is ahumanly created, durable environment, a notion I explain in more detailbelow.

8. Knott (2011: 93).9. I would thus reject some readings of Arendt which try to separate her notion

of political action from her understanding of the public sphere, by transfer-ring her concept of action into a ‘social’ context. While I do agree with theintent of this move, I believe it is necessary to point out that one needs to gobeyond Arendt to establish it. For example, Seyla Benhabib moves the notionof action into a broader ‘social’ setting, when they relate action to narrativeidentity. With the notion of ‘narrative action’ Benhabib conflates social andprivate communities with the political or public sphere, in order to overcomeArendt’s restrictive conception of the political. Benhabib argues that if actionis understood as narrative we see that it is a feature of every kind of humaninteraction and is thus not restricted to the public but prevalent in any kindof social and intimate setting. In place of a public sphere, where only disin-terested, ‘impersonal’ public discussion takes place, Benhabib therefore setsthe notion of a ‘solidaristic community’ where identities are sustained bylistening to each other with respect. This communal respect allows us todevelop and exercise our ‘capacity for autonomous agency’. This moves the‘ideal’ sphere from the political to the social level, a move that disregards therole the autonomy of the political plays in Arendt’s thought. Problematically,however, Benhabib retains Arendt’s ‘artificial’ notion of political equality,which Arendt rightly notes could not exist in the social realm. See Benhabib(1999: 349 and 2003: 129 ), and for a related account of narrative politicalaction see Cavarero (2000).

10. While she discusses this notion in The Human Condition with reference tothe Ancient Greeks, I do not take her as making a ‘historical’ argument. ThatArendt develops a schematic theory of human existence is problematic, aswe will see, when she later seeks to use these notions as a blueprint to anal-yse actual political events. I understand Arendt’s frequent avowal that thepolitical sphere and political thinking and judgements need to be ‘free’, andher own strict application of theoretical categories on the ‘actual’ social andpolitical world, which at times severely limit her understanding of actualpolitical events, as one of the major contradictions of Arendt’s oeuvre.

11. Arendt (1998: 97–100, 135).12. Ibid.: 143.13. Interestingly, however, Arendt notes that in our natural states we can expe-

rience happiness: it is the only activity in which ‘men, too, can remainand swing contentedly in nature’s prescribed cycle, toiling and resting,laboring and consuming, with the same happy and purposeless regular-ity with which day and night and life and death follow each other’(ibid.: 106).

14. Ibid.: 137.15. Ibid.: 144.16. See Markell (2003: 11).

172 Notes

17. The concept of political equality as Arendt discusses it in The Human Condi-tion is not altogether clear. She remarks that in the Greek polis the equality ofthe political realm ‘meant to live among and to have to deal only with one’speers, and it presupposed the existence of “unequals” who . . . were alwaysthe majority of the population in a city-state’ (1998: 32). In the Greek world,equality had thus nothing to do with the modern concept of justice but was‘the very essence of freedom: to be free meant to be free from the inequalitypresent in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor beingruled existed (ibid.: 33). This notion of political equality Arendt also discussesin her previous work The Origins of Totalitarianism where she makes clearthat equality is not inherent to human nature, but is artificially created inthe political sphere (1973: 301). Equality is thus not a descriptive conceptbut a normative one. In her discussion of plurality as the decisive featureof the public sphere, however, Arendt seems to gesture towards the notionof equality as an existential fact of human existence that is bound to therelative similarity of human beings. They can ‘understand each other andthose who came before them’ and ‘plan for the future and foresee the needsof those who will come after them’ because of their similar needs and emo-tions (1998: 175) – a notion I return to below. Finally, Arendt notes, morein keeping with the former ‘Greek’ notion of equality, that ‘the equalityattending the public realm is necessarily an equality of unequals who standin need of being “equalized” in certain respects and for specific purposes.As such, the equalizing factor arises not from human “nature” but from out-side . . . Political equality, therefore, is the very opposite of our equality beforedeath, which as the common fate of all men arises out of the human condi-tion.’ For Arendt, ‘the actual experience of this sameness, the experience oflife and death, occurs not only in isolation but in utter loneliness, where notrue communication, let alone association and community, is possible’ (ibid.:215). While these accounts of equality appear to be somewhat conflicting,it is clear that for Arendt political equality is not natural to the human andthat, moreover, an awareness of one’s own death might not be a politicallyequalising factor as White proposes.

18. Arendt (1998: 182).19. See Villa (1996: 81); Honig (1993: 78).20. Arendt (1998: 175).21. As Arendt notes, ‘[i]f men were not equal, they could neither understand

each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future andforesee the needs of those who will come after them’. If they were not dis-tinct, however, they would not actually have any need for action or speech‘[s]igns and sounds to communicate immediate, identical needs and wantswould be enough’ (ibid.: 175–176).

22. Ibid.: 176.23. Ibid.: 184.24. For Arendt, thinking in the mode of work leads to a means – ends view

of the world: ‘During the work process, everything is judged in terms ofsuitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else.’ This‘utility standard’ becomes a never-ending chain of means and ends, whereevery end is just a means to a new end. One becomes entangled in a way ofthinking that is incapable to understand ‘the distinction between utility and

Notes 173

meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between“in order to” and “for the sake of” ’. Finally, this leads to a collapse back intoa world view closely related to the experience of labour – the relation to theworld becomes caught in a cyclical movement that doesn’t provide meaning.Ibid.: (153–154).

25. Ibid.: 184.26. Ibid.27. Arendt (2006a: 257).28. Arendt (1978: 34).29. Arendt (1998: 179–180).30. This notion is disputed by Adriana Cavarero who draws heavily on Arendt

to establish the political importance of narrative identity. For Cavarero it isthe intimate connection between an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ that allows the otherperson to grasp the ‘I”s identity and tell her story. Hearing one’s own lifetold from the mouth of another, one is able to grasp one’s unity and whole-ness, an experience that bestows a sense of agency and power to personswho suffer from disenfranchisement and a feeling of rupture. Cavarero crit-icises Arendt’s notion that human beings are unable to tell their own storyas ‘homage to the patriarchal tradition’ in philosophy that values death overlife. She interprets Arendt’s wish to leave the task of telling the story of aperson to posterity as a reference to a heroic understanding of the actor wholongs after death and subsequent immortalisation. In my reading, this, how-ever, is only partially correct. Arendt is indeed not interested in awardingthe actor the possibility to hear her own story, but this is because she doesnot think that the experience of unity is important for the self and for one’sability to act politically. Cavarero is right that Arendt refers to Greek herowho invites death as the archetype of the narrated life. The point for Arendt,however, is that having one’s story told by a storyteller in the future providesthe hero with a ‘worldly’ and thus political form of immortality. In this way,the exceptional story of the hero’s life becomes one of the exemplary storiesthat furnish our thinking and judgement. However, not ‘having’ a unifiedlive-story and thus a fixed identity while one is alive, should be interpretedas a homage to life rather than death. If death freezes who a person canbe, and what can happen in her story, thus making her true identity visible,being alive means that nothing is fixed, everything is still a perpetual becom-ing. Because identities are in flux they do not lend themselves to unifiednarration. Instead of a glorification of death, Arendt’s refusal of providing aunified identity to the living is better understood as the wish to overcomerestrictions on the individual’s freedom to change and develop who she isin ways that allow for a continual reinterpretation of her past. Uniquenessis not bound to the possibility to narrate one’s story in a cohesive mannerbut only to the unrepeatability of every life. In order to be unrepeatable, alife does not need to be told in a unified form. I thus understand Arendt ascloser to Butler, who, as we will see, stresses that one’s past always remainsopaque. It is this ‘otherness’ in the centre of identity that allows the self toconnect to the other person. See Cavarero (2000: 29) and Butler (2005 and2012).

31. Wellmer (2001: 168).32. Arendt (1978: 212).

174 Notes

33. Arendt (2006b: 64).34. Butler (2005: 40).35. Against theorists like Cavarero, who find in Arendt material for their claim

that each human being longs for the possession of a unified story that wouldexplain who they are, it might not be too far stretched to argue that Arendt’sunderstanding of the political sphere and natality anticipates current cri-tiques of theories of ‘narrative identity’. Galen Strawson argues that ‘[t]hereis a widespread agreement that human beings typically see or live or experi-ence their lives as a narrative or story’, a notion he calls the ‘psychologicalNarrativity thesis’. He further claims that this thesis is often coupled with an‘ethical Narrativity thesis’, that is, the belief that ‘experiencing or conceivingone’s life as a narrative is a good thing, a richly Narrative outlook is essen-tial to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood’. Strawson dismisses bothforms of narrativity, stating that not all people experience their lives in theform of a linear, unified narrative. Moreover, he asserts, not experiencingoneself in the form of a linear narrative is not necessarily a ‘bad’ or ‘lack-ing’ form of selfhood. As we have seen, for Arendt, action is closely linkedto the ontological condition of natality because it initiates something com-pletely new and unforeseeable. Political actors are ‘reborn’, their social pastis therefore of little concern. Therefore, someone who experiences herself inthe ways that Strawson describes as ‘episodic’ seems uniquely able to fulfilArendt’s expectations of the ideal political actor. As episodic person: ‘one haslittle or no sense that the self that one is was there in the (further) past andwill be there in the future, although one is perfectly well aware that one haslong-term continuity considered as a whole human being’. Albeit this mightnot necessarily be the case, Strawson argues that episodic persons might bemore ‘in the present’, a character trait that arguably might help to be ableto leave aside one’s group-specific interests when engaging in politics. Forexample, if I do not define myself in relation to a history of growing up in aworking-class background, this would help me to become the ‘disinterested’actor Arendt conjures instead of forwarding the ‘particularistic’ interests of‘my’ class (Strawson 2004).

36. For Arendt, in modern society labour has become the dominant activity andthus infiltrates the logic of government. A state which is primarily concernedwith the (bodily) desires and needs of its population will not create trulydemocratic forms of government but a form of administration. Our current‘social’ governments are thus a ‘kind of no-man rule’ – where bureaucracytakes over decision-making. As there is no one left who feels responsible this‘social’ form of government has the potential to become ‘the cruelest andmost tyrannical’ form of rule. Society, for Arendt, ‘excludes the possibility ofaction’, for the individual to distinguish herself and take responsibility forthe public realm. In this way, social government ‘normalises’ its members.It makes them ‘behave’ (1998: 40). In modern society, Arendt’s animal lab-orans is permitted to occupy the public realm, which means that ‘there canbe no true public realm; but only private activities displayed in the open.That is mass culture, and its deep rooted trouble is a universal unhappiness’(ibid.: 134). Ultimately, the overwhelming bodily needs, created and broughtto the fore in the cataclysms of modernisation, have created a world wherethe unpredictable nature of (political) action is paired with the processualand overwhelming character of labour processes. For Arendt, the social has

Notes 175

the ‘irresistible tendency to grow’, ‘to devour’ and in light of recent technicalprogress the return to the natural stands in danger of ‘devouring’ the world,ultimately destroying the possibility not only for freedom but for life itself(ibid.: 44–46).

37. See e.g. Arendt (2003a).38. Arendt (2003c: 107).39. Arendt quoted in Bernstein (2000: 283). As Bernstein makes clear, this type of

thinking cannot be equated with ‘such mental processes as deducing, induc-ing, and drawing conclusions whose logical rules of non-contradiction andinner consistency can be learned once and for all and then need only to beapplied’ (ibid.: 279). Arendt does not rule out the importance of this kindof thinking. It provides a factual ground for judgement, but it is merely aprecondition – not the activity we are concerned with in matters of moral orpolitical judgements. Thus, in Bernstein’s words, Arendt distinguishes think-ing from knowing. Knowing is here understood as primarily concerned withfinding a single, universal truth, while thinking is concerned with mean-ing. This differentiation, as we will see, is called into question by Cavell andButler, who are critical of the notion of absolute knowledge.

40. For Arendt, acting and thinking are both activities that form part of thevita activa as opposed to the notion of vita contemplativa, that is the way ofwithdrawing from the world either in a religious or philosophical sense to bein the present of the eternal, universal or unchanging. In difference to thatany activity of the vita activa will always be related to change or contingency.

41. Benhabib (2003: x, 87).42. Bernstein (2000: 279).43. Arendt (2003c: 101).44. Ibid.45. Arendt (1972: 61).46. Ibid.: 63.47. Ibid.: 64–65.48. Ibid.: 64–65.49. Arendt (2003c: 101).50. Ibid.: 94.51. Ibid.: 111.52. Villa (2001: 297).53. Arendt (1978: 31).54. Arendt’s discussion here seems to show a certain disdain of any overt dis-

play of emotions in public life – the reference to inner organs, which mightremind us of the expression ‘spilling one’s guts,’ hints not only to thenecessarily hidden but also to the ugliness of what is inside us.

55. Arendt (1978: 19).56. Arendt quoted in Dolan (2000: 264–265).57. Ibid.: 265.58. However, it should be noted that Arendt’s appropriation of Kant is some

respect is decisively un-Kantian. See on this point for example Beiner (2001).59. Arendt (2006a: 237), my emphasis.60. Arendt (2003c: 140).61. Arendt (2006a: 237), my emphasis.62. Ibid.: 238, my emphasis.63. See Bevir, Harigs, and Rushing (2007: 3).

176 Notes

64. Arendt (1978: 35–36).65. It has to be noted, however, that Arendt seems to develop two variations of

her notion of judgement. In a version I do not discuss here, which she devel-ops specifically in ‘The Crisis in Culture’ and ‘Truth and Politics’, Arendtwrites about judgement as a faculty that enables political actors to decidewhat courses of action to undertake in the public realm. Here she seems totake the view that personal judgement needs the discussion with others. SeePassarin d’Entreves (2000: 253).

66. Arendt (2003c: 140).67. Butler (2009: 156).68. Arendt (1972: 207), my emphasis.69. As argued above, one’s judgement is only as good as the exemplars one can

draw on – and it seems that in Arendt’s view ‘good’ exemplars are mainlyprovided by a ‘classical’ western education. Unfortunately this has the effectthat Arendt appears at times unable to fully grasp the position of AfricanAmericans in the early 1960s, who, deprived of equal access to educationand economically disadvantaged, fail to live up to Arendt’s standard of thedisinterested political actor. For example in the essay ‘On Violence’ she thusstates that ‘serious violence’ only entered the scene of student protests withthe appearance of the ‘Negro movement’:

Negro students, the majority of them admitted without academic qual-ification, regarded and organized themselves as an interest group, therepresentatives of the black community. Their interest was to loweracademic standards . . . it seems that the academic establishment, in itscurious tendency to yield more to Negro demands, even if they are clearlysilly and outrageous, than to the disinterested and usually highly moralclaims of the white rebels.

(Ibid.: 120–121)

And she adds in appendix viii

Even more frightening is the all too likely prospect that, in about fiveto ten years, this ‘education’ in Swahili (a 19th century kind of no-language spoken by Arab ivory and slave caravans, a hybrid mixture of aBantu dialect with an enormous vocabulary of Arab borrowings; see theEncyclopaedia Britannica 1961) African literature, and other non-existentsubjects will be interpreted as another trap of the white man to preventNegroes from acquiring an adequate education.

(Ibid.: 191–192)

3 The Situated and Embodied Self: Butler and Cavellon Subjectivity, Language, and Finitude

1. See Rorty (1979).2. Cavell (1999: 44, 45).3. Cavell (2005c: 166).4. As Richard Rorty phrases it, the critique of the ‘modern’ view of language is

one way of criticising a strand of modern philosophy that would expect ofphilosophy ‘what we once thought religion might do – take us right outside

Notes 177

language, history, and finitude and put us in the presence of the atemporal’(Rorty, 2005: 17).

5. As Cavell states, ‘Horror is the title I am giving to the perception of theprecariousness of human identity, to the perception that it may be lost orinvaded, that we may be, or may become, something other than we are, ortake ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting for,and are unaccountable’ (Cavell, 1999: 418).

6. Rorty points out that Cavell in Part I and II of The Claim of Reason conflatesthree notions of scepticism: ‘the “professional” philosopher’s skepticism cre-ated by what Reid called “the theory of ideas” (the theory that analysesperception in terms of immediately, certainly known givens)’; ‘the Kantian,Romantic worry about whether the words we use have any relation to theway the world actually is in itself’ and the notion of ‘standing outside theworld’ alluded to here. He argues that Cavell is unable to proof that thesethree types of scepticism are intimately connected. Engaging with this argu-ment, however, exceeds the scope of this chapter. I will therefore sidestepthis issue and follow Cavell’s argumentation. See Rorty (2005).

7. As Cavell ‘argues that experience I have called “seeing ourselves outside theworld as a whole,” looking in at it, as we now look at some objects forma position among others . . . I have found sometimes presents itself to meas a sense of powerlessness to know the world, or to act upon it; I thinkit is also working in the existentialist’s (or say, Santayana’s) sense of theprecariousness and arbitrariness of existence, the utter contingency in thefact that things are as they are’ (Cavell, 1999: 236).

8. Hammer (2002: 56).9. Cavell (1976: 234); Cavell claims with Wittgenstein and Heidegger that the

existence of the world is beyond demonstration and there will always remain‘some question as to the mystery of the existence, or the being, of the world’(ibid.: 241).

10. To make this argument Cavell draws on Wittgenstein’s discussion of theword ‘game’. There are many very different activities we call ‘game’. It wouldbe misleading to look for something all activities called ‘game’ have in com-mon. To know whether we rightly apply the name ‘game’ to something, werely on our agreement with others. See Cavell (1976: 50).

11. Ibid.: 52.12. Cavell (1999: 383).13. As I will return to in Chapter 4, the reference to the body shows that Cavell –

like Butler – seeks to avoid linguistic idealism. Instead, he points to an inter-connection of physical bodies and ‘bodies of expression’. Stressing the roleof acknowledging your body also means that in exchange with others anidentity is established for the self, which is at the same time changing andconsistent. While who we are is developed by what we say, and thus seemsunstable, these various expressions become unified as they are related to thesame, but also changing, body.

14. Cavell (1990: xxxi).15. Cavell (1999: 101).16. Cavell (2004: 11, 49, 222).17. Cavell (2004: 22); Hammer (2006: 170).18. Flathman (2006: 103–104, my emphasis).

178 Notes

19. Norris (2006b: 82).20. Ibid.21. Butler (1997a: 10–11).22. Quoted in Thiem (2008: 26).23. This notion is also expressed by Austin’s theory of speech-acts to which both

Butler and Cavell refer. Speech acts, Austin claims, are categorically distinctfrom statements, because they are not simply true or false, but constitute anaction. As Austin writes ‘if a person makes an utterance of this sort we shouldsay that he is doing something rather than merely saying something’ (Austin,1970: 235).

24. Butler (1990: 164, 165).25. Butler often refers to cases of intersexual people to show how difficult it

is to live in societies which are structured along a binary-gender system, ifone cannot follow this division. Butler’s view of the questionable biologicalground of sexual distinction into two clearly defined groups has been givensupport by recent discussions regarding the way biological sex is defined (e.g.for Olympic sports) where at least three sometimes not congruent definitionsof sex can be used (form of genitalia, DNA, and hormone levels). Male andfemale could also be thought of as the extreme ends of a biological contin-uum, while many bodies show anatomical components of both sexes. Seee.g. Fausto-Sterling (2000).

26. Butler (1993: 68).27. White (2000a: 82).28. Butler (2009: 3).29. Cavell discusses this difference in relation to Derrida’s, in his view mistaken,

reading of Austin. See Cavell (1994: 100 ff).30. Hammer (2002: 162).31. Ibid.32. In my understanding, Cavell is aware of these costs, however, he discusses

this more in terms of moral perfectionism than in his engagement withlanguage.

33. Butler (2000: 41).34. Thiem (2008: 27).35. Butler (2005: 19) As Butler makes clear in an earlier text, the formation

of the subject always relies on an ‘exclusionary matrix’ which simul-taneously produces ‘a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet“subjects” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of thesubject. The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhab-itable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated’ (Butler,1993: 3).

36. See for a more thorough discussion Balibar (2011).37. Lorey (2012: 39, 43, 44).38. Butler (1997a: 91, my emphasis).39. Ibid.40. Ibid.41. See Foucault (1990).42. Butler (1997a: 2, 83).43. Ibid.: 14–15.44. Lorey (2012: 52).45. Butler (1997a: 3, 10). See also Oliver (2001: 61).

Notes 179

46. In The Psychic Life of Power Butler discusses the Freudian and Kleinian notionsof mourning and melancholia in order to establish how we come into beingas gendered subjects, who define themselves through the love to the oppositegender. Establishing one’s gender identity she argues could be envisioned as aprocess of internalisation of the lost object of love. This allows for an under-standing of normative gender roles, which, while compelling, are not copiedstraightforwardly. Instead, by being compelled to reject our love for the pri-mary care-giver of the same gender prior to internalising the gender identitythis person stands for as a lost love-object, we develop an ambivalent rela-tionship to the norm. More concretely, because societal norms foreclose ourlove to the same gender, the girl’s love to the mother, or the boy’s love to hisfather needs to be denied. When the girl has to state that she never lovedand thus never lost the mother, the process of mourning is blocked. As theloss of the loved object cannot be openly grieved, the lost object becomesinternalised and is thus saved. What is internalised, however, is not onlythe idealised notion of the lost object, but also the aggression towards thisobject one had to give up, and which has often also hurt us in other ways.By internalising both idealisation and accusation the self is established asreflexive or split. This ambivalence marks a difference to the Foucaultiannotion of subjection discussed above. Guilt here is not created by the nor-mative demand as such but by our ambivalent emotional attachment to theobject. As Butler remarks in reference to Klein, if the Freudian notion ofmelancholia means that when we come into existence, we invariably haveto vanquish the other, the other person appears as what we have already lost.It therefore becomes marked as an object for aggression. Guilt emerges, ‘notin consequence of internalising an external prohibition, but as a way of pre-serving the object of love from one’s own potentially obliterating violence.Guilt serves the function of preserving the object of love, and, hence, of pre-serving love itself’. Guilt thus has the function to keep our desire to kill theloved but forbidden and lost object in check. Guilt emerges in the course ofmelancholia not only, as the Freudian view would have it, to keep the deadobject alive, but to keep the living object from ‘death,’ where death meansthe death of love, including the occasions of separation and loss. See Butler(1997a: 26–27, 68–69, 80). These notions will play a role in Chapter 4, in thischapter, however, I concentrate on Butler’s more recent engagement withpsychoanalysis, where she turns foremost to the work of Jean Laplanche.

47. Butler (2005: 52).48. Ibid.: 71.49. Ibid.: 54.50. Butler (1999: 13).51. Butler (2004a: 31).52. Ibid.: 148.53. Ibid.54. Ibid.: 19.55. Ibid.56. Ibid.: 44.57. Ibid.: 75.58. Adorno (1993: 194).59. Riley (2000: 5–8).60. Cavarero (2012).

180 Notes

4 Otherness and an Ethics of Responsibility

1. This is how Kelly Oliver describes current philosophical concepts ofotherness. In her critique of Judith Butler’s discussion of recognition, sheargues that Hegelian theory would understand the self as formed in a nec-essary relationship of dependency and subordination. As Oliver reads it,the Hegelian notion of recognition requires the objectification of the otherperson. In the Hegelian situation, she argues, when one self-consciousnessencounters another, the other person appears first as an object. ‘The lord andbondsman become certain of their own self-consciousness only by negatingLife or the immediacy of being both in themselves and in the other. Thisis why they must risk their own life and also risk the life of the other. Lifeitself must be negated. Recognition requires abstracting from the immediacyof being/Life’.

Moreover, Oliver is irked by the violent language thinkers like Levinasand Butler employ when describing the self–other relationship. To invokeviolence as a necessary part of subject-formation would make it difficultto formulate a non-violent stance in one’s political argumentation, as itbecomes complicated to distinguish avoidable from necessary violence.Understanding dependency as the necessary condition of becoming a sub-ject would ultimately make it difficult to envision a more egalitarian society.By understanding the other person in terms of an object, the subjectivity ofothers is dismissed. ‘The Other’ thus never appears as a concrete other per-son. In contemporary theory, others would therefore too often appear eitheras ‘mute, impoverished, unavailable, still to come, almost worshipped (a laDerrida and Emmanuel Levinas)’ or as ‘invisible, unspoken, nonexistent, theunderside of the subject (a la Foucault and Butler)’. In all cases, however, theother would remain ‘an object for the subject’. By understanding intersub-jective relations in terms of hostility ‘the rhetoric of the other’ would in itselfdeny ‘subjectivity to those othered within dominant culture’ (Oliver, 2001:61, 95–96).

Similarly, Adriana Cavarero argues that while others are acknowledgedin contemporary theory as a necessary presence for the subject, ‘who’these others are seems to be of minor concern. Instead of relying onnotions of a general ‘Other’, we should therefore engage with other peo-ple in the intimate form of the concrete ‘you’ to whom the ‘I’ is boundin conversations of mutual recognition and friendship. As we recipro-cally appear to each other, we ‘do not lend substance to the anonymousface of an indistinct and universal alterity’. Seeing the other as a con-crete ‘you’ calls for a new understanding or recognition that allows usto ‘think dialogic subjectivity as noncontestatory conversation’. (Cavarero,2000: 90).

2. As Espen Hammer remarks, Cavell argues in The Claim of Reason that

it is far from clear that the [external world] skeptic, though capable ofconstructing a best case for knowledge (one that generalizes), ever man-ages to enter a definite claim on which to focus his attack. To live one’sskepticism with respect to the external world would be tantamount topsychosis: what the skeptic opens our eyes to is that this is the best, that

Notes 181

our everyday life with objects, though not immune to the possibility offailure, is all we shall ever have.

(Hammer, 2002: 143)

3. Cavell (2005b: 149–150).4. Cavell (1999: 241).5. There is always also the possibility that what I take as pain-behaviour is

someone calling her hamster, or clearing her throat, see Ibid.: 43.6. Ibid.: 44–45.7. Cavell also uses his discussion of pain-criteria to argue that we don’t know

ourselves. This assertion hinges on the notion that what differentiates thecriteria for pain from criteria for an external object is that they are neces-sarily expressive. In more orthodox readings of Wittgenstein, this argumentonly applies to the pain of others. While I can only see whether someoneelse is in pain when this is outwardly expressed, it seems non-sensical tostate something like ‘I know I am in pain’. Whether I’m in pain or notis something I cannot fail to know. Cavell disagrees with this notion andmakes the point that the expression ‘I know that I am in pain’ might ‘be per-fectly meaningful in response to an analyst who has uncovered my attemptsto suppress or deny that truth about myself’. As I have argued in Chapter 3,psychological repression might lead to a situation where we cannot be said to‘know’ ourselves. As we have seen, Cavell states, ‘when it comes to regions ofthe soul like . . . coldness covered with affectionateness, or loneliness coveredwith activity, or hatred covered with judiciousness, or obsessiveness coveredby intellectuality . . . one’s lack of knowledge about oneself may fully con-trast with one’s beliefs about oneself . . . And here my relation to myself isexpressed by saying that I do not know myself.’ In this formulation, theunknowability of the self is expressed as a sense of relating to oneself like toanother person. When developing a reflective stance towards our own selvesthat we might discover that (against our own assumption) we do not knowourselves. If we remain unaware of the limits of self-knowledge, however,this might lead us to live a life of conformism, unaware of our own ethicalpotential and unwilling to take responsibility for ourselves and our com-munity. For Cavell, the task of philosophy, as of psychoanalysis and art, isthus to heighten our self-knowledge by confronting the limits of our abilityto know the self. While complete self-awareness must remain an illusion, adenial of finitude, it is the process of reflectivity that allows us to developsubjectivity. See Hammer (2002: 66) and Cavell (1999: 101).

8. That something might turn out not to be ‘human’, that we could cre-ate something human-like assuming and faking the human and in thisway casting doubt on our humanity is indeed a recurrent theme of thescience-fiction genre, as for example in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheepby Philip K. Dick or the TV show Battlestar Galactica. Maybe the prevalenceof this storyline could be taken as the cultural expression of a contempo-rary form of scepticism fed by a feeling of unreality regarding technologicalprogress.

9. Quoted in Mulhall (1994: 110).10. Cavell (1976: 264).11. Hammer (2002: 63).

182 Notes

12. I am thus critical of theories of ‘narrative recognition’ thinkers like Oliverand Cavarero suggest. They highlight how learning the other person’sunique live-story allows for a bond between the concrete I and the con-crete you that has healing and empowering consequences for the ‘you’. SeeCavarero (2000); Oliver (2001).

13. As we have seen, Stephen K. White describes this notion as ‘capaciousagency’. This form of agency he finds is bound to a non-theistic liberal tra-dition, where the agent ‘finds through reflection only herself as a being whocan in fact reflect upon herself and her choices; that is, who has the power,or capacity, to frame and revise her plan of life’. Our universal capacity forreason then ‘allows you to comprehend that you have the power to directyour life’. White (2009: 56).

14. Cavell (1994: 4).15. Norval (2007: 171).16. Cavell thus claims for the moral encounter with others what Arendt claims

for the political sphere. I will come back to this point in Chapter 6, whereI discuss it in terms of Arendt’s notion of forgiveness in the political sphere.As Arendt argues, ‘[w]ithout being forgiven, released from the consequencesof what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confinedto one single deed from which we could never recover’. Arendt (1998:237).

17. Hammer (2002: 146).18. Ibid.19. Cavell (2005b: 151).20. Hammer (2002: 147).21. For a short discussion of this notion, see Butler (2005: 108).22. There is, however, a peculiar aspect to Cavell’s invocation of the everyday.

The scenarios he offers often have a dreamlike and bizarre quality, highlight-ing the uncanny in our mundane experiences; the shakiness of what we needto assume as the stable ground of our social relationships. What strikes mein Cavell’s examples of the everyday is that they are precisely not everyday.It might take reflection on our daily practice of conversing with others todissipate the extraordinariness of Cavell’s examples, to see their relevance tothe way we view the world. In other words, Cavell’s style precludes a tooeasy or seamless translation of his thinking to concrete situations in one’sown daily encounters or indeed for our political judgment. An engagementwith Cavell’s work heightens our awareness for our ethical responsibility inthe everyday thus not by making concrete suggestions on how we shouldbehave towards each other, but by creating in the reader a certain sensibilitytowards one’s engagement with others, a willingness to suspend judgement.Albeit I do not have the space here, it would be important to investigatethe role of mental illness in Cavell’s work and follow up on the suggestionCavell makes about the therapeutic character of philosophy and its relationto psychoanalysis. In this context, we might ask how his ‘everyday’ exam-ples address experiences of extraordinary mind-states and the boundariesbetween the ‘normal’ and the ‘insane.’

23. Cavell (2005b: 136).24. Ibid.: 137.25. Ibid.

Notes 183

26. This highlights an important difference between Cavell’s and Kripke’s read-ing of Wittgenstein. Discussing Kripke Cavell notes, ‘while ‘there is no rea-son’ we act and agree in language as we do, as there is no reason we walk aswe do, as opposed, for example, to walking ‘in place’ periodically, or revers-ing direction after we have taken a given number of (what we call) steps orpaces in a given direction. If I find someone who walks . . . in this way, I maywell have some sort of eerie feeling, not however because I find this experi-ence to generalize (so that the idea of walking, or the entire idea of purpose-ful conduct vanishes), but because I am faced with the alien, or the singular’.

For Cavell, what ends with the encounter of the singular is not the exis-tence of community or the possibility to speak meaningfully of walking(there are still others who, I presume, share my way of walking), but thepossibility for explication. While for Kripke ‘the entire idea of meaning van-ishes into thin air’, for Cavell at this point the only thing that vanishes isthe need for further conversation (on this particular topic). See ibid.: 135.

27. Ibid.: 136.28. As I will try to show in the next chapter, however, we might also come to an

understanding of responsibility that relies less on connection than Cavell’s.It is then maybe precisely the irreducibility of otherness and the impossibil-ity for communication on which our responsibility for a truly other other isfounded – a notion which allows us to open the concept of the other beyondthe human.

29. Ibid.: 149–150.30. Cavell (2005b: 150).31. Cavell (1999: 400).32. Ibid.: 356.33. Ibid.: 369.34. Cavell (2005b: 150).35. Cavell’s reading of Levinas’s notion of the infinite turns on their respec-

tive reading of a passage of Descartes’s Third Meditation, where Descartesattempts to prove the existence of God, because ‘I’ as a finite being couldnot come up with the idea of the infinite. Cavell expresses his uncertaintythat he understands the necessity for ‘Levinas’s insistence that it is infiniteresponsibility for this other that is revealed when the infinite is put in me’.The notion of God, of the Infinite, is ‘put into me’, as Levinas expresses it,by God. While this opens me up to the realm of the Other, at the same timeit establishes this relationship as inherently unequal. Cavell remarks on the‘striking coincidence’ that both he and Levinas take recourse to the samepassage from Descartes’s Third Meditation to remark upon the role of Godin establishing ‘for myself the existence, or relation to the existence, of thefinite other’. However, he further remarks that they derive at ‘something likean opposite conclusion’. Instead of finding in Descartes’s proof ‘the openingto the finite other’, Cavell argues that Descartes passes by the other as ‘mensimilar to myself’. See Cavell (2005b: 144–146).

36. Levinas in Levinas and Kearney (1986: 23), see also Butler (2004b: 131–132).37. See Butler (2012: 10–11). Butler is critical of this notion of non-historical or

non-cultural revelation of the face. Similarly to Cavell, she insists that anyform of ethical demand relies on translation, and this translation alters whatis conveyed.

184 Notes

38. Levinas (1986: 23).39. Levinas (1990: 89). See also discussing this notion in terms of the messianic

Butler (2012: 41).40. Butler (2012: 42).41. Levinas (1986: 23–24).42. Cavell (2008: 117).43. Ibid.44. Ibid.45. Ibid.46. Cavell (2005b: 144).47. I understand thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Cavell to engage in such a

critical move as well as Derrida, Levinas, and Butler. Moreover, at least inher reading of Platonic political philosophy I understand Arendt as makingrelated points.

48. Morgan (2011: 89).49. Ibid.50. Levinas quoted ibid.: 92.51. Levinas quoted ibid.52. It is precisely the thought that by putting something in everyday language,

we reduce it to the already known, to our habitual framework that accountsfor Levinas’s often difficult terminology. As Judith Butler remarks in a dif-ferent context, challenging ordinary language allows for the analysis ‘ofocclusions or concealments that take place when we take ordinary languageto be a true indicator of reality as it is and as it must be’. Butler (2007: 10).

53. This should recall the discussion of finitude in Chapter 1, where the influ-ence of Heidegger’s understanding of knowledge against the horizon ofmortality has been mentioned.

54. I see this argument as close to Wittgenstein’s notion of the necessity of ‘pic-tures’ for the working of language. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein employs‘the picture of the earth as a ball floating free in space’ to argue that ‘[t]hepicture of the earth as a ball is a good picture, it proves itself everywhere, itis also a simple picture – in short, we work with it without ever doubting it’Wittgenstein (1969: §§146–147). The problem with such pictures is thereforenot that we use them to represent and grasp a more complex reality, but thatwe get captivated by them, forgetting that they are pictures and not reality.

55. Morgan (2011: 156).56. Ibid.: 40.57. See Marrati (2009: 86); Cavell (2004: 182).58. Butler (2012: 59), Butler ibid quoting Levinas59. Levinas (1998: 116–117) quoted in Butler (2012: 229) ftn.4. Butler points out

that the translation mistakenly renders sans as ‘with’.60. Butler (2009: 2).61. Morgan (2011: 63).62. Ibid.: 64.63. At first this seems to mark a difference between the Cavellian notion of the

acknowledgement and Levinas’s notion of responsibility: for Cavell, I wouldhave the possibility to deny the other without actively hurting her. I just donot understand myself as addressed by her. Cavell seems to allow for the pos-sibility to ignore otherness, by ignoring the scene of address as such. In theLevinasian formulation, ignoring the other is expressed in much more violent

Notes 185

terms, as the destruction of the concrete other person. However, when weconsider the examples Cavell gives for ignoring the other’s address we realisethat they do indicate a violence done to the other. If I think a hurt personmight be a robot and thus refuse help, I harm the other by omission.

64. Levinas quoted in Morgan (2011: 64).65. Butler (2012: 54).66. Butler (2012: 55), As Butler argues, the interdiction against killing ‘is a

question of what “can” be done and so a question of capacity or power’.67. Ibid.68. Ibid.69. Ibid.70. Ibid.71. Ibid.72. Ibid.73. I draw here specifically on Derrida’s reading of Levinas in Adieu à Emmanuel

Lévinas. Derrida (1997).74. See Raffoul (1998a, 1998b).75. Derrida quoted in Gormley (2012: 396).76. Butler (2004b: 23).77. Derrida (2004: 60).78. Murdoch quoted in Gormley (2012: 388).79. Butler (2004b: 24).80. Levinas quoted in Morgan (2011: 109).81. Gormley (2012: 401).82. Wolin quoted in Gormley (2012: 401).83. Derrida quoted ibid.: 404.84. Cavell (2006: 290).

5 Responsibility beyond the Human?

1. As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, the discourse of humanrights has been criticised by Arendt, who insists that one has to be a citizento be a bearer of rights. I understand this notion as based on her deroga-tory understanding of the ‘natural’ or ‘species being’ of the human. In TheOrigins of Totalitarianism, Arendt states that ‘[t]he great danger arising fromthe existence of people forced to live outside the common world is that theyare thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, ontheir mere differentiation. They lack that tremendous equalizing of differ-ences which comes from being citizens of some commonwealth and yet,since they are no longer allowed to partake in the human artifice, they beginto belong to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to aspecific animal species. The paradox involved in the loss of human rights isthat such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a humanbeing in general . . . representing nothing but his own absolutely unique indi-viduality which, deprived of expression within and action upon a commonworld, loses all significance’.

And she goes on summing up the danger of statelessness that correspondsto the loss of human rights: ‘The danger is that a global universally inter-related civilization may produce barbarism from its own midst by forcing

186 Notes

millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are theconditions of savages’ (Arendt, 1973: 302).

2. Following Jane Bennett’s and Michael Shapiro’s definition, ‘moralism’ refersto ‘a style of speaking, writing, and thinking that is too confident about itsjudgments and thus too punitive in its orientation to others’. See Bennettand Shapiro (2002: 4).

3. The procedures of ordinary language philosophy examine, as Austin phrasedit, ‘what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it’. The‘we’ referred to here, Cavell makes clear, is the native speaker of the givenlanguage, in his case the native English speaker. As Cavell remarks, ordi-nary language philosophy would have relatively little to say about ‘quantumleaps’ or ‘mass society’, but would clarify the nature of cultural phenomenalike morality. As we will see below, it is of great importance that Cavell inthis context defines morality as a cultural and not a ‘natural’ phenomenon.See Cavell (1976) and Hammer (2002: 4–7).

4. There are several references to ‘form of life’ in the Philosophical Investigations,amply discussed in the literature: ‘It is easy to imagine a language consistingonly of order and reports in battle . . . And to imagine a language means toimagine a form of life.’ (§19); ‘Here the term “language-game” is meant tobring into prominence the fact that speaking of language is part of an activity,or of a form of life.’ (§23); ‘ “So you are saying that human agreement decideswhat is true and what is false?” – It is what human beings say that is trueand false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreementin opinions but in form of life’ (§241); ‘Can only those hope who can talk?Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say thephenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life.’ (p. 144);‘What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life’(p. 226), (Wittgenstein, 1953).

5. Cavell (1989: 41).6. Ibid.: 48.7. As Cavell explains, this social reading of Wittgenstein makes him sound too

conventionalist ‘as if when Wittgenstein says that human beings “agree inthe language they use” he imagines that we have between us some kindof contract or an implicitly or explicitly agreed upon set of rules (whichsomeone else might imagine we lack)’ (ibid.: 41).

This social reading has important consequences for the discussion of scep-ticism Cavell’s oeuvre focuses on. The Wittgenstein quote, ‘What has to beaccepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life’ (Wittgenstein,1953: 226), is often understood ‘as proposing a refutation of skepticism withrespect to the existence of other minds. Taken in its social direction thiswould mean that the very existence of, say the sacrament of marriage, orof the history of private property, or of the ceremony of shaking hands, orI guess ultimately the existence of language, constitutes proof of the exis-tence of others. This is not in itself exactly wrong. It may be taken as avision, classically expressed, of the social as natural to the human. But [ . . . ]it begs the skeptical question. Because if what we ‘accept’ as human beings‘turn out to be’ automata or aliens, then can’t we take it that automata oraliens marry and own private property and shake hands and possess lan-guage? You may reply that once it turns out who these things are we (who?)

Notes 187

will no longer fully say that they (or no longer let them?) marry, own shake,speak. Perhaps not, but then this shows that from the fact of their exhibit-ing or ‘participating in’ social forms it does not follow that they are human’(ibid.: 42).

8. In this interpretation, Wittgenstein is read as emphasising the ‘social natureof human language and conduct, as if Wittgenstein’s mission is to rebukephilosophy for concentrating too much on isolated individuals, or foremphasizing the inner at the expense of the outer’. Wittgenstein’s missionwould be to free philosophical thinking from an excessive concentration onthe solipsistic thinking subject (ibid.: 41).

9. See Mulhall (1994: 70–71).10. Cavell calls ‘the natural’ a hidden preoccupation of the Philosophical Inves-

tigations. See Cavell (1989: 41). Cavell here enumerates phrases in thePhilosophical Investigations such as ‘natural reactions’ (§185), ‘fictious naturalhistory’ (p. 230), or ‘the common behaviour of mankind’ (§206).

11. As Cavell argues,

about forms of life having to be accepted, being the given, its biologicaldirection – emphasizing not forms of life, but forms of life . . . The crite-ria of pain, say do not apply to what does not exhibit a form of life, sonot to the realm of the inorganic . . . and there is no criterion for whatdoes exhibit a form of life. This interpretation is part of my argumentthat criteria do not and are not meant to assure the existence of, forexample, states of consciousness, that they do not provide refutationsof skepticism.

(ibid.: 42)

12. Ibid.13. Ibid.: 48.14. On the conservative interpretation of Wittgenstein, see for example Cerbone

(2003: 50); Pleasants (1999: 1).15. Cavell (1989: 44).16. The term ‘Humanität’ we might recall has played a decisive role in Herderian

humanist philosophy where it is defined as the aspiration of dignity, but alsothe expression of the character of our species.

17. As, for example, Bob Plant argues, while

positing a ‘common humanity’ necessarily entails the possibility ofexcluding individuals from that category, [ . . . ] this is not inherentlyunjust . . . in extreme cases where reason and justification have been thor-oughly ‘exhausted’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: §217) is not merely excusablebut the only appropriate response to claim that someone has ‘lost theirhumanity – albeit temporarily. The neo-fascist who tours Auschwitz tolaugh at the photographs of mass graves, or to entertain a friend byclimbing into the incineration ovens (in short, the man who persis-tently indulges in an utterly ‘malicious joy at the misfortune of others’(Schopenhauer, 1995: 135), can indeed be said to have ‘lost their human-ity’ in this sense. His failing is not epistemic; he has neither merely norprimarily made an error of judgement. Rather, his moral reactions and

188 Notes

priorities have become so skewed that he no longer understands what itmeans to make such judgements in the first place.

(Plant, 2005: 94–95)

This choice of example is particularly telling because here the ‘inhumane’ actis not one where another human being, or non-human animal, is physicallyhurt or killed. The point here is that Plant’s discussion does not deal primar-ily with the question whether we kill the other or ‘let them die’ but whetherwe empathise with their pain. This ‘neo-fascist’ however might understandherself as a moral being, with a moral code that appears unacceptable fromour point of view. To deny her humanity, however, would mean that I wouldhave to deny the humanity of a great portion of human beings, and wholesocieties who have been or are involved in practices of slavery, persecution,and discrimination.

18. Ibid.: 82.19. Ibid.: 86.20. Ibid.: 83 see also Wittgenstein (1953: §220).21. Plant (2005: 86); Wittgenstein (1990: §540–542). As Wittgenstein writes,

‘[b]eing sure that someone is in pain, doubting whether he is, and so on,are so many natural, instinctive, kinds of behaviour towards other humanbeings, and our language is merely an auxiliary to, and further extensionof, this relation. Our language-game is an extension of primitive behaviour’(ibid.: §545).

22. Plant here quotes Peter Winch, who argues that ‘ “there could not be ahuman society which was not also, in some sense, a moral community.”Moral problems “force themselves on you” insofar as they emerge from the“common life between men and do not presuppose any particular forms ofactivity in which men engage together”.’ Expanding on this quote, Plantargues that ‘suffering is not primarily an epistemic or hypothetical matter,it is central to the natural life of human beings. The other’s suffering com-mands us to help . . . for it is part of the grammar of others suffering that oneis thereby placed under obligation.’ (Plant, 2005: 88–89).

23. Making this point, Plant quotes Wittgenstein, who states, ‘The game doesn’tbegin with doubting whether someone has a toothache, because thatdoesn’t – as it were – fit the game’s biological function in our life. In itsmost primitive from it is a reaction to somebody’s cries and gestures, a reac-tion of sympathy or something of the sort. We comfort him, try to help him’(ibid.: 87; Wittgenstein, 1993: 381).

24. Plant (2005: 89).25. Ibid.: 87. While Plant does not wish to ‘contest the obvious anthropo-

logical fact that the manner in which different cultures organize andimplement their moral values may vary’, he still argues that ‘the depthof such cultural diversity is not . . . unfathomable, but necessarily circum-scribed both by pre-linguistic behaviours and fundamental physiological-biological facts concerning the inherent vulnerability of mortal, embodiedbeings’.

26. Ibid.: 95.27. Ibid.: 88.

Notes 189

28. As Cavell sums up this discussing,

when, in response to my expressing doubt that there are moral truthsfor whose certainty moral theory should undertake to provide proofs,philosophers more than once have proposed ‘It is wrong to torture chil-dren’ as a certain truth to which moral theory has the responsibility ofproviding an argument, and at least one philosopher added: an argumentstrong enough to convince Hitler.

(Cavell, 2008: 102)

29. Cavell (2008); Diamond (2008); Coetzee (2003).30. In the novel, Costello gives a lecture in which she expresses her horror about

the way we treat animals in order to produce food. She compares this tothe holocaust. Her argument is particularly interesting in the context of thischapter, because what she is repelled by is not only the slaughtering itself,but our willed ignorance or ‘forgetting’.

It is not because they waged an expansionist war, and lost it, thatGermans of a particular generation are still regarded as standing a lit-tle outside humanity, as having to do or be something special before theycan be readmitted to the human fold. They lost their humanity in oureyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part.

While ‘ignorance may have been a useful survival mechanism’, this ‘isan excuse which, with admirable moral rigour, we refuse to accept’. Shedraws a plain comparison between the death-camps of the Nazis and ‘drug-testing laboratories, factory farms, abattoirs’. Those facilities ‘are all aroundus . . . only we do not, in a sense, know about them’. In the view of thefictional character Costello, we are thus ‘surrounded by an enterprise ofdegradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reichwas capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end,self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, live-stock ceaselessly intothe world for the purpose of killing them’. (Coetzee, 2003: 64, 65).

31. Cavell (2008: 102).32. Ibid.: 93.33. Ibid.: 102. And Cavell asks what Thoreau is ‘seeing when he declares, “I never

know a worse man than myself”.’34. Cavell (1989: 69).35. Cavell (2008: 116). As I have remarked in Chapter 4, Cavell also discusses

Thoreau’s perception that ‘his very existence, the assertion of the will tolive in the world by feeding himself’ is ‘without certain justification – thereare debts in living, conditions of existence, . . . that are uncountable. Whatmakes them insupportable is the degree to which they are unnecessary. Thenthe question in which an adventurous life may well be spent in search, orexperiment, is to replace false by true necessaries, or means, to what onetruly finds good (a quest as ancient as Plato’s Republic)’ (ibid.: 117).

36. Cavell (2008: 115).37. When Plant argues that ‘there is something primordially significant about

the human form’, he continues by stating,

[t]hat people campaign for the rights of non-human animals and theunborn foetus is not unintelligible, even to those who passionately

190 Notes

disagree. It is not as though such individuals were to campaign for therights of carpers or iron filings – which clearly would raise questionsconcerning what such ‘rights’ could possibly amount to.

(Plant, 2005: 86)

The argument that ethics is linked to the possibility to possess rights and thatthis possibility is further linked to a certain likeness to the human, however,is not convincing. It appears to exclude a concern for the human relationshipto the non-human world from being a legitimate and ‘ethical’ concern. Thislimits the possibility to develop an environmental ethics that departs froman anthropocentric position.

38. Butler (2004a: 17).39. Lorey also stresses that precariousness implies the fundamental role of repro-

ductive work and care, a notion that links precariousness to notions oflabour, an aspect I will come back to in the next chapter. That precariousnesshighlights care in terms of ‘Sorge’, however, also connects this notion witha Heideggerian understanding of existence. See Lorey (2012: 33–34).

40. As Butler phrases it, ‘If my fate is not originally or finally separable fromyours, then the “we” is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easilyargue against; or, rather, we can argue against it, but we would be denyingsomething fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation.’(Butler, 2004b: 22–23).

41. This, in Butler’s reading, is Melanie Klein’s position. Klein argues that wedevelop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. Our feel-ings of guilt are not, as commonly assumed, an expression of our ‘trulyhuman’ ability for self-reflection, but instead find their origin in the fearof death. Our wish to preserve our own lives would thus take into accountthe relational character of life. What guilt is then supposed to keep in checkis the wish to destroy the other/object to whom one is bound. ‘If Klein isright’, Butler writes, ‘I probably don’t care very much about the other personas such; they do not come into focus for me as another, separate from me,who “deserves” to live and whose life depends on my ability to check myown destructiveness’ and she follows that ‘indeed it would seem that guiltdoes not index a moral relation to the other, but an unbridled desire forself-preservation’. (Butler, 2009: 45, 46).

42. As Bonnie Honig has argued, here Butler’s project appears closely related toWhite’s, which Honig labels ‘mortalist humanism’, a position I have crit-icised in Chapter 1. Honig acknowledges that Butler is right in directingour attention towards the ways in which ‘contemporary democracies’ ten-dency to suppress or instrumentalise grief on behalf of national aims’. Shemaintains, however, that focusing on the universality of grief is problematicbecause mortality and grieving are ‘always also wrapped up in – inseparablefrom – their meaning, which varies (as Butler concedes)’. Honig thus calls fora deconstruction of the binary of death and burial in which death appearsas a univocal natural and universal fact and burial or grief as the sociallyvariable, in a similar way as Butler in her earlier work had deconstructed therelationship between gender and sex. Moreover, as Honig argues, basing a‘return to humanism’ on shared mortality and grief overlooks the ‘equallyimportant resources of feast and finitude, appetite and hunger, abundance

Notes 191

and lack, festival and lamentation’. As Honig stresses, we ‘may all be mortals(with varying attitudes toward and experiences of death) but we are also, asArendt insists along with Nietzsche, natals as well; and a focus on natality –which is no less minimal than mortality, ontologically speaking – may gener-ate new commonalities while orienting humanism differently than mortalitydoes’. See Honig (2010: 8).

43. Butler (2004b: 20).44. Butler (2009: 3).45. Lorey (2012: 25).46. Butler (2009: 15).47. Butler (2004a: 4).48. Butler (2004a: xvii).49. Butler (2004b: xvii). As Butler argues, ‘[t]he media’s evacuation of the human

through the image has to be understood . . . in terms of the broader problemthat normative schemes of intelligibility establish what will and will notbe human, what will be livable life, what will be a grievable death. Thesenormative schemes operate not only by producing an ideal of the humanthat differentiate among those who are more and less human. Sometimesthey produce images of the less than human, in the guise of the human,to show how the less than human disguises itself, and threatens to deceivethose of us who might think we recognize another human there, in that face.But sometimes these normative schemes work precisely through providingno image, no name, no narrative, so that there never was a life, and therenever was a death.’ (Butler, 2004b: 146).

50. Butler (2004b: xvii).51. As Butler states,

The ‘being’ of life is itself constituted through selective means; as a result,we cannot refer to this ‘being’ outside of the operations of power, andwe must make more precise the specific mechanisms of power throughwhich life is produced. Obviously, this insight has consequences forthinking about ‘life’ in cellular biology and the neurosciences, sincecertain ways of framing life inform those scientific practices as wellas debates about the beginning and the end of life in discussions ofreproductive freedom and euthanasia.

(Butler, 2009: 2)

52. Ibid.: 2.53. Ibid.: 3.54. Ibid.: 16.55. Ibid.: 18.56. I introduce this example to highlight Butler’s argument that there are no

ontological grounds to argue for or against the protection of a certain kind oflife, but rather only for looking critically at the frameworks used to considercategories of life. This argument is thus used to distinguish her discoursefrom the ‘pro-life’ discourse, a discourse that, as Butler omits to mention,most of the time would argue in a different vein, which is not addressedby Butler. For many pro-life activists, what matters in not personhood but aGod-given soul, an issue that is difficult to address from Butler’s perspective.

57. Ibid.: 19.

192 Notes

58. Ibid.59. Ibid.60. Ibid.: 20.61. Ibid.: 21, 23.62. For such an approach, see Deutscher (2008).63. Butler (2009: 16).64. On the idea of companionship and eating animals, see Cavell (2008:

103–105), and Diamond. On a differentiated treatment of non-humananimals regarding their status as ‘food’ or companion, see Wolfe (2013: 53).

65. Derrida (2008: 23).66. While I here concentrate mainly on the ‘negative’ effect of scientific dis-

course on the relationship to the animal, it should also be noted that currentcalls for animal rights are also often linked to scientific discoveries in biology,where previous assumptions about the mental, linguistic, and moral capabil-ities of animals are called into question. See for example Clay and de Waal(2013).

67. Derrida (2008: 25).68. Ibid.69. Ibid.70. The fictional character Abraham Stern writes to Costello,

The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is atrick with words which I will not accept. You misunderstand the natureof likenesses; I would even say you misunderstand wilfully, to the pointof blasphemy. Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not havethe likeness of man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow thatcattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead.It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way.

(Coetzee, 2003: 94)

71. Derrida quoted in Wolfe (2013: 44).72. Ibid.: 45.73. This question has important implications for our ethical thinking as a whole.

As Cavell points out, ‘the case of breeding animals for the manufacturingof food’ not only elicits an ‘extremity of responses ranging from horror toindifference’. Moreover, in difference to other difficult questions such as thedeath penalty, the legitimacy of war, torture of prisoners, euthanasia or abor-tion, the question of killing animals on a large scale is an issue ‘that touchesthe immediate and perhaps invisible choices of most of the members of asociety every day’. It is thus the prevalence or ‘every-dayness’ of the question,and the possibility to make relatively easy ‘life-style’ choices in response toit that make it particularly interesting. See Cavell (2008: 93).

74. By pointing out that animals, for example his cat, look at him, Derrida drawsattention to the viewpoint of the other, making the animal-other appear inher singularity. For Levinas, Derrida continues,

the animal has no face, he does not have the naked face that looks at meto the extent of my forgetting the color of its eyes. The word nudity, whichis used so frequently, which is so indispensable for Levinas in describingthe face, skin and vulnerability of the other or of my relation to the other,

Notes 193

of my responsibility for the other when I say ‘here I am,’ never concernsnudity in its sexual difference and never appears within the field of myrelation to the animal.

(Derrida, 2008: 107)

75. As we have seen, White argues for an ethical position built on an awarenessof common mortality. This position distinguishes the human from the ani-mal by giving weight to the notion of awareness/consciousness of mortalityand dignity. Other animals might be mortal but (we assume that) they arenot aware of it in the way human beings are. Therefore, there is a specificdignity to human life. For White, human dignity is synonymous with ourcapacity for linguistic expression and reasoning that justifies the preferencegiven to human life above all other life-forms. It is the ‘capacity for disclo-sure and articulation that best constitutes what human dignity amounts to,and thus that to which we owe justice’, see White (2009: 131).

76. Ibid.: 50. White uses this example in order to argue against WilliamConnolly’s notion of presencing; however, I believe his argument could beequally directed against Derrida’s notion of the animal as other to whom weare responsible.

77. Butler (2012: 39).78. On Benjamin’s and Levinas’s notion of the anarchic, see Butler (2012: 67–68).79. Butler (2004a: 13).

6 Re-Imagining the Political

1. See, for example, Hardt and Negri (2005) and Virno (2004).2. Arendt (1961: 3).3. Ibid.: 4.4. Ibid.5. Ibid.: 5.6. Ibid.: 6.7. Arendt argues that since 1789, spontaneous councils emerged in every rev-

olution, without any of the participants knowing that such councils hadexisted previously. She cites Paris in 1870 and 1871, Russia during the spon-taneous and not party-led strikes in 1905 and during the first apprising at thetime of World War I and during the February revolution of 1917, as well asGermany in 1918–1919 and Hungary in 1956 as examples. See Arendt (1963:264–276).

8. möglichst unmittelbaren, weitgehenden und unbeschränkten Teilnahme desEinzelnen am öffentlichen Leben (Arendt, 1965 quoting in ftn 80: 324 Anweiler,1958 ‘Die Räte in der ungarischen Revolution’ in ‘Osteuropa’ Bd.8,).

9. Ibid.: 338.10. Ibid.: 339.11. Ibid.: 340 she quotes from Fröhlich (1949) Rosa Luxemburg.12. Arendt remarks how surprisingly short time it took for the Hungarian ‘neigh-

bourhood’ councils to build, ‘as if by natural inclination’ higher organsthat coordinated their actions, and allowed for the formation of regional-and provincial organisations and state-wide systems of representation andorganisation (ibid.: 343).

194 Notes

In Arendt’s mind they did so without discussing on a theoretical level howa large-scale republican state could be established. Moreover, again she main-tains that their strife towards state-building also happened in absence of theunifying pressure of a common external enemy. As already remarked aboveI find this claim, and with it the clear distinction between a ‘Schmittian’and ‘Arendtian’ notion of the political, highly dubious. Arendt disregardsthe more complicated historical situations within which councils emerged.As she herself has conceded, councils were usually part of a public upris-ing that necessarily directed against something and were, as in the case ofHungary, also quickly suppressed by this shared external enemy. To arguethat their forms of organisation were not in any way influenced by this‘enemy’ thus appears highly doubtful.

For her the history of councils is unified by the spontaneous will to founda new political body, a new type of republican state based on councils, ina way that the central power would not usurp the particular, original, andconstitutive power of the constituting parts. This aspiration, however, hasso far always failed. Nevertheless, for Arendt the council republics remainthe first and only actual revolutionary hope for European peoples and, asshe adds, maybe in future for the entire world population. As a new form ofpolitical organisation, councils would allow everyone to take part in currentpublic affairs, even under the aversive conditions of mass society (ibid.: 341).

13. For a more detailed discussion see Butler (2012: 141–149).14. From the perspective of today we might add that colonial expansion

set in motion social and political processes which still, in the course ofpost-colonial wars and persisting economic hardship, influence patterns ofmigration from former colonies towards Europe.

15. Arendt did not employ the term ‘biopolitics’. What she describes, however,presupposes the extension of statistical acquisition and census of popula-tions which produces a form of knowledge that allows the ‘manipulation’,and ‘purification’ of the nation. The term biopolitics also highlights theconnection between population control and notions of productivity, whichhave played an important role in discourses of migration control and the‘nationalisation’ of populations (see, for example, Foucault, 2008, 2009).

16. In her argumentation, Arendt thus presupposes the conflation of person-hood, defined as the ability to be a bearer of rights and humanity, which wehave sought to call into question (Arendt, 1973: 267).

17. See Arendt (2006c: 25–26).18. Ibid.: 275. In the case of Europe, questions of national belonging and citizen-

ship have developed in the light of not only the work-migration programmesof the 1950s to 1970s but also the ‘asylum crises’ since the 1990s and theprocess of EU expansion. See, for example, Karakayali (2008).

19. Borders have never been completely controllable, and states will also infuture not be able to control completely the movement of migrants. Whatmight be new, however, is a double standard, where EU states aim to defendtheir territorial sovereignty by expanding border controls and regulationbeyond their actual state-territory through a system of ‘third-countries’ andthe control of the Mediterranean Sea by the Frontex border agency and theincorporation of private transport companies in the mechanisms of migra-tion control (see, for example, Hess and Kasparek, 2010). However, we might

Notes 195

note that the European nation state as a construct has always relied on impe-rial relationships to other countries that have included the expansion notonly of its economic influence but also of its territory beyond ‘national’borders, in order to secure a notion of sovereignty of the ‘core’ country.

20. Arendt (1973: 279). About the relevance of the camp for current policies ofmigration within the EU see, for example, Pieper (2010: 219–228).

Arendt states that even ‘the terminology has deteriorated’. In her argu-mentation, the term ‘stateless’ had ‘at least acknowledged the fact that thesepersons had lost the protection of their government and required inter-national agreements for safeguarding their legal status’. By contrast, the‘post-war term “displaced persons” was invented during the war for theexpress purpose of liquidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring itsexistence’. As Arendt points out, ‘[n]onrecognition of statelessness alwaysmeans repatriation, i.e., deportation to a country of origin, which eitherrefuses to recognize the prospective repatriate as a citizen, or, on the contrary,urgently wants him back for punishment’. (Arendt, 1973: 279). We mightadd that current debates routinely speak of ‘illegal immigration’ which fur-ther assumes the necessity of repatriation. In particular, we should be waryof a rhetoric that seeks to delineate so-called legitimate asylum seekers (whoturn out to be virtually none, in particular, as it would not be possible formost to enter the EU legally) from so-called illegitimate economic migrants.As Serhart Karakayali shows in his empirical study on ‘illegal’ migration inGermany, the reasons for migration could never be fit neatly into the cat-egories states have offered (Karakayali, 2008: 16). A No Borders networkmanifesto notes: ‘People move for many different reasons. Many of thecauses of global migration can be traced back to the West’s imperial and cap-italist ventures: western-manufactured weapons and armed conflicts, wars ofaggression in pursuit of oil and other natural resources, repressive regimesbacked by Western governments, climate change and land grabs, and soon. But this is not the whole story. We shouldn’t overemphasise the roleof western powers and fall into the trap of seeing people who migrate ashelpless victims. People have always travelled in search of better living con-ditions, or simply to pursue their dreams and desires.’ (http://noborders.org.uk/node/47) To appeal to a general notion of freedom of movement recog-nises the problematic conception of ownership and belonging I have notedin Chapter 4. What we should recognise in discourses about the undeserving‘economic’ migrants is a non-reflective notion of entitlement to the richesof the world. A prosperity that, we might add, is based on the dispropor-tional distribution of economic and political power, which has its roots inthe history of European colonial expansion.

21. See, for example, Derrida (2002: 100). As Derrida argues, a politics that doesnot make references to unconditional hospitality loses its reference to justice,because it would be unable to take the other into account. See Derrida (2005).

22. See here also Arendt (1972) – in the essay on civil disobedience Arendt arguesnot only that law is the necessary durable structure of society, whose stabil-ity enables change within its parameters, but also that the idea of law isterritorially bound.

23. As Paolo Virno describes it, Hobbes’s multitude ‘shuns political unity, resistsauthority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status

196 Notes

of juridical person because it never transfers its own natural rights to thesovereign.’ As Virno argues, it is this concept of multitude that resurfacesin the current ‘post-fordist’ globalised world, where state sovereignty isincreasingly weakened. See Virno (2004: 23).

24. The German term Sozialstaat Lorey uses connotes a stronger and more car-ing function as the English translation welfare-state allows for – a differencethat in practice is mirrored by the different dimensions of welfare and pub-lic provisions and understandings of relationship between citizens and statein Anglo-American and the Western and Northern European states. See e.g.Espen-Andersen (1990). However, even in this formulation, I would arguethat the care function of the state has always been an evolving and disputedfield, which depended on a series of exclusions and thus never existed in astatic or stable form.

25. Lorey (2012: 24).26. Ibid.: 54.27. A concentration on the economic or labour aspect of precarity has been

prevalent in the German-speaking discussion on the move towards neoliber-alism and post-fordism in the past decades (das Prekäre and das Prekariat – aterm that reminds us of the Proletariat, the Marxist workers). Lorey does notdistinguish between work and labour the way Arendt does, and I thereforeuse these terms as interchangeable in the discussion below.

28. In this context, Paolo Virno notes that in current globalised conditionsthe Heideggerian distinction between fear and anguish collapses. While fearrefers to a clearly defined danger (e.g. a natural disaster or the loss of one’sjob), anguish has no clear or single cause. It is ‘provoked purely and simplyby our being exposed to the world, by the uncertainty and indecision withwhich our relation to this world manifests itself’. Virno links this distinc-tion to the difference between life as part of ‘the people’, where in a closedcommunity a ‘clear separation between a habitual “inside and an unknownhostile” outside’ can be made. Here anguish as a reaction to the unknown isheld in check and replaced by fear. In the world of the multitude, however,no such distinction is possible. For Virno ‘the permanent mutability of theforms of life, and the training needed for confronting the unchecked uncer-tainty of life, lead us to a direct and continuous relation with the worldas such’ which in turn causes an ‘overlapping of fear and anguish’. As heexplains,

If I lose my job, of course I am forced to confront a well defined dan-ger, one which gives rise to a specific kind of dread; but this real dangeris immediately colored by an unidentifiable anguish. It is fused togetherwith a more general disorientation in the presence of the world in whichwe live; it is identified with the absolute insecurity which lives in thehuman animal . . . One might say: fear is always anguish-ridden; circum-scribed danger always makes us face the general risk of being in thisworld. If the substantial communities once hid or muffled our relation-ship with the world, then their dissolution now clarifies this relationshipfor us: the loss of one’s job, or the change which alters the features ofthe functions of labor, or the loneliness of metropolitan life – all theseaspects of our relationship with the world assume many of the traits

Notes 197

which formerly belonged to the kind of terror one feels outside of thewalls of the community.

(Virno, 2004: 32, 33)

29. Lorey (2012: 85).30. Ibid.: 86.31. Ibid.: 92. In the precarisation of work then ethnic and gender roles are still

interwoven in ways where female migrants do the ‘traditional female carejobs’ which remain insecure and badly paid.

32. Frassanito-network (2005) http://thistuesday.org/node/93 (accessed on the26.04.2013).

33. See Lorey (2012: 107–110).34. Arendt noted that while capacity for action, to create something new that

we cannot control, can leave the political realm this is deeply problematic.Linking action to science she writes:

Modern natural science and technology, which no longer observe or takematerial from or imitate processes of nature but seem actually to act intoit, seem . . . to have carried irreversibility and human unpredictability intothe natural realm, where no remedy can be found to undo what has beendone . . . Nothing seems more manifest in these attempts than the great-ness of human power, whose source lies in the capacity to act, and whichwithout action’s inherent remedies inevitably begins to overpower anddestroy not man himself but the conditions under which life was givento him.

(Arendt, 1998: 238)

35. No-Borders network: http://noborders.org.uk/node/47, http://www.noborder.org/about.php (accessed on the 13.04.2013).

36. Ibid.37. Ibid.38. Celikates (2010: 281–291).39. Lorey argues for an understanding of exodus from the neoliberal governmen-

tality that would result from the refusal of capitalisable self-regulation andthe development of another form of self-formation, which in this refusaltests out new forms of living (im Ungehorsam neue Lebensweisen erprobt).She makes clear however that such a refusal does not free ourselves fromour interwovenness in neoliberal systems (kein Befreiungsschlag von allenbisheringen neoliberalen Verstrickungen) but is only the beginning of ongoingstruggles about how to be governed and govern oneself. (Lorey, 2012: 130).

This understanding builds on a Foucaultian notion of the relationshipbetween subject and state, where a positive, activating form of govern-ing tries to integrate the individual in relationships of power. Instead ofworking with punishment or exclusions, such forms of governmentalitywould instead aim to render the life of the singular human being and thepopulation as a whole more economically productive, thus creating an inter-nalised pressure within individuals to correspond to socially diffused normsof productivity. See, for example, Hess and Kasparek (2010: 18).

40. The possible tension between a preoccupation with the world, which presup-poses a disinterestedness in one’s personal affairs, and the wish to develop

198 Notes

an authentic self is not sufficiently addressed by Arendt. In the Arendtianformulation, paradoxically, the formation of a distinct individuality presup-poses an indifference towards the self, the wish to live an authentic life thusappears as one which cannot as such motivate a person to step into the politi-cal sphere but is ‘accidentally’ discovered by the political actor. Paradoxically,however, authenticity is also a strong motivational force to act politically, asArendt shows in her discussion of the Greek heroes who, by showing theirauthentic self, become immortal through their actions.

41. For Arendt, love is not political because ‘everything that appears in pub-lic’ must be ‘seen and heard by everybody’ and therefore have ‘the widestpossible publicity’. In Arendt’s definition, however, love is a narrowly con-strued relationship between one man and one woman who, by the force oftheir passion for each other, destroy the in-between necessary for politicalrelationships. Love, she argues, ‘by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others’. While Arendtascribes to love an ‘unequalled power of self-revelation and an unequalledclarity of vision for the disclosure of who’ a core function of acting in thepublic sphere, the disclosure of lovers remains unworldly (Arendt, 1998:242).

We might argue against Arendt, however, that any private relationshipindeed has social, cultural, and political significance that exceeds the per-sonal dyad. Our relationships only appear as unworldly if we do not considerthe role of discourses that enable or restrict love, desire, and passion, theways in which we are together and the ways in which these bonds arerecognised socially and politically. We might therefore not only questionthe ‘private’ nature of the relationship between two people (the historicaland cultural contingency of which is already shown in Arendt’s hetero-sexist formulation) but also consider how personal relationships create anemotion surplus that can be directed beyond the private towards a polit-ical articulation to enable certain forms of relationships which are deniedrecognition.

42. Therefore, Arendt continues, we should regard ‘the modern loss of respect’as a ‘symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life’(Arendt, 1998: 243).

43. Ibid.: 240. Arendt distinguishes trespassing which is frequent from crime,which in her mind is seldom, and from the even rarer ‘radical evil’. Whilethe former two can either be forgiven or punished (and only that whichcould be punished could be forgiven), confronted with radical evil one cando neither. Radical evil thus marks the transcendence of the realm of humanaffairs and ‘the potentialities of human power’. Paradoxically, Arendt seemsto demand, here and later in the closing pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem, topunish with death that which is not punishable, by quoting Jesus that it‘were better for him [the evil-doer] that a millstone were hanged about hisneck, and he cast into the sea’ (Arendt, 1998: 241). See for a discussion ofArendt on the death penalty for Eichmann, Butler (2012: 158–167).

44. Arendt (1998: 238).45. Hetzel (2010: 249).46. Ibid.: 246.47. See also Hetzel (2010: 246).

Notes 199

48. Butler (2004b: 20).49. The definition of solidarity I propose thus differs decisively from earlier def-

initions prevalent in the 19th century where solidarity was understood ascreating social cohesion in an increasingly dispersed, but clearly delineated,society. This latter understanding is still present in the Marxian argumenta-tion. While calling for international solidarity, it understands this solidarityas one that exists between equals, that is, workers who share a commonidentity and common goals. See Marchart (2010: 357).

50. Ibid.51. For a discussion of these issues, see, for example, Schaap (2011), Menke

(2007), and Ranciere (2004).52. Schaap (2011: 38–39).53. See here also the notion of communitas which Roberto Esposito has for-

warded. See Bedorf (2012: 32).54. Butler (2004a: 3).55. Kioupkiolis (2011: 696).56. Ibid., see also Hardt and Negri (2005: 87, 208–211, 217–218, 340, 225–226)

and Critchley (2007: 102–147).

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 74, 85agency, 22–3, 27, 36, 46, 50–2, 58, 62,

65–6, 68, 73–4, 96–7, 135, 164moral, 90, 110, 164political, 44, 55, 69, 135–6, 138,

141, 148, 156–7, 162–4, 167Arendt, Hannah on

action, 20–37, 42, 142–3, 157councils, 137, 142freedom, 14, 21–2, 25, 27, 30, 32,

35–6, 45, 138–41, 151–2, 163Greek polis, 14, 31, 138Holocaust, 20, 29homo faber, 25, 27, 29judgement, 33–5, 37, 39, 41–4labour, 24–5, 30, 32plurality, 15, 22, 23, 26, 27, 34, 35,

42, 56political sphere, 14, 20– 27, 30–2,

35–8, 137–44, 155–8, 163social (the), 6, 18, 21–4, 32, 152–3thinking (as activity), 32, 34–8,

41–2uniqueness, 15, 20–4, 26– 28, 30,

32–3, 64, 74, 140, 143work, 24–6, 28, 30–1, 34, 152

authenticityand Arendt, 20, 23, 38, 141and Cavell, 85, 98and Heidegger, 6–7and Lorey, 152

Benhabib, Seyla, 21, 171Butler, Judith on

abortion, 126–8freedom, 65Hegel, 71iterability and Derrida, 62mourning, 71, 104, 123–5, 128–9psychoanalysis, 57, 65, 69, 70, 72,

122, 167subjection, 57, 67–8

Cavarero, Adriana, 21, 75Cavell, Stanley on

acknowledgement, 81, 82, 84, 86,89, 96, 136

criteria, 48–9, 52, 81, 115‘form of life’, 86, 109, 111–14,

119–20freedom, 83–5, 89, 114ordinary language philosophy, 80,

110, 111perfectionism, 47, 52, 53, 56, 85,

110, 117, 166robots, 81scepticism, 47, 48, 49, 55, 56, 79,

80, 81, 88, 89, 107, 166Cooetzee, John, 118Costello, Elizabeth, 118, 131

daimon, 28, 39Derrida, Jacques, 7, 60, 62, 64, 79,

100, 104–5, 110, 130–3, 146doxa, 40

Emerson, Ralf Waldo, 52, 119–20

forgiveness, 158Foucault, Michel, 65–9, 148, 149freedom, see Arendt on, Cavell on,

Levinas onFrench Resistance, 139–41, 154Freud, Sigmund, 69

genocide, 131–2see also Arendt on the Holocaust

governmentality, 66, 68, 148–150,156, 163

Hegel, 74see also Butler on

Heidegger, Martin, 3–13, 23–4, 31, 47,66, 72, 95

Hobbes, Thomas, 148, 158

207

208 Index

Holocaust, see genocide and Arendt onHolocaust

Honneth, Axel, 160–1hospitality, 100–3, 145–6, 161

see also welcomingHungary (revolution), 142

Kant, Immanuel, 40–1, 84–5, 106Kiopkioulis, Alexandros, 3

Laplanche, Jean, 69–70, 72Levinas, Emanuel, 79, 90–105,

107, 115, 120, 122, 124–5,132–3

on the ‘face’, 91–3on freedom, 96–7

life story, 22, 27, 30, 39, 74Lorey, Isabell, 122, 148–52

Marchart, Oliver, 10–13, 138Marx and Marxism, 11, 113, 140migration, 144–7, 151, 153, 161monstrosity, monster, 117–19, 131moral patient, 109–10moral subject, 33, 54, 82–4, 90, 92, 99,

114, 118Morgan, Michael, 94, 96–7mortality, 5–9, 16, 39, 46, 72, 95Murdoch, Iris, 104

natality, 8, 23, 27, 34, 35, 39, 72, 74nation state, 12, 31, 103, 111,

137, 138, 140, 143–7, 149, 150,155

naturalism, 110, 114non-human animal, 112, 118, 119,

120, 128–33, 135

Oliver, Kelly, 180ontic, 12–13, 138

pain (criteria for), 81–2, 88, 115–17philia politike, 157Plant, Bob, 115–17, 120plurality, 22, 23, 26, 27, 34, 35, 42, 56,

74, 76, 113, 136political (the), 6, 10–14, 21–2, 26,

30–1, 35, 37, 38, 44, 56, 98–100,

102, 104, 105, 109, 134, 137–44,147, 152, 153–9, 162–5

see also Arendt on the politicalsphere

post-fordism, 150, 152postfoundationalism, 3, 7, 10–12, 136power relations, 31, 47, 56, 63, 66, 75,

100, 142, 156precariousness, 49, 107, 121–7, 133,

148–51, 153, 162precarity, 123–5, 129, 147–54, 156,

162–3prison, 67

recognition, 7, 28, 31, 47, 64, 71, 101,115, 121, 125, 129, 134, 136,160–1

respect as a political affect, 138, 157–8revolution, 137–42Riley, Denise, 75Rorty, Richard, 3, 176, 177

solidarity, 123, 137–8, 143, 153, 156,157, 160–2

soul, 36, 39, 53, 67–8, 83, 88, 116,119

spectator, 28, 29, 31, 43statelessness, 143–5, 147storyteller, 28, 29

see also life story and spectator

trauma, 29–30, 79, 95, 104, 106trust, 82, 104

as a political affect, 138, 157–9

uniqueness, 20–4, 26–28, 30, 32, 33,39, 44, 50–2, 57, 64, 69, 74–6, 82,91, 96, 117, 134, 140, 143, 161,165

violence, 25, 67, 75, 98, 100, 102, 119,120, 123–5, 131, 158, 162

distribution of, 100and normativity, 57, 65

Virno, Paolo, 148vulnerability, 2, 72, 73, 91, 93, 96, 97,

104, 121, 122, 124, 125, 129, 135,159, 162

Index 209

weak ontology, 7–9, 165welcoming, 79, 102–3, 105,

108see also hospitality

White, Stephen K., 8–11, 132–3Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 48–50, 81, 100,

109–11, 113–16Wolfe, Cary, 131