In this essay I compare Nussbaum's and Arendt's approach to narrativity. The point of the comparison is to find out which approach is more adequate for practical philosophy: the approach influenced by cognitive theory or the one influenced by hermeneutic phenomenology. I conclude that Nussbaum's approach is flawed by methodological solipsism, which is due to her application of cognitive theory.

Proceedings of the annual congress of the Finnish Philosophical Association in 2013. Theme: memory.

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a group as such. What makes groups important, over and above the individual worth of the group's members? This paper explores Hannah Arendt's efforts to answer that question, and concludes that she failed. In the course of the argument, it examines her understanding of Jewish history, her ideas about “the social,” and her conception of “humanity” as a normative stance toward international responsibility rather than a descriptive concept.

Commentaries on Eichmann in Jerusalem are of two kinds. The first confronts the historical relevance of Arendt's `report' and attempts to ascertain whether her ironical presentation of Eichmann's trial matches reality, namely, the incommensurable suffering of the Jewish people. The second focuses on the meaning of her expression `the banality of evil', and places Arendt in a long tradition of moral and political philosophy concerned with the problem of evil and, accordingly, of judging evil. The argument of this paper is (...) that both paths of research miss Arendt's intention, and that her `report' has to be read in light of Walter Benjamin's conceptions of history and storytelling. On the one hand, Eichmann in Jerusalem was not intended to reflect reality objectively because, as Arendt claimed, the objectivity of scientific historiography may serve only to condone the genocide. Throughout her entire work, Arendt aimed at avoiding the neutrality of historicism, the `tradition of sine ira et studio', which, according to her, represents a renunciation of responsibility. On the other hand, Arendt emphasized that she did not attempt to write about the nature of evil but to faithfully describe a phenomenon. Therefore the questions to be answered are: What did Arendt mean by a `report'? What does it mean to describe Eichmann's trial non-objectively but faithfully? In this paper, I show that her report should be understood in the light of a new methodological experiment inherited from Benjamin, which can be broken down into two steps: 1. To reveal the truth of history in stories rather than seek historical `objectivity' through theories; and 2. To look at events from forgotten standpoints, which are assumed to represent the experienced `inside' of history. (shrink)

This essay explores recent scholarship on Hannah Arendt's contribution to the field of global justice. I show that many of Arendt's ideas have been brought to bear fruitfully on some of the most pressing global issues of our day. I turn first to the area in which Arendt has, arguably, been most influential, namely human right. I then look at recent scholarship on Arendt and various issues in global justice, including immigration, statelessness, human security, global poverty, political reconciliation, and global (...) democracy. This essay offers a critical analysis of the ways that Arendt's work has been employed in discussions of global justice and highlights the contributions that she has made to this field of thought.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, and (...) the Arendtian account of solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus, Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity politics feminist theory in good stead. (shrink)

We discuss some implications of the Holocaust for moral philosophy. Our thesis is that morality became distorted in the Third Reich at the level of its social articulation. We explore this thesis in application to several front-line perpetrators who maintained false moral self-conceptions. We conclude that more than a priori moral reasoning is required to correct such distortions.

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the (...) “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre- or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes place—and thus the very possibility of politics. (shrink)

Amongst the Arendtian scholars, there is almost a consensus on Arendt’s supposedly reluctance to the question of the body. The Arendtian body is said to belong to the unpolitical realm of necessity, in other words, the body is a private matter that should not appear in public. It is antipolitical. However, in this paper, I want to suggest that there is a possibility to outline a phenomenology of embodied political action in what I think to be Arendt’s hidden phenomenology of (...) the body. To make my point, I will first show that what the scholars call the Arendtian body is in fact an Arendtian Body. Secondly, in the German version of The Human Condition, Arendt surprisingly used the Heideggerian term Befindlichkeit that, I will argue, outline the basis of a political phenomenology of the body in Arendt’s work. More precisely, I will try to show that political action is embodied, that there is a hexis, a pathos and an ethos of action. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s fierce critique of sovereignty, along with her excavation of Greek agonism, has gained much traction among critical theorists of international politics who revisit the basic assumptions of conventional international theories, such as state sovereignty and power as domination. This paper engages with an increasingly popular stream within such critical international studies that appropriates Arendt’s agonism to envision a form of a global public acting in concert. I argue that Arendt’s thoughts cannot be reduced to a radical vision of (...) agonistic cosmo-politics. Rather, her thinking suggests that political actors appreciate and care for their public worlds while remaining alert to institutional ossification. Her appreciation of the constitutional state confirms that state agency is an important element of her thoughts. By examining the vicissitudes of publicity found in Arendt’s thinking and their reflexive effect on inter-polity relations, the article elucidates the grounds of her international agonism and brings home a form of international politics where states pursuing the domestic goal of greatness coexist and cooperate. Thus, the study suggests that critical scholars of radical agonism miss the important implications of an “institutional” Arendt for international politics. (shrink)

International relations (IR) scholars have increasingly integrated Hannah Arendt into their works. Her fierce critique of the conventional ideas of politics driven by rulership, enforcement, and violence has a particular resonance for theorists seeking to critically revisit the basic assumptions of IR scholarship. Arendt’s thinking, however, contains complexity and nuance that need careful treatment when extended beyond domestic politics. In particular, Arendt’s vision of free politics—characterized by the dualistic emphasis on agonistic action and institutional stability—raises two crucial issues that need (...) further elaboration for IR research that appropriates her thinking. One involves the orientation of her international thoughts. Although Arendt shows “idealistic” aspirations for authentic politics practiced by diverse equals in an institutionally articulated space of freedom, she never loses interest in the extant situation of “non-idealistic” politics. Engaging with Arendt’s theory orientation requires a careful analysis of difficult topics, such as her distinctive conception of the political and her critiques of the nation-state and international law. The other topic that needs clarification when Arendt’s thoughts are applied to IR involves specific ways of associating different sites of power. A close examination of Arendt’s council-based federalism reveals her distinctive idea of international politics, based on her acute awareness of the fundamental complexity that lies in power association and state agency. Bringing IR topics like state agency into conversation with her works generates illuminating questions for Arendt scholarship. Likewise, the ongoing debate on agonistic and institutional features of Arendt’s thoughts can provide crucial insights into critical studies of international politics. (shrink)

This article puts Arendt’s conception of non-human animal appearance into a productive dialogue with recent developments in critical animal studies and animal rights theory within which notions such as agency, zoopolis, and animal agora play an important role. By reinterpreting the animal condition in Arendt’s account of the human condition, it demonstrates her potential contribution to political theory in a world where non-human-animals and nature are seen as making claims of entry into the political community. By emphasizing Arendt’s later work, (...) in which she expresses an openness towards the possibility that non-human animals are drawn to appear, the article indicates how Arendt might help us, both to rethink the boundaries of the political community beyond the human species, and to recognize the political agency of non-human animals. (shrink)

The book Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity is a contribution not only to the phenomenological tradition of thought and Hannah Arendt studies, but also political science and, most importantly, political philosophy. Sophie Loidolt advances an intervention that stands in contrast to contemporary phenomenological research which in certain times have had the tendency to perform depoliticized examination of the self and sociality, actually revealing the intention of Phenomenology of Plurality to articulate the numerous elements that comprise the methodological (...) novelty with which Arendt changes the theory of the political. (shrink)

Abstract. — This article argues that the reading of Plato has had an influence on the development of Hannah Arendt’s (1906-1975) political philosophy. It sketches H. Arendt’s profile of the “political Plato” and shows how Plato’s philosophy inspired H. Arendt’s philosophical project. It pays a special attention to the subject of totalitarianism. It shows that H. Arendt’s reading was greatly influenced by the ideological interpretations of Plato of the 1930’s and 1940’s, and by the work and the method of interpretation (...) developed by Martin Heidegger. Résumé. — Cet article pose que la lecture de Platon a influencé le développement de la philosophie politique d’Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Il esquisse le profil du « Platon politique » arendtien et met en lumière les inspirations que l’oeuvre platonicienne a insufflées au projet philosophique d’H. Arendt, en portant une attention particulière au thème du totalitarisme. Il démontre que la lecture d’H. Arendt a été fortement influencée par les interprétations idéologiques de Platon des années 1930 et 1940, et par les travaux et la méthode d’interprétation développée par Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

What can Hannah Arendt's writings offer to current thinking on the environment? Although there are some obvious connections between her work and current issues in environmental ethics, not very much has been written on the topic. This article argues that Arendt's philosophy is particularly fruitful for environmental thinking because she explicitly links the material and biological conditions of human existence with the political conditions of human freedom. This is articulated in the article as the requirement of both constrained consumption and (...) unconstrained deliberation. The article elaborates these notions before concluding that Arendt's philosophy uniquely combines the existential task of self-understanding with the practical task of confronting our environmental challenges. (shrink)

Agonistic recognition in education has three interlinked modes of aesthetic experience and self-presentation where one is related to actions in the public realm; one is related to plurality in the way in which it comes into existence in confrontation with others; and one is related to the subject-self, disclosed by ‘thinking. Arendt’s conception of ‘thinking’ is a way of getting to grips with aesthetic self-presentation in education. By action, i.e., by disclosing oneself and by taking initiatives, students and teachers constitute (...) their being. The way Arendt theorizes action (vita activa) makes it essentially unpredictable and destabilizing, which does not seem to fit into what should be expected from education. In the article I will argue that it should have a place by virtue of the debate, challenge and contest it offers. But education should also be defined from a specific kind of contemplation called ‘thinking’ to become the cultivation of a faculty of judgment in education—thinking (vita contemplativa) as a common virtue in education. Arendt’s demarcation between truth and meaning does from the point of view of agonistic recognition in education call for ‘thinking’ as a qualification of political and moral meaning–the ‘taste’ to be established in the individual, by individual judgements but always judged in relation to members of a community. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the question (...) of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)

For Marx, work is the fundamental and central activity in human life and, potentially at least, a ful lling and liberating activity. Although this view is implicit throughout Marx’s work, there is little explicit explanation or defence of it. The fullest treatment is in the account of ‘estranged labour’ [entfremdete Arbeit] in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts;1 but, even there, Marx does not set out his philosophical assumptions at length. For an understanding of these, one must turn to Hegel. Marx (...) is quite explicit about his debt to Hegel in this respect. (shrink)

: This paper relates Arendt's critique of a labor society to her thoughts on the "good life." I begin with the claim that in the post–mass production era, Western societies, traditionally centered around gainful employment, encounter a decrease in the relevance of labor and can thus no longer rely on it as a resource for individual or social meaning. From Arendt's perspective, however, the current situation allows for the possibility of a transition from a society based on labor to a (...) society centered around activities. I explore Arendt's different types of activities—labor, work, action—with respect to the question of justice between the genders. (shrink)

The conventional interpretation of Hannah Arendt's accounts of forgiveness considers them secularistic. The secular features of her thinking that resist grounding the act of forgiving in divine criteria offer a good corrective to religious forgiveness that fosters depoliticization. Arendt's vision of free politics, however, calls for much more nuance and complexity regarding the secular and the religious in realizing forgiveness for transitional politics than the secularist rendition of her thinking allows. After identifying an area of ambiguity in Arendt's thoughts that (...) invites further investigation of religious forgiveness, this study seeks to relieve her misgivings about religion's role in politics by engaging with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology, which emphasizes worldliness and altruism in religious faith. Through constructive engagements with both thinkers, the article presents a balanced Arendtian position that is neither solely secularist nor complacent about religion in politics. (shrink)

In this chapter, Jussi Backman approaches Hannah Arendt’s readings of ancient philosophy by setting out from her perspective on the intellectual, political, and moral crisis characterizing Western societies in the twentieth century, a crisis to which the rise of totalitarianism bears witness. To Arendt, the political catastrophes haunting the twentieth century have roots in a tradition of political philosophy reaching back to the Greek beginnings of philosophy. Two principal features of Arendt’s exchange with the ancients are highlighted. The first is (...) her account, in The Human Condition (1958), of the profound transformation of the Greek perceptions of political life initiated by Plato, the founder of the Western tradition of political philosophy; this transformation, according to Arendt, leads to an instrumentalization of politics as a means toward a higher end. The second feature is Arendt’s distinction, in her unfinished Life of the Mind (1977–8), between three different points of departure for thinking discovered by ancient philosophy—wonder, fear, and conscience—and three different outcomes of thinking—contemplation, willing, and judging. Backman argues that what connects these two interpretations of ancient philosophy is an attempt to rethink and rearticulate the complex relationship between thinking and action, between the reflective vita contemplativa and the world-oriented vita activa. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, some of the most distinctive features of the modern age derived from the adoption of a process-imaginary in science, history, and administration. This article examines Arendt’s work, identifying what it calls the ‘process-frame’ in her criticism of imperialism, economy, and the biologization of politics. It discusses an interpretation in which ‘natality’ presents a completely alternative mode of temporality, a resistance to the process-frame. This interpretation, it is argued, needs to be specified by taking into account that political (...) action both interrupts and starts processes of its own. To confine and overcome the negative effects of process-framing, it is important to emphasize action as a world-building activity – something capable of establishing a relatively stable area of the common world by initiating processes of its own. Second, it is also important to cultivate ways of thinking and perceiving particular acts as meaningfully independent of all-embracing processes. (shrink)

Arendt claimed that violence is not part of the political because it is instrumental. Her position has generated a vast corpus of scholarship, most of which falls into the context of the realist-liberal divide. Taking these discussions as a starting point, this essay engages with violence in Arendt’s work from a different perspective. Its interest lies not in Arendt’s theory of violence in the world, but in the function that violence performed in her work, namely, in the constitutive role of (...) violence in her thought. It argues that the concept of violence allowed Arendt to make important distinctions serving to catalyze the categories that constitute her political philosophy and, in particular, the categories of public and private. More specifically, it claims that the concept of violence in Arendt’s work is the a priori background against which both the public and private realms should be defined. (shrink)

El texto propone una confrontación entre la fenomenología de la vita activa de Hannah Arendt y la ética del cuidado. Se trata, por una parte, de aplicar las distinciones arendtianas entre esferas pública y privada, y entre labor, trabajo y acción , a la actividad de cuidar, para reafirmar su relevancia; por otra parte, tomando el concepto de «mundo» como clave de la definición de cuidado, se ensaya una reinterpretación crítica de los conceptos de Arendt a partir de algunos análisis (...) feministas y de una fenomenología responsiva y del cuerpo, a fin de plantear una reivindicación matizada de las implicaciones públicas del cuidar, en línea con las propuestas de paso de una ética a una «política del cuidado». (shrink)

Though many have recently attempted either to locate Arendt within feminism or feminism within the great body of Arendt's work, these efforts have proven only modestly successful. Even a cursory examination of Arendt's work should suggest that these efforts would prove frustrating. None of her voluminous writings deal specifically with gender, though some of her work certainly deals with notable women. Her interest is not in gender as such, but in woman as assimilated Jew or woman as social and political (...) revolutionary. In this paper, I argue that Arendt recognized that what frequently passes for a gender question is not essentially a matter of gender at all, but rather an idiosyncratic form of loneliness that typically affects, though is by no means limited to, women. In her work one finds the conceptual tools necessary to understand the “woman problem” rather than an explicit argument or a solution to it. (shrink)

In the 1980s extra-parliamentary social movements and critical theories of race, class, and gender added a new sociocultural understanding of justice—recognition—to the much older socioeconomic one. The best-known form of the struggle for recognition is the identity politics of disadvantaged groups. I argue that there is still another option to conceptualize their predicament, neglected in recent political philosophy, which understands exclusion not in terms of injustice, more particularly a lack of sociocultural recognition, but in terms of a lack of freedom. (...) I draw my inspiration from Hannah Arendt's model of political action. Arendt diagnoses exclusion not solely as a mode of injustice, but as a lack of participation and public freedom. Consequently, she advocates a struggle for participation, political equality, and freedom as a strategy for emancipation or empowerment. Arendt could help feminists see that collective empowerment is made possible not by a shared identity (the target of poststructuralist critics) but by common action in the service of a particular worldly issue or common end. In other words, feminists would do well to appreciate the revolutionary quality and heritage of the feminist movement better, that is, its character as a set of practices of freedom. (shrink)

This article explores Hannah Arendt's insights into the forms of social control operating especially in democracies, together with the possibility of resistance to such control. Since the way in which one defines freedom informs one's understanding of the techniques that suppress, regulate, and modify behaviour, the article begins by sketching Arendt's notion of freedom, and compares this to its liberal counterpart. That discussion leads to Arendt's conception of power, whose corollary is freedom, and whose suppression amounts to control. The institutional (...) and ideological infrastructure that accompanies the encroachment of ?the social? ? which Arendt links to the hegemony of liberalism ? is conceived as rendering the individual both powerless and apathetic. The article concludes with suggestions regarding resistance to modern forms of control, viewing Arendt's ontology as a source of tenable strategies for the deepening of democracy. (shrink)

This article addresses the critique of the modern conception of history and time through a reading of Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s work provides an alternative to the thought with universal pretensions that has dominated the panorama of modernity. She thinks the historical through contradiction and gives a place to human experience next to facts. In thinking the event Arendt shows the insufficiency of the modern chronological appropriation of the past and the limits of using theory as a given framework of interpretation. (...) Understanding the historical event is to challenge the chronology assumed in our forms of understanding and representing the real. Her work blurs the tacit boundary that lurks in modern forms of representation between a ‘dynamic’ present and a ‘congealed’ past. Arendt’s thinking provides a critique of the modern notions of time and history as of the use of theory as a fixed framework of interpretation. (shrink)

This paper draws upon Hannah Arendt's idea of the 'right to have rights' to critique the current protection gap faced by refugees today. While refugees are protected from refoulement once they make it to the jurisdiction or territory of a state, they face an ever-increasing array of non-entrée policies designed to stymie access to state territory. Without being able to enter a state capable of securing their claims to safety and dignity, refugees cannot achieve the rights which ought to be (...) afforded to them under international law. Drawing upon both legal theory and political philosophy, this paper argues that refugees today, just as the stateless in Arendt’s time, must be afforded the ‘right to have rights’, understood as a right to enter state territory. (shrink)

This article is intended to contribute to the discussion on the meaning of volunteering by investigating voluntary work from the viewpoint of volunteers active in Swedish civil society organizations.Meaning refers both to the cognitive meaning of concepts and to the perceived meaning in life. The aim to uncover the predicates that people attribute to the concept is an attempt to anatomize volunteering as a social construct. Five predicates emerged and they make up the phenomenological structure of volunteering. By contextualizing this (...) structure in contemporary Swedish society, it is demonstrated that the conceptual meaning of volunteering has significance for its existential meaning. The volunteers say that their authenticity is confirmed through the voluntary work since they are making themselves manifest in public. Following Hannah Arendt, the reasons for this is that authenticity demands that the volunteers conduct their actions in a public realm where their actions acquire an intrinsic value as neither coerced nor instrumental. (shrink)

The paper traces the role of ‘women’ in Seyla Benhabib's work. It argues that this tracing helps to make clear the way that Benhabib's latest work relies on assuming distinctive political temporalities between the international (cosmopolitan and moral) and the domestic (democratic and political) spheres. The international is characterised by an unlocatable linear temporality of moral learning that draws on Habermas's reading of Kant's philosophy of history. In contrast, in the domestic, cosmopolitan temporality enters into a dialectical relation with an (...) Arendtian, republican temporality that is open and unpredictable and is clearly located within the (revisable) boundaries of political community. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is widely regarded as a political theorist who sought to rescue politics from ‘society’, and political theory from the social sciences. This conventional view has had the effect of distracting attention from many of Arendt’s most important insights concerning the constitution of ‘society’ and the significance of the social sciences. In this article, I argue that Hannah Arendt’s distinctions between labor, work and action, as these are discussed in The Human Condition and elsewhere, are best understood as a (...) set of claims about the fundamental structures of human societies. Understanding Arendt in this way introduces interesting parallels between Arendt’s work and both classical and contemporary sociology. From this I draw a number of conclusions concerning Arendt’s conception of ‘society’, and extend these insights into two contemporary debates within contemporary theoretical sociology: the need for a differentiated ontology of the social world, and the changing role that novel forms of knowledge play in contemporary society as major sources of social change and order. (shrink)

El paradigma del Juicio constituye un modelo de racionalidad que pretende elevarse como alternativa positiva ante los retos coyunturales introducidos por el giro lingüístico de la filosofía en el pensamiento contemporáneo. Frente a la difícil tarea de defender principios universalistas en la cultura actual, este modelo aspira a pronunciarse positivamente sobre cuestiones tales como la de la validez normativa que pueda afectar las relaciones entre acción humana y deliberación. Para alcanzar su objetivo, el paradigma del Juicio patrocina una forma de (...) la normatividad sin principios (validez ejemplar), enraizada en el juicio reflexionante kantiano y en el sensus communis (sentido común) de la tradición retórico-humanista. El objetivo de este artículo es la presentación de dicho modelo de racionalidad dentro de la filosofía kantiana y, por medio de la exploración de sus antecedentes histórico-filosóficos (Gadamer), y gracias a un rodeo por la tradición retórico-humanista (Aristóteles y Vico), se busca soslayar el énfasis estético que la fundamentación de Kant acentuó. Finalmente, se pondera el alcance y pertinencia que posee dicho paradigma en la reapropiación de dos de sus intérpretes en la filosofía contemporánea: Alessandro Ferrara y Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

In this article I compare and contrast Hannah Arendt’s and Stanley Cavell’s understandings of critique, focusing in each case upon the role played in it by skepticism. Both writers are decisively influenced by the later Heidegger’s thought that thinking as such is, first, the necessary turn to a practice adequate to our situation and, second, something that we shun. They also share the desire to take up this Heideggerian thought in Kantian terms: what is at stake is critical thinking. It (...) is here, however, that they part ways, with Arendt insisting that critique is as incompatible with skepticism as it is with dogmatism, and Cavell insisting that skepticism is the central moment within critique. Arendt’s attempt to ban skepticism from critique forces her into the contradictory position of at once denying and affirming the role of dogma in critical thinking. Cavell, in contrast, is able to shed light consistently upon the question of how citizens might best respond to the new – a task, ironically, that is a... (shrink)

The unmanaged organization is moving from coffee corners to social networks. This means not only a change of media, but also a transformation in how organizations exert control over workers and how workers resist the commodification of emotions. After analyzing instances of the online publication of images and texts that escape organizational control, we identified three main ambiguities helpful in framing future studies about organizational control and resistance: ambiguity between private and public spheres, ambiguity between spontaneous and performed manifestations, and (...) ambiguity between the distribution and control of power. Our main contribution is to understanding the Internet, particularly social networks, as a medium for employee resistance through distance, and in using the three aforementioned ambiguities to help analyze this phenomenon. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is one of the few philosophers to examine the dynamics of political action at length. Intriguingly, she emphasises the disclosure of who the actor is as a specific distinction of political action. This emphasis is connected with some long-standing worries about Arendt’s account that centre on its apparent unconcern for political responsibility. In this paper, I argue that Arendt’s emphasis on disclosure actually harbours a profound concern with responsibility. I do so by examining three questions. The main part (...) of the paper focuses on how disclosure is bound up with political actors’ attempts to act with one another. It asks: what would it be for an actor to evade disclosure? And: what is involved in an actor acknowledging the fact of disclosure? – Looking at the matter negatively, attempts to evade disclosure and its implications lead to irresponsibility. Positively, for the actor to accept disclosure is to see herself as bound to her fellow actors and audience by relations of joint action and mutual accountability. The conclusion asks a third question: what would it mean for on-lookers to deny the relevance of actors’ disclosure? I argue that Arendt’s historiography – which revolves around stories in which political actors reveal who they are – reflects her conviction that people can and must take responsibility for their world. (shrink)

Radical evil and the banality of evil are the two ways in which Arendt has cataloged totalitarian evil at different stages of his work. The aim of this paper is to approach the different Arendtian conceptions of evil from a political perspective in order to determine whether there are continuities or whether, on the contrary, there is an abrupt change in Arendt's thinking. The difficulty that must be faced is that the problem of evil and the political question are not (...) issues addressed by Arendt directly but are transversal contents that must be traced in the totality of his work. It is concluded that radical evil and the banality of evil are not mutually exclusive notions but rather function as expressions that refer to two different levels, one more general and structural and the other linked to the behavior of individuals within the government structures studied. (shrink)

Comparing the typologies of human activities developed by Beauvoir and Arendt, I argue that these philosophers share the same concept of labor as well as a similar insight that labor cannot provide a justification or evaluative measure for human life. But Beauvoir and Arendt think differently about work (as contrasted with labor), and Arendt alone illuminates the inability of constructive work to provide non-utilitarian value for human existence. Beauvoir, on the other hand, exceeds Arendt in examining the ethical implications of (...) our existential need for a plurality of free peers in a public realm. (shrink)

A wave of interest in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault as bio-political thinkers was initiated by publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. The intellectual connection of these two figures is, however, broader than their bio-political considerations. Arendt and Foucault both offer detailed accounts of an ethico-political self. Both Arendt’s and Foucault’s later work explores the meaning of living ethically and politically. By examining the relationship between self, ethics and politics, I suggest there are two general points of convergence in Arendt (...) and Foucault regarding the ethico-political self: a shared suspicion of ethical or political systems presented as universally applicable; the attempt to undermine prescriptive moral and political models by fostering a dynamic and critical self-relationship. In the shared attempt to develop a dynamic ethico-political attitude Arendt and Foucault present their respective alternatives to universally applicable moral and political structures, which both consider to be potentially dangerous. (shrink)

The article examines the writings of one of the most influential political philosophers, Hannah Arendt, and specifically focuses on her views regarding the distinction between the private and the public and the transformation of the public to the social by modernity. Arendt’s theory of human activity and critique of modernity are explored to critically evaluate the social contributions and implications of reproductive technologies especially where the use of such technologies is most dominant within Western societies. Focusing on empirical studies on (...) new reproductive technologies in Israel, it is argued, powerfully demonstrates Arendt’s theory, and broadens the perspectives through which society should evaluate these new technologies towards a more reflective understanding of its current laws and policies and their affect on women more generally. (shrink)

RESUMEN En este trabajo esperamos mostrar la relevancia del análisis arendtiano de la cuestión judía, y en particular de las políticas de asimilación y del proceso de secularización, para abordar el problema de la carencia de mundo en la época moderna. De este modo, la cuestión judía nos permite delinear una incisiva crítica a la configuración del mundo moderno, a la vez que esbozar una concepción ampliada del mundo a través de la reconstrucción de la tradición oculta de los judíos (...) parias. Así, tomando distancia de las interpretaciones que conciben el mundo en Arendt como un espacio de interacción ideal o formal, este recorrido por la problemática judía posibilita el despliegue de los aspectos materiales, culturales e históricos concretos que sustentan el mundo común. ABSTRACT In this paper I try to show the relevance of the Arendtian analysis of the Jewish issue, and especially of the assimilation policies and the process of secularization, in relation with the problem of worldlessness in modern age. Through the Jewish issue, it is possible to delineate a criticism to the modern world’s configuration, while at the same time, following the reconstruction of the hidden tradition of pariah Jews, an expanded conception of world could be illuminated. Taking distance from the interpretations that conceive the world in Arendt´s perspective as an ideal or formal interaction space, the study of the Jewish problematics, makes possible to highlight the material, cultural and historical concrete aspects of the common world. (shrink)

The perplexing relationship between two of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, has been the subject of much speculation within academic circles. For Arendt, Heidegger was at once, her mentor, her lover, and her friend. In this paper, we juxtapose Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil against her relationship with Heidegger in an effort to consider the question: How does corporeality inform theorizing? In answering this question, we repudiate the conventional reading of the banality (...) of evil, which attributes the theory to Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann during the latter’s criminal trial for the actions that he perpetrated in the operation of the Holocaust. Instead, we argue that the theory is, more compellingly, reflective of Arendt’s deeply personal attempts at making sense of Heidegger’s decision to affiliate himself with the German Nazi Party in the years preceding, and during, the Second World War. Through this revisionist account of the banality of evil, we animate the idea that theorizing is the discursive corollary, and belongs within the phenomenological parameters, of corporeality. Finally, we contend that any constructive understanding of how corporeality informs theorizing will only be realized, when there is a collapsing of the seemingly impervious philosophical boundaries that demarcate between ontology and epistemology. (shrink)