El último libro que Arendt se planteó escribir, sobre la capacidad de juzgar, iba a cerrar la trilogía sobre La vida del espíritu. El proyecto quedó reducido a un paratexto formado por un título y dos citas, una de ellas tomada del quinto acto de la segunda parte del Fausto de Goethe. El presente trabajo plantea una lectura del contexto de esta cita con la obra de Arendt que permita esclarecer por qué habría tenido sentido incluir precisamente esta cita en (...) el volumen nunca escrito. Lejos de poder ser leído, desde Arendt, solo como ejemplo de dictador totalitario, el personaje de Fausto puede ser también leído, con Arendt, en clave política desde otra perspectiva. Su disputa con la alegoría de la inquietud y de la cura, la Sorge, nos presenta a una figura en vías de convertirse en persona capaz de reflexionar y por tanto juzgar: máscara con voz propia. (shrink)

In Arendt’s political theory the concept of civil society is often read as an extension of her concept of the social and is therefore dismissed as irrelevant to her political vision. This view leaves Arendtian theory in an exclusivist position with regard to contemporary political contexts and experiences. My aim in this essay is to address this problem by discussing the relationship of Arendtian theory and the concept of civil society in the context of contemporary political experience. This calls for (...) not only a particular reading of the social in Arendt but, more importantly, for a joint reading of Arendt’s concept of the council state and civil society. Here, civil society is defined as the associations institutionalized by the voluntary engagement of active citizens, which definition, I argue, is compatible with Arendt’s concept of politics as action, plurality, and participation. (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 essay examines Arendt’s descriptions of “Hottentots” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, especially the comparisons and contrasts she frequently draws between Hottentots and other peoples. In particular, Arendt highlights dehumanization of presumptively “civilized” people in comparing them to African “savages.” Close reading of such analogies demands that we look beyond the racial explanations that other scholars have offered and focus instead on how Arendt’s conception of humanity is bound up with a specific sense of culture that is antiprimitivist—exclusive of peoples (...) without history, primitives. Analysis of her moral anthropology uncovers the Cape Colony discourses and postenlightenment German philosophical supports that inform her antiprimitivism. However, Arendt’s antiprimitivism may not remain confined to Origins. In later essays, Arendt analyzes the various aspects of culture in instructive ways.Yet she also synthesizes culture concepts into a schema that introduces problems for her. (shrink)

This article makes the political dimension of Gadamer's thought more explicit by examining the interplay of three concepts in his work: solidarity, friendship, and the other. Focusing primarily on certain post--"Truth and Method" writings, I argue that Gadamer's conception of solidarity has to do with historically contingent manifestations of bonds that reflect a civic life together of reciprocal co-perception. These bonds go beyond conscious recognition of observable similarities and differences and emerge from encounters among those who are, and remain, in (...) important ways other to each other. I make this case through an analysis of Gadamer's phenomenology of friendship and the crucial role of otherness in his accounts of both understanding and friendship. I suggest that Gadamer's political thought gives us a way of conceptualizing solidarity and otherness without making the other same or leaving the other completely other. (shrink)