Hannah Arendt’s Performative Politics

Author:

McGowan John1

Affiliation:

1. English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina

Abstract

Abstract Hannah Arendt’s distinctive understanding of the political is best understood as generated by her performative theory of action. This chapter lays out Arendt’s vision, using the concept of the performative as the interpretative key. Agents in Arendt are acting politically when they create their identities in a public space that is (also) constituted by their self-fashioning actions. The political realm exists to enable such identity creation and to memorialize the deeds performed in front of others. Arendt’s work is deeply antiutilitarian. She does not want politics to accomplish anything substantial beyond providing the freedom to create oneself—and to have that creation remembered. Such freedom is valuable in and for itself, not because it produces anything. As a result, she is hostile to more rhetorical understandings of political debate and to attempts to harness politics to enable collective and cooperative action. The difficulties of Arendt’s thought stem from her rejection of more usual understandings of power, politics, and action. But those rejections serve to make us question the self-evidence and the desirability of our taken-for-granted received ideas.

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Reference19 articles.

1. Arato, Andrew, and Jean Cohen.  2010. “Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty in Arendt.” In Politics in Dark Times, edited by Seyla Benhabib, 137–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Arendt, Hannah.  1972. “On Violence.” In Crises of the Republic, 105–98. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

3. Arendt, Hannah.  1977a. “What Is Freedom?” In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 143–72. New York: Penguin.

4. Arendt, Hannah.  1977b. “Truth and Politics” In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 223–59. New York: Penguin.

5. Arendt, Hannah.  1979. “On Hannah Arendt.” In Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, edited by Melvyn A. Hill, 301–39. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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