Hannah Arendt, an anthropologist's ally? Relational subjects, political action, and anti-racism in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Hannah Arendt has never held a significant place in anthropology. Perhaps her focus on mid-twentieth-century Europe and the USA, where she misunderstood Black struggles, outdates her for a twenty-first-century global discipline. However, this article argues that core aspects of Arendt's oeuvre can advance debates on relational subjectivity and political action because her efforts to think past the scourge of totalitarianism in Europe parallel the discipline's own efforts to think past colonialism everywhere else in the world. These two intertwined phenomena require the same undoing of “modern” Western political discourse, particularly its emphasis on bounded entities like individuals, nations, and states. The article synthesizes Arendt's work on subjectivity and action to unite the anthropology of personhood, existential-phenomenological anthropology, and political anthropology for the sake of an ontology of subjectivity supporting progressive politics. It, firstly, presents Arendt's tripartite division of human existence—labor, work, and action—to convey her unique understanding of political life. Secondly, it presents the relational subject as composed of an inner plurality but appearing as a singularity requiring recognition from a plurality of other such subjects. Thirdly, it argues that Arendt's view of council-style politics exemplifies a generic polity allowing relational subjects to simultaneously reconstitute themselves and their polity through joint action. Fourthly, it examines her argument that racism marks the end of humanity so we can align her work with decolonial anthropology. This tricky task requires us to unpack Arendt's Conradian representations of the colonized to understand how imperialism abroad pre-conditioned the destruction of political life in Europe through totalitarianism.