Beyond Identity and Difference
Samir Gandesha
On one reading, the very possibility of Platonic political philosophy is a contradictio in adjecto insofar as in his dialogues Plato does not use the adjective “political” to describe the noun “philosophy” but, rather, places the two terms in an antagonistic relationship with one another. And, as dramatized in dialogues such as Phaedo, Crito, and Apology, such antagonism has roots in traumatic event: Athenian democracy’s tragic treatment of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, which offered him the choice of either exile or death (he, of course, chose the latter) for insulting its gods. So, Platonism embodies the aspiration to “make the world safe” for philosophy by mastering the inherent contingency, novelty, and sheer plurality of political life. Platonism can never forget the dangers that confront the philosopher, in particular that quintessential philosopher of the agora, Socrates, who, acting as a gadfly, irritates his interlocutors with questions they are unable to answer, with a recognition that the beliefs they confidently profess do not stand up to reasoned scrutiny. One can see this, for example, in the late-period dialogue, the Laws, in which Plato seeks to outline with detailed precision the good city as a kind of “ideocracy.” Nowhere else is the precarious position of the philosopher more dramatically expressed, however, than in the Republic’s cave allegory.1 After having returned from the arduous journey up beyond the cave and having glimpsed the Form of the Good, the philosopher takes upon himself the thankless and perilous task of returning to the cave to convince its inhabitants that what they take for reality is, in actual fact, appearance, mere play of the shadows cast on the walls in front of them and from which shackles they need to be freed by way of an arduous dialectic.
Of course, this characterization of Plato’s mobilization of philosophy in a kind of “tyranny of truth” against politics is the interpretation that Hannah Arendt, herself, offers.2 It is an interpretation that is of particular importance for her understanding of the political as the realm of contingency, plurality, and, above all, appearances. Were Plato’s account of politics as the shadowy realm of the cave correct, then political judgment would entail subsuming particulars beneath pre-given rules or Eidos (forms), accessible through an act of anamnesis or unforgetting. But politics is not to be understood in such terms; rather, it is rooted in temporal particulars from which one then must, through an act of imagination—a making of that which is absent present—generate a general rule or a universal concept. Politics, in other words, does not have to do with the unum verum understood in opposition to doxa or opinion but, rather, starts with an understanding of doxa as the articulation of the dokei moi, “what appears to me”3 —the assumption that the shared world opens up to me differently than it does to others. Plato’s attempt to remember and honor Socrates can be seen as an act of forgetting insofar as he replaces the latter’s maieutics that aims at bringing forth the citizen’s truth from doxa with an account of dialegesthai that aims at destroying doxa.4
For Plato, construing the cave as the space of politics, the realm of shadow play, showed dramatically that the only proper way to address the realm of the political realm was by way of an exit strategy. In this sense, the allegory is to be taken with utmost seriousness. The philosopher in leaving the cave exits the political and enters into the light cast by the form of the Good. And such an exit from the political, at least on this non-ironic reading, entailed its re-creation as a mirroring or mimesis of divine logos accessible only by virtue of the conceptual journey of dialectic that retraced the philosopher’s haptic ascent upward toward the sunlight. The highest good, in this account, was the vita contemplativa—the life spent in agitationless contemplation.
Plato’s anti-political bias provides the context necessary to fully grasp the key importance of the concepts “pariah” and parvenu to Arendt’s political theory. If philosophy seeks to take its leave of the political, then, in Arendt’s view, the pariah can only find a home within this space in which difference is permitted to appear as such. Pariah and parvenu denote social difference and identity, respectively. The word “pariah,” according to the OED, derives from the South Indian language Tamil. When capitalized it refers to “a member of a scheduled tribe of South India concentrated in southern Kerala and Tamil Nadu, originally functioning notably as sorcerers and ceremonial drummers and also as labourers and servants, but later increasingly as ‘untouchables’ in insanitary occupations.” It has come to mean lower caste, outcaste and, more recently, “a member of a despised class of any kind; someone or something shunned or avoided; a social outcast.”5 Parvenu , in contrast, designates newly acquired wealth and/or social status; it designates the social climber.
These two categories represent the t wo options for members of minority groups in the midst of a majority with a different culture, religion, or ethnic identity. Of course, for Arendt, the daughter of Jewish parents, although not necessarily a “dutiful” one as Gershom Scholem suggested in his pointed criticism of Eichmann in Jerusalem, her example was the unique position of Jews in Germany. Of course, pariah also referred to refugees and stateless persons more generally. Before what Max Weber refers to as the original European “pariah people,”6 the Jews, lay two options. The first was to remain separate and apart from the larger gentile society and maintain their own language, Yiddish, religious and cultural practices, and face, from time to time, the occasional pogrom and restrictions on their political liberties. The second, of course, was to assimilate, often by conversion to Christianity and its attendant change of name, into the norms, values, and, ultimately, identity of the dominant society.
As becomes clear in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, the pariah was to be understood specifically in terms of European Jewish experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Out of experiences of social exclusion, marginalization, and anti-semitism, the figure of the pariah constituted a “hidden tradition.”7 This hidden tradition emphasized “all vaunted Jewish qualities—the ‘Jewish heart,’ humanity, humour, disinterested intelligence—[are] pariah qualities.”8 Above all, the pariah was clear about the importance of thinking as a prelude to speech and action—central categories for understanding Arendt’s political theory.
This tradition manifests what for Arendt constitutes a third option, adopted from Bernard Lazare, and this is the idea of a “conscious pariah,” one who is aware of and embraces as a matter of political decision his position as someone “never quite at home in this world.”9 Such an awareness made possible a solidarity with other such outcastes. For Arendt, thinking through the fraught and shifting relations between these two categories, again as initially applied to Jews, enabled her to clarify the relation that is central to her mature political theory as set forth in her 1958 book, The Human Condition. This is the relation between the “social” and the “political.” As she puts it in the The Origins of Totalitarianism: “During the 150 years when Jews truly lived amid, and not just in the neighborhood of, Western European peoples, they always had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social insult for political success.”10 The pariah in this sense, perched as he was on the boundary between the social and the political, being simultaneously insider and outsider, embodies a central political virtue as expressed by both Socrates and Kant—namely, the capacity to view things from an “enlarged mentality,” which, interestingly, in Arendt’s gloss on Kant entails training “one’s imagination to go visiting.”11
For Arendt, Platonism establishes the dominance of identity over difference insofar as it establishes the real Idea over and against the particular understood as appearance. By formulating a third alternative, that of the “conscious pariah,” the outsider capable of acting with other such outsiders, Arendt is able to articulate a nuanced relation between difference and identity. Such a relation becomes central to Arendt’s notion of the political as the realm of appearances comprised by the being together of those who are different. If totalitarian space is constituted by the “squeezing of individuals together as if by a band of iron,” then the space of the genuinely public realm is one which, far from being reduced or minimized, is opened up between subjects. Such an openness is precisely, then, the space of appearances. The conscious pariah was he whose pariahdom was, as it were, a free act, and in such a free act was grounded the capability of acting together with others who had also freely embraced their pariah status. In such capacity for collective action Arendt located an alternative source of power to the conventional Hobbesian-Weberian definition understood as domination, as “power over.”
The pariah-parvenu opposition highlighted the paradoxical relation between what would come to be with the publication of The Human Condition, two key concepts lying at the center of her work: the social and the political. The social denoted three related but differentiated things: universal commodity exchange, mass society, and the realm of sociability as when we speak of “high society.” Significantly, while the logic of the social was inherently assimilative, that of the political was based on a recognition of difference and plurality. The predominant sense it had for Arendt, however, was what Marx referred to as the “metabolism with nature” via labor and the increasing coordination of production relations under modern condition via the modern bureaucratic state or the rule of “nobody.” The social implied, in other words, the realm of necessity. The political, in contrast, was the realm of free speech and action that was separated from the realm of infinite, boundless metabolic processes by virtue of its worldhood. The political was, in other words, constituted by the web of meaning comprised of past words and deeds in narrative form. The rectilinear time of the political stood in contrast to the cyclical time of labor processes and made possible new beginnings or a new temporal sequence. As I have argued elsewhere,
A central moment in the genealogy of the concept of the social in Arendt’s thinking is a characterization of the social as embodying an exclusionary logic. The relation between parvenu and “pariah” is to be understood in terms of their differential relations vis-a-vis society. While the pariah is excluded because of her difference—in the case of Varnhagen, because she was a Jewish woman—the parvenu is one who does whatever is required in order to gain acceptance in the very society that excludes those “like” her, including, of course, sacrificing a crucial aspect of her own identity. T he pariah can only gain entry to the social, that is, become a parvenu, by accepting and internalizing society’s exclusionary logic. As against the perspective of the conformism and self-loathing of the parvenu, Arendt advocates the perspective of what she calls that of the “conscious pariah”—the individual who, far from seeking to gain admittance to and acceptance in a society that would exclude the other, takes a stand of solidarity against the exclusions that constitute that society with those others similarly excluded. The standpoint of the conscious pariah is what Arendt comes to understand as the political. The political itself embodies the tension comprised of, on the one hand, a recognition of differences between individuals, that is, plurality, and the possibility of sharing and acting together in a shared world. The political, then, can be said to involve a kind of non-reductive being-together of difference.12
Arendt’s had two models for the conscious pariah. The first was Rahel Varnhagen and the second, Rosa Luxemburg. Arendt wrote a biography subtitled “The Life of a Jewess,” about Varnhagen, and an important essay based on the biography by Nettl of Rosa Luxemburg included in the volume Men in Dark Times. According to one of her American biographers, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt identified with both women, especially the first. Varnhagen, who, according to her own admission, was blessed with neither extraordinary beauty nor intelligence and was from a “pariah” people, nonetheless played a key role in the Berlin salon culture of the late eighteenth century, was intimate with some of the leading lights of the German Enlightenment, German romanticism and, herself, participated in the “Goethe cult.” Rahel Varnhagen is particularly important for Hannah Arendt because she journeys from marginalized pariah to assimilating and striving parvenu who sacrifices those aspects of herself that matter the most in order to meet the dominant expectations of German society. In the end, though, on her deathbed, Varnhagen reverts to speaking Yiddish and therefore reinvents herself a second time, this time as a conscious pariah. In this, she affirms Arendt’s answer to Günther Gaus’s question, “What remains?” Language remains, Arendt answers.
Arendt, herself, much like Heinrich Heine, whom she greatly admired, adopted the position of the “conscious pariah” in her very approach to political theory. On the one hand, her embrace of figures like Bertoldt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and, of course, Rosa Luxemburg, and the Council Communist movement placed her at odds with the political Right. Yet, her invocation of the ancients, Athenian democracy in particular, her controversial assessment of the integration of the Little Rock school system, her less-than-favorable interpretation of the French Revolution as compared with the American Revolution, not to mention her critique of Marx in The Human Condition based on the differentiation of the social and the political, placed her deeply at odds with the political Left as well. But nowhere was Arendt’s own status as a conscious pariah made clearer than in the aftermath of Eichmann in Jerusalem in which she shows the complicity of some of the Jewish leaders with the Final Solution. As Scholem’s infamous response shows, Arendt was made into a pariah of the pariah people par excellence.13
The supreme political virtue, for Arendt, then was reflective judgment. Insofar as political space is comprised by plurality and therefore cannot be reduced to an overarching identity, political phenomena are characterized by particularity. Hence, reflective judgment must begin with such particularity and generate universals out of them. In the political realm that constitutes a fundamentally open temporality between natality and mortality—as opposed to the unending metabolic processes that, for Arendt, characterize labor located within the realm of the social—only reflective judgment can adequately contend with the emergence of the new or the unprecedented.
The opposition between pariah and parvenu is one that continues to shape Arendt as a distinctive thinker of the Jewish experience in the twentieth century. For example, Leon Botstein argues that the opposition is key to understanding Arendt’s support of both a secular, progressive Zionism, on the one hand, and, on the other, a Jewish Diaspora that had its center of gravity in the as it were adopted political tradition of Jeffersonian America whose revolution, in contrast to that of France, emphasized not the social but the political question.14 Botstein argues, in fact, that Arendt’s political theory only makes sense within this particular force field that begins to come apart at the seams twenty years after the Eichmann trial. He sees in this tension an extraordinary form of nationhood in Israel that took its bearings not from the standpoint of the parvenu or their identification with the aggressor but from that of the pariah and their identification with the “underdog.”
It is also apparent in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler. The former argues that peace between Israelis and Palestinians might be possible if each nation can understand itself in a condition of “exodus” vis-à-vis the other and therefore extend a measure of hospitality to the other.15 In a similar way, Judith Butler argues that Israel can learn to establish an ethical relation to its neighbors, namely the Palestinians, by learning from the important emphasis on living together with others in the Diaspora.16 One wonders, finally, whether the opposition itself is necessarily restricted to the Jewish experience and intra-Jewish debates. For example, Edward Said’s notion of exilic experience is another way of understanding the pariah: as someone who is compelled to see phenomenon simultaneously from the inside and the outside, he who thinks and writes in a “contrapuntal” and “nomadic” way.17 Or, as Theodor W. Adorno puts it in his brilliant essay on “Heine the Wound,”
Now that the destiny which Heine sensed has been fulfilled literally, however, the homelessness has also become everyone’s homelessness; all human beings have been as badly injured in their beings and their language as Heine the outcast was. His words stand in for their words: there is no longer any homeland other than a world in which no one would be cast out any more, the world of a genuinely emancipated humanity. The wound that is Heine will heal only in a society that has achieved reconciliation.18
Notes
1 Plato, “Republic,” in Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945), 514A–521B.
2 Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 78. See also Alan Ryan’s interpretation in his On Politics Vol. I: A History of Political Thought: Herodotus to Machiavelli (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2012), 31–70.
3 Ibid., 80.
4 Ibid., 90–91.
5 “pariah, n. and adj.” OED Online. July 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/137889?redirectedFrom=Pariah& (accessed November 29, 2018).
6 Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 276.
7 Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” The Jewish Writings, 275–97.
8 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jewish Writings, 274.
9 Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” 283.
10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1976), 56.
11 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 43.
12 Samir Gandesha, “Homeless Philosophy: The Exile Philosophy and the Philosophy of Exile,” in Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, ed. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 247–80.
13 See Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 465–511.
14 Leon Botstein, “The Jew as Pariah: Hannah Arendt’s Political Philosophy,” Dialectical Anthropology 8, nos. 1/2 (1983): 47–73.
15 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Cesare Casarino and Vincenzo Binetti (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 24–26.
16 See Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
17 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) , xxv.
18 Theodor W. Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 85.