Samir Gandesha
While Arendt touches upon the question of statelessness in many of her occasional writings,1 it is in The Origins of Totalitarianism that she addresses this key problem systematically. So important is this concept that Arendt argues that it is synonymous with the coming into being of a new type of human being: “the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.”2 As she states in the opening sentences of the Preface to the first edition of Origins: “Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.”3 That the problem of statelessness goes beyond the geopolitical field is indicated by the two synonyms “rootlessness” and, especially, “homelessness.”
The latter, in particular, is a key concept of Arendt’s political theory indicating the centrality of the concept of “worldhood” that she draws from the phenomenological tradition. It is through the meaning-constituting activity of work—as distinguished from labor—that we make a home on earth. The human condition of plurality is defined by virtue of its location in the meaningful fabric of the world. Statelessness is the end point of the driving processes inherent in the “social” understood in terms of commodity exchange, mass society, and sociability that contribute to a de-worlding of the world or the process by which the fragile fabric of human meaning is increasingly torn asunder. Statelessness is, therefore, the expression of a much deeper and more profound crisis that lies at the heart of modernity.
The methodological challenge of Origins, as Arendt explains, has to do with the fact that in twentieth-century totalitarianism, we are confronted with a novel type of political regime. In the face of such a regime, traditional political categories reveal their shortcomings. The “shock of the new”—and the middle of the twentieth century was nothing if not shocking—must be borne as a kind of “burden” with a kind of methodological, and philosophical courage. Hence, she argues,
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us-neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality-whatever it may be.4
While it may be tempting to understand totalitarianism via the ancient concept of tyranny or the modern concepts of Caesarism or Bonapartism, comprehension, however, entailed a refusal to subsume either case, Hitlerism or Stalinism, beneath already existing political or civilizational categories. Rather, it was necessary to begin the activity of understanding with particulars and not generalities. Arendt would later reflect on the distinctive nature of the logic of political theory in one of her last works, namely, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, which she, surprisingly, located neither in historical works such as “Perpetual Peace,” nor in “Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” or “What Is Enlightenment?” his architectonic contributions to practical philosophy Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, nor in Critique of Practical Reason, as one might have expected. Rather, she locates it, surprisingly, in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. More specifically, she roots Kant’s political philosophy in his account of reflective as opposed to determinative judgment—rooted in sensus communis or “common sense” that moves from particulars to universals rather than from universals to particulars.5 Reflective judgment can be understood as aiming at universality insofar as it takes into account the shared sense embodied in human understanding itself located in a distinct form of life (bios). It is tied, therefore, to imagination, in making the absent viewpoints of others present in precisely in such judgment.
Nowhere was the challenge to confront the new of the unprecedented greater than in the phenomenon of “statelessness”:
Much more stubborn in fact and much more far-reaching in consequence has been statelessness, the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history, and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons, the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics. Their existence can hardly be blamed on one factor alone, but if we consider the different groups among the stateless it appears that every political event since the end of the first World War inevitably added a new category to those who lived outside the pale of the law, while none of the categories, no matter how the original constellation changed, could ever be renormalized.6
Origins seeks to provide an account of “totalitarianism” by constructing a historical constellation of elements of which statelessness played a key role, with the Jews as the quintessential “pariah” (Max Weber) and therefore also the stateless people, so “anti-Semitism” as it played out from Germany, with the distinction between the assimilated and “Shtetl” Jew or the parvenu and pariah, to the French Dreyfus affair. In the latter, the nation was constituted explicitly in opposition to the rootless, cosmopolitan, and “traitorous” figure of the Jew personified by the falsely accused Captain Alfred Dreyfus. To anti-Semitism, Arendt adds, in the second section of the book, the role of imperialism in which racism comes to play an ever more pronounced role. Indeed, totalitarianism in its National Socialist form entails the application of colonial techniques of domination and control to Europe itself.7 The third section on “totalitarianism” proper, which is grounded in the loneliness of deracinated, “homeless,” subjects that comprise the “mass,” the alliance between elite and mob, totalitarian propaganda and organization within the connect of quasi-Darwinian philosophies of history, emphasizing the planetary struggle between races (Nazism) and classes (Stalinism).
There are at least three ways in which the concept of statelessness—a concept that, it goes without saying, has only gained in importance in our own time—plays a key role in Arendt’s thinking: the transformation of the distinctive nature of human life in to naked life; the opposition between pariah and parvenu; finally, the phenomenon of statelessness pushes the discourse of human rights to its limits. It does so insofar as those reduced to a condition of naked life—those, in other words, with the most legitimate claim to human rights—are those who paradoxically have the least “right” to it because they are members of no political community or state.
Statelessness plays a key role in the logic by which human beings are reduced to a condition of animality suspended between life and death. The nature of this logic is exterminationist, which is to say, its telos or end lies in genocide. This is the logic stretching, as it were, from Nuremburg to Wannsee, from the discriminatory laws passed in 1935 to the Wannsee Conference of early 1942 at which the Final Solution to the “Jewish Question” was decided. For Arendt, this was a logic whereby human life, understood as belonging to a specific fabric of meaningfulness constituted by what she calls “the world,” was reduced to the baseline of naked life that humans shared with other living beings. This logic represented a kind of reification or thingification of the human being, a reduction of the inherently temporal human existence, poised between birth and death, natality and mortality, to mere animal existence.
In other words, the condition of statelessness constituted a crucial waystation in the transformation of human life from bios to zōē. As Arendt explains in her magnum opus The Human Condition: “The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zōē, that Aristotle said that it ‘somehow is a kind of praxis.’”8 In the concentration camp (Lager)—that space where “everything was possible”—we witness an acceleration and crystallization of this logic whereby inmates are increasingly stripped of what it is about them that makes them human. The inmates’ capacity for personhood, to be able to narrate the temporal shape of their lives in the form of a biography, which means to be differentiated from others, already undermined by discriminatory Nuremburg Laws, was progressively and decisively destroyed in the camp. This is, incidentally, why, as Primo Levi showed in his arresting writings on the camp, what often separated the “drowned” from the “saved,”9 the so-called “Musalmänner” from the survivors, was the unwavering attachment to the individualized rituals of everyday life.10 It was through her account of the camp that Arendt was able to depict the manner in which totalitarianism represents the deepening hold of the metabolic logic of the social that violently liquidates differences. In Agamben’s view, the Musalman is a biopolitical figure par excellence insofar as he is understood as “Homo Sacer,” that is, he who can be put to death by sovereign power.11
While Arendt’s intention was to criticize Marx’s conception of the “metabolization of nature”12 in her account of the social, she was actually much closer to him than she thought. This becomes clearer with the so-called “neue Lekture der Marx” from the late 1960s onwards. These new readings emphasized the centrality of Marx’s critique of the value-form. Figures like Postone emphasize the way in which that far from articulated from the normative position of concrete labor, Marx’s critique was in fact primarily directed against “abstract labour” that corresponds to the general equivalent, law of value and to the compulsive and reductive assimilation of difference by identity.13 In other words, for Marx, the assimilation of difference was not to be celebrated but to be criticized. Communism could, in fact, be understood as a community of “conscious pariahs” insofar as it was a form of society in which the freedom of each was premised upon the freedom of all and vice versa.14 Totalitarianism doesn’t so much represent the logic of Marx’s account of the social as it does the value-form which was the object of his critique.
The second way in which statelessness figures in Arendt’s work is that it highlights the intensification of the opposition between pariah and parvenu. Reflecting her own experience as a “stateless person” after the Second World War, Arendt showed the way in which settled refugees were forced to choose between two options: between resisting assimilation to the host country by embracing a kind of social-death or by engaging in a kind of self-directed violence and subordinating herself to it its normative order.
Man is a social animal and life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off. Moral standards are much easier kept in the texture of a society. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused. Lacking the courage to fight for a change of our social and legal status, we have decided instead, so many of us, to try a change of identity. And this curious behavior makes matters much worse. The confusion in which we live is partly our own work.15
Arendt goes on to tell the proverbial story of a certain Mr. Cohn, the exemplary parvenu, who, in a fruitless effort to forget (and make the world forget) his own Jewishness becomes first a German, then a Czech, an Austrian and finally a French “patriot.” But, ultimately, assimilation was no answer insofar as he was never permitted to properly belong to these nations. On the other hand, Jews faced persecution from other Jews. Arendt was aware of the particular animus reserved by German Jews from those Jews who hailed from the East or the so-called Shtetl Jews.
French Jewry was absolutely convinced that all Jews coming from beyond the Rhine were what they called Polaks—what German Jewry called Ostjuden. But those Jews who really came from eastern Europe could not agree with their French brethren and called us Jaeckes. The sons of these Jaecke-haters—the second generation born in France and already duly assimilated—shared the opinion of the French Jewish upper class. Thus, in the very same family, you could be called a Jaecke by the father and a Polak by the son.
This “strength to conserve one’s own integrity” in the face of this points back to the problem of political judgment and informs Arendt’s conception of the political, which I will return to shortly.
The third aspect of statelessness that plays a significant role in Arendt’s work is the way in which it dramatically illuminated the limits of human rights. Critics of the French Revolution, such as Edmund Burke, were skeptical of the very premise of universal human rights, as, for example, set forth in the revolution’s “Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen,” that one could in fact speak of the “rights” of the “human being” in the abstract rather than the rights of members of particular historically situated nations.16 Arendt shows the historical truth of this intuition insofar as those most in need of the protections of “human rights,” namely, the stateless, were the least able to call upon them.
Not only did loss of national rights in all instances entail the loss of human rights; the restoration of human rights, as the recent example of the State of Israel proves, has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights. The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships-except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.17
What the stateless revealed was the hidden premise that Burke indicated and to which Arendt’s own analysis also pointed, namely, that it was necessary “to have a right to rights.”18 The idea that one required a “right to rights” indicated the supreme irony of human rights: the supposed bearer of human rights, the human being as such, the “man without qualities,” was precisely unable to claim them. What Arendt pointed to was precisely the contradiction inherent in the idea of the “rights of man and citizen,” that, on the one hand, it asserted the undeniable and inalienable rights of the human being, yet on the other, made clear that there simply were no rights other than those granted by nations.
How are we to relate these three dimensions of the condition of statelessness: its generation of a historically new type of human being, crystallization of the opposition between the parvenu and the pariah, and the way it makes explicit the implicit crisis inherent in the doctrine of human rights? All three dimensions of statelessness could be said to culminate, negatively, in Arendt’s conception of the political space as constituted, indeed, bounded by the world comprised of past meaningful speech and action. This shared world, which elaborated a temporal barrier between new instances of speech and action, on the one hand, and the atemporal processes of metabolism with nature, allowed for the human condition of plurality to come to full fruition.
In marked contrast to the disappearing totalitarian space in which subjects are bound together, the political space is the space that opens between subjects, that preserves their differences. Within such political space, subjects can act in concert without subordinating themselves to a dominating, overarching identity. In this conception, one could truly say, the refugee isn’t simply the “vanguard of his people” insofar as for him history is no longer a closed book but also the avant-garde of political understanding insofar as he adopts the position of the “conscious pariah.” It is the conscious pariah, the new type of human being, figures like Rahel Varhagen, Rosa Luxemburg and, indeed, Hannah Arendt, herself, who are the least able to rely on existing concepts within which to subsume the particulars of political life, who must find the “strength to conserve their own integrity,” and think for themselves by generating new concepts with which to understand the world.
Two decades into to the twenty-first century, the problem of statelessness has begun to rival that from the period from the end of the First World War to the immediate postwar period. Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on this phenomenon are being enthusiastically revisited by journalists and philosophers. The stateless appear not only in familiar guises such as the refugee fleeing ethnic or communal persecution, for example, but also as second-class citizens who are one step away from having their citizenship revoked because of real or perceived transgressions. However, here it is important to heed Arendt’s own strictures against a complacent form of comprehension and on her insistence on the importance of coming to terms with what is distinctive about the historically unprecedented condition of statelessness.
Notes
1 See for example the essays collected in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).
2 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 265.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Brace Inc, 1976), vii.
4 Ibid., viii.
5 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 83–84.
6 Arendt, Origins, 276–77.
7 See also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005) and Enzo Traverso, Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003) for similar arguments.
8 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97.
9 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
10 This leads to the paradox identified by Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002) that ultimately the true horror of the camps was unknowable: Those who experienced the worst didn’t survive and those who survived didn’t experience the worst.
11 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
12 Arendt, Human Condition, 79–135.
13 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Ca mbridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
14 Such a reading, of course, flies in the face of his argument for the liberation of Jews from Judaism as part of the project of human liberation in his 1843 “On the Jewish Question.”
15 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 271.
16 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 1982).
17 Arendt, Origins, 299.
18 Ibid., 296.