Abstract
At the heart of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, we find an often misunderstood central proposition: life is worldless. Through a close reading of Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), this paper aims to unpack the complications of this proposition in order to provide a new understanding of the roles of the “world” and “worldlessness” in Arendt’s thought. Contrary to traditional interpretations, I argue that if we follow Arendt’s arguments to their logical conclusions we have to consider the possibility that both the world and meaningful human action are essentially worldless: while the world is nothing but the objectification of the difference between the worldlessness of life and the worldlessness of thought, the essence of meaningful human action will always be marked by a withdrawal from the world. This inversion of Arendt’s reflections on life, thought, world, and action, is the necessary foundation for a new engagement of the problem of worldlessness in the age of biopolitical rule.
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Notes
- 1.
For a reconsideration of Arendt’s political philosophy from the perspective of contemporary discussions of biopolitics, see Diprose and Ziarek (2018).
- 2.
- 3.
For an overview of Arendt’s critique of modernity, see Villa 1996: 171–208.
- 4.
- 5.
For a critique of Arendt’s human essentialism from the perspective of biodiversity, see Oliver 2015: 71–110.
- 6.
Arendt’s negative political judgment on monasticism is in stark contrast with Giorgio Agamben’s arguments in The Highest Poverty (Agamben 2013).
- 7.
In my reading, Werner Hamacher reached a similar set of conclusions about the possibilities of being-with in Arendt’s writings (Hamacher 2017).
References
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Végső, R. (2020). Towards a Poetics of Worldlessness: Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Human Action. In: Kulcsár-Szabó, Z., Lénárt, T., Simon, A., Végső, R. (eds) Life After Literature. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33738-4_4
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