Abstract
This article seeks to investigate the relation between bodies’ movements, political freedom and the ontological constitution and maintenance of public space, understood in the very material sense of the res publica, the public thing, particularly the question what inhibitions of movement in public space could tell us about the meaning of uninhibited movement for political freedom. The starting point of this inquiry into the political value of bodily movement are Hannah Arendt’s cursory remarks, that we find scattered throughout her work, about elementary corporeal capacity of free movement as basic to political freedom. Referring to Butler and Merleau-Ponty, it reconstructs Arendt’s account of the relation between our elementary free bodily movement, public space and political freedom. While this account proves very insightful, it also exposes a certain ambivalence about the political meaning of free movement. Further, the author argues that this ambivalence results from Arendt’s reluctance to radically think through the consequences of her account of the corporeal nature of free movement. Engaging with feminist criticisms of Arendt’s body-aversiveness (especially Judith Butler’s), she shows that it is not so much the vulnerable body, but the capable, including resisting, body that is missing in Arendt’s account of political freedom. For that reason, the author turns to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body to argue that bodily free movement is not just negative, but could have a positive meaning as a political ‘practice of freedom’.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
It is important for Arendt not to assimilate ‘as I wish’ or ‘as or where one pleases’ ‘where we will’ to the faculty of the will—at least not in the conventional sense of free volition or freedom of choice. Below I will relate Arendtian wishing to spontaneity (see note 4).
- 3.
As it is well known, Arendt holds that sovereignty and rule have no place in poli-tics whatsoever (1958 230–36).
- 4.
Spontaneity underpins natality, the principle of public freedom for Arendt; see 1958 175–81; 1968b, 143–72; and 1951, 478–79. Arendt suggests that spontaneity is already inherent in humans’ embodied existence, i.e. ‘life itself’, however limited: “spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not only with human freedom but with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping alive” (1951 438).
- 5.
- 6.
In fact, exploitation is not even a necessary feature of slavery: not every slave ever has been exploited or treated badly. Prior to his release, the enslaved Greek philosopher Epictetus (50–135), for example, received permission from his master to study Stoic philosophy.
- 7.
See, among many others, Gündoğdu (2015).
- 8.
On politics as “the art of the possible” and hence of “thinking in limits”, see the letter to the German student activist, Hans Jürgen Benedict, that Arendt wrote in 1967: Arendt und Benedict 2008, “2–8. For two very different arguments about the necessary spatial limitations of politics in the Arendtian sense, see Oudejans (2011), and Benhabib (2004).
- 9.
Arendt also calls this positive freedom ‘power’. Freedom and power are so closely interrelated for Arendt, that she describes them in near-identical words, see, for example (1958 199–207).
- 10.
In this regard, Arendt agrees with the the late Foucault. See, for example, Foucault (1997), 281–301.
- 11.
- 12.
See also 2002 168.
- 13.
Recent Arendt scholarship indeed confirms that Arendt is far less hostile to the body—more particularly the activities of labor and work—than is usually assumed. See, for example, Gündoğdu (2015), Honig (2005).
- 14.
For a description of this Gestaltswitch in terms of a shift from a focus on social justice to political freedom, applied to the issue of sexual difference, see Borren 2013. The notion of political “translation”—the representation of problems as matters of common concern—is taken from Gündoğdu (2015), 69. By the way, translation is not the same as achieving consensus.
- 15.
Arendt does not seem to have read the Phenomenology of Perception (first published in French in 1945), but only the unfinished and posthumously work The Visible and the Invisible (first published in French in 1964, cf. Merleau-Ponty 1964c).
- 16.
- 17.
This is in fact the only instance in The Phenomenology of Perception in which Merleau-Ponty uses the notion of “I can”, referring to Husserl’s unpublished papers.
- 18.
See Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body’s relevance to the figure-background structure of perception: Merleau-Ponty (2000), 117–18.
- 19.
The Schneider case is but the most famous example he describes in detail.
- 20.
Merleau-Ponty did in fact write about politics, especially Marxist politics, but did not explore the possible political meaning of his ontological account of embodiment. Literature on Merleau-Ponty’s political theory mainly deals with his writings that explicitly address political topics. See Coole (2007), and, earlier, Kruks (1981). An exception is Mensch (2009).
- 21.
For an interesting account along these lines, see Mensch (2012).
- 22.
These laws include the Natives Land Act (1913), the Group Areas Act (1950), and the Pass Law Act (1952).
- 23.
Examples include the Defiance Campaign of 1952, the Women’s March of 1956, and the Pan African Congress Campaign of 1960 that resulted in the massacre of Sharpville. These campaigns were preceded and often inspired by protests led by Gandhi1894 to 1913.
- 24.
To be sure, the suffering and the capable body refer to one and the same phenomenal reality, but it is the perspective again that matters here.
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Borren, M. (2022). The Embodiment of Political Freedom: Spontaneous Movement, Plurality and the Ontological Constitution of Public Space. In: Robaszkiewicz, M., Matzner, T. (eds) Hannah Arendt: Challenges of Plurality. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81712-1_5
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