Abstract
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt exposed the scandal of universal human rights: though rights are supposed to accrue to individuals in virtue of their humanity alone, they seem to dissolve in exactly the moment an individual becomes nothing other than human. Ranciere claims this critique renders the Rights of Man “void.” 1 Others claim that we have to get beyond Arendt’s aporias in order to reconstruct the potential of human rights in our times. 2 Gündoğdu’s work, which rehabilitates Arendt’s aporetic approach to rights in the service of an emancipatory theory of the rights of migrants, enters these debates definitively. Her aim is to politicize rights by insisting on the agency of migrants, who span the precarious gap between man and citizen, and who pose a unique challenge the boundaries of political belonging. Gündoğdu achieves her aim. Along the way, she fleshes out a convincing theory of cosmopolitanism from below and provides a number of novel and surprising interpretations of Arendt.
Gündoğdu begins with Arendt’s “aporetic method.” Arendt had learned from Socrates that discursive inquiry should not aim to obtain incontrovertible truth, but should “provoke thinking and encourage judgment in the face of political and normative crises” (35). Accordingly, Arendt’s critique of rights was incisive, but not absolute. She identified a fundamental problem, namely, that the functioning of the Westphalian system presupposed a “trinity” of nation-state-territory. When the terms of the trinity found themselves askew, as they did in the aftermath of WWII, there was a breakdown of the system. Yet, as Gündoğdu emphasizes, Arendt did not remain with the philosophical quandaries produced by the gap between man and citizen, and moved instead to rethink rights in terms of a “right to have rights.” The Socratic-inspired aporetic method uses perplexities to provoke rather than foreclose future judgment of concrete political dilemmas.
Gündoğdu conducts her own analysis of the struggles of migrants in the spirit of the aporetic method, moving repeatedly from perplexity and contradiction to rethinking rights as a political practice. She does not acknowledge it, but the aporetic method bears striking similarities to Frankfurt-style critical theory. For that reason, her approach to human rights will find many sympathetic readers among contemporary critical theorists.
In chapter 2, Gündoğdu shifts to Arendt’s theory of “the social,” which helps her distinguish political from anti-political approaches to human rights. Her aim here is to critique administrative humanitarianism. “The social” is an infamously troubled category in Arendt’s oeuvre, one which many would happily jettison, and so Gündoğdu’s revival of it may come as a surprise to familiar readers. However, the surprise is a pleasant one. Through a rehearsal of arguments from On Revolution alongside Arendt’s lesser-known comments on the early labor movement in The Human Condition, Gündoğdu argues that “the social” is best understood as an administrative approach to politics that objectifies individuals and denies them agency. While Arendt undoubtedly worried about the intrusion of animal laborans into the public, her theory does not preclude the translation of economic and social issues into political ones. In an illuminating discussion, Gündoğdu describes how Arendt admired the early labor movement for “forg[ing] a political approach that inventively tied together questions of economic justice, social change, and democratic government” (83). While she condemned the French Revolution for the reduction of political agents into a suffering mass worthy of pity, Arendt also admired and celebrated the potential transformation of animal laborans into a political agent.
Gündoğdu revives the controversial category of “the social” because she is interested in the process through which an object of pity and administrative compassion, that is, the contemporary refugee, might be transformed into a political actor. Consistently, Gündoğdu challenges the boundaries of Arendtian theory, turning categories back on themselves in order to politicize the migrant. For example, in chapter 4, she questions action-centric interpretations of Arendt’s phenomenology and revives the status of work and labor. The rights to work and to labor in a durable world are not only vital for a meaningful human life but they are also integral components of political life and worthy of political demands. Indeed, migrants often politicize issues of housing, commerce, and labor within refugee camps and detention centers.
One of many memorable examples in the text is an account of “50 Sierra Leonean women who mobilized at the Boreah camp to demand plastic sheeting to protect their shelters from rain damage” (157). The women staged a demonstration and asked humanitarian administrators to receive a representative delegation to negotiate the issue. Traditional interpretations of Arendt would exclude such matters of housekeeping from the proper sphere of politics. However, Gündoğdu persuasively argues that “by . . . positioning themselves as political subjects . . . and demanding plastic sheeting as a right and not as a gift” (157), the women accomplished the politicization not only of their interests but of themselves.
A more disturbing example that Gündoğdu lingers over is the practice of lip-sewing that was taken up by migrants who were held in detention in Australia’s Woomera camp in 2002. In this case, migrants sewed their lips together in an attempt to insert themselves into the public realm and highlight “the impossibility of making rights claims” from a position of geographical isolation and political invisibility (160). Gündoğdu rightly treads lightly in her analysis of lip-sewing. Instead of condemning or applauding the practice, she draws attention to its symbolic illustration of voicelessness. We expel migrants from the political community when we silence them by detaining them and making them invisible. The road back into politics starts, then, with the reclamation of voice.
Voice is a persistent theme in the book, which we should expect from a faithful Arendtian take on politics. In “The Borders of Personhood”—perhaps the best and most intricate chapter in the book—Gündoğdu explores Arendt’s interest in persona, the Latin term for a stage mask, “through which the individual, undisguised voice of the actor could sound.” 3 Arendt understood persona in terms of legal personality. Legal personhood gives an individual standing and “allows public appearance without the pervasive fear of arbitrary violence” (92). Crucially, Arendt observed that when individuals are stripped of their persona, they are thrown back on their bare humanity and in that moment lose their rights. Since Arendt’s time, this problem has been mitigated by the development of universal legal personhood, which is guaranteed to all individuals by international human rights law (IHRL). However, Gündoğdu points to the persistent precariousness of personhood in our age of rights. Because sovereign territoriality is upheld in international law alongside individual rights, governing authorities can evade rights claims made by migrants and avoid granting asylum.
Though Gündoğdu shows how sovereign territoriality brings IHRL into contradiction with itself, she does not explicitly address whether these perplexities would dissolve if states developed beyond their current sovereign form. Indeed, Gündoğdu’s advocacy of cosmopolitanism focuses exclusively on claiming and declaring rights from below, or what some have called “cosmopolitics.” 4 Her avoidance of the top–down aspects to cosmopolitanism makes the work more convincing. By focusing on outsiders and their rights claims, Gündoğdu provides a counter-narrative to critics of human rights like Samuel Moyn, who has painted the international human rights regime as an anti-political last utopia. 5 The struggles for agency among migrants depicted in this book are anything but anti-political.
Gündoğdu’s concluding discussion explores Arendtian cosmopolitics through the example of the French migrant movement, sans-papiers. In 1997, representatives of sans-papiers released a manifesto “that resembled the eighteenth-century revolutionary declarations” (196), which Gündoğdu uses to re-interpret Arendt’s elusive formulation of a “right to have rights” in terms of revolutionary founding. Declarations of right, Gündoğdu argues, are always made without prior authorization. The declaration of sans-papiers is a radical re-imagining of the boundaries of the political community and a demand for inclusion. Arendt’s “right to have rights” is most fruitfully read, then, as a declaration that is also a revolutionary founding, one that transforms the boundaries of membership in the traditional Westphalian nation-state.
Rightlessness in an Age of Rights is an intricate and erudite work. As an interpretation of Arendt, it is bold and original. Her successful revival of “the social” is particularly striking. She also brings surprising resources from Arendt’s oeuvre, such as her admiration for the labor movement, to bear on the theorist’s understanding of political freedom. Ultimately, Gündoğdu stays true to Arendt’s enduring commitment to the dignity of the political. This commitment is reflected in the author’s mission to politicize the struggles of migrants as a form of cosmopolitanism from below. She remains cognizant of the obstacles this “insurrectional” form of politics faces. Migrant politics are the politics of the outsider and the underdog. However successful, these politics are worth the effort Gündoğdu takes to theorize them because at stake is nothing less than the boundaries of the Westphalian nation-state.