Hannah Arendt,the problem of the absolute and the paradox of constitutionalism,or

Introduction

In the final chapter of On Revolution, in which she draws attention to the lost treasures of the revolutionary tradition, Hannah Arendt writes that ‘the spirit of revolution contains two elements which to us seem irreconcilable’. The experience of founding brings forth an ‘exhilarating awareness of the human capacity of beginning’, an exhilaration which is tempered through a pressing concern with the ‘stability and durability of the new structure’. That in our contemporary political vocabulary we recognize stability and the spirit of the new as opposites is ‘a symptom of our loss’. ¹ This loss is especially germane to the apparently perplexing relation between constituent and constituted powers in contemporary constitutional thought. Across its diverse formulations, constituent power has recently been framed as a ‘paradoxical’ concept. Emmanuel Sieyès, writing in the formative years of the French Revolution, did not see the concept as paradoxical. The nation, as the rightful body to draw up the new constitution of France, was the constituent power, though this power was enacted only through a complex account of representation intended to temper the unbridled ethical will that was later seen in the Terror. ² The treatment of constituent power in contemporary thought, however, has reneged on Sieyès’ fateful insights. For a number of contemporary writers, constituent power evokes a pressing tension between the generative and the expansive constituent power of the people, and the necessity to divide and constrain it if it is to offer up a viable constitutional form. ³ By interpreting constituent power as ‘paradoxical’, these theorists come to read the concept through the theoretical lens that Arendt wishes to critique, for the founding act is bracketed into two opposed elements: the intense novelty of constituent power against the stability of constituted powers. Though their conclusions differ, this conceptual framework organizes the positions of theorists as diverse as David Dyzenhaus and Antonio Negri. For liberal constitutionalists like Dyzenhaus, constituent power must immediately give way to a stable constituted power, and with it the rule of law, once the moment of founding has passed. ⁴ Negri, who seeks to move beyond the tension, celebrates the radical freedom of a constituent power that remains permanently in excess of constitutional form. ⁵ The effort to stabilize the constitutional order necessarily implies an execrable containment of the creative potential of the multitude. Despite their unalloyed political differences, each of these theorists retains the antagonistic relation between stability and novelty, with implications for the conceptual relation between politics and law, for the innovation or unruliness of ‘the political’ is positioned against the surety of the symbolic order of law.

This article takes up Arendt’s assertion that to recapture the lost spirit of revolution consists in ‘the attempt at thinking together and combining meaningfully’ the opposed temporalities of stability and novelty. ⁶ Others have undertaken similar tasks by focusing upon her council system, though this has amounted to a theorization of the persistence of constituent power within the constituted order. ⁷ It is vital also to consider this in the act of founding itself if the opposition is to be challenged effectively. In order to do so, this article re-examines the political temporality that is evoked in the activity of founding. This is developed with attention to her account within The Life of the Mind, where she revises her position from On Revolution. Here she confronts what she calls ‘the riddle of foundation’, or ‘how to restart time within an inexorable time continuum’. ⁸ The new always emerges within a world that preceded it in time, and so appears to disrupt our received understanding of stability. In constitutional theory, this tension is augmented by a peculiar superhuman need to begin political life with a new calendar. This, Arendt recognizes, is achieved most readily through appeals to extra-temporal absolutes that, in mimicking divine genesis, undo the human achievement of founding. ⁹ Within this article, I argue that Arendt’s response is not to repudiate absolutes in politics but instead to offer a critical redescription of them. Rather than a ‘resolution’ to the riddle, her response is more appropriately framed as a ‘disruption’ to the commonplace temporalizations we attribute to our political vocabulary, allowing us to approach the relationship between stability and novelty as compatible rather than antagonistic ideas. In doing so, we are more appropriately placed to navigate the conceptual make-up of the paradox of constitutionalism and theorize an alternative relation between constituent power and constitutional form.

This argument is built in three parts. In part I, I parse three distinctive readings of the Arendtian account of founding, arguing that each of them employs absolutes as tools of political theology, a position which has important implications for the manner in which they relate politics to law. ¹⁰ This is problematic for two reasons: first, this retains the bifurcation between stability and novelty; and second, through this manner of thinking it imports a thin conception of law as command into their argument. While Arendt certainly does employ the term ‘absolute’ in this manner, it is by no means exhaustive. Greater sensitivity to her other uses highlights that she does not exclusively consider them tools of political theology. The significance of this is developed in part II, in which I argue that her Augustinian reflections on a predicament of beginning anew in Kant’s First Critique illuminates the limitations of a conventional manner of understanding beginnings as a rupture in time. I develop this theme in part III by critiquing the temporal vocabulary employed by the paradox of constitutionalism. Arendt also leaves open the possibility of considering how temporality weighs upon our actions. By reading her thoughts on the temporality of the thinking ego against her position on the temporality of action, one possibility is that our mental reflections on time disentangle our actions from commonplace assumptions of linear continuity, so disrupting our association of the new with rupture. This strategy of disrupting the temporalities we associate with political action assists in reconsidering the ‘paradoxical’ relation between constituent and constituted powers, by challenging the theoretical lens through which a constituent power is made necessary.

I The problem of the absolute

Arendt’s reflections on revolutionary beginnings have an ambiguous relation with the term ‘absolute’. She is deeply troubled with the manner in which they are employed as recourse to God, for power within a political realm attentive to human plurality can never amount to omnipotence. ¹¹ Such omnipotence, as is found in her considerations of sovereignty and totalitarianism, compresses the space between humans destroying their capacity to act and to begin. ¹² And yet, she nevertheless recognizes their importance in the case of laws by which political communities are founded. ¹³ While she affirms that ‘the absolute…spells doom for everyone’ when it enters ‘the political realm’, ¹⁴ she celebrates the absolute that is engendered in the principium. ¹⁵ Andreas Kalyvas has recently sought to overcome this tension by dismissing Arendt’s use of the terms ‘altogether new’ and ‘absolute novelty’ as ‘misleading expressions’, in favour of an account of a ‘relative beginning’. ¹⁶ While his reading is insightful, I am unconvinced that one can write off Arendt’s language so straightforwardly. Arendt’s choice of words strikes me as more ambiguous; while she wishes to refute a groundless will, she does not subsume the absolute under this term, but applies the word ‘absolute’ in manners that pull in different directions. Attentiveness to this is integral to the manner Arendt relates novelty to stability rather than treating them as countervailing tendencies. On occasion, she employs the term ‘absolute’ as a noun, which stands in for authority by appearing as a transmundane object, while on others, when, for example, she talks of ‘absolute novelty’, it is employed as an adjective that modifies the intensity of the novel act. There is, in addition, an important interaction effect between these two employments if the mundane intensity of an ‘absolute beginning’ is betrayed when it appeals to a transmundane or divine absolute. This is evident if we take two examples. The first is clearest in her polemic against Emmanuel Sieyès. ¹⁷ It is the substitutional problem of conferring upon the nation the authority that it might act as astand-in for the divine absolute: the positing of a ‘Creator-god who creates time along with the universe and who as legislator remains outside His creation’. ¹⁸ The great virtue of this mode of the absolute was to be found in its ability to break the vicious circle of law-making for the political temporality of the divine absolute locates the Will beyond the temporal realm altogether, residing ‘in’ eternity. The second is the temporal absolute of rupture – that is, an absolute break with the past. This, she refers to as an ‘absolute beginning’. It is, however, a more problematic construction for it encapsulates this tension between the mundane and transmundane employments of ‘absolute’. In utilizing ‘absolute’ as an adjective, it qualifies the action in such a way as the absolute appears to be generated by the act itself. Nevertheless, this appears to be betrayed for though it does not cite God directly, it nevertheless imitates his capacity to create time itself. In doing so, one destroys the distinctive temporality of politics as the will overrides the other faculties of the mind, allowing the actor to believe in the unthinkable, that man born in time could restart it. ¹⁹

Each of these engages in what Michael Freeden has recently referred to as the ‘arrogance and arrogation of politics’ – that those political decisions that claim finality do so unduly by appropriating authority from elsewhere. Ostensibly conclusive decisions endeavour to occupy a ‘godly role of boundary setting’ in the commencement of political time, which corresponds to the ‘finality of initiation’ in order to control the trajectory of political life. ²⁰ This practice of political arrogation is vital to Arendt’s critique of the unwieldy uses of absolutes within politics. They secure the foundation through the imitation of a transmundane principle allowing secular government to retain the political instruments of Christian political theology. ²¹ In section II, I will argue that theologico-political absolutes are not exhaustive of Arendt’s thought on the subject. It first serves to examine the consequences that follow when treated as if they were. In order to do so, I take three distinctive readings of Arendt’s constitutional founding. These are Bonnie Honig’s Derridean rereading, Andreas Kalyvas’ account of ‘relative beginnings’ and Mark Wenman’s affirmation of constituent power as absolute rupture. What remains intact in each account is an employment of ‘absolutes’ as tools of political theology. In treating absolutes in this fashion, each of them persists with a theorization of law as a symbolic order that is ‘against’ politics. As such they conceptualize the relation between politics and law inadequately. The implication is an inability to consider the categories of novelty and stability together in the manner which Arendt calls for.

In her impressive comparative reading of Arendt’s On Revolution with Jacques Derrida’s Declarations of Independence, Bonnie Honig identified in Arendt an attempt to address the question of how to ‘establish lasting foundations without appealing to gods, a foundationalist ground, or an absolute’. ²² In place of an appeal to an extra-political source of authority, Honig places stress on an act of performative writing that is the most exemplary form of being-in-the-world; the ‘we hold’ of the declaration was the actualization of freedom in action, that ‘requires no appeal to a source of authority beyond itself’. ²³ Against this, she contrasts Derrida, who demonstrates the ‘we hold’ of the declaration to be caught up in the undecidability of the constative utterance of a people who are yet to come into being. Her solution is neither to deny nor to succumb to the constative moment of founding, but instead calls for Arendt to ‘resist’ this undecidability. ²⁴ In appealing to resistance, Honig sets up the initial intervention into the problem of the absolute. Absolutes are illicit because they are irresistible, though the peculiar undecidability may be exploited in order to resist the irresistible absolute. This ‘resistance’, however, reworks the relation between law and politics. Though it resists the act of putting the law of laws above humankind, law remains associated with the divine command that nevertheless holds the absolute in its place as a ‘law of laws’. ²⁵ This is the heritage of the Derridean strand of Honig’s interpretation for which absolutes, like constative utterances, are structural necessities of our language that cannot simply be abandoned. ²⁶ This has pressing implications for the Arendtian activity of augmentation, for there are acute differences between Arendt and Derrida. For Arendt, augmentation, derived from the Roman conception of law as an alliance, is an activity of ‘adding to the original foundation’ through which law and politics appear together as mutually compatible categories. ²⁷ The Derridean undecidability, however, undoes this compatibility for he conceives of law as command. ²⁸ This is not to diminish the innovation of Honig’s interpretation, but rather place emphasis upon the manner in which her Derridean inflection configures the relation between law and politics, for the structure of resistance is not only a resistance against the absolute, but a resistance against the law. The deconstructive move converts augmentation, an activity of ‘being-alongside’, into resistance, that is, as ‘being-against’. ²⁹ Stability and novelty are agonistically related in a precarious, open-ended struggle between politicization and de-politicization. ³⁰ Though the opposition is transformed into a generative tension, stability nevertheless remains antithetical to the spirit of the new.

More recent revisionary interpretations of On Revolution have challenged Honig’s breakthrough reading. Andreas Kalyvas takes Honig’s reading to task, instead arguing that Arendt celebrates the American revolutionaries who were able ‘to avoid the language and practices of absolute rupture’ that a purely performative politics entails, for they relied upon pre-existing contracts, charters and self-governing public bodies, thus escaping the ‘lawlessness and power vacuum that a complete break would have necessarily created’. ³¹ Through the ‘relative’ nature of beginning in On Revolution, he argues, Arendt’s story of the American founding drew its strength from the ability to remain in continuity with the preceding democratic culture of the colonies. While this was an instance of ‘extraordinary politics’, no absolute beginning arose for authority was derived from the legal traditions and institutions that persisted. Though Kalyvas’ interpretation offers the critical insight that a thread of temporal continuity remains, this is styled as a legal continuity in order to avoid the proximity to Carl Schmitt by ‘repudiating the notion of an ex nihilo beginning’. ³² There is certainly good reason to think Arendt is replying to Schmitt, ³³ though this need not be so straightforward as a repudiation of absolutes, and the inversion of Schmitt’s argument. To suggest this is the case is troublesome for it tempers the manner in which Arendt rethinks the significance of law. For Kalyvas, the appropriate action is to take guidance from existing laws, and not to throw oneself into the abyss of freedom. A relative beginning ensures that the absolute does not emerge, but only in this instance, a position enhanced by his emphasis upon the exceptionally good laws of colonial America. The absolute, as the spectre of a Schmittian conception of commandment, remains conspicuous in its absence, for it is excluded from the particular case though not overcome generally, and so Kalyvas’ thesis retains the phenomenological make-up that associates law with stability, and politics with the new, though a new inflected with decisionism. To escape this decisionism, the novelty of politics is subordinated to the law through which it is harnessed and contained. ³⁴ Rather than an antagonistic relation, or an agonistic struggle, politics is inscribed within the law though the distinctive conceptual functions of each are retained.

It is for this reason that Mark Wenman has celebrated what Arendt recognizes as the ‘specific revolutionary pathos of the absolutely new’. ³⁵ Noting Kalyvas’ effort to advocate only ‘relative beginnings’, Wenman has interpreted Arendt’s argument instead as an endorsement of a form of action that manifests in the ruptural temporality of radical innovation. ³⁶ On his account, that Arendt keeps alive this connection between constituent power and temporal rupture is precisely what separates her thought from her agonistic heirs. Wenman wants to take Honig’s interpretation without its Derridean gloss. Instead, by placing the stress upon the ‘absolute priority’ of constituent power as revolutionary rupture he interprets Arendt as ‘stress[ing] unequivocally the moment of radical innovation’ which he connects with an absolute beginning. ³⁷ While Wenman reads Arendt as opening up an abyss of freedom, he suggests she does so only by radically rupturing the historical time continuum. Though he appreciates the phenomenological importance of the act of founding, the insightful distinction that he sketches between constituent power as revolution and augmentation, along with his preference for the former, urges us to engage in a politics that does not concede to the closure of law. In order to do so he styles this rupture in the form of a messianic break. ³⁸ That is to say, for Wenman theologico-political absolutes are necessary to overcome the law and mobilize the brand of militant cosmopolitanism he demands.

None of this is intended to diminish the innovation of their readings, for the positions of Wenman, Honig and Kalyvas strike upon crucial elements of Arendt’s thought, though I wish to emphasize that in utilizing absolutes as theologico-political tools, they are encouraged to think of law and politics as opposed categories, and so cannot get a handle upon a complementary relation between novelty and stability. In the process of doing so, the temporal experience of founding is drawn in one of three ways: it is either a continuity with the past, a radical break from it, or an agonistic struggle against the despotic though stabilizing absolute. Each of these readings leads us back into the paradox of constitutionalism, for the temporal lens through which they approach founding associates constituent power’s novelty with a political break, and stability of constituted power with continuity.

II Of relative absolutes

The term ‘absolute’ plays a far more distinguished role in Arendt’s account of constitutional founding than has thus far been acknowledged. In attending to it, we can appreciate that it is precisely this common distinction, which maps continuity on to stability and associates rupture with radicality, that Arendt reworks. In addition to these theologico-political uses, there is another ‘absolute’ which conceives of the temporality of founding differently. Here, Arendt establishes the grounds for a peculiar construction she refers to as ‘relatively absolute spontaneity’, which she employs to critically rewrite the valence of the term ‘absolute’ in order to reintegrate it into her political vocabulary by scrambling the terms of temporal experience in modern western thought that bind novelty to futurity and rupture. This appropriately frames her characterization of the absolute as it applies to the establishment of principles in and of politics. The purpose of this is to undo what both Honig and Kalyvas, in their own ways, take to be the despotic moment of the absolute that places the law above and against politics. This oblique argument can be discerned if one first appreciates that through her often experimental and eclectic writing the meaning and valence of words such as ‘authority’, ‘foundation’ and ‘absolute’ shift radically. She exploits this strategy of reading as a means of disrupting the commonplace distinctions that the political vocabularies of the ‘western tradition’ attribute to absolutes.

As a way into this disruption of our temporal register, Arendt considers Kant’s ‘embarrassment’ in dealing with the problem of bringing something new into a world already in motion. There is an apparent tension in which Kant describes a chain of causation beginning in the moment he rises from his chair. In doing so, she quotes Kant: a new series has ‘an absolute beginning in this event, although as regards time this event is only the continuation of a preceding series’. ³⁹ What is ‘so very troublesome’, for Arendt, is the ‘notion of an absolute beginning, for [according to Kant] “a series occurring in the world can have only a relatively first beginning, being always preceded by some other state of things”’. ⁴⁰ This is to suggest a perplexing tension is in place between the act being at once relative and absolute. In rising from a chair, the act can be said to be an ‘absolute beginning’ insofar as causality is concerned, if not time, for though time does not begin anew, something new is initiated in willing that act. Despite this, due to our received relation between causation and temporality, it is not at all straightforward whether such a beginning can be interpreted as an ‘absolute beginning’. Kalyvas has taken this passage to indicate that Arendt is reproaching Kant’s failure to distinguish absolute from relative beginnings, in order to affirm his interpretation of her as a theorist of the latter. ⁴¹ This, however, seems to paper over precisely the temporal difficulty at stake, for she does not turn to Kant in order to resolve the problem of willing, but to prise it open. It is certainly the case that humans cannot commence time anew as if they were gods though it diminishes the thrust of Arendt’s account of the will and of action, each with its ‘miraculous’ qualities, ⁴² if the beginning is treated as only relatively new. The discussion points to something more profound. The manner in which we take for granted the appearance of the new within politics does not so much conflate temporality with causation, but privileges the former over the latter. Our common sense dictates that the absolutely new is not only unprecedented, but that it attains its unprecedented significance by appearing ex nihilo, and so a problem follows: the absolutely new may emerge only as an event unconnected with the past, an activity that, short of an arrogative gesture to the tools of political theology, is beyond the scope of human action. In doing so, it also naturalizes the phenomenological opposition between novelty and stability, in which the absolutely new appears only as a punctuated temporal break that, insofar as it is to be perceived as an absolutely new event, must break from that which existed before.

Rejecting the absolutely new in favour of a relative beginning does little to address this naturalized opposition. It is, however, possible to identify an attempt on Arendt’s behalf to redescribe the temporality and valence of an absolute beginning in order to square this difficulty. In Augustine, she finds a distinction between two beginnings, the principium of heaven and earth, and the initium of humankind, a distinction that points to the phenomenon that Kant draws between those temporally absolute and relative beginnings. ⁴³ Arendt returned to this distinction often throughout her body of work, and the employment is significant for not only does she consider him the only philosopher who, through this distinction, adequately explains Genesis in a manner sensitive to the human capacities to begin, but in doing so he sufficiently complicated the relation between what we take to be relative and absolute beginnings. Though principium amounted to the beginning of the world and time, time became meaningful only through the initium of humankind without whom the movement of time was unthinkable. Prior to the creation of humankind, time turned in a ‘purposeless way’, and so it was for the ‘sake of novitas… that man was created’. ⁴⁴ While principium may readily have been called the ‘absolute’ beginning in the Kantian manner, in that it successfully commenced time, that time was created in principio is of only relative consequence, for the new only attained its meaning as a beginning in relation to the initium of man who could conceive of time in a purposeful fashion. The vital point, as Arendt recognizes in a footnote to her discussion of natality, is that Augustine’s notion of principium has a ‘much less radical meaning’ than the standard translation of the Bible’s first verse. ⁴⁵ This evaluation more appropriately frames the phrase that she often quoted from City of God that demonstrates the enormous capacity of humankind to act as beginners, ‘that there was a beginning [initium], man was created before whom nobody was’. ⁴⁶ The capacity to begin does not follow from a humankind created in God’s image, or the arrogation of a god-like capacity as a Schmittian decision might, nor does it imply Scotian univocity. ⁴⁷ Rather, it was with initium and not principium that a new event was made intelligible as a beginning which, in accordance with her conception of human plurality, could be meaningful only when recognized as such by humans who perceive time by breaking the temporal continuum into tenses.

This clarification is crucial, for it reveals the manner in which Arendt’s account of natality is geared in The Life of the Mind toward disrupting our sense of the absolute beginning as it appears in Kant. The predicament that Kant cannot square between an absolute causal beginning and a relative temporal beginning is seemingly dealt with in Arendt’s argument by inverting the relation between them. The creation of time, in Arendt’s interpretation of Augustine, is not ontologically superior to the creation of humankind within time, for the former, principium, can only be fully comprehended following the latter, initium. That is to say, in Augustine’s philosophy, there is an intensity to the human will vis-à-vis creation that is not found elsewhere in the philosophical tradition with which she is concerned. Arendt continues that had Kant known of Augustine’s philosophy of natality, he might have recognized that ‘the freedom of a relatively absolute spontaneity is no more embarrassing to human reason than the fact that men are born’. ⁴⁸ At the heart of this claim is a peculiar construction. To say an act is ‘relatively absolute’ is contradictory, though it reveals the sort of ontological bracketing she wishes to challenge. The grave problem, for Arendt, is that the very hypothesis of the absolute beginning goes back to the biblical doctrine of Genesis in which the beginning is bound to principium, and so the vocabulary of the absolute is always interpreted through, and judged against, the standard of ex nihilo creation. Such, however, necessarily encloses the absolute within the confines of a divine will. As Kant examines the idea of the absolute beginning, he too renders it meaningful only by judging it against the principles of biblical Genesis. ⁴⁹ It is in Augustine that Arendt finds the tools to unhook this commonplace relation. This contradictory construction of the ‘relative absolute’ in contradistinction to the divine absolute cuts to the heart of Arendt’s dilemma. The divine absolute is wholly inattentive to the fragile human capacity to begin anew. Not only is it wholly inaccessible to human action short of an arrogative gesture of imitation, but it also frames human activity in a partial or relative manner, so diminishing its reception. In contrast, the ‘relative absolute’ captures the human capacity of beginning ‘absolutely’. That is to say, her position does not amount to a repudiation of the absolute, but the recovery of an alternative manner of employing it that is sensitive to human plurality.

This excavation from Willing appropriately frames an otherwise abstruse comment in On Revolution, in which Arendt offers the affirmative statement that the search for an extra political absolute that might break the vicious circle of law-making is ‘futile’ for ‘this absolute lies in the very act of beginning itself’. ⁵⁰ She relates this to the concept of the principle which is the ‘solution to the otherwise unsolvable problem of an absolute in the realm of human affairs’. ⁵¹ Like the lost Roman auctoritas, principles are critical for politics insofar as they establish criteria for normative judgement. ⁵² In recognizing the principle as the absolute that lies in the act of beginning, Arendt draws an elementary distinction not between absolute and relative beginnings, but between divine and worldly absolutes that map on to the two Augustinian capacities to begin. When understood in this way I am not encouraged, as George Kateb is, to understand the principle as that which ‘comes to one from outside and inspires “from without”’, for it then appears to us as a quasi-transcendental normative standard that derives its binding force from its location outside of the world. ⁵³ Conversely, Lucy Cane’s insight that the principle comes into being through cycles of repetition and regeneration, though agreeable, diminishes the ‘event-character’ Arendt associates with the relatively absolute beginning. ⁵⁴ The temporality projected by initium intends to disrupt the contrast between the two. Instead, the principle is closely related to the concept of archê, endowed with a particularly human capacity to begin. Though she recognized this to be typically associated with sovereign rule, Arendt wished to resume the lost etymological connection that splits the act of ruling from that of ‘setting in motion’. ⁵⁵ In recovering this ancient meaning of archê, Arendt affirms the thread of continuity between the act of initiation and the activity of ruling that is inaugurated. Ruling does not separate ruler from ruled by conceiving of the beginning as a temporal break between sovereign and subject, but conceives the activity of politics under a principle that, coeval with the beginning, ‘inspires the deeds that are to follow and remains apparent as long as the activity lasts’. ⁵⁶ In doing so, Arendt attends to the manner in which stability springs from the beginning, rather than emerging subsequently – in the activity of ruling – to suppress its novelty. ⁵⁷

There is a spatializing phenomenology of law that proceeds from this. Through the lens of principium, the beginning of law serves as a partitioning device that commences time and space, with the explicit purposes of securing the inside from the outside and reducing politics to peace, an ability amplified by the command-authority emanating from the ‘power monopoly of the state’, itself an imitation of the divine creator who prohibits human actions through commandment. ⁵⁸ The lens of initium, in conceiving of beginnings as activities sensitive to human plurality, conceptualizes law differently. Insofar as the beginning is not conceived as a radically punctuated rupture in time and space, but an activity within time that is inaugurated and augmented, the creation of law serves not as a wall to separate one from another, but, in accordance with the Roman lex, seeks formal relationships and ties between individuals. ⁵⁹ To this effect, law served as a means of forging an alliance or rapport to relate things, in order to bring individuals face-to-face. ⁶⁰ The spatial inflection of this is to see lex not as the preservation of a space, but the reduction of distance between individuals in order to foster political interaction and forge a common world. The correlated effect is to conceive law alongside politics as complementary tools that augment the founding act. ⁶¹ That is to say, the implication of the temporality associated with the relatively absolute beginning of initium is to alter one’s perception of their relation to law. Politics is not a disposition of being-against the law, nor does Arendt contrast constituent with constituted power. This conceptual nesting is the legacy of interpreting the absolute beginning as principium.

III Beyond the paradox of constitutionalism: The temporality of the relative absolute

The overlooked, and relatively finely tuned, difference over the temporality Arendt associates with the term ‘absolute’ not only is thoroughly relevant to her own account of political founding, but also allows us to get a handle upon the phenomenological make-up of the paradox of constitutionalism. Doing so appropriately situates her response in a manner that devises an account of founding that reconciles stability with the emergence of the new by disrupting our common-sense temporalizations of these categories. Loughlin and Walker’s paradox of constitutionalism presents the elementary tension of modern constitutionalism in the relation between the people as constituent power and the constitutional form that they bring into being. The unconditionally generative constituent power of the people must, for it to successfully establish a constitutional regime, be ‘divided’ and ‘constrained’ through the instituting act. ⁶² To frame the problem differently, constitutionalism appears paradoxical for it relates constituted power to the stability associated with legality and continuity, and constituent power with the punctuated novelty of politics. When Loughlin and Walker identified this problem in their 2007 volume, they presented 4 possible solutions. ⁶³ Irrespective of the political bearing ascribed to constituent power under each thesis, the meaning and function of constituent and constituted powers are kept intact. In each instance, it is accepted that the latter captures and constrains the former in order to preserve – or police – politics. What goes unaddressed is the manner in which we are encouraged to view constitutionalism through the narrow scope of such a paradigm. The excavation of the problem of the absolute presents an elementary perspective as to why this is the case. By The Life of the Mind, Arendt seems to have recognized that the problem of the absolute cuts in both directions. It is insufficient to contend that the conventional manner of employing theologico-political absolutes in politics undermines the activity of founding, for absolutes condition our politics irrespective of our appeal to them, insofar as they assist in organizing the temporal relations within which our political language operates. So long as the activity of beginning is associated with principium in this manner, we anticipate that the emergence of the new can only have radically disruptive consequences, a claim that seems to hold even once the overt theologico-political connotations have been shed. This is illustrated in Andrew Arato’s recent efforts to move beyond the paradox of constitutionalism by developing a paradigm of ‘post-sovereign’ constitution-making. Here the concept of constituent power is ‘de-dramatize[d]’ by conceiving of constitutional founding as a process of legal revision, though this activity nevertheless organizes itself around the familiar temporal clustering of law, stability and continuity in order to temper the unruly constituent power. ⁶⁴ The stability ensured by legal continuity is necessary so long as the activity of constituent power is conceived through the lens of a theologico-political absolute. The corollary is that the elementary bracketing between stability and the new remains intact. Though this may provide a viable constitutional form, its solution to the paradox of constitutionalism is to invert the bifurcation through which stability is given preference over novelty in even the first instance.

This diagnostic point demonstrates that it is not enough simply to reject or resist the concept of the absolute when conceiving of the activity of founding. So long as we associate the absolute beginning with temporal rupture – one that is imitative of the divine creation of the world – our vocabulary fosters conceptual bifurcations and ‘automatic thought-reactions’ that Arendt wished to do away with, bracketing off stability against novelty, by pairing them with continuity and rupture respectively. ⁶⁵ Practically, moreover, it allows the radically new to appear only in predictable ways, namely, as a break from the past. Arendt’s solution, at least by The Life of the Mind, is not an endorsement of ‘relative’ beginnings, for she would be led back into the problem. It is the notion of relatively absolute spontaneity that allows her to reconsider this. If it is to allow us to conceive of stability and novelty together, however, the temporal structure of this activity requires discerning. In reading her account of the temporality of the thinking ego against the temporality of action, a ‘relatively absolute’ beginning within time springs from creative reflection on the past, displacing assumptions of linear continuity that associate the new with rupture. This elaborates the finer points of difference between my interpretation of Arendt and Kalyvas’ ‘relative beginnings’ thesis in order to demonstrate how this temporality can be put to work to reconsider the terms of the paradox of constitutionalism.

Toward the end of Thinking, Arendt returns to a parable by Kafka entitled ‘He’. ⁶⁶ Here she envisions the location of the thinking ego upon a ‘battleground’ between the forces of past and future. That they are ‘forces’ is pivotal to her conceptualization of temporality, for each of them presses upon the mind in order to shape the world of the thinker. Passively, it is within this rectilinear temporality that an individual life rises out of ‘natural’ life, characterized by cyclical time. ⁶⁷ Actively, however, the forceful nature of past and future operates as a springboard for innovation. This is clearest in her modification of the parable in which she dismisses the notion that the protagonist might ‘jump out of this world altogether’, for to do so would be to absolve past and future of their meaning. ⁶⁸ Rather, as the forces of past and future meet, his presence causes ‘the stream of time to deflect from whatever its original direction’. The ensuing ‘third force’, having resulted from past and future whose origins are infinite, is projected diagonally from a point of origin in the present outward in an ‘infinite’ direction. ⁶⁹ The modification that Arendt makes is significant for two reasons. First, she identifies the location of the thinking ego within the world, rather than within the nunc stans of Christian philosophy, the thinking equivalent of the unreflexive theologico-political will of constituent power. Second, it is when situated within the world that the absolute condition of human creativity is affirmed. The diagonal force is a thought process that, building upon the mind’s location between past and future, reaches out into infinity, the avowal of the ontological intensity of thinking, an activity that gives rise to the absolutely new without transgressing the temporal continuum.

Though this is characterized as ‘a perfect metaphor for the activity of thought’, ⁷⁰ one should be careful in bracketing it to this arena alone. ⁷¹ The striking opposition between vita activa and vita contemplativa developed in The Human Condition was largely rethought by The Life of the Mind. ⁷² Thought is not a practice that occurs outside of the temporal world, but is one deeply connected to ‘experience’. ⁷³ While the practice of thinking remains a solitary activity, the two additional faculties of the mind, willing and judging, remain responsive to the realm of appearance. ⁷⁴ These three faculties were to be kept in correspondence to prevent what she saw as the perennial problem of the philosophic tradition – the retreat of the thinking ego. ⁷⁵ Critically, the relation between thought and action is a recursive one; to be puzzled by the temporality of founding is a perspective that confronts the life of the mind before it confronts the realm of appearance. Paul Ricoeur grasps this reflexivity when arguing that ‘it is vita contemplativa which allows vita activa to understand itself and to reflect upon its own temporal condition’. ⁷⁶ Certainly this interface between thinking and acting can be enlarged if her reflections upon Walter Benjamin are considered. ⁷⁷ For Benjamin, the past appears in the present not as ‘homogenous, empty time’, but as jetztzeit, a moment pregnant with transformative potential, in which the past is received in order to amplify the creativity of action. ⁷⁸ Critically, for Arendt, this utilization of the past involves a strategy of ‘citability’, which she distinguishes from ‘transmissibility’. ⁷⁹ While the latter is the thread of narrative continuity that ties the past to the present through the authority of tradition, citability makes use of what she elsewhere calls a ‘fragmented past which has lost its certainty for evaluation’. ⁸⁰ There is a timeliness to this appropriation of Benjamin for, like the loss of tradition, activities of founding throw us into a protean universe. ⁸¹ Short of exceptional circumstances, when the founding of a new constitution is necessary the pre-existing political landscape is rarely capable of providing the requisite legitimacy to secure the founding, for if authority were intact there would be no need for a new constitution. ⁸² In the instance of founding, it is not enough to replace the security of tradition with what Benhabib calls ‘narrativity’ for this nevertheless remains within the conceptual frame of a transmissible past that can be utilized unproblematically. ⁸³ Kalyvas appears to have narrativity in mind when he turns to preceding laws to stabilize the founding. For him the narrative of legal continuity secures the grounding of the constitutional beginning, through which the old is in position to place ‘self-limitation and stability’ upon the new, operating in a manner not dissimilar to the transmissibility of tradition. ⁸⁴ Arendt’s Benjaminian offering presents a thought-practice that is a little more complex; after all, storytelling is only one aspect of what Arendt does. ⁸⁵ This she combines with an experimental writing, which turns to the past to ‘pry loose the rich and the strange’. ⁸⁶ The Benjaminian gift of thinking poetically entails the playful combination of thought-fragments in order to evoke novel and serendipitous experiences. While Raluca Eddon suggests that one would be ‘hard-pressed to imagine a more effective neutralization of the messianic dimension of Benjamin’s thought’, ⁸⁷ she fails to recognize the sophistication of Arendt’s move. Arendt reads Benjamin against Benjamin in order to disentangle the thought-fragment from its messianic-revolutionary surroundings. The ‘citability’ she identifies in Benjamin’s work is one that is bound neither to authorial intentionality nor a narrative totality. The cited thought-fragment might creatively misread the intention behind the cited act, though this is due to its essayistic styling of prising open the gap between past and future in order to give birth to a new beginning. This fleshes out her reflections on Kafka, for the act of beginning is not defined in opposition to the old. The passing of judgement upon those thought-fragments recovered from the past means that the old is transformed into the radically new through the practice of thinking – the deflection of both tenses into an infinite present. It raises the past to open the present up to the new: ‘the genuine picture may be old, but the genuine thought is new. It is of the present.’ ⁸⁸

There is good reason why we should be careful of this distinction between a transmissible and a citable past, for when in Life of the Mind she reconsiders the American founding, Arendt recognizes that the founding fathers were caught once again in the problem of temporality. She highlights that they ‘renege[d] on the very experience of freedom and novelty’ in seeking a justification for their actions ‘which will have to show the act as a continuation of preceding events’. ⁸⁹ A narrative resolution circumvents the riddle by ensuring all foundation is the refoundation of a prior political arena, so while it never confronts the problem of temporal boundary-setting, it comes at a cost. In doing so, the founding fathers denied themselves the ‘hope of founding a new Rome’; instead they were forced to ‘repeat the primeval foundation and found Rome anew’. ⁹⁰ The subtle distinction drives to the heart of Arendt’s position. What is sure is that the absolutely new need not dismantle the old in order to attain its meaning, but whereas Kalyvas’ extraordinary politics, like Arato’s post-sovereign constitution-making, puts guides in place to ensure self-limitation, Arendt refuses this trope of the western tradition. The former founds Rome anew by re-establishing the old in its image, the latter founds a new Rome by judging the new against the exemplar. The temporal difference between the two is acute – while the former is bound to the past, the action of the latter draws from the past, though its action is not rendered meaningful through its relation to the past. The founding, while not a temporal beginning, could claim to be an act of ‘absolute novelty’ that initiates a new space in the world. It is not simply ‘the new as an improved restatement of the old’. ⁹¹

It is here that a distinctive conceptualization of political temporality emerges. Unlike process-driven activities, in which time appears to transition imperceptibly between tenses, the ‘gap’ that is opened in the present – the infinite diagonal generated when self-consciously located between the weight of past and future – represents a moment of unending possibility. It is here that we might locate this conception of ‘relatively absolute spontaneity’. This moment is by no means one that appears ex nihilo; it is not an emergence from sheer voluntarism but an absolute generated from an application of the three mental faculties in concert. In doing so, Arendt reconceptualizes absolutes as tools that are not bound to political theology. In response to the Kantian predicament that events of this world can have only ‘relatively first beginnings’, ⁹² these parables build upon Arendt’s Augustinian claim that men are born ‘newcomers again and again in a world that precedes them in time’. ⁹³ The capacity to begin in a ‘relatively absolute’ manner respects the finitude of humankind, and the limitations upon our worldly capacity to begin. To act otherwise – to begin as if that beginning was ex nihilo – is to invoke the very Schmittian tool of political theology and, with it, a troubling conception of law as command. ⁹⁴ By contrast, her reformulation of an ‘absolute’ activity retains the properly temporal experience of politics by experimentally retrieving from the past those imperfect thought-fragments that might be put to a new and innovative use to prise open an absolutely new beginning. To be sure, the absolutely new is not a straightforward continuation of past events for the past does not appear to the thinking ego as an unproblematic narration. It is a fragmented past that has lost its certainty. Jacques Taminiaux writes of Arendt, ‘it is the past itself that launches an appeal to the invention of the new…of a future way of inhabiting the world’. ⁹⁵ This requires clarification, for the past is only meaningful through experience of it. The past is ‘launched’ into the absolutely new only through the interface of thinking and acting. The characteristically infinite trajectory of thought projects the past toward the initiation of a new act, through which the quality of the absolute is to be established not in its origin, but in its trajectory. By locating the will between past and future, the absolutely new emerges not as a break from the old but what Patchen Markell has called an agent’s ‘attunement’ to the act’s character as an irrevocable event. ⁹⁶ The old is not the context from which the act breaks but the context that provides the tools for its amplification.

In thinking through beginnings in this fashion, we go some way to addressing the paradox of constitutionalism, for it allows us to think through the will of the founding act differently. In place of the rigid distinction between constituent and constituted power, in which the former appears as an uncompromising willfulness against which all positive law falls silent, ⁹⁷ the will of Arendt’s founding has a reflexive character. By locating the will in the state of nature, Sieyès’ constituent power is absolved of its temporal bindings. If I am correct in the case that I have presented, it is not so much its intensity, but the de-temporalization and isolation of Sieyès’ constituent power that characterize its willfulness in an uncompromising manner. Doing so is precisely the imitative strategy of a theologico-political absolute to which Arendt wants to draw our attention. Conversely, in Arendt the will is related to the constellation of human freedom, plurality and temporal finitude, and so while her reflexive account manifests in a resistance against any attempt to be commanded, ⁹⁸ it does not do so in an uncompromising manner that throws out of joint our experience of time. Arendt, rather, is attentive to the manner in which the will can reconcile novelty with stability, for it is not only located in time, but aware of that location. In doing so, one reflects upon the situation in order to take responsibility for the chain of events initiated. This is not to say that the will is self-limiting, but rather that, like archê, the new does not appear as a discrete or unencumbered moment but a trajectory that builds upon itself, in concert with law, in order to develop stable grounds for politics.

The critical point is that the concept of constituent power is absent from Arendt’s normative vocabulary, and with good reason. ⁹⁹ Constituent power is necessarily bound up with an unreflexive modality of action that requires the pairing of a constituted power tasked with constraining the absolutely new. It is not enough to devise a relative conception of the will alone in order to escape the dilemmas associated with constituent power. Her solution is to correct the theoretical lens of the absolute through which the need for a constituent power manifested. The paradox is addressed by placing the relation between law and politics within a fundamentally different field of commitments. Consider, for example, the question over the illegality of the founding act, which is an alternative expression of the paradox of constitutionalism. In Arendt excluding the conceptual framework of constituent power through her redescription of the absolute, the relation between law and politics is conceived differently, as a mutually enabling, rather than antagonistic, pairing. Arendt’s relatively absolute beginning is coeval with the spirit of the law engendered by the founding principle. One might say the founding act is already legal, as if it ‘anticipates’ the law that is inaugurated. Such a conclusion remains internal to the terms of the paradox. ¹⁰⁰ Rather, the legality of founding does not trouble Arendt for it already inappropriately conceives of the law as a ‘catalogue of prohibitions’ that primarily serve to partition the political from the non-political and the legal from the illegal. ¹⁰¹ The Roman-inspired law to which Arendt appeals in On Revolution and The Life of the Mind does not commit to such spatial, temporal and legal boundaries. ¹⁰² Like the relatively absolute beginning that occurs within the world, it is ultimately of little consequence that the act of founding occurs ‘outside’ of the law. What is of consequence is that the activity of founding, like the law, serves to connect, rather than to divide.

Conclusion

My reading of Hannah Arendt’s constitutional founding has sought to draw attention to an overlooked aspect of her argument. Within On Revolution, and, to a greater extent, the revisions to that argument in The Life of the Mind, Arendt is engaged not only in a theorization of founding, but also a reconsideration of the political temporality that is associated with it. This is not, as has been argued by others, the celebration of legal continuity over the ruptural mood of the French Revolution. Rather, I have argued that in the course of her argument, one can discern crucial elements through which she rewrites the meaning and valence of the term ‘absolute’ in order to disrupt the manner in which the absolutely new is associated with the commencement of time itself. This move is more than just a linguistic sleight-of-hand in attributing the term ‘absolute’ to an act that is only relatively new. Instead, the reworking is a phenomenological one that intends to disrupt the commonplace temporalities through which we associate creation with a decisionistic brand of political theology. The implicit intention in doing so is to alter the theoretical lens that relates the new to temporal origins, the lens through which the need for a constituent power manifests.

The argument developed has presented two significant insights. First, I have sought to demonstrate that, when viewed from the perspective of temporality, the problem of the absolute may be employed as a diagnostic device in order to navigate the paradox of constitutionalism. Through this lens it is possible to see why the paradox of constitutionalism appears paradoxical for it naturalizes an opposition between stability and novelty around which our political vocabulary clusters concepts. This is only because novelty is conceived through the ruptural temporality of principium. This is carried over into thinking about constituent power irrespective of any overtly theologico-political connotation attached to the concept. To this effect, the various possible formulations of the paradox of constitutionalism, whether a constituent power tempered by a constituted power, the question over the (il)legality of the founding act, or the people who are both creator and creation of the law, each is a consequence of our thinking of the beginning as principium, through which we are encouraged to consider the new as a ruptural or ex nihilo beginning that institutes a temporal boundary, partitioning the political from the non-political, and the legal from the illegal. All of this requires a conceptualization of political agency arrogated from God. Arendt’s wager is that humans are temporal creatures who recognize our finitude in the world. Although we try, humans are unable to begin as if we were God. The upshot of our being hominem temporalem is that time is conceivable only in our presence. Arendt’s brilliant conclusion to this was to recognize the priority of the Augustinian initium over principium; correspondingly, beginnings are meaningful only in our reception of them. The important conclusion that follows is that we are not held captive by the picture of the theologico-political absolute, for though our whole vocabulary is shot through with temporal aspects we nevertheless have the capacity to rethink the manner in which temporality weighs upon our actions. Part III of this article examined one way in which Arendt achieves this, through which the absolutely new event of initium emerges from the interface between thinking and acting that creatively draws from the past and projects into the future, one that is attentive and responsive to the world. This relatively absolute modality of founding is not only characterized by a reflexive formulation of the will, but also the political will’s relationship with law. In forgoing the aspects of division that are carried over from the account of principium, Arendt is able to conceive of law to a different end, namely as a rapport that enables and augments the connection between individuals. Once this aspect of her argument is discerned, a distinctive temporalization of founding emerges that opens the possibility for a politics distinct from either what James Muldoon has called a ‘middle path’ between liberal constitutionalism and radical democracy, ¹⁰³ or Antonio Negri’s belittling depiction of a ‘perfectly conservative’ model of legal continuity and American exceptionalism that is ‘more appropriate to a neophyte than a Heideggerian philosopher’. ¹⁰⁴ Whether Arendt’s relatively absolute spontaneity conceives of a sufficiently radical politics for theorists of constituent power such as Negri is a question that can remain open. What is clear, however, is that her considerations of the problem of the absolute introduce an interpretive apparatus for considering political founding that prises apart the conventional associations of stability with ‘conservatism’ and novelty with ‘radicalism’.