Abstract
A reflection on Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration, with a particular focus on her reconstruction of early critical theory and the ‘Benjaminian moment’ that links Hannah Arendt to Theodor Adorno.
Keywords
Here I am again/back from the wide world
With her signature brilliance and enviable erudition, Seyla Benhabib has assembled the touchstones for a political theory for our times, when an estimated 68.5 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes, nearly a third of whom are refugees and half of them children, and other 10 million people are stateless, denied citizenship and the basic rights that come with it. At its most ambitious, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration is an effort to lay the theoretical foundations for a political response to this global challenge. At its more modest, it is an attempt to reconstruct the intellectual history of the 20th century through the Jewish experience of exile. Benhabib’s project pivots primarily on the work of Hannah Arendt, but especially where it connects to the writings of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Judith Shklar, Albert Hirschman, Isaiah Berlin and others. Readers partial to any one of these thinkers may want a more systemic or complete treatment or may quarrel with any particular interpretive claims, but a bigger question concerns the political–theoretical stakes in gathering these very different thinkers together under a common purpose. What links a revolutionary writer like Walter Benjamin to the anti-Marxist Isaiah Berlin? Does Hirschman’s anti-fascism come into clearer focus in the company of these other thinkers? How does Shklar’s work as a whole – not her early critique of legalism, but also After Utopia, her book on Hegel, and the celebrated ‘liberalism of fear’ – relate to Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment, the argument about myth and mimesis and the philosophy of negative dialectics? Are there resonances that go beyond those that travel through Arendt? Are there important differences that get elided in the focus on the experiences they shared?
Some of the most powerful pages of the book are those that detail Benhabib’s family history and how it has impacted her life and work. She traces her earliest ancestry to a Rabbi Jacob Ibn-Habib of northwestern Spain, whose descendants fled their homes during the Catholic Inquisition and took up residence in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman ‘hospitality’ was always double-edged, though, offering modest political protections and religious tolerance in exchange for second-class citizenship, extra tax burdens and a melancholy sense of non-belonging that would follow the Jews of Turkey for the next five centuries. She relates the significance of the figure of Sabbatai Zevi, a Jewish convert to Islam and gatekeeper to the Sultan’s palace, and his followers, who ‘went on to play a significant role in the administration of the Ottoman Empire – a role not unlike that of the “Schutzjuden” in Austro-Hungary and the German Kaisserreich’ (p. 11). And she punctuates this long historical sketch with the more recent fate of Turkish Jews in the young Republic’s compromise with Nazi Germany, which kept Turkey out of world war but also sent its Jewish men to labour camps. ‘The Jews of Turkey were once more saved by their Turkish protectors’, she remarks of this recent past, ‘yet this rescue, if anything, heightened their sense of vulnerability, and perhaps also, resentment, toward their benefactors’ (p. 12). It may have also inspired the sense that a German-Jewish intellectual tradition could offer the deepest insights into the politics of difference and that their particular experiences of exile could point to a universal normativity. It goes without saying that Benhabib’s tremendous intellectual legacy and impact is bound up with these German Jews and the universal lessons she draws from them. But it is her simultaneous proximity to and distance from them that explains their appeal and her own intellectual positions over the years, often more rigorously ‘German’ than the Germans themselves.
Exile, Statelessness, and Migration is a powerful intervention in contemporary political debates about the nation-state and statelessness, the politics of migration and the rights of refugees. Just as important is how it amplifies the political project in early critical theory while refusing the fetishism and formalism by which the autonomy of the political gets established in so much of the contemporary debate, even in some readings of Hannah Arendt’s work. For Benhabib, the political is tied up with moral considerations, aesthetic reflection, even economic considerations. She follows the deeply Adornian insight that says there is something dishonest and even monstrous about treating concepts – the concept of the political, for instance – in isolation from other concepts and from its object. I take Benhabib’s theory of reflexive judgment as a repudiation of this dishonesty and a profound mediation on what’s left of truth in our ‘post-truth’ age. For this theory of judgment, she appeals to Arendt but also to Benjamin and Adorno. She reconstructs a Benjaminian–Adornian concept of interpretation that, on my reading, is quite different from judgement in Arendt’s sense.
I will come back to this concept of interpretation. For now, I want to pause on ‘Playing Chess With History’ – Benhabib’s subtitle, but also the scene with which the book opens, set in Benjamin’s Paris apartment sometime between 1933 and 1940, where he and Arendt would pass evenings in exile playing chess, teaching friends and family how to play and mastering their own approach in relation to each other. Chess was ‘not just a pastime for Walter Benjamin’, Benhabib argues, ‘but a complex metaphor for thinking about history, progress, teleology, and the ironies of fate’ (p. 34). She notes the prominence of chess in Benjamin’s last major work, On the Concept of History, entrusted to Arendt and Adorno just before his death. The very first thesis opens with the image of an automaton at a chess table, wearing Turkish clothing and with a hookah in his mouth, appearing to outwit all of his human opponents. In truth, a hunchback is sitting under the chess table, pulling the puppet’s strings, and he is the real player. Indeed, the hunchback is an expert chess player, but also a master of illusion, from il-ludere, or ‘in play’. He is playing two games at one: the game of chess and the art of illusion. Could we speak of a play-concept in Benjamin’s philosophy of history, which is also linked to his aesthetics and his politics? I think Benhabib’s evocative idea of ‘playing chess with history’ speaks to this ludic element in Benjamin’s thought.
But what about ‘The Turk’ – the automaton Benjamin brings back to life, who once toured the European courts in the late 18th century and was not exposed as a hoax until the 19th century? What can be said of this mechanical chess master, outfitted in Orientalism and powered by the semblance of technological triumph, beyond Benjamin’s eye for the odd curiosities of European culture? Benjamin drafted this thesis in the days following Stalin’s pact with Hitler, with the arc of history bending toward fascism and revolutionary Bolshevism complicit in the process. What might have led him to the ‘The Turk’ as a fitting allegory for philosophy in these dark times? Who is playing with history here? And who is getting played? The puppet, Benjamin says, is ‘historical materialism’ – it is always supposed to win the match. But the puppet only wins to the extent that it enlists the services of theology, a hunchback hiding beneath the table, who is ‘small and ugly and must be kept out of sight’ but who also puts everything in play and keeps the whole machinery in motion. Just beneath the surface of every determinism, including historical materialism, lies an abject theology. In her introduction to Illuminations, Arendt notes that the hunchback was a fixture of Benjamin’s German childhood, found in scary storybooks but also part of the larger cultural imagination. In that context, it is striking that Benjamin’s hunchback is not especially frightening but rather pitiable and pathetic. He’s also ambiguous: on the one hand, an unlikely power and real agent in history; on the other hand, the servant of a deception and a con.
The hunchback might be contrasted with that other figure of German childhood, the gypsy, beautifully recast by Adorno in an aphorism from Minima Moralia, ‘Heliotrope’. The aphorism opens with the child’s eager anticipation of Christmas, not for the gifts but for the parents’ guest who will visit the family home. The guest will bring tales and treasures from far-away places, ‘luggage with the stickers from the Hotel Suvretta and Madonna di Campiglio…precious gems of Aladdin and Ali Baba, wrapped in expensive cloth’, confirming a world of adventures and possibilities beyond the borders of the bourgeois household. And ‘just as fairies talk to children in fairy-tales, so too does the guest talk earnestly, without condescension, to the children of the house’, inviting them into a community of equals and into the affairs of adulthood. All of the ordinary rules and hierarchies will be suspended; ‘perhaps tomorrow they may even be allowed to skip school’. What the visit awakens, Adorno says, is a promise of happiness that children learn to repress as fear. With it, every figuration of that fear comes to appear in a new light. ‘The fortune-telling gypsy, who is let into the front door’, Adorno writes, ‘is absolved in the lady visitor and transfigured into a rescuing angel’ (1978, 177).
Do we see here, in the lady-visitor, a counter-image of ‘The Turk’: not a man hiding behind another man and a machine, but a woman who is also the messenger of a vanquished happiness? Does her difference and exoticism read differently, as an invitation to utopia, or at least the proof of something other than what exists? How does this gypsy become an angel? Who or what is being rescued? It is a strikingly Benjaminian image, in an aphorism filled with them. Not only the childhood fairy tales and collector’s souvenirs and gypsy-angels who tell the future, but heliotropism itself – the movement of flowers in the direction of the sun – is a Benjaminian motif. What Benhabib says of chess could also be said of heliotropism, that it is a metaphor for thinking about class struggle, progress and history. And it, too, is a prominent theme in Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history. Recall the fourth thesis: The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual. Nevertheless these latter are present in the class struggle as something other than mere booty, which falls to the victor. They are present as confidence, as courage, as humor, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question. Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun, so too does that which has been turn, by virtue of a secret kind of heliotropism, towards the sun which is dawning in the sky of history. To this most inconspicuous of all transformations the historical materialist must pay heed. (Benjamin 2003)
Adorno also has something of a play-concept, I think, which gets elaborated in ‘The Essay as Form’ and in the reflections on Samuel Beckett, and even in the theory of mimesis and the brief reflections on clowning in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Benhabib offers a deft account of the ‘naturally beautiful’ in Adorno, which she reads for its resonances with an Arendtian approach to judgment (pp. 57–8). But the ‘naturally beautiful’ also points to Benhabib’s more Benjaminian idea of ‘playing with history’ – as a historical form, but one that preserves its non-identity with history and plays with it. The ludic element in Benjamin’s thought is also present in Adorno’s. This view would be consistent with Benhabib’s more general argument about the ‘Benjaminian moment’ in Adorno’s critical theory, which she sees not as passing phase of his early intellectual development but a ‘deep and lasting’ part of his philosophy, ‘informing his well-known mature theses such as the primacy of the object and the non-identical concept of the concept’ (p. 43). She rightly emphasizes that Adorno’s concept of interpretation, first developed in his early lecture on The Actuality of Philosophy, is itself indebted to the complex theory of interpretation Benjamin outlines in the ‘Epistemological-Critical Prologue’ to The Origins of German Tragic Drama. Adorno was teaching a seminar on Origins right around when he delivered his lecture.
Reading for this ‘Benjaminian moment’ in Adorno’s work, and especially arguing for the importance of the Trauerspiel study in shaping his view of critical theory, probably also means minimizing Max Horkheimer’s influence. Of course, this is not for playing favourites in the Frankfurt School. Benhabib is one of the editors of an important volume of essays on Max Horkheimer and her early writings offer extensive commentary on his thought and legacy. Critique, Norm, and Utopia remains among the most incisive readings of Horkheimer’s work in particular, as well as a pioneering study in the foundations of critical theory more broadly. But here she insists not merely on difference between Horkheimer and Adorno, between the social scientist and the philosopher but merely on the opposition and irreconciliation. She reads Adorno’s early lecture as the direct repudiation of Horkheimer’s idea of critique and an inversion of what he saw as the relationship of philosophy and the social sciences in the pursuit of truth. For Horkheimer, philosophy is asking questions, to which the sciences furnish answers. For Adorno, philosophy’s proper task is interpretation, which is not a search for hidden meanings but the investigation into open secrets, not unearthing buried intentions but mapping the unintentional appearance of truth in the constellation of things. Philosophy answers the questions asked by science.
Benhabib suggests but never actually says that contemporary critical theory must choose between Horkheimer and Adorno. Must we choose? What are the implications of the choice for the kind of work we do? Or must we redefine these tasks – social science and philosophy – and their relation in the present? What is the role of the natural sciences in this project? Can we study the politics of migration, for example, without knowing the environmental and climate science? Have our disciplinary boundaries fallen into disrepair in a way that makes the work of the early Frankfurt School especially relevant again? Do we need a reinvestment in a scientific standard of truth or is the problem that this standard was always prone to distortion and degradation? Will any of these efforts survive the neoliberal and neo-fascist assault on intellectual life and culture? These questions are of special interest and vital importance to those of us who do theoretical work in social science departments and who remain committed to the ambitions in early critical theory to integrate empirical research and philosophical interpretation. Our numbers are dwindling, as theoretical research becomes more marginal to the social sciences and philosophy becomes more narrowly ‘analytic’ and abstracted from history, politics and society. In this context, the ‘debate’ that Benhabib stages between Horkheimer and Adorno also reads as re-establishing necessary contact between philosophy and the social sciences. Perhaps the point is not that we choose between Horkheimer and Adorno, but instead that we inhabit an intellectual space in which philosophy and the social sciences are bound to one another and rely upon one another to do about half of the work. A bit like the best co-authors.
Or perhaps the point is the rehabilitation of a forgotten pursuit, interpretive social science, as an alternative to abstract idealism and empty empiricism. This is a project for which Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin are vital sources, as are many of the other thinkers Benhabib presents in this book, and others of their generation. But in pursuit of this project, interpretive social science, I wonder if we risk decentering Benhabib’s main source of inspiration and theoretical insight: Hannah Arendt.
Adorno himself never abandoned the idea of philosophy as interpretation. He introduces Negative Dialectics by reflecting on the ‘summary judgment’ of philosophy that it had ‘merely interpreted the world’ and not changed it. The reference is to Marx and his celebrated thesis on Feuerbach, that philosophy had only interpreted the world, while the point was to transform it. Interpretation lives on, says Adorno, because the moment for philosophy’s realization was missed. The effort to change the world had tragically miscarried. And, so, the effort to interpret it is at least partly vindicated. It is a rare rebuke of the 11th thesis from within the Marxist tradition, but also indicates Adorno’s enduring engagement with Marx's ideas. Key elements of Adorno’s philosophy – negative dialectics, the primary of the object, even the idea of critique and its emancipatory aims – are clearly owed to Marx. And Adorno’s concept of interpretation, too, especially its rehabilitation in Negative Dialectics, develops in response to Marx and to a felt crisis in Marxism. Adorno calls for a rethinking of the relation between philosophy and science but also the relation between theory and practice. This aspect of Adorno’s critical theory – Benjamin’s, too – gets muted in Benhabib’s account.
It could be that the contemporary constellation poses the question of interpretation and transformation anew, as the planet heats up, the far right gains significant political ground, and at least some among the ruling class plan their escape to Mars. We might wonder how these Jewish exiles speak to our conditions, in their universality, but also in their particular experiences and examples. We might ask what connects these Jewish refugees to a new generation of migrants fleeing Central America, Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan. Sadly, the deadly shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg brings the connection into clearer focus. The killer had targeted this synagogue specifically because he believed it was connected to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a Jewish American non-profit organization that has been resettling refugees and asylum seekers in the United States since the late 19th century. The HIAS played a pivotal role during and after the war resettling Jews in America, including thousands of children whose parents were murdered by Nazis. The organization was active during the American War in Vietnam in assisting Vietnamese refugees with resettlement and had more recently expanded its advocacy and activism to focus on refugees from Central America and the Middle East. For neo-fascists and White nationalists, the HIAS is part of a Jewish plot to ‘darken’ White America. For some, immigration itself is a Jewish conspiracy. Violent anti-Semitism and xenophobic racism are intimately connected and deeply interwoven on the far right.
And it is here where I find these thinkers essential for our times, less for their universal lessons and more for their specific and situated attempts to understand how fascism works and how to think and act against it. Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism and her portrait of Eichmann. Adorno’s studies of fascist propaganda and the authoritarian personality. Benjamin’s radical aesthetics. Shklar’s liberalism of fear and the idea of putting cruelty first. Hirschman on exit, but also on the passions and the ideological history of modernity. Even Berlin’s eclectic liberalism. Each show how political theory is shaped by political experience, but also how a discernable theoretical tradition forms around the anti-fascist effort. This effort, as I see things, is ongoing.
