Abstract
Steve Buckler , Hannah Arendt and Political Theory: Challenging the Tradition, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2011, 185 pp.
Nearly 40 years after her death, fascination with Hannah Arendt shows no signs of abating. And, it is even extending beyond the academy. Germany in 2012 saw the release of an internationally popular and award-winning biopic by Margarethe von Trotta, “Hannah Arendt.” The film, which focused on the Eichmann trial, dramatized the power of Arendt’s thinking and attempted to stage what so preoccupied her all her life—the practice of thinking and its provocation in others. Blogging about the film for The Paris Review, Roger Berkowitz (also contributor to the present symposium) praised von Trotta and screenwriter Pam Katz for engaging “head-on the `impossible task of putting thinking on screen.” 1 Buckler’s book can be read as an academic complement to that cinematic endeavor. He asks: What is it about Arendt’s writing that continues to provoke and incite response?
This book is innovative for Buckler’s grappling with what made Arendt’s particular synthesis of theory and practice so powerful. He aims to put his finger on her “distinctive, potent and consistently challenging way of theorizing politics” (1). That finger lands on “voice.” Bucker contends that for Arendt, to speak fruitfully about politics from a theoretical standpoint requires the adoption of a distinctive voice; one that incorporates a variety of idioms which combine to mediate the theoretical impulse and to bring our discursive resources into more proximate relation with the experience of politics itself”. (4)
One could simply put it down to the fact that she has a voice at all. She refuses the abstract, impersonal, and universalist style of traditional philosophy which is simply “the repression of the voice,” as Timothy Gould has put it in his eloquent study of “voice and method” in Cavell. 2 Not that Arendt’s voice is like Cavell’s. She is always principled, always located in a specific controversy or event, often impassioned but always public—never personal or introspective.
Buckler makes Arendt’s corpus into a site of inquiry into precisely how—rhetorically and stylistically—a political theorist achieves such a voice. He contends that, Arendt “sets herself against the dominant tradition by adopting…mediations of the theoretical voice which establish an authentically alternative way of speaking” (7). Buckler identifies two such mediations. The first of these he terms “epistemological,” and describes as adopting a “situated, dialogic modulation of the theoretical voice” that aims to forestall “conceptual closure” (8). He terms the second “temporal,” adopting a “fragmental narrational modulation” that manages to “avoid historical closure” (8). She achieves these mediations through three crucial “stylistic motifs”: the use of “narrative,” of “poetic and metaphorical devices,” and of “examples” (52).
These strategies have two distinctive results. The first is a political mediation that stages for her readers the notion of plurality that is so central to her work. This is mediation as “intercession” to bring about “a level of agreement between disputatious voices or standpoints…in conscious opposition to the strident, unitary voice of traditional theory” (39). The second is a historical mediation that aims for “a non-traditional way of making the past relevant to the present” (44). Specifically, Arendt aims to excavate examples and instances from the past not as authoritative models whose purpose would be to govern conduct in the present. Rather, they are to spark thinking about present events: “An emphasis upon the sense of continuing mutual illumination between past and present in terms of the particular significance of events confirms the requirement to keep thinking, in terms of a search for meaning” (47–48).
Arendt’s corpus contains many confounding instances of these strategies. There is her propensity to draw on fiction to analyze history, exemplified in Origins of Totalitarianism. What to make of her segue from a factual account of the relations between Boers and Jewish financiers in South Africa to the stories of Rudyard Kipling? To her credit, Arendt does preface this move with an explanation: Only in the frankly invented tale about events did man consent to assume his responsibility for them, and to consider past events his past. Legends made him master of what he had not done, and capable of dealing with what he could not undo.
3
There are other examples, such as the book on Rahel Varnhagen, which plumbs the political and social dilemmas of an assimilated German-Jew, a mode of being that was becoming extinct even as Arendt explored Rahel’s way of inhabiting it. This work defies easy classification as history, biography, or philosophic work by virtue of the many passages where Arendt writes as if from Rahel’s consciousness. She set out deliberately to draw what she called a “portrait” that “follows as closely as possible the course of Rahel’s own reflections upon herself.” 4 There are also the arresting and explicitly non-neutral frames that she attaches to her accounts of present and past political events. These include not only the infamous “banality of evil” but also “The Image of Hell” which was the title for an early essay on the concentration camps, and “The Elements of Shame,” which was her working title for what would be published as Origins. 5
The concept of “voice” works particularly well to frame an interpretation of these striking yet difficult points in Arendt’s work. To quote once more from Gould on Cavell, this idea of voice is meant to remind us, for instance, of the recognition that the point of uttering some words and the circumstances in which they get uttered are as much a part of the significance of those words as what philosophers are inclined to call their “meaning” and “reference”.
6
Buckler is not the first Arendt scholar to be captivated by Arendt’s unconventional protocols of argument. A long-standing (though not voluminous) strand of secondary literature has taken up Arendt’s storytelling, including (among others) Vollrath, Luban, Benhabib, Kateb, 7 as well as my own work. Buckler’s study puts him among this group, as he acknowledges. He understands himself to both build upon and break with this tradition of interpretation. I want to take issue, however, with the way he casts his break with this scholarship, as consisting in a rejection of these authors’ claim that “narrative” constitutes Arendt’s “method” of political theory. I do not read these authors (or my own work) as having taken Arendt’s narrative strategies for anything so comprehensive as a method, only to point to them as something noteworthy and largely overlooked in the secondary literature.
Moreover, with the exception of Vollrath (1977), none of these authors venture to attribute a “method” to Arendt. It is Buckler himself who ambitiously aims at “reconstructing and characterizing a distinctive method” in Arendt’s work, a term that he acknowledges “Arendt herself would probably have greeted with a degree of suspicion” (4, 2; emphasis added). Arendt’s political thought took different forms depending both on what occasioned it, and on whom she imagined her audience to be. Her oeuvre is unique by virtue of the diversity of her discursive strategies. In my view, a real strength of Buckler’s study is its calling attention to that diversity—even if he meant to persuade readers of its “deep consistency” (3).
Buckler makes another very important contribution with his conceptual clarification of the difference between what Arendt aimed to do with what she termed “storytelling,” and “narrative” as that term is understood in historiography. Buckler rightly emphasizes that Arendt’s storytelling was a profound departure from “narrative” strategies, at least as they are conventionally understood in the discipline of history, as a modality that, in its own terms, provides us with an account of events or experiences that itself demonstrates narrative completion (and in virtue of which can claim a modal equivalence with the finality that more “behavioural” explanatory accounts promise) (45).
Steve Buckler has left us a thoughtful and insightful study of Arendt’s challenge to the traditions of both philosophy and political theory. It deserves to be widely read as it opens up new directions for exploring these most elusive aspects of Arendt’s thinking and writing. The emphasis on voice, in particular, might spark a comparative study of Arendt and Cavell that would shed new light on both.