Between Survival and Sovereignty: Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Political Theory

• In Event: Hannah Arendt and Modern Jewish Politics

Abstract

In justifying the legitimacy of the Jerusalem court to preside over the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt appeals to a “political” rather than “geographical” interpretation of the territorial principle of jurisdiction. The state of Israel, Arendt argues, is politically continuous with the Jewish collective victimized by Eichmann’s criminal actions. And thus, a court in Jerusalem established after the time and beyond the place of Eichmann’s crimes is nonetheless competent to sit in judgment. The evidence for this continuity is, as Arendt sees it, “a common language, religion, a common history, and laws” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 26?). Here, Arendt’s legal reasoning in her book on the Eichmann trial is a direct and unmistakable echo of her discussion of “the space of appearance” in The Human Condition (1958).

After establishing the intertextual relationship of Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Human Condition, this paper will discuss the significance of the relationship. Bonnie Honig has argued that The Human Condition—Arendt’s “most ‘Greek’ text”—has a “Jewish unconscious.” Adopting her insight but eschewing the psychoanalytic framing, this paper will argue that Arendt’s political theory in The Human Condition, normally parsed as Greek and nostalgic, actually possesses a deeply Jewish and modern point of reference. The malleability and survivability of Arendt’s non-sovereign conception of “the space of appearance” corresponds to her portrait of the survival of Jewish religious, cultural, and political life. The paper will conclude with a reflection on the irony that Arendt’s non-sovereign conception of Jewish political survival achieves apotheosis in Jewish political sovereignty in the modern state of Israel.

Author

• Judah Isseroff