Discovering the Other’s Voice: Arendt, Lugones, and “World-Traveling”

• In Event: Arendtian Politics

Abstract

Long known as a theorist of freedom, exile, and plurality, in recent years increased attention has been paid to Hannah Arendt’s writings on truth, thinking, and judgment. Often writing in response to the rise of “alternative facts” or “post-truth,” or to polarization and the ideological thinking that accompanies it, scholars of Arendt’s work have drawn fruitfully on Arendt’s notions that political truth is founded on testimony not expertise, and that we may think across division by “training our imagination to go visiting.”

A much less prominent figure within contemporary theoretical work has been María Lugones, despite Lugones’ many illuminating contributions to questions of boundary, coalition, and thinking across and within difference. While Lugones’ work stands as a valuable resource for thinking about division and democratic backsliding in its own right, in this paper I show that she can also be put into fruitful conversation with Arendt.

I begin by taking up an under-theorized element of Arendt’s account of “representative” thinking: the “discovery” of one’s ability to think from a different perspective. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt writes: “I first talk with others before I talk with myself, examining whatever the joint talk may have been about, and then discover that I can conduct a dialogue not only with others but with myself as well” (LM, 1.189). Why do some people (Eichmann, Hippias) seemingly never make this discovery? Is it something that “just happens,” or does it require “training”? And what protects, or alternatively impedes, the accuracy of this voice as a representation of the absent other?

I argue that Arendt’s account of representative thinking, especially as it is presented in “Truth and Politics” (1967) and later writings, undersells the difficulty of representing others’ perspectives. Arendt is insufficiently attentive to the likelihood of misrepresentation and distortion of others’ voices, especially those who occupy marginalized positions within dominant political cultures. I turn to Lugones’ account of “world-traveling” to highlight this problem, arguing that Lugones’ key insight of plural worlds helps to get in view the political and epistemic burdens involved in “visiting” others.

This paper has three parts. In the first, I reconstruct the development of the concept of representative thinking in Arendt’s work through a reading of her earlier essays “Introduction into Politics” (written 1956–59) and “The Concept of History” (1961). The account of representative thinking presented in “Truth and Politics” emerged through a complex set of reflections on storytelling and facticity. These reflections show up certain challenges for the thinker that are not always clear in “Truth and Politics.” Representative thinking operates within and against the centripetal force of hegemonic norms structuring the political space.

In the second part, I discuss the space in which representative thinking occurs. Arendt’s account of representative thinking is heavily centered on the model of the agora, a privileged area within the walled-off polis. This creates problems for the theory of representative thinking because it sets up a colonial imaginary in which the polis is “the” world and whatever is outside the polis is a “worldless” empty space, a “desert.” What is not visible, or not immediately intelligible, from the point of view of this privileged center is liable to be misinterpreted even by an exemplary Arendtian thinker.

In the final part, I turn to a discussion of Lugones and world-traveling. For Lugones, world-traveling is an experience of “flexibility” in which the traveler can shift from “constructions of life where she is more or less ‘at home’” to constructions where she finds herself a stranger or outsider, or in epistemic contexts that casts her in a new and unflattering light (“PWT,” 77–78). World-traveling, especially for those at home in dominant cultures and thus unused to the experience of self-fragmentation, can represent a practice of courageous thinking that pushes against the boundaries of polis-centricity and enables a more reliable discovery of the voice of the other.

Author

• Sam McChesney, Northwestern University