Disalienating the World: Arendt, Benjamin, and the Allegories of Catastrophe

• In Event: Arendtian Politics

Abstract

This paper analyzes in greater depth the connections between Arendt and Benjamin that have generally been dealt with only in passing, and only in rare instances, in critical analyses of these thinkers. Most of these already limited studies focuses primarily on their shared notion of the fragmented nature of time and Benjamin’s influence on Arendt’s conception of storytelling. I attempt to show that the nature of this influence extends into Arendt’s conception of language more broadly, of thinking, and most importantly, her political treatment of revolutions, radical origins and foundings. Seyla Benhabib’s account of this connection pits Benjamin’s influence at one of two conflicting poles tugging at Arendt and her relationship to studying the past – between, crudely speaking, the Benjaminian and the Husselerian/Heideggerian strains in her thought – the former characterized by an emphasis on “rupture, displacement and dislocation” and the latter by an emphasis on uncovering “at the privileged origin the lost and concealed essence of the phenomena.” In turning to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel text, which deals explicitly with the Baroque allegory as the linguistic edifice of time as ruin, I suggest also that there may be another Benjamin-inspired interpretation of Arendt’s privileging of an ‘concealed essences’ and ‘lost origins’ element, which in turn inform her complex treatment of revolutions and its relationship to language and storytelling. I take Benjamin’s treatment of origins in his Trauerspiel text to shed light on Arendt’s concept of natality and revolutions, or radical breaks in existing origins. Secondly, I link this re-reading of Arendt’s turn to “extraordinary politics” to see its relationship to language that is neither meant to be persuasive or deliberative. Instead, the paradigmatic form is the allegory, which links interaction between text and reader, and allows for the articulation of the past without weighing readers and interpreters with an unambiguous declaration of authorial authority, as the basis of its formal achievement. Finally, I argue that this understanding of allegory, in turn, provides an important paradigm for contemporary democratic theory by highlighting a feature of language, beyond reason-giving, rhetoric, or myth, but a method of reckoning with the past and rebuilding a source of contingent authority through new political action.

Author

• Michelle Chun, Rochester Institute of Technology