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2012 11: 4 originally published online 21 SeptemberEuropean Journal of Political TheoryAyten Gndogdu

'Perplexities of the rights of man': Arendt on the aporias of human rights

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E JPTArticle

Perplexities of the rights ofman: Arendt on the aporiasof human rights

Ayten GundogduBarnard College-Columbia University

Abstract

This article provides a new interpretation of Hannah Arendts critical analysis of the

perplexities of the Rights of Man by drawing attention to its overlooked methodolog-

ical orientations, especially its aporetic nature. Arendts critique is aporetic as it cen-

tres on the paradoxes of human rights and analyses them by putting into practice a

mode of inquiry that she associates with Socrates. The article challenges the conven-

tional understanding of aporia as a paralysing impasse and suggests that aporetic thinking

can create possibilities of rethinking key concepts especially in times of crises. To make

this point, I respond to Jacques Rancie`res criticism that the paradoxes introduced by

Arendt paralyse thinking and doom human rights to an inevitable destiny of failure. I

argue that, precisely because of its aporetic nature, Arendts critique attends to possi-

bilities of rethinking and reinventing human rights, as can be seen in her articulation of

a right to have rights.

Keywords

aporia, Arendt, human rights, Rancie`re, Rights of Man, Socrates

Writing after the Second World War, Hannah Arendt inquired into the challengesposed by massive scales of population displacements in the 20th century, whichrendered millions of people stateless. Those who were stateless, she argued, foundthemselves in a condition of rightlessness as they lost not only their citizenshiprights but also their human rights.1 Arendt identied a paradox in this precariouscondition: precisely when the stateless appeared as nothing more than human, itproved very dicult, if not impossible, for them to claim the allegedly inalienablerights they were entitled to by virtue of being born human. She took this paradoxas a symptom of the perplexities of the Rights of Man and oered one of the mostpowerful criticisms of human rights.

Corresponding author:

Ayten Gundogdu, Department of Political Science, Barnard College-Columbia University, 418-A Lehman Hall,

3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598, USA

Email: [email protected]

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Arendts critical analysis of human rights has received much scholarly attention.While some political theorists have turned to her critique to grapple with thechallenging problems posed by the contemporary plight of non-citizens to theexisting institutional and normative frameworks of human rights,2 others havedeployed it to rethink politics of human rights in terms of democratic and associ-ational practices of claiming rights.3 Yet another group of scholars have drawn onArendts critique for the purposes of nding less conventional foundations andjustications for human rights.4

This article joins these scholarly eorts to rethink human rights along Arendtianlines. However, it also makes the argument that this rethinking is enabled by anoverlooked dimension of Arendts critique: its aporetic nature. Arendts critique isaporetic as it is centred on the perplexities or paradoxes pervading its object ofstudy, as the title of the section on human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianismindicates (i.e. perplexities of the Rights of Man or die Aporien derMenschenrechte in the German version).5 In addition, it is aporetic in the sensethat it puts into practice a mode of thinking that Arendt associates mainly withSocrates. Aporetic thinking starts with ordinary concepts of political life (e.g. jus-tice, happiness, courage), calls into question their conventional understandings andopens up the possibilities of thinking them anew. I argue that Arendt undertakessuch an aporetic inquiry in response to the crisis of human rights in the early 20thcentury.

Attending to this aporetic dimension, illuminating the methodological orienta-tions of Arendts inquiry, is crucial since her analysis, which has proved to beinspiring for many, has not been immune to criticism. In one of the most powerfulcriticisms provided to date, Jacques Rancie`re has argued that Arendts analysis ofhuman rights paralyses our political imagination with the paradoxes it introducesand makes it impossible for us to consider the democratic potential of modernrights declarations. In Rancie`res reading, Arendts critique traces the origins ofproblems such as statelessness to the paradoxes in the early formulations of humanrights and attributes to these rights an inevitable destiny of inecacy or failure.6

Examining the methodological orientations of Arendts critique is crucial toaddress this deeply embedded scepticism about its premises and conclusions.

In the rst section of the article, I delineate the main contours of aporeticinquiry by turning to Arendts discussion of Socrates in The Life of The Mindand Promise of Politics. Arendts understanding of aporia is crucially dierentfrom its conventional understanding as a paralysing structure. Indeed, as her dis-cussion of Socrates indicates, facing up to the perplexities arising from our pre-vailing assumptions about key concepts is the very condition of possibility forthinking these concepts anew. Since the goal of this section is to identify andexplain what Arendt nds promising in the example of Socrates, I focus exclusivelyon her interpretation of Socrates, without questioning the validity of her claimsabout the Socratic method.7 The second section reconstructs the main argumentsof Arendts critique of human rights, elaborated particularly in The Origins ofTotalitarianism and On Revolution, in the light of the discussion of Socratic

Gundogdu 5


aporetic inquiry. On the basis of this interpretive work, the third section analysesthe distinctive aspects of Arendts critique of human rights particularly in responseto the criticisms raised by Jacques Rancie`re. Read as an aporetic inquiry, Arendtscritique does not attribute an inevitable destiny to the paradoxes of human rights.As dierent from more recent criticisms of human rights, especially the one oeredby Giorgio Agamben, Arendts analysis attends to the multiple, equivocal andcontingent historical trajectories of these rights. Most importantly, it recognizesthe possibility that the paradoxes of human rights can be politically navigated tocontest inequality, as can be seen in Arendts analysis of the Dreyfus aair and herarticulation of a right to have rights.

Aporetic thinking: methodological orientationsof Arendts critique

Arendts critique of human rights takes its starting point from the puzzling condi-tion of the stateless who found themselves deprived of not only citizenship rightsbut also human rights. Resisting the temptation to understand this troubling con-dition as an unfortunate exception to an otherwise sane and normal rule, Arendtanalyses it as a symptom of some paradoxes deeply embedded in human rightssince their early formulations in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man andCitizen.8

On the one hand, these rights were assumed to be natural; individuals wereentitled to them by virtue of being born as human beings.9 As distinct fromrights that took their ground from history and changed from one community tothe other, the rights of man were derived from human nature that was assumed tobe universally shared and relatively stable.10 They were the rights attached to allhuman beings abstracted from any belonging or membership in a political com-munity.11 On the other hand, the declaration of these allegedly natural, abstractand inalienable rights was coeval with the emergence of the nation-state. Within thecontext of the nation-state, rights of man came to stand for national rights.12 Inan international system organized around the principle of nationality, humanrights seemed to be unenforceable in the case of individuals deprived of citizenshipin any sovereign state, as manifested in the condition of millions of stateless peoplewho lost their political membership and became nothing but human.13

Arendts inquiry is centred on the paradoxes, perplexities or aporias of humanrights, and we usually associate these terms with some kind of an irresolvablelogical quandary that is in many ways paralysing for thought. Indeed, this is themeaning that is implicit in Jacques Rancie`res recent criticisms of Arendt:

She makes them [Rights of Man] a quandary, which can be put as follows: either the

rights of the citizen are the rights of man but the rights of man are the rights of the

unpoliticized person; they are the rights of those who have no rights, which amounts

to nothing or the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, the rights attached to the

fact of being a citizen of such or such constitutional state. This means that they are the

6 European Journal of Political Theory 11(1)


rights of those who have rights, which amounts to a tautology. . . . Either a void or a

tautology, and, in both cases, a deceptive trick, such is the lock that she [Arendt]

builds.14

In this rendering, an analysis centred on paradoxes is debilitating as it locksthought in a binary logic human rights are either the rights of those who are castas subjects without any rights (e.g. stateless or poor) or merely the rights of citizenswho already have rights. Arendts reading, Rancie`re argues, blinds us to the polit-ical possibilities that release us from the paralysing grip of these conundrums as itfails to see how the equivocality in the declaration, arising from the simultaneousinvocation of man and citizen as the subject of rights, opens up spaces forpolitical contestation.

In what follows, I provide an alternative account that foregrounds the criticalpotential of Arendts inquiry by revisiting her analysis of aporetic thinking in herdiscussion of Socrates. In my rendering, thinking through perplexities and para-doxes is far from paralysing. In fact, aporetic thinking can be seen as the verycondition of possibility for rearticulating human rights beyond the binaries thatprevail in the conventional understandings of these rights (e.g. man/citizen, uni-versal/particular, nature/history). This reinterpretation recasts tension and contra-diction, as Jill Frank puts it in a dierent context, not as stymying the possibilitiesfor political action nor as making moot frameworks of falsity and truth, but ratheras opening the way to less binary ways of thinking about age-old problems anddilemmas.15

In her analysis of thinking in The Life of the Mind, Arendt describes Socraticdialogues, inquiring into key concepts of political vocabulary, as aporetic for tworeasons. First, they are aporetic as they are centred on perplexities arising from ourconventional assumptions about ordinary concepts. Second, they are aporetic alsobecause of their resistance to resolving these perplexities by turning to an absoluteprinciple or conclusive truth.

Socratic dialogues centre on very simple, everyday concepts that are part andparcel of everyday speech.16 For Arendt, they are valuable precisely because of thisfocus; since we invoke these terms very frequently, we rarely think about theirmeanings. In each dialogue, Socrates urges his interlocutors to give an accountof the terms of their everyday vocabulary, and points to the perplexities that theseaccounts result in. Arendt underscores that these perplexities are not riddles towhich Socrates has readymade answers; Socrates himself is deeply puzzled bythem and sincerely interested in seeing whether his puzzlement is shared by hisinterlocutors.17

In Arendts reading, Socratic dialogues are aporetic also because they refrainfrom resorting to an incontrovertible truth to resolve these perplexities. At times,Arendt describes the way Socrates proceeds as circular, and this seems to indicatethat aporetic thinking leads to nothing other than the innite regress of logicalparadoxes.18 Yet, in Arendts rendering, this movement from one perplexity to theother is promising precisely because of its resistance to impose some kind of an

Gundogdu 7


absolute principle for nding a nal resolution to these challenging political andethical dilemmas. As Socrates inquires into perplexities arising from unexaminedbeliefs, his goal is not to give his interlocutors the truth. Refraining from the phil-osophical temptation to resolve the challenges arising from the contingencies ofpolitics by resorting to an incontestable truth, Socrates urges his interlocutors tond the truthfulness of their own opinions by carefully examining them in anincessant dialogue. All opinions, according to Arendt, are in need of such inter-subjective armation that involves critical assessment.19

The critical import of aporetic thinking becomes clear especially in Arendtsdiscussion of the metaphors used to describe Socrates. As a gady, Socratesdemands his interlocutors to give an account of their taken-for-granted opinions,as he stings and provokes them into thinking. For Arendt, aporetic thinkingconsists not merely of a provocation or prodding though; it also entails midwiferyor [delivering] others of their thoughts.20 Socrates purges his interlocutors oftheir unexamined pre-judgments that would prevent them from thinking.21

Probably, the most interesting analogy is that of the electric ray. Thinking ofSocrates as this sh that can paralyse and benumb with its electric dischargesevokes a negative image of aporetic inquiry precisely the image that I am ques-tioning. However, as Arendt underscores, what looks paralysing from outside,from the standpoint of ordinary human aairs, is indeed a productive momentas it is felt as the highest state of being active and alive.22

When these three metaphors are taken together, aporetic thinking assumes amuch more critical function than what the conventional meaning of aporia indi-cates. The Greek word aporos literally means without passage, and denotes anuncrossable and untreadable path, or an impasse.23 Conventionally understood asa paralysing structure blocking the way and setting obstacles to thinking, aporia, inArendts work, becomes the very condition of possibility for thinking our keyconcepts anew. Aporetic thinking assumes a crucial political and ethical importparticularly in times of crisis when one can no longer rely on existing rules or lawsto tell the right from wrong, beautiful from ugly.24 Under these conditions,aporetic thinking can have a liberating eect on the faculty of judgement,which, according to Arendt, is the most political of mans abilities as it helps usdecide in the absence of given rules under which a particular case or phenomenoncan be subsumed.25

As I will discuss, Arendts critique of human rights engages in the practice ofaporetic thinking she associates with Socrates. Similar to Socrates, Arendt takes acrucial term of our political vocabulary i.e. human rights and looks at theconventional accounts of what this term means. The very title of her article onhuman rights, published shortly before Origins, resonates with the ti esti (i.e. whatis it?) questions that instigate aporetic inquiry in Socratic dialogues: The Rightsof Man: What are They?26 Just like the everyday concepts that Socrates inquiredinto, the term human rights had become slippery:27 [R]ecent attempts to frame anew bill of human rights have demonstrated that no one seems able to dene withany assurance what these general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of



citizens, really are.28 More crucially, these attempts failed to attend to the onehuman right that the plight of the stateless seemed to reveal: the right to belong toa political community (i.e. a right to have rights).29 In response to this problem,Arendt undertakes an aporetic inquiry that centres on the perplexities of humanrights one that engages in a rethinking so as to render the concept meaningfulagain.30

Hence, the goal of Arendts aporetic inquiry is not to demonstrate that humanrights are either void or tautological, to use Rancie`res terms,31 but instead to opena critical space for their revaluation. In ways similar to the Socratic dialogues,which underscore that all of our opinions are in need of intersubjective armationto become truthful, Arendts critique highlights that human rights lose their mean-ingfulness without practices of scrutinizing our conventional assumptions aboutthem. Only such practices can alert us to how these assumptions as unexaminedpre-judgments stand in the way of a new articulation that would allow humanrights to be more responsive to crises inaugurated by unprecedented forms ofinjustice such as the ones encountered by the stateless in the early 20th century.

Perplexities of the Rights of Man

Arendts analysis of the plight of the stateless results in a critical inquiry thatcentres on the constitutive tensions of human rights as manifested in modernrights declarations, especially the 1789 Declaration. In what follows I will discusstwo ways in which aporias gure in Arendts analysis of human rights. First,human rights give rise to perplexities because of their ultimate groundlessness.Despite endless search for normative foundations to clarify their subject, scopeand ground, they continue to be dened in terms of the tensions between man/citizen, universal/particular, natural/historical tensions that can turn out to beexplosive in some contexts. Second, human rights are perplexing also due to theirtense, and at times even conictual, relationship with the institutional structuresestablished to protect them. To have at least some permanence, they are in need ofinstitutions, and yet these same institutions can also end up undermining the pos-sibilities of claiming and exercising human rights. I suggest that Arendts critique isaporetic as it centres on these perplexities to understand the problems encounteredby the stateless and resists the temptation to resolve them by resorting to anabsolute.

Particularly Arendts discussion of the Rights of Man in On Revolution callsattention to the perplexities arising from the groundlessness of modern rights dec-larations. Whereas in the past a new body politic could legitimate its founding withreference to divine authority, secularization in the modern age leaves politicalactors with the problem of nding a new authority for the laws, rights and insti-tutions they establish.32 This problem attending the founding of any body politic inthe modern era becomes manifest especially in the declarations of rights: There isno period in history to which the Declaration of the Rights of Man could haveharkened back. . . inalienable political rights of all men by virtue of birth would

Gundogdu 9


have appeared to all ages prior to our own as they appeared to Burke a contra-diction in terms.33 As utterances bringing forth the rights that they assert to bealready existing, modern declarations, to use the words of Costas Douzinas, installthe radical contingency of linguistic proclamation into the heart of constitutionalarrangements.34 This radical contingency can be seen, for example, in Arendtsaccount of the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence, whichannounces the rights declared to be self-evident yet also adds, We hold thesetruths to be self-evident.35 Arendts emphasis on we hold indicates that rightsowe their existence ultimately to our acts of declaring and claiming them and thatthese rights cannot be derived from any pre-existing ground.36

The perplexities arising from this groundlessness can be seen in the equivocalformulations of rights, especially in the 1789 Declaration that proclaims the sub-jects of these rights to be both man and citizen. This aporia reverberates in theother constitutive tensions pervading the declaration; the scope of these rights,whether they are universal or particular, is undecided: if they are the rights ofman, they are universal entitlements regardless of membership in a political com-munity; if they are, however, rights of citizen, then they are rights guaranteed byparticular communities. The nature of these rights is similarly ambivalent; thedeclaration presenting them as natural, prepolitical rights is proclaimed by a spe-cic political community in a particular historical context (as can be seen in theAmerican Declarations emphasis on we hold).

There is the temptation to turn to an absolute to resolve the perplexities attend-ing such declarations, or any new beginning, in the modern era, as can be seen inthe recourse to nature as a new transcendent source of authority or an absolutefrom which to derive authority for law and power.37 However, Arendt nds thisresolution problematic particularly in the light of statelessness as it relies on anabstract human being who seemed to exist nowhere and evades the importanceof political community for guaranteeing human rights.38 Positing nature to resolvethe aporias arising from the groundlessness of human rights creates the illusion thatindividuals are subjects of rights in their natural condition. Yet, the condition ofthe stateless deprived of any political status reveals the problems of this assump-tion. Finding themselves in a kind of state of nature, the stateless persons are atbest perceived as objects of charity deserving our compassion as fellow humanbeings sharing the same innate qualities with us and at worst, as savages whosehumanity is barely recognizable and whose alienness is perceived as threatening.39

Nature has long been discredited as the foundation of human rights. However,Arendts aporetic inquiry has crucial implications even in a postmetaphysical agethat has moved away from such absolute grounds. The continuing theoreticaldebates on the normative foundations of human rights suggest that the perplexitiesarising from the groundlessness of these rights are still not easy to come to gripswith. Indeed, the appeal of resolving the political and ethical dilemmas of suchgroundlessness by establishing foundations, albeit not metaphysical ones, is dem-onstrated by the scholarly debates on Arendts understanding of human rights.Arendts critical readers, including Seyla Benhabib, see the lack of normative



foundations in her analysis of human rights as an unresolved problem.40 Scholarssuch as Peg Birmingham and Serena Parekh, however, defend Arendt against thesecriticisms precisely by deriving normative foundations for human rights from herpolitical theory.41 When Arendts critique is read as an aporetic inquiry, however,the lack of foundations is not a problem awaiting a solution; it is indeed in tunewith a mode of thinking that refuses to establish nal resolutions for the politicaland ethical dilemmas arising from the groundlessness of human rights. Taking usaway from a project of philosophical foundation-giving,42 this thinking insteadturns our attention to how political actors themselves navigate these political andethical dilemmas as they declare, invent or claim rights within changing historicalcircumstances (as will be seen in the analysis of Dreyfus aair in the next section).

Arendts resistance to invoking an absolute to resolve the perplexities of moderndeclarations, linking her analysis of human rights to Socratic aporetic inquiry, isalso motivated by a practical concern. A thinking centred on foundations can giveus the illusion of security and stability and turn our attention away from questionsof how human rights can be politically guaranteed. For Arendt, human rights arein need of political practices and institutions that can provide relatively permanentguarantees: We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on thestrength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.43 Only arti-cial, conventional or man-made laws can give permanence to these mutual guar-antees of political equality. Human rights are in need of such articial inventions ifthey are to be eective; indeed, Arendt underlines the inecacy of all declarations,proclamations, or enumerations of human rights that were not immediately incor-porated into positive law, the law of the land.44 Yet her account also suggests thatthe very institutional structures that we establish to have relatively permanentguarantees can end up undermining these rights.45 Arendts analysis of this con-stitutive tension between human rights and the institutional structures establishedto protect them also underscores the aporetic dimension of her critique.

The 1789 Declaration itself is an embodiment of this paradox to the extent thatit simultaneously posits nature as the foundation of the Rights of Man and implic-itly acknowledges that these rights are in need of articial institutions with itscoeval articulation of national sovereignty. The Declaration announces a set ofinalienable rights and suggests that the nation was subject to the laws that wouldow from the Rights of Man. It establishes the Rights of Man as the source of allpolitical power and the foundation-stone of the body politic.46 Yet, it simulta-neously declares that nation to be sovereign and entrusts it with the guarantee ofrights.

Arendts analysis of the nation-state reveals the tension between human rightsand the institutions that are entrusted with their protection. The institutionalframework of the nation-state rests on a precarious balance between nation andstate. State legitimizes itself as the supreme legal institution in charge of theprotection of all inhabitants in its territory, regardless of their nationality.Nation, however, is an exclusive community composed of those who belong byright of origin and fact of birth.47 Arendt argues that the precarious balance

Gundogdu 11


established between nation and state was imperilled particularly with the rise ofnational consciousness, which turned the nation into a new absolute. Analysingthe conquest of state by the nation, she underscores how the state lost its repre-sentative function and gradually became an instrument of the nation. Through thisgradual conquest, nationalism identied citizens only with those who werenationals.48 As a result, the equivocality between the rights of man and therights of citizen, which could have been politically navigated to claim equality,was increasingly eaced in the name of the rights of nationals within the contextof the nation-state. As the egalitarian promises of modern rights were furtherundermined with the rise of imperialism and emergence of tribal or ethnic nation-alisms, it became even more dicult to turn the equivocal invocation of the rightsof man and citizen into a site of political contestation to claim rights for those whoare not nationals.

Can we think of other institutional structures that provide better guarantees forhuman rights and attenuate the violent eects of these constitutive tensions that wesee in the nation-state? Very briey put, the aporetic inquiry outlined here suggeststhat, although some institutional structures might be more promising in terms ofoering eective guarantees for equal rights, no institutional form, including adenationalized, post-national or cosmopolitan one, will fully resolve the tensionsbetween rights and their institutional protections. To illustrate this point, I willbriey discuss Arendts arguments in favour of limited sovereignty and her reec-tions on world government and citizenship.

Although Arendt provides us with one of the most powerful criticisms of sov-ereignty,49 in a puzzling section of The Human Condition, she also makes room forwhat she describes as limited sovereignty: Sovereignty, which is always spuriousif claimed by an isolated single entity, be it the individual entity of the person orthe collective entity of a nation, assumes, in the case of many men mutually boundby promises, a certain limited reality.50 This limited sovereignty, bound by mutualpromises given by those constituting the political community, one can argue,would provide more eective guarantees for human rights. Indeed, some scholarssuggest that Arendts analysis points to a territorially bound state with the insti-tutional framework of a republican federation as the guarantor of rights.51 Wouldsuch a republican framework resolve the aporias of human rights? AlthoughArendt does not address this question explicitly, given that the mutual promisesare not completely immune to the contingency and fragility characteristic ofhuman action, they can provide guarantees that are only relatively permanent.In the face of this contingency and fragility, political actors still need to be atten-tive to how the republican structures established to furnish guarantees for equalitycan end up losing their potency, or even worse, create their own violentexclusions.52

Could post-national, or even cosmopolitan, structures oer resolutions to theconstitutive tensions that seem to pervade institutional forms centred on the prin-ciple of sovereign territoriality? Could such structures provide conclusive answersto the aporias of human rights, especially those arising from what Seyla Benhabib



refers to as the paradox of democratic self-determination?53 Arendts very briefdiscussions of world government, world citizenship and world-wide federation indierent contexts indicate that even a cosmopolitan framework would not fullyresolve the aporias arising from the tense relationship between human rights andtheir institutional guarantees. These aporias would certainly be transformed andredened in a cosmopolitan setting, and even then, not always to the eect ofproviding more stable guarantees for human rights. For example, Arendts briefinvocation of the possibility of a world government at the very end of her analysisof human rights in Origins suggests that even post-national structures can end updrawing violent distinctions between insiders and outsiders. From Arendts per-spective, a world government does not eliminate the possibility that a highly orga-nized and mechanized humanity will conclude. . . that for humanity as a whole itwould be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.54 Even short of such liquidation,there is no guarantee that a world government would protect human rights andmaintain human plurality. Indeed, as this world government tries to achievecommon bonds among dierent peoples, it can end up destroying dierences, cre-ating a horridly shallow unity and giving rise to the forbidding nightmare oftyranny.55 Similarly, a world citizenship does not necessarily free us from theconstitutive tensions between rights and their institutional protections, especiallygiven the possibility that it can end up eradicating dierences between citizens of adiverse range of political communities.56 Even more nuanced articulations of cos-mopolitanism do not seem to be impervious to such dangers. A good example inthis regard is Karl Jasperss idea of a world-wide federated structure, which aimsto sustain human plurality by advocating the ideal of limitless communication;although Arendt seems to be quite enthusiastic about this institutional proposal,she is still hesitant to fully endorse it as can be seen in her criticism of Jasperssproposal to abolish war.57 Her critique suggests that this world-wide federatedstructure would harbor its own peculiar dangers, including the alarming prospectof federated police forces.58

As this brief discussion looking at Arendts invocation of non-national institu-tional possibilities in dierent contexts demonstrates, the constitutive tensionsbetween human rights and their institutional guarantees do not exist only in theframework of the nation-state. Even if the guarantees of these rights could becompletely detached from the nation-state and assumed by other institutions,there is still a need to undertake critical inquiries of the dynamic and tense rela-tionship between human rights and the institutional orders established to protectthem. What is at stake here is an aporia that is characteristic of any politics ofhuman rights. On the one hand, despite their prevailing conceptualisation asabstract, natural and inalienable rights, human rights are in need of intersubjectiveguarantees that can have some relative permanence only within an institutionalstructure. On the other hand, the institutions we establish for guaranteeing theserights can end up eroding them or rendering them ineective. Arendts aporeticinquiry is characterized by this antinomic relationship, to use Etienne Balibarsterms, between rights and institutions.59 Her recognition of this antinomy in her

Gundogdu 13


discussion of several institutional forms renders her analysis relevant for contem-porary readers interested in post-national and cosmopolitan possibilities.

Arendts critical analysis implies that the perplexities arising from the foundingpremises and institutional entanglements of human rights constitute the very ter-rain that political actors continue to navigate as they claim, exercise and debatehuman rights. One needs to carefully examine this terrain and attend to theseperplexities to understand how problems such as statelessness leave some peoplewithout any rights. Such re-examination is the condition of possibility for rethink-ing human rights in response to these problems, as will be seen in Arendts owninvocation of a right to have rights.

Aporias of human rights: recapturing equivocalitiesand contingencies

As Arendt attempts to read the systemic problems encountered by the stateless as asymptom of the perplexities of the Rights of Man, does her aporetic inquiry endup attributing to modern rights declarations a fatalistic trajectory? Does heraccount leave us with a very deterministic account, suggesting that the paradoxesof human rights inevitably lead to problems such as those encountered by thestateless? These questions have been recently raised by Jacques Rancie`re who sug-gests that Arendts analysis leaves us with an overwhelming historico-ontologicaldestiny from which only a God is likely to save us.60 Indeed, Rancie`re suggests thatit is Arendts analysis that provides the intellectual underpinnings of GiorgioAgambens recent critique that ties human rights inextricably to sovereign violence.

Although Rancie`re is right to point out that Agamben is inspired by Arendt, heoverlooks some of the distinctive aspects of Arendts critique. Agamben andArendt have similar starting points as they both take the problems such as thoseencountered by refugees as symptoms revealing the deeply embedded paradoxes ofhuman rights in a nation-state system. Yet, whereas Agamben sees these para-doxes, including the constitutive tension between man and citizen, as a reinscrip-tion of the centuries-old metaphysical divide between bios (politically qualied life)and zo e (natural life) that has held human life in the grip of sovereign power andsubjected it inescapably to violence,61 Arendts analysis casts them as challengingmodern political and ethical dilemmas that can be navigated and renegotiated indierent ways. Her aporetic inquiry, attuned to the complex historical trajectoriesof human rights and aiming at their rethinking, signicantly diers fromAgambens sweeping statements speaking to the 24 centuries of Western politicalhistory.62 Furthermore, whereas Agamben calls for a politics that renounces allconcepts tied to sovereignty, including human rights and citizenship,63 Arendtscritique aims to grapple with the paradoxes of human rights precisely to think themanew.

To outline these distinctive aspects of Arendts aporetic inquiry in response toRancie`res critique, I discuss two interrelated points. First, far from being a one-sided, deterministic account, Arendts critique foregrounds the equivocal eects of



human rights their political promises and risks precisely because it is centred ontheir aporias. Second, these aporias are not ahistorical contradictions doominghuman rights to an ontological destiny from the very beginning; instead, theyare political and ethical dilemmas that are shaped and transformed signicantlyby historically contingent events and conditions, which can enable or undermine thedemocratic struggles of rights. In this reading, perplexities of human rights are notlogical contradictions or ontological traps ensnaring us perpetually, as Rancie`resreading of Arendt suggests; they are instead complex and demanding political andethical questions that we continue to grapple with as we invoke, claim and exercisehuman rights.

This response draws on Arendts attempts to understand historical events interms of equivocality and contingency:64 Arendt does not turn to the 1789Declaration to locate a chain of causes that would inevitably lead to the massivescales of rightlessness for the stateless persons in the 20th century. Rightlessness isneither historically inevitable nor completely haphazard or accidental given theperplexities of the Rights of Man. It owes its structure to a crystallization of aset of elements, and yet none of these elements in this particular congurationdetermines the outcome in advance.65 In other words, perplexities in the foundingpremises and institutional orders of human rights can signicantly, yet not com-pletely, explain the complex conguration of rightlessness encountered by the state-less in the early 20th century. To fully understand this problem, one needs to lookat other elements in this constellation, including how political actors negotiatethese perplexities and how historical events shape and transform politics of humanrights. In this reading, just as any other element in this conguration, the Rights ofMan do not have a single, xed trajectory but contain an innite number ofabstract possibilities and have an equivocal past.66

Suggesting that Arendt attends to the multiple possibilities and equivocaleects of the Rights of Man is almost counterintuitive given her scathing criticismof the French Revolution and the 1789 Declaration, especially in On Revolution.However, even this work allows an understanding of the French Revolution andthe Rights of Man in terms of equivocal histories containing multiple possibili-ties. Most importantly, Arendt interprets both the French Revolution and the1789 Declaration as new beginnings, as events exemplifying the experience ofmans faculty to begin something new or the experience of interrupting the his-torical time that is assumed to be linear and continuous and of reclaiming polit-ical freedom as a shared human possibility.67 As new beginnings, both the FrenchRevolution and the Rights of Man contain multiple possibilities and can beappropriated in dierent ways by political actors depending on historical circum-stances. For example, Arendts account of the Paris Commune reveals that theFrench Revolution can be, and has been, appropriated in new and unanticipatedways by political actors. Arendt nds in the Commune, which she describes as anunexpected and largely spontaneous outcome of the Revolution itself, the pos-sibility of reclaiming this new beginning for a political organization that canactualize the republican promise of equality and freedom through self-

Gundogdu 15


governance.68 She also credits both the French and American Revolutionsfor making world politics imaginable for the rst time, ushering an erain which politics would concern all men qua men, no matter where theylived, what their circumstances were, or what nationality they possessed.69 Asone of the events ushering world politics in this sense, the 1789 Declarationcontains the promise of claiming equal rights for all regardless of nationality,ethnicity or race.

Arendts acknowledgement of this possibility, despite her criticism of the trans-formation of the Rights of Man into the rights of nationals within the context ofthe nation-state, comes to light particularly in her analysis of the Dreyfus aair.Arendt describes this case as one testing the impartiality of law, which was assumedto be the greatest achievement of the 19th century.70 For the most part, she readsthe case as one grimly arming that there was no such impartiality and that thosewho were pariahs in the society did not share in the promise of equal rights.71 Yet,Arendts description of the grounds on which Dreyfus should have been defendedreveals her attentiveness to the equivocalities of the 1789 Declaration and thepossibility that human rights can be turned into a political site of contestationfor making claims to equality:

There was only one basis on which Dreyfus could or should have been saved . . . the

stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human rights that republican view of

communal life which asserts that (in the words of Clemenceau) by infringing on the

rights of one you infringe on the rights of all.72

This statement is confusing given Arendts criticism of the 1789 Declaration,particularly its Jacobin interpretation. Yet, if the Declaration is understood asequivocal, in line with Arendts interpretation of historical events in general, itcontains multiple possibilities, including political dangers and promises.Particularly the constitutive tension between man and citizen carries within ita risk. Within the context of the nation-state, this tension was generally resolved infavour of the rights of citizen, making it dicult for those who were not seen asmembers of the political community to claim human rights. Especially the rise ofnational consciousness, as mentioned earlier, can render this constitutive tensionbetween man and citizen explosive at the expense of the rights of man. Yet, as anequivocal event, the declaration contains other possibilities, including the politicalpossibility of contesting these narrow interpretations, as Clemenceaus defence ofDreyfus demonstrates. Arendt applauds Clemenceau for his insistence on jacobi-nischer Menschenrechtspatriotismus in the German version of Origins, or Jacobinpatriotism of human rights as highlighted by Hauke Brunkhorst.73 This perplexingformulation is particularly striking as it simultaneously reveals the paradoxes ofhuman rights (man/citizen, universal/particular, natural/historical) and shows thepossibilities of politically navigating these to contest injustice and claim equalityregardless of ethnicity, race or religion. As this case reveals, Arendts aporeticinquiry recognizes the equivocal eects of the 1789 Declaration by attending to



not only the risks it harbours in its underlying assumptions but also the newpolitical possibilities that its ambivalent formulations can give rise to.

It is precisely the recognition of such possibilities that Jacques Rancie`re over-looks in his critique of Arendt. Attributing to her a narrow understanding of pol-itics that necessarily excludes rights struggles from its scope, Rancie`re suggests thatArendts critique fails to take into account the democratic possibilities inscribed inthe equivocalities of the Rights of Man.74 For Rancie`re, the interval between manand citizen in the 1789 Declaration can become the site of a political disputewhereby those who have no part put to test the principle of equality inscribedin the Declaration; indeed, this polemical space is crucial for understanding thedemocratic struggles in the modern era.75

As this brief discussion of the Dreyfus aair shows, Arendt would agree, thoughwith some caveats. Although Arendts emphasis on the equivocal eects of histor-ical events opens up the possibility of an analysis that is in tune with Rancie`resinsistence on the need to recognize the democratic potential of these rights declara-tions as abstract inscriptions of equality, her critical inquiry also underscores theneed to look at the historical conditions that can undermine or enable such pos-sibilities of renegotiating the aporias of human rights and this brings me to thesecond point about Arendts approach, i.e. attentiveness to contingency.76 Rightsstruggles do not take place in a historical vacuum; historical conditions such as therise of imperialism and racism, both of which Arendt saw as destructive for thenotion of humanity that is central to the concept of human rights, can indeedmake it very dicult to politically negotiate the aporetic terrain of human rights soas to contest rightlessness and claim equal rights.77 Arendts critique then turns ourattention to not only the political practices of navigating the paradoxes of humanrights but also the historical conditions that continuously shape the possibilities ofclaiming and exercising these rights.

This emphasis on contingency counters Rancie`re who suggests that Arendtcasts the rightlessness of the stateless as an inevitable doom dictated by theperplexities of the Rights of Man. The goal of Arendts aporetic inquiry isnot to nd out the logical contradictions that have determined the eects ofhuman rights in some formalistic and atemporal sense. To use RichardBeardsworths apt description of Derrida, Arendts critique is instead con-cerned to untie aporia from logical determination.78 It underscores the needto analyse the deeply embedded paradoxes in the 18th-century rights declara-tions to understand the late modern phenomenon of statelessness. However,it does not suggest that these constitutive tensions necessarily lead to therightlessness of the stateless or the totalitarian catastrophe. The plight of thestateless is instead a contingent yet structured (hence, not accidental) constel-lation one that is crystallized through the conguration of several elements,including the paradoxes in the underlying assumptions of modern rights dec-larations, tensions in the institutional structures established to guarantee theserights (e.g. nation-state) and historical transformations that aporias of humanrights undergo as a result of events such as the rise of imperialism.

Gundogdu 17


Conclusion: human rights and aporetic critique

Rancie`re suggests that Arendts paralysing quandary, stuck within binary concep-tions of man/citizen, nature/history, abstract/concrete, universal/particular, ren-ders rights of man either void or tautological, and his critique ends with aprovocative call: If we want to get out of this ontological trap, we have to resetthe question of the Rights of Man.79 In the light of this reconstruction of Arendtscritique of the Rights of Man, I argue that aporias, perplexities and paradoxes,understood usually in negative terms as paralysing quandaries, can indeed be cru-cial in rethinking human rights beyond their conventional binaries especially intimes of crisis. In the face of the crisis triggered by massive scales of statelessness,Arendt shows how conventional accounts relying on these binaries, particularly thebinary of nature versus history, render human rights either void or tautological inRancie`res terms. Understood as natural rights grounded in some kind of a uni-versally shared, abstract nature, human rights are assumed to exist independent ofhuman plurality; yet, without intersubjective guarantees and mutual agreementsthat are possible only within a community of actors, human rights can be renderedmeaningless and void, as the plight of the stateless reveals. Understood as histor-ically grounded rights that we inherit as members of particularistic communities,however, human rights risk becoming tautological as they indicate nothing morethan the rights of citizens and leave out those who are deprived of citizenship.

To use Rancie`res terms again, for purposes counter to his, Arendt resetsthe question of human rights to think them anew beyond these conventionalbinaries that fail to respond to the crisis triggered by statelessness. Thisrethinking is exemplied by her eorts to rearticulate human rights as aright to have rights a rearticulation that is conspicuous by its absence inRancie`res critique. Arendt tries to clarify this perplexing rearticulation in sev-eral ways; it indicates a right to belong to some kind of organized commu-nity, to live in a framework where one is judged by ones actions andopinions in short, the right of men to citizenship and the right of everyindividual to belong to humanity.80 Even more so than the Jacobin patriotismof human rights that Arendt applauds in Clemenceaus defence of Dreyfus,this new formulation resists reducing human rights to either the rights of manor the rights of citizens by insisting on the importance of both citizenship andhumanity for guaranteeing rights. This attempt to refuse the either/or logic ofthe conventional binaries such as man/citizen, universal/particular, and nature/history81 can be seen especially in the striking formulation in the Britishedition of Origins, The Burden of Our Time:

The Rights of Man can become implemented only if they become the prepolitical

foundation of a new polity, the prelegal basis of a new legal structure, the, so to

speak, prehistorical fundament from which the history of mankind will derive its

essential meaning in much the same way Western civilization did from its own

fundamental origin myths.82



As seen in this perplexing articulation, which is not without its own productiveaporias, Arendts critique concludes with a rethinking of human rights that refusesto unequivocally determine the scope, subject and ground of these rights. Arendtsown declaration of a right that is deeply political yet cannot be fully guaranteedby any existing political community, a right that is in need of laws yet cannot becontained in any specic legal order, a right that is historically contingent yet resistsany historicist determination demonstrates that there are no easy resolutions tothe perplexities of human rights. The goal of aporetic inquiry is not to nd suchresolutions in the form of underlying foundations or institutional models butinstead to grapple with these perplexities to understand how they are manifestedin new forms of rightlessness as well as in new struggles for equality that canreinvent the meaning of human rights.

This rearticulation of a right to have rights is also important in terms of under-standing the distinctive goals of Arendts aporetic critique of human rights. Similarto Socratic dialogues urging Athenian citizens to nd the truthfulness of their ownopinions by carefully examining them, Arendts critique does not aim at abandon-ing human rights but instead rendering them meaningful again. Setting the task ofcritique as rethinking, Arendts inquiry raises cautions against some of the morerecent criticisms of human rights such as the one oered by Giorgio Agamben.Theoretically, as Arendts aporetic approach indicates, a critique attributing tohuman rights a singular, uniform logic fails to attend to the multiple, equivocaland contingent eects of human rights as a discourse characterized by aporias.Politically, calling for an emancipatory politics severed completely from humanrights, such a critique risks overlooking the struggles that reclaim these rights inimaginative ways.83 With its equivocal and contingent understanding of aporias, anArendtian critique of human rights not only subjects their underlying assumptionsand paradoxical eects to a relentless scrutiny but also attends to (indeed, as thebrief discussion of Arendts perplexing notion of a right to have rights indicates,participates in) such inventive practices of rearticulating these rights.

Notes

I am grateful to Cigdem Cdam for reading several versions of this article and providingdetailed comments at different stages of writing. I would also like to thank Mary Dietz, BudDuvall, Bill Scheuerman and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and

suggestions on an early draft. The article has benefited significantly from the substantialfeedback provided by the members of my writing group at Barnard College. Different ver-sions of the article have been presented at the Old Europe, New Orders: Post-1945 GermanThought on War, Peace, and International Law (Indiana University, Bloomington, March

2009) and the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association; I wouldlike to thank the participants of these meetings for their helpful comments.1. Hannah Arendt ([1951] 1968) The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 2912. New York:

Harcourt.2. Seyla Benhabib (2004) The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge

and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gundogdu 19


3. James Ingram (2008) What is a Right to Have Rights? Three Images of the Politics ofHuman Rights, American Political Science Review 102(4): 40116. Jeffrey Isaac (1996)A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and The Politics of

Human Rights, American Political Science Review 90(1): 6173.4. Peg Birmingham (2006)Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common

Responsibility. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Serena Parekh (2008)

Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights.New York: Routledge.

5. Arendt (n. 1), p. 290. Arendt (1955) Elemente und Ursprunge Totaler Herrschaft, p. 465.

Frankfurt am Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt. Christoph Menke also notes the use ofthe term aporia in the German version of Arendts Origins; however, he does notprovide an analysis of the methodological implications of this term. See Menke(2007) The Aporias of Human Rights and the One Human Right: Regarding

the Coherence of Hannah Arendts Argument, Social Research 74(3): 73962.6. Jacques Rancie`re (2004) Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?, The South Atlantic

Quarterly 103(2/3): 297310.

7. Hence I do not address the extensive literature on Socratic inquiry. For the seminalessay on Socratic elenchus, see Gregory Vlastos (1994) The Socratic Elenchus: Methodis All, in Myles Burnyeat (ed.) Socratic Studies, pp. 129. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. For a more recent analysis focusing on the critical import of aporiain Socratic dialogues, see in particular Vasilis Politis, Aporia and Searching in the EarlyPlato, in Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis (eds) Remembering Socrates, pp. 88109. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

8. Arendt (n. 1), pp. 2678.9. Arendt ([1963] 1990) On Revolution, p. 149. London and New York: Penguin.10. Arendt (n. 1), p. 298; Arendt (1949) The Rights of Man: What are They?, Modern

Review 3 (1): 2437, at p. 35.11. Arendt (n. 9), p. 149.12. Arendt (n. 1), p. 230.

13. Ibid. p. 299.14. Rancie`re (n. 6), p. 302.15. Jill Frank (2006) The Political Theory of Classical Greece, in John S. Dryzek, Bonnie

Honig and Anne Phillips (eds) Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, pp. 17592, at p.178. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

16. Arendt (1978) Life of the Mind: Thinking, p. 170. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.17. Ibid. p. 172.

18. Ibid. p. 16970.19. Arendt (2005) Socrates, in Jerome Kohn (ed.) The Promise of Politics, pp. 539, at pp.

145. New York: Schocken Books. See also Dana Villa (2001) Socratic Citizenship, p.

261. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.20. Arendt (n. 16), p. 172.21. Ibid. p. 173.

22. Ibid.23. Richard Beardsworth (1996) Derrida and the Political, p. 32. London and New York:

Routledge. My reading is partly informed by Derridas argument that aporia is notnecessarily a failure or a simple paralysis, the sterile negativity of the impasse. See

Jacques Derrida (1993) Aporias: Dying Awaiting (One Another at) the Limits of



Truth, tr. Thomas Dutoit, p. 32. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Most impor-tantly, for both Arendt and Derrida, aporetic thinking helps the faculty of judgement inthe absence of a given rule, norm or ground.

24. Arendt (n. 16), p. 193.25. Ibid. p. 192. For an in-depth analysis of Arendts notion of judgement, see, among

others, Linda Zerilli (2005) Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.26. Arendt (1949, in n. 10).27. Arendt (n. 16), p. 170.

28. Arendt (1949, in n. 10), p. 26.29. Ibid. p. 37.30. Ibid. p. 34.31. Rancie`re (n. 6), p. 302.

32. Arendt (n. 9), pp. 39, 15960.33. Ibid. p. 45.34. Costas Douzinas (2000) The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of

the Century, p. 95. Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing.35. Arendt (n. 9), p. 193.36. A similar analysis of modern declarations can be found in Jacques

Derrida (1986) Declarations of Independence, New Political Science 15: 715. Foran analysis of the similarities and differences between Arendt and Derrida on thisscore, see Bonnie Honig (1991) Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derridaon the Problem of Founding a Republic, American Political Science Review 85(1):

97113.37. Arendt (n. 9), pp. 192, 161.38. Arendt (n. 1), p. 291.

39. Ibid. p. 301.40. Seyla Benhabib ([1996] 2003) The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, pp. 82, 185,

1945. Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.

41. Birmingham turns to natality and Parekh identifies conscience as the foundation forhuman rights in Arendts work. Birmingham (n. 4); Parekh (n. 4), p. 153.

42. Patchen Markell (2008) Review of Peg Birmingham, Serena Parekh, Notre Dame

Philosophical Reviews. Available online at http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id14788(consulted June 2010).

43. Arendt (n. 1), p. 301.44. Arendt (n. 9), p. 149.

45. For similar assessments of Arendts position on institutions, see Etienne Balibar(2007) (De)constructing the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on theCoherence of Hannah Arendts Practical Philosophy, Social Research 74(3): 72738,

at pp. 7334. Bonnie Honig (2006) Another Cosmopolitanism? Law and Politics in theNew Europe, in Robert Post (ed.) Another Cosmopolitanism, pp. 10227. Oxford andNew York: Oxford University Press.

46. Arendt (n. 9), p. 109.47. Arendt (n. 1), p. 230.48. Ibid.49. Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen (2009) Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External

Sovereignty in Arendt, Constellations 16(2): 30730.

Gundogdu 21


50. Hannah Arendt ([1958] 1998) The Human Condition, p. 245. 2nd edn. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

51. Roland Axtmann (2006) Globality, Plurality and Freedom: The Arendtian Perspective,

Review of International Studies 32(1): 93117, at pp. 107110. Ronald Beiner (2000)Arendt and Nationalism, in Dana Villa (ed) The Cambridge Companion to HannahArendt, pp. 4462, at p. 55. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Seyla Benhabib (2006) The Philosophical Foundations of Cosmopolitan Norms, inRobert Post (ed.) Another Cosmopolitanism, pp. 1344, at p. 15. Oxford and NewYork: Oxford University Press. Jean L. Cohen (1996) Rights, Citizenship, and the

Modern Form of the Social: Dilemmas of Arendtian Republicanism, Constellations3(2): 16489, at pp. 170, 175.

52. Arendts analysis of the American Revolution gives credence to both of thesepoints. First, as the tragic fate of the American Revolution demonstrates, even

republican arrangements that have their origins in mutual promises can end up los-ing their potency when they fail to establish common spaces where citizenscan act together. Second, Arendt also attends to the possible violent exclu-

sions of a republican arrangement; in an often overlooked section of On Revolution,for example, she criticizes the Americans for failing to address poverty as a politicalproblem, which left the poor excluded from the light of the public realm. See Arendt

(n. 9), p. 69.53. Benhabib (n. 2), p. 66.54. Arendt (n. 1), p. 298.55. Hannah Arendt (1968) Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World? in Men in Dark Times,

pp. 8194, at pp. 87, 81. New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Co.56. Ibid. p. 89.57. Ibid. pp. 845, 934.

58. Ibid. pp. 934. For extensive discussions of Hannah Arendts arguments about feder-alism at the international level, see Axtmann (n. 51), pp. 111ff. Douglas Klusmeyer(2000) Hannah Arendts Case for Federalism, Publius 40(1): 3158.

59. Balibar (n. 45), p. 734. This reading does not cast Arendt as an anti-institutionalist as itunderscores her recognition of the need for institutional protections for rights. However,attending to the equivocal effects of such protections, it also diverges from readings that

portray Arendt in a more institutionalist vein. For the latter, see in particular JeremyWaldron (2000) Arendts Constitutional Politics, in Dana Villa (ed.) The CambridgeCompanion to Hannah Arendt, pp. 201219. Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.

60. Rancie`re (n. 6), p. 302; emphasis mine. For a similar criticism, see also HaukeBrunkhorst (1996) Are Human Rights Self-Contradictory? Critical Remarks on aHypothesis by Hannah Arendt, Constellations 3(2): 1909.

61. Giorgio Agamben (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, p. 127. Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press.

62. Ibid. p. 11.

63. Giorgio Agamben (2000) Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, tr. Vincenzo Binettiand Cesare Casarino, pp. 1526. Minneapolis and London: University of MinnesotaPress.

64. This emphasis on equivocality and contingency can be seen in Arendts historiograph-

ical reflections, especially in response to Eric Voegelins critique of Origins.



See Hannah Arendt (1994) A Reply to Eric Voegelin, in Jerome Kohn (ed.) Essays inUnderstanding, 19301954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, pp. 4018. New York:Schocken Books. For a discussion of Arendts historiographical approach, see, among

others, Benhabib (n. 40), pp. 639; Lisa Jane Disch (1994) Hannah Arendt and the Limitsof Philosophy, ch. 4. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press.

65. Arendt (1994) Understanding and Politics, in Jerome Kohn (ed.) Essays in

Understanding, 19301954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, pp. 30727, at p.325. New York: Schocken Books. For crystallization, see Benhabib (n. 40), p. 64,and Disch (n. 64), p. 148.

66. Arendt (n. 65), p. 325.67. Arendt (n. 9), p. 34.68. Ibid. p. 239.69. Ibid. p. 53.

70. Arendt (n. 1), p. 91.71. Ibid. p. 117.72. Ibid. p. 106.

73. Hauke Brunkhorst (2006) Reply to Critics, Philosophy and Social Criticism 32(7): 82538, at p. 827.

74. Rancie`re argues that Arendts well-known distinction between political and social

consigns issues such as economic inequality to the social realm and forbids their polit-icization. Rancie`re (n. 6), pp. 2989, 301302. This reading, however, overlooks the factthat Arendt uses the term social in many different, and often conflicting, ways, notalways suggesting a distinct realm with a given set of issues and actors. For further

discussion, see especially Hanna Pitkin (1998) The Attack of the Blob: Hannah ArendtsConcept of the Social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In addition, Rancie`resclaim that Arendts archipolitical vision hinders a positive assessment of democratic

rights struggles is quite questionable given her favourable account of the labour move-ment in The Human Condition. See Arendt (n. 50), pp. 21220.

75. Rancie`re (n. 6), p. 303.

76. This attentiveness to historical conditions of political struggles is at times missing inRancie`res analysis a point that cannot be fully developed here given the scope of thisarticle. For a similar criticism though, see Bruno Bosteels (2009) Rancie`res Leftism, or,

Politics and its Discontents, in Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (eds) JacquesRancie`re: History, Politics, Aesthetics, pp. 158175, at pp. 169, 175. Durham, NC:Duke University Press.

77. Arendt (n. 1), pp. 157, 161.

78. Beardsworth (n. 23), p. 47.79. Rancie`re (n. 6), p. 302.80. Arendt (n. 1), pp. 2957; Arendt (1949, in n. 10), pp. 30, 37; Arendt (n. 1), p. 299. There

is now a vast literature on Arendts notion of a right to have rights a perplexingformulation that cannot be fully explained given the scope of this article. See, amongothers, the works mentioned in notes 24. For the purposes of this article, this rear-

ticulation is important as it shows that Arendts rethinking of human rights is enabled byher aporetic mode of inquiry.

81. Rancie`re himself questions the syllogistic logic of the either/or especially in conven-tional understandings of the Rights of Man, which force us to unequivocally determine

Gundogdu 23


the subject of these rights either as man or citizen. See Rancie`re (1992) Politics,Identification, and Subjectivization, October 61: 5864, at p. 62.

82. Arendt (1951) The Burden of Our Time, p. 439. London: Secker & Warburg (emphasis

mine).83. I have developed these criticisms elsewhere; see Gundogdu (forthcoming), Potentialities

of Human Rights: Agamben and the Narrative of Fated Necessity, Contemporary

Political Theory.



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