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THREE: The Principle of Givenness: Appearance, Singularity, and the Right to Have Rights
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For Hannah Arendt, our capacity for beginning is the only promise left after the horrifying events of the twentieth century. Augustine’s notion of beginning, or natality, is at work throughout Arendt’s work after The The Origins of Totalitarianism, informing her key concepts of action, freedom , and power. These three notions have as their ontological basis the event of natality: our freedom and power to act are the result of our being born—the initium. Oddly, the political distinctions that Arendt draws from Augustine’s understanding of the event of natality seem to eschew all that is usually associated with this event, most notably all that has to do with embodiment. Arendt seems to use Augustine’s understanding of the human being as a beginner as the basis for distinguishing the public from the private, freedom from necessity, and action from labor. All these distinctions have as their basis Arendt’s foundational distinction between zoe (life) and bios politikos (political life). Her claim that each human being has an equal capacity to begin something new by virtue of birth is the principle upon which Arendt separates the sphere of equality that marks the bios politikos from zoe, where embodied differences of all kinds necessarily hold sway. THREE The Principle of Givenness: Appearance, Singularity, and the Right to Have Rights Every man, being created in the singular, is a new beginning by virtue of his birth; if Augustine had drawn the consequences of these speculations, he would have defined men, not, like the Greeks, as mortals, but as “natals.” Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, vol. 2, Willing Without a stage-set, man cannot live. The world, society, is only too ready to provide another if a person dares to toss the natural one, given him at birth, into the lumber room. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen This observation is well known and has been made by many readers of Arendt. Here, however, I want to draw attention to an earlier reference in The Origins of Totalitarianism to Augustine’s understanding of natality, one that Arendt herself never fully develops but that points to another dimension of the event of natality. This other dimension insists on the affirmation of all that she seems subsequently to dismiss from the political space. It calls into question Arendt’s strict distinction between the public and the private, between the bios politikos and zoe. Further, it suggests that the very plurality that Arendt understands as the conditio sine qua non of political life is infused with an ineradicable difference or alienness that is inextricably part and parcel of the right to have rights. Her earlier reference to Augustine indicates that zoe (unqualified life) must be included in the bios politikos and that to exclude it is to commit an originary act of violence that is antithetical to the very existence of the public space and the right to have rights. GIVENNESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS Arendt’s reference to Augustine occurs in Part Two of The Origins of Totalitarianism , at the conclusion of her analysis of imperialism, which ends with an examination of the decline of the nation-state and human rights. In the very last pages of this analysis, Arendt describes those stateless refugees who, having lost their political status as citizens, have lost any and all recourse to human rights. What she and other refugees found was that in the very situation where the declaration of general human rights ought to have provided remedy, just the opposite occurred: “If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case” (OT, 300). It is in the context of the loss of human rights that Arendt refers to Augustine. I again quote the text: The human being who has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern. This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt...