Introduction: Culture and Political Community

The first loss which the rightless suffered was … the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world.

(Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)

In recent years the work of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt has been increasingly invoked by theorists and writers associated with or important to the disciplines of cultural and literary studies, from Giorgio Agamben to Julia Kristeva, and from Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak to Homi Bhabha (see Agamben 1998; Kristeva 2001; Butler and Spivak 2007; Bhabha 1994). The publication by Stanford University Press of a collected volume of Arendt's writing on literature and culture edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb confirms her increasing currency for those working in these fields (Arendt 2007a). But the range of Arendt's writing on literature and culture, and the centrality of narrative and performance to Arendt's political [Begin Page xi] philosophy, both point to a more intricate and enmeshed relationship between the political and the cultural than may at first be evident. As I will argue in this introduction, and as the various contributors elaborate more fully in the essays that follow, Arendt's political philosophy is 'cultural' in profound and often unacknowledged ways. The contention of this special issue is that her political philosophy offers important insights and resources for contemporary criticism if understood in its own terms, rather than simply being regarded as a tractable source of conceptual terms or historical predicaments to be deployed within existing frameworks of cultural analysis and interpretation. This special issue, which as far as I am aware is the first such issue of an Anglophone journal in literary and cultural studies devoted entirely to Arendt, seeks instead to reflect on the process of intellectual passage or translation from political philosophy to literary and cultural studies. Following Walter Benjamin's conception of translation, this issue therefore takes seriously the nonidentity between the political and the cultural precisely in order to explore the possibilities for moving between them (see Benjamin 1996).

The profoundly cultural dimension of Arendt's political philosophy is perhaps most evident in the work that appears to have least to say about culture per se, namely Arendt's remarkably inventive but highly idiosyncratic study The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973). Written in response to the social and political collapse of Continental Europe in World War II, the book adumbrates the constellation of historical vectors that could retrospectively be seen to converge in German National Socialism and the police regime of the USSR under Stalin: "[w]hat I did," Arendt writes, "was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and … trac[e] these elements back in history as far as I deemed proper and necessary" (1994, 402-03). As a result, the study constellates a range of elements that had appeared to existing political philosophy and historiography to have little to do with one another, and certainly not to have a causal relationship to the regimes she describes as totalitarian. It not only locates anti-Semitism, "race thinking," and "tribal nationalism" within this constellation, but also includes much more diffuse and wide-ranging historical shifts, such as the social atomization generated by capitalist modernity, the disintegration of class as a central political and social identity, imperialism, the intensification and extension of technological capabilities, and the incipient globalization of the nation-state form (1973, 158, 227). As Roy Tsao argues in an important reading of the text, what underpins this dizzying array of elements and provides a measure of cohesion (if not consistency or completeness) to Arendt's analysis is a submerged conception of "recognition" as providing the "social texture" or nexus through which political community is possible and within which it takes place (2004, 126-29; Arendt 1973, 293). [Begin Page xii] I would argue that it is this largely implicit conception of social texture as recognition that engenders the profoundly 'cultural' dimension of her political philosophy.¹

The consideration of political community remains largely implicit or submerged in The Origins of Totalitarianism because the book is primarily concerned with its disintegration in the middle of the...