Thoughts on Arendt so far

So I only read Hannah Arendt's Imperialism section and have just started into Totalitarianism, skipped the first part. So these are what my questions are drawing on...

1) Ok so this totally might seem random but there is something interesting when Arendt says

"When, in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and 'thought in continents,' these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs." (138)

What arrests me here is the arrangement of imperialism and the phrase "thinking in continents." It's said that Cecil Rhodes "thought in continents," in keeping with his "expansion is everything" (124), so I want to ask why continents? Even for Robert Young (who we read in Chris Connery's class a few weeks ago) wants to call postcolonial thought "tricontinental thought" because it was born out of the Tricontinental Conference in 1966. The irony of this is that it was held in Havana, in Cuba, an island, and we might suppose that islands feel so closely to one continent or another that they are subsumed with it. And we also might suppose that continents are the ones with superior power of any kind in comparison to islands. However, islands are a bit trickier than that and hard to claim or incorporate into any one territory.
Perhaps the mistake with imperialism and expansion was that they were thinking in continents and thus not sustainably, but with the "insanity" of unlimited expansion.  I still don't think we've gotten outta this mindset...

2) Was bothered by some statements made by Arendt and wasn't sure how to take them?

"Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans" (186)

"The word 'race' has a precise meaning only when and where peoples are confronted with such tribes of which they have no historical record and which do not know any history of their own. [. . .] races in this sense were found only in regions where nature was particularly hostile. What made them different from other human beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality--compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder." (192)

These are two examples of things that bothered me... what are Arendt's politics? From these two statements which at least appear to take things seriously and aren't trying to be ironic or anything, she casts judgement and apparently erases the indigenous from America and Australia, and then seems to call for civilized human vs. barbarian discourse. Some of her other statements seem helpful and profound, so a bit difficult to reconcile them....

3) Some of her interesting and useful stuff is here. For example, for racism Arendt says: "no matter whether racism appears as the natural result of a catastrophe or as the conscious instrument for bringing it about, it is always closely tied to contempt for labor, hatred of territorial limitation, general rootlessness, and an activistic faith in one's own divine chosenness" (197). I think this is really useful in thinking about the origins of racism and what the idea of another race threatens.
Then there's what Arendt says about human rights:

"From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an 'abstract' human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some kind of social order. If a tribal or other 'backward' community did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it had not yet reached that stage of civilization, the stage of popular and national sovereignty, but was opposed by foreign or native despots. The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one's own people, seemed to be able to ensure them." (291)

"The calamity of the rightless is . . . that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever." (295) 

Again, there is this savage/barbarian and civilized dichotomy, but Arendt has a point about these human rights that are somehow unenforceable, which she says on page 293. Moreover, her discussion in the chapter talks about how certain ideas obscure the fact that we ignore groups of people and do not take responsibility for humanity as a whole, particularly by breaking ourselves up into smaller, divided groups. This a) seems related to China Mieville and his discussion on the failures of international law and self-determination and b) We just read Octavia Butler in my TAship and perhaps one solution to human rights or the universal human is NOT about each of us finding a complete and total sense of agency but seeing ourselves in mutual symbiosis with each other, mutually dependent, which we are anyway and what i'm sure green peace and the like have been saying all along. But it's more useful to think about it in the way that maybe we should switch our formulations and think not necessarily that the first step is self-determination or complete agency, but agency with compromises and mutual symbiosis.

Thoughts on After Evil

This response focuses on Robert Meister's After Evil. Posting on what i've read thus far....

Themes brought up: time (especially the now/present), physical bodies, pain, framework of victim/perpetrator/beneficiary, recognition, different kinds of justice, affect, subjectivity.....

1) Meister's discussion of the genre of human rights discourse as a narrative is really interesting, and I think it's pretty clear to see what he's talking about just by watching in particular the TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU). Let me first just say that I love this show with its characters and the questions it raises, but the narrative and how it raises its questions are things to consider, since I have always seen it as a spectacle, a pornography of rape, incest, abuse, and victimization. The subjects of this drama are women, children, immigrants, people of color all cast as victims deemed 'special' and are interrogated by the police investigators and district attorneys to tell their stories of pain and horror, often repeatedly. We often don't see the actual rape or crime occur, but see its aftereffects. Thus, "the victim's original torture is narrated as a secret humiliation and defeat and its public exposure as a dramatic reversal of fortune that brings about eventual moral victory. Such narratives take place against a scene of private darkness followed by one of public light. (Past torture had to be done in secret--it could not have been broadcast; the description of that torture has to be public, it cannot be covered up if healing is to occur)" (Meister 67). As Meister further says, "It is thus not bodily pain itself but the narrative genre used to depict it that creates moral feeling in the audience. If accounts of physical pain used the conventions of pornography or eschatology, they might evoke feelings in their audience of moral superiority or moral vulnerability or both" (67). SVU is sort of like a miniature, individualized version of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Meister talks about that makes it seem more privatized and individual than an institution or human rights culture, as Meister puts it. SVU also takes up the role of victim and perpetrator, as well as beneficiaries, trying to expose others as part of the crime but also incorporating us, the viewers into the narrative. We are the "people who may want to feel bad about the conditions described but who would be made highly uncomfortable if the victim were portrayed as blaming them. In social melodrama the victim is always constructed as innocent (morally undamaged by suffering) so that the melodrama's audience, which is likely to include beneficiaries of such suffering, can understand themselves as bystanders who are capable of feeling compassion without fear" (63-4).
I'm just thinking through SVU here to think about how this new Human Rights Discourse can be seen in our everyday lives.


2) Some interesting connections or points brought up with the pastness of evil, guilt, blame, appropriateness, confession, compassion, and overcoming.
I find that the word "overcoming" is used a lot in conversations about discrimination or disadvantages that people must get over, and Meister mentions it when he says "the historical victims of slavery could never claim to be a national majority and now claim to have finally 'overcome' only as a consequence of Barack Obama's election as president" (83), where "overcome" is used as a way to prolong transition, deferring "closure in order to make permanent the project of national recovery" (83). Meister further says that "national recovery from a history of racial oppression requires both a continuing awareness of the dangers of relapse and a constant vigilance against the repetition of past patterns and practices. This argument implies that we can never recover from our past unless we believe ourselves to be in permanent recovery--that we are never in greater danger of reviving racism than when we believe ourselves to have overcome it" (101). This is never more perfectly said and embodied in the idea of "post-race." If social justice discourse sets itself up as overcoming injustices (or evils), isn't this a continuation of the postponement of justice? how do we frame our discourse differently so that we are not caught in a cyclical battle?


3) What is justice/just/justness? What does justice look like, and do we all have the same definition of justice? There is justice-as-struggle and justice-as-reconciliation, but what do these justices mean, and are they different?


4) the perpetrator/victim/beneficiary appear to be unstable categories--people can straddle many areas and sometimes are privileged depending on the situation (see 33, 53). meister primarily associates this with identification with a certain category. these categories can be useful but also can be turned around, with the perpetrators/beneficiaries identifying as victims. it still seems to go back to the melodramatic good vs evil, wrongdoer vs wronged--how do we get out of this?