Читать книгу Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness - Christopher Peys - Страница 8
ОглавлениеIn February 2017, just weeks after the American Presidential Inauguration brought into office a populist politician with a controversial social media presence, Megan Phelps-Roper stood on a stage in New York City and explained how Twitter allowed her to experience the “power of engaging the Other.”1 In the wake of Donald Trump’s rise to power, an ascent characterized by his unconventional use of Twitter and his reliance upon misinformation disseminated through the internet, Phelps-Roper spoke of how this microblogging service played an instrumental role in her decision to dissociate herself from her family’s fundamentalist organization: the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). Describing the drawn-out process of leaving the WBC, an extremist organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America,”2 Phelps-Roper outlined how her encounters with strangers on Twitter helped her to see the world anew and to recognize the inconsistencies in her family’s idiosyncratic reading of the Bible; the cruelty in their practice of celebrating human tragedy; and the brutality of picketing funerals.3 It was within the public domain of Twitter that Phelps-Roper purports to have had discussions which—despite being heated—were characterized by a sense of curiosity and a spirit of care that gave rise to a form of civic friendship with people whom she once believed to be unclean, evil, and damned. That is, Phelps-Roper and her interlocutors on Twitter wove a worldly web of friendship, so to speak, through the repeated practice of acting caringly toward strangers online, putting into practice what might be described as a form of discursive hospitality: a welcoming of the (unknown) Other’s voice into the public space provided by this social media platform. Moreover, the care shown to Phelps-Roper came in the form of forgiveness, a response to her past actions that not only allowed her to renew her once-hostile relationship with the world, but also to begin acting politically with people who would once have been the target of her vitriolic rebukes when she was a congregant of the WBC.
When contextualized within a broader framing of global affairs in today’s digitally interconnected world, Phelps-Roper’s story draws attention to the public significance of being hospitable to and engaging openly with the Other. Seen in this light, her narrative demonstrates how we might go about caring for the bonds of civic friendship that maintain the worldly realm in which the doing of politics can occur: “the political.”4 We find in Phelps-Roper’s story a distinctive strain of cosmopolitan hospitality and forgiveness, both of which are practices that I contend are forms of public care capable of repairing, maintaining, and enhancing worldly, political relationships. In this book, I take her account as a reference point in the development of a world-centric, caring theory of political action. Phelps-Roper’s experience is remarkable during a period in history when the fragile fabric of the political runs the risk of snapping entirely under the strain imposed upon it by the forces of world-ending alienation. Because Phelps-Roper’s past political experiences effectively represent one extreme on the political spectrum in contemporary, global civil society, given that the WBC’s radically intolerant ideology and belligerent forms of theological-political evangelism situate this group at the far end of the religious right, her narrative provides an opportunity to explore anew the ideas of cosmopolitan hospitality and forgiveness within the context of an example which showcases a form of civic enmity that directly inhibits the doing of democratic politics.
Though I draw upon Phelps-Roper’s experience of political life at the fringes of society, and the story of how she disassociated herself from the WBC, my aim is to offer a political theory of the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism. I focus on these two interrelated ideas—which are connected in terms of an underlying conceptual logic inherent to both—because it is my belief that they are forms of practice that can be enacted for the sake of the worldly realm of politics, whether that be the relational spaces of public action occurring in the phenomenological realm and/or those spheres of human affairs found in cyberspace. It is through cosmopolitanism and acts of forgiveness that we can (re)develop more just, inclusive spaces for the doing of politics in our global age.
In this book, I examine the ideas of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness through the prism of “care,” a term that is used throughout the remainder of this text explicitly in reference to the work of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and—specifically—her notion of “care for the world.”5 As a means of rethinking the practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, reframing them as forms of political action that “care for the world,” this book also draws upon the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). In particular, the deconstructive theory for which Derrida is so well known provides a valuable means of revealing the conceptual topography of the aporetic impasses that he contends are concealed within the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism: the very boundaries that simultaneously constrain and constitute the undergirding logic of these two ideas. In today’s digitally interconnected but politically polarized world, it is my belief that such boundaries should be tested and renegotiated precisely because it is through such modes of action that rifts within sociopolitical communities can be overcome and the worldly realm of public, political action can be (re)cultivated. But what are the consequences of rethinking such boundaries in terms of “care”? In what ways does this act of conceptual renegotiation reframe the political and alter the ethico-political landscape? How, then, to map out this terrain? Where Derrida’s work helps us to identify the pitfalls and paradoxes inherent to the practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, Arendt’s corpus supplies the intellectual tools necessary to theorize an approach to the political that emphasizes the worldly significance of maintaining, repairing, and preserving the web of relationships that constitute and condition the public realm.
A twentieth-century thinker whose work is shaped not only by her training in philosophy but also by her lived experience as a Jewish woman exposed to the evils of Nazi totalitarianism, Arendt’s theory of “the political” stands as a testament to the dark potentialities capable of being realized when the realm of human affairs falls into a worldless state of disarray and terror. Having been subjected to the harsh realities of being forced to flee the Nazis in 1933, an escape that rendered her stateless until 1951 (when she became a citizen of the United States), Arendt brings to her work an understanding of the vicissitudes and vulnerabilities of being without political rights and of existing as an outsider with no equal access to or standing in the world. Her experiences of totalitarianism and statelessness, coupled with her extensive knowledge of Western philosophic and political thought, provided her a unique perspective on the human condition, informing her fundamental belief in the need to think and act in terms of the “world,” which—for her—corresponds to the “space constituted by the many” where “political activity” can be “performed.”6
A key concept throughout her body of thought,7 Arendt’s notion of “world” is associated with her understanding of how “things”—both tangible and intangible—can be said to make up the public realm of the political. For her, the political—as a space of relations—is a “human artifact,” one which is fabricated by “human hands” and that corresponds with the “affairs” that “go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.”8 The “world” can be understood as a political community’s publicly shared, “common home.”9 For Arendt, however, this “space for politics,”10 or worldly sphere of political affairs, is a thoroughly fragile fabrication and a thingly entity ever in need of care, most especially during periods of history when (violent) conflict and/or pernicious social forces have made the public realm unfit for human habitation. When the public realm of the political is largely bereft of a kind of unifying “common sense” (sense that it is common to all), civic friendship, and—significantly for Arendt—any notable sense of amor mundi (or “love of the world”), there is a need to think anew about what it means to act caringly for the sake of the “world”: for the “common home” shared by all who come to inhabit this “space for politics.” In terms of conceptualizing care as an act that sustains and enhances humankind’s “common home,” then, it is to Arendt and her theory of the political that I turn in order to orient us toward a world-centric theory of public care. More specifically, I reconsider the acts of forgiving and cosmopolitan theory throughout this book in terms of Arendt’s understanding of the human condition, in particular her theorization of political “action” and the notion of “care” which accompanies it. This, paired with a reconfigured, complementary form of cosmopolitan hospitality, derived from Derrida’s work, paves the way for my own theory of cosmopolitanism, one which is noninstrumental, worldly, and ultimately cares for the political experience of freedom.
Derrida engages only infrequently with Arendt’s body of thought, drawing upon her work in a 1993 essay entitled “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,”11 as well as in his own reflections on cosmopolitanism and forgiveness.12 Arendt, in turn, does not discuss Derrida’s work at all. This is unsurprising given that he was at the beginning of his academic career, and largely unconcerned with matters of politics in the latter years of Arendt’s life. This being said, the limited academic exchange between Derrida and Arendt pales into insignificance when taking into consideration the possibilities presented to scholars by a concomitant examination of their respective reflections on the Western canon of philosophic and political thought. There are many reasons to read these two thinkers together, not least because they—as Samir Haddad has pointed out—“share much in their personal and intellectual biographies [. . .] and both constantly worked through an intense engagement with the philosophical tradition [. . .] always referring back to traditional texts with a view to challenging and transforming received interpretations.”13 Not unlike Haddad, as well as numerous other scholars who have placed these two prominent, twentieth-century European thinkers in dialogue with one another,14 I engage with the work of both Arendt and Derrida because I believe that in doing so, new conceptual pathways for thinking about “the political” are revealed. Although I will not be comparing and contrasting their work, nor will I be placing them in conversation with one another, so to speak, I will instead be reading them alongside one another as a means of reconsidering cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. More specifically, I contend that new understandings of what it means to care for the public realm are unearthed by using Arendt’s body of thought to supplement that of Derrida’s work.
In a conceptual maneuver unique to this book, I provide an Arendtian-inspired response to the paradoxes that can be identified through a Derridean deconstruction of the notions of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, in order to understand more fully how liberal, democratic communities might go about caring for the world in times of extreme polarization, alienation, and/or (violent) conflict. I use Arendt and Derrida’s work to do exactly as Haddad suggests: to challenge and transform their respective interpretations of the political tradition as a means of arriving at a world-centric theory of public care. Recalibrating Arendt’s understanding of the human condition, as well as building upon a Derrida’s work on the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitan hospitality, I present a theory of a “caring forgiveness” and a “caring cosmopolitanism.” A caring forgiveness and a caring cosmopolitanism are world-centric theories of political action that provide an alternative means by which to consider how the act of forgiving and of welcoming the (unknown) Other’s voice are closely interrelated forms of political practice. Much theorizing has been done on both forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, but little research in the field of political theory, broadly defined, treats these two ideas together, least of all from the perspective of “care.”15 Here, I do so using Arendt’s notion of “care for the world” as a means of demonstrating how the faculty of forgiving and practices of cosmopolitan hospitality are two interrelated forms of political action that ultimately care for the powerful experience of human freedom: the power to begin new courses of political action with a plurality of other people in the world.
When deconstructed from a Derridean perspective, the paradoxical conceptual logic inherent to the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism are exposed in such a manner that the ethico-political (im)possibilities of putting into practice each of these two ideas can be examined directly. A deconstructive approach, which Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney describe as a type of “conceptual genealogy”16 in their joint preface to Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), uncovers the concealed, aporetic underpinnings of the logic of forgiving and welcoming the (unknown) Other. Finding that the possibility of practicing forgiveness and cosmopolitanism is rooted in the impossibility of experiencing each of these two ideas in “pure,” unconditional terms,17 Derrida highlights that humankind’s ability to forgive and act hospitably toward strangers is fundamentally a matter of thinking, as well as acting, at and between the boundaries of human (im)possibility. In an effort to “re-world” these two notions, or to theorize them in terms of what Ella Myers describes as a “worldly ethics,”18 I investigate the conceptual dynamics revealed by a Derridean deconstruction through Arendt’s conceptualization of the human condition and her understanding of the “world.” I therefore use her distinctive understanding of “the political” to theorize a worldly, caring theory of democratic praxis. This is not to say that Arendt’s body of thought allows scholars of global politics to transcend entirely the aporetic impasses identified by Derrida’s work, but that an Arendtian-inspired response to the paradoxes associated with a Derridean deconstruction of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism allows these two notions to be reconceptualized as worldly, political forms of public care. Accordingly, in this book, I investigate the preternatural nature of Derrida’s conceptualization of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, doing so in order to frame my own examination of these ideas as two thoroughly human forms of public, political action that “care for the world.”
1. “Nobody Cares Any Longer What the World Looks Like”
A Kansas-based, reformed Calvinist church, one which was founded by Fred Phelps—Phelps-Roper’s grandfather—in 1955, the WBC first gained international notoriety for its extreme religious fundamentalism and far-right, political activism in the early 1990s.19 Making manifest their “hyper-Calvinist” beliefs through their distinctive, prejudicial brand of public ministry,20 members of the WBC have—since Fred Phelps first began speaking out against homosexuality in 1991—directed the full force of their evangelical energies on what Phelps-Roper’s mother, Shirley Phelps, once described as the “militant sodomite agenda.”21 According to Rebecca Barrett-Fox, whose book—God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (2016)—places the WBC’s message within the broader context of the religious far-right in the United States, this church not only preaches that “God hates the nonelect,” and thus that the “message of salvation should not be offered to the nonelect,”22 but also that God is “punishing America for its tolerance of homosexuality.”23 It is in terms of this extreme system of beliefs that the WBC understands life in America: their vociferous attacks on members of the LGBTQ community—as well as against Jews, Muslims, other Christian denominations, American soldiers, and politicians—stemming from their contemptuous approach to the so-called nonelect. The WBC congregation regularly pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in combat, as well as those of gay men who have died from AIDS, using explicit, colorful protest signs which have in the past included statements such as: “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”; “Fags Doom Nations”; “9–11 Gift from God”; “Your Rabbi is a Whore”; and “God Hates the World.” Such protests and proclamations are a part of the WBC’s daily operations, and Phelps-Roper describes how—at five years old—she “joined” her “family on the picket line for the first time,” with her “tiny fists clutching a sign” that she “couldn’t read yet: ‘Gays are Worthy of Death.’”24 Guided by their fundamentalist religious beliefs, the WBC exhibits a staunchly dogmatic worldview, one which is not only radically intolerant of persons and peoples who fail to conform to their organization’s narrow, prejudicial interpretation of the Bible, but also one that is defined by its rigid “us” versus “them” understanding of societal relations.
This view of the world shapes the entirety of the WBC’s ideological framework, and it informs the sense of inimicality that characterizes this small but vocal community of Americans. Discussing the views of her former church in a 2015 interview, Phelps-Roper stated that the WBC fostered an in-group/out-group mindset, one that serves as the frame through which this organization sees the world:
It [was] so strong—“us” versus “them.” There [was] no middle ground. That was something again that was also drummed into us. You are either a Jacob or an Esau [. . .] they were twins in the scriptures, and God loved Jacob and hated Esau. This was before they were even born, God loved Jacob and hated Esau, and so, you’re either a Jacob or an Esau, and if you are a Jacob, you want nothing to do with the world. The Book of John talks about [how] friendship with the world is enmity with God. “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.”25 So, it was very important, this “us”/“them” [. . .] and that definitely solidified this identity.26
A self-proclaimed “Jacob,” the WBC views itself as the community of faith chosen by God to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, and that all those who do not share their perspective are akin to an “Esau”: the nonelect progenitor of Israel’s early biblical enemy, Edom.27 In her recent book, Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope, Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church (2019), Phelps-Roper describes her family’s conflictual relationship with the world as “the quarrel of the covenant,” which is to say, the “never-ending struggle of the good guys against the bad,” or the “eternal conflict between the righteous and the wicked.”28 Channeling a thoroughly Schmittian understanding of “the political,” whereby the “specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy,”29 the WBC’s self-identification as a “Jacob” puts them at odds with the other peoples of the world: enemies with whom “friendship” is impossible and the possibilities of cultivating a commonly held, political “middle ground” are limited. Pitted against all who exist beyond the theological confines of their church, then, the members of the WBC bring to life an ideological disdain for the world, as well as the “things” in it, and they embody a distinctly anti-world worldview that alienates them from the people who comprise the broader sociopolitical community within which they live, move, and act.
In this sense, when Phelps-Roper speaks about her life as a “Jacob,” as well as the period during which she went about leaving the WBC and becoming an “Esau,” it is evident that her personal experience of cultivating a renewed relationship with those persons and peoples whom she once treated with contempt required her to overcome an extreme state of alienation from the “world.” Though it is difficult to pinpoint precisely how Phelps-Roper and the members of her former church define their usage of the term “world,” a word which can be interpreted in an assortment of different ways depending on the biblical text and translation used, I focus here specifically on how this expression pertains to “the political,” thereby employing it in notably Arendtian terms as that which corresponds to the “space for politics.” Given the extent to which the Westboro Baptists’ ideology and activism maintain a rigid us/them conceptualization of “the political,” Phelps-Roper’s story of forsaking her family and of starting anew within the community of “Edom,” therefore, offers an example of what it might mean to (re)cultivate the world shared with the (unknown) Other when sociopolitical tensions and political polarization have engendered seemingly intractable states of civic worldlessness. Phelps-Roper’s narrative offers but a single experience of someone who has attempted to renew their relationship with the people of the world and to reconcile herself to those whom she had once worked so hard to rebuke, reject, and remain at odds with as a congregant of the WBC. Her story is nevertheless an intriguing account of how the practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitan hospitality care for the world during times of sociopolitical darkness and when states of worldlessness take shape within civic communities.
While the historical context within which Phelps-Roper lives, moves, and acts differs from that of Arendt’s lifetime, there is, within an Arendtian register of thought, a theory of politics that is fundamentally concerned with the maintenance, reparation, and preservation of “the political” during “dark times.”30 For Arendt, these are those periods of human history when the public realm of human affairs has fallen into a worldless state of intractable sociopolitical alienation, violence, and/or terror. The threat to the world posed in dark times is, as she writes, “the growth of worldlessness, the withering away of everything between [people], [which] can also be described as the spread of the desert.”31 As in early twentieth-century Germany, the danger that exists in deserted spaces of such vast nothingness is “that there are sandstorms in the desert,” which “can whip up a movement of their own.”32 Although the “sandstorms” to which Arendt refers are those of the totalitarian movements she once found herself caught up within, the salience of her observations have broader significance. Equating to a loss of shared experiences had between people, the “growth of worldlessness”—or development of states of “world alienation”33 —is an ever-present hazard whenever and wherever a plurality of people live and act within sociopolitical communities. Throughout her corpus, Arendt underscores that the worldliness of the public, political realm is precarious, ever in need of care, and perpetually under threat precisely because “dark times”—as she writes—“are not only not new, they are no rarity in history.”34 In this sense, when Arendt tells Günter Gaus—during a 1965 interview for German television—that “nobody cares what the world looks like,”35 she is expressing her concern for the public realm of “the political,” which, in her view, has grown “dark” in the modern age.
In emphasizing that there is a perpetual need to care for worldly spaces within which people can speak and act freely together, Arendt’s political theorizing can be interpreted as a call to action that flows from her broader critique of contemporary civil society: that humankind has lost its feeling for, love of, and capacity to act politically within the public realm. That is, Arendt’s pointed remark to Gaus stems from her deep-seated concern for public life and the overall mission of her work, which George Kateb suggests “should be recognized as the recovery of the idea of political action, in a culture which [. . .] has lost the practice of it, and in which almost all philosophy is united, if in nothing else, in denying intrinsic value to it.”36 More specifically, Arendt sought to re-invigorate “the political” in an historical age when worldlessness had permeated civil society. While the Westboro Baptists’ anti-world worldview offers an example of a radical rejection of worldly affairs, a hyperbolic expression of their fundamentalist belief in what Arendt would describe as the “uncompromising otherworldliness of the Christian faith,”37 their approach to the world is in alignment with the ways in which people throughout history—scholars and laypersons alike—have tended to privilege the vita contemplativa and/or the vita spiritualis over the various activities that comprise the vita activa. In other words, the Arendtian criticism that humankind has largely neglected to “care for the world” strikes a chord when thinking about the ways in which members of the WBC have devoted themselves entirely to the task of securing—at least according to their faith—their respective places in the Kingdom of Heaven. Arendt’s conceptualization of the “world” demands that a renewed attention be paid to the very environment that supports people as public, political beings: the “world” and the “things” of the world that provide the conditions of existence for a thoroughly human life.38
Extending Arendt’s metaphor of the “desert,” the conditions that give rise to the “growth of worldlessness and the withering away of everything between people” are not established during a single summer heatwave. Rather, the “desert” can be said to form through a gradual process of desertification, occurring over an extended period of time—maybe even the longue durée—and as a plurality of factors crystallize in such a manner that a state of worldlessness comes to condition the sociopolitical relations within civic communities. Here, it is worth emphasizing that Arendt’s account of totalitarianism is not, as she writes in a response to Eric Voegelin’s critique of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), “a history of totalitarianism but an analysis in terms of history [. . .] [it] does not deal with the ‘origins’ of totalitarianism—as its title unfortunately claims—but gives a historical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitarianism.”39 Rejecting the idea that it is possible to trace totalitarianism’s chain of causality to a definitive, singular source, Arendt underscores that the totalitarian “sandstorms” of the twentieth century formed gradually and in the wake of what she describes as the break in the Western tradition: with the severance of the “discursive construct of beliefs and conventions based on the presumption of historical continuity in the transmission of inherited patterns across generations.”40 According to Arendt, the break in the Western tradition—though having been completed in the twentieth century with the catastrophic events of the World War I and World War II—took place incrementally as the authority-claiming systems and structures of belief that had long-maintained order in the West eroded: as processes of secularization intensified following the Protestant Reformation; as mass society took shape with the coming of the Industrial Revolution; and as the power of nation-states overcame established forms of political, legal, and moral order.41 For her, the significance of this rupture—which saw the three-strand, rope-like line of continuity formed by the “trinity” of religion, authority, and tradition cut completely—cannot be overstated because it meant that it was no longer possible to rely on the ideas, beliefs, and mores of the past in the task of understanding, addressing, and overcoming the problems posed by contemporary life.
It is, arguably, neither inherently good nor bad that the tradition has been cut, though new questions about how to proceed in a life of uncertainty are raised when the stability offered by traditional practices, culture, and faith are lost. That is, while we have—as Arendt observes—“the great chance to look upon the past with eyes undistracted by any tradition,”42 our positions in the world have been fundamentally destabilized, in the sense that the loss of tradition and traditional systems of authority is “tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world.”43 Not unlike the metaphorical “fiddler on the roof,” who plays for the sake of tradition, people living in the wake of the break in the tradition must—to borrow the words of Tevye, the protagonist of the 1971 film of the same name—try to “scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking [their] neck.”44 But what happens when there is no longer any roof for the fiddler to stand on, no platform upon which to play his song? What does it mean, in other words, to stand one’s ground in a world which is without grounds, doing so—moreover—in a manner that allows one to continue playing a “pleasant, simple tune”?
Adamant that the break in the tradition “does not entail [. . .] the loss of the human capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world,”45 Arendt recognizes the possibility of acting caringly for the public realm of “the political.” That said, the voided nature of the past has left those wishing to understand and/or practice care publicly wondering what exactly they should be caring for, as well as how they might go about doing so in “dark times.” What, in particular, are people doing when they act caringly within and for the sake of the public realm of “the political”? In what ways can acts of public, political care be said to counteract the forms of civic alienation and enmity that give rise to worldlessness, to the withering away and tearing apart of the very fabric that maintains the “space for politics”? How, even, can “care”—a seemingly conservative notion—be understood when, as Arendt writes in the preface of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “we can no longer afford to take that which is good in the past and simply call it our heritage”?46 This is, perhaps, the challenge of our time: to care for the world when it is no longer clear what it means to care; no longer apparent why we should care at all; and no longer possible or desirable to suggest that there is any singular, ideal means of caring for our “common home.” It is certainly a complicated task, and it is difficult to know where to begin and how to conceptualize care as a public, political form of practice when “nobody cares any longer what the world looks like” and when the traditional “groundwork of the world” has been pulled from beneath our feet.
In addition to identifying what might be described as a crisis in care, which is a plight related to and not unlike the “crisis of culture” that Arendt first wrote about in the early 1960s, she also provides her readers with a means of beginning to think and act caringly for the sake of world sans the support supplied by the “groundwork” of the tradition. She does so by theorizing a means of re-engaging with the past and retrieving those ideas, understandings, and practices that might aid us in our present struggles, in the fight to ward off the forces of civic alienation capable of tearing the world asunder. Not only does the approach outlined by Arendt provide a means of selectively and judiciously drawing from history aspects of the past that might be of benefit in today’s world, it is also a means of reaching back in time that is commensurable with Derrida’s efforts to read the “text” deconstructively, which—for him—constitutes the Western canon of philosophy and politics. This “text” is, in his view, a sort of inheritance, le héritage, or as he explains: “the heritage, too, is a ‘text,’ in the broad but precise sense I give to this word.”47 It “implies not only a reaffirmation and a double injunction, but at every moment, in a different context, a filtering, a choice, a strategy.”48 The person presented with this decision, the “heir,” is “not only someone who receives, he or she is someone who chooses, and who takes the risk of deciding.”49 Though more is said about Derrida’s approach to the “text” in the subsequent chapter, where I examine in greater detail his deconstructions of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, it is in terms of his reading of le héritage that it becomes possible to investigate ideas in such a manner that their particular legacies, undergirding logics, and underlying arrangements of power can be revealed, reconsidered, and innovatively reconstrued. This is not to say that Arendt and Derrida agree entirely about how the tradition should be understood; they do not, with the former identifying the break in the tradition as an “accomplished fact,”50 while the latter sees no such rupture at all. In locating a conceptual common ground between Arendt and Derrida, however, I bring together their respective readings of the Western philosophic and political canon as a means of re-theorizing cosmopolitanism and forgiveness.
Drawing upon a different metaphor, one which serves as a starting point for reconsidering what can be done in a world where anything is possible, Arendt—echoing Walter Benjamin—presents the image of a pearl diver. This is someone who “descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface.”51 Navigating the dark “depths of the past,” represented by the sea, the diver must carefully select the thoughts and ideas that have “crystallized” into something valuable: the pearls and pieces of coral that “remain immune to the elements.”52 The diver does so with the “conviction” that although “the living” are “subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization,” allowing certain thoughts and ideas to be retrieved and admired while others are left at the bottom of the sea.53 In my efforts to think anew about the “world” and what it means to care for the worldly realm of “the political,” I consider the notions of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness as two “pearls,” two treasures worth salvaging from the ravages of the past, presenting them—as in bringing them into the present—as valuable forms of public action.
2. Care and “Caring for the World”
It is in the first chapter of this book that I “resuscitate”—to borrow Arendt’s Benjaminian-inspired usage of the word—the notions of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, doing so specifically with the help of Derrida and what might be described as his own deconstructive style of “pearl” diving. In the remainder of this section, however, I briefly consider the notion of “care” itself, an idea and form of practice which holds a privileged place in Arendt’s body of thought. As a means of framing this book’s Arendtian understanding of public care, it is especially necessary here to conceptualize care within the Continental vein of philosophic and political thought from which both Arendt and Derrida’s thinking emerged. Specifically, there is a need to highlight how an Arendtian conceptualization of care and “caring for the world” is formed in contrast to the notion of Sorge—German for “care”—found at the core of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology.
Well known for his distinctive approach to the study of Being, and infamous for his affiliations with the Nazi party, as rector of the University of Freiburg between 1933 and 1934, Heidegger is one of the most prominent—though thoroughly controversial—philosophic figures of the twentieth century. While it is difficult to separate his overwhelming influence on Continental thought from the controversy that surrounds him, his impact on both Arendt and Derrida should not be overlooked. It is well documented that Heidegger was once Arendt’s teacher, briefly her lover, and someone to whom she turned throughout her life. For her, his work was, in varying degrees, a source of intellectual inspiration and yet, at other times, dangerous and abhorrent in its presentation of certain Nazi tendencies. In spite of this, Arendt’s association with Heidegger is often used as a means of attempting to discredit her work.54 Such harsh critique, verging on condemnation (though unique in the more personal nature of its attack in Arendt’s case, owing to their intimate relationship), did not touch her alone. The work of thinkers from across the Humanities has been similarly criticized, culminating in the so-called Heidegger Affair in France during the 1980s. Derrida, too, found himself under scrutiny and deeply embroiled in this controversy, specifically as a result of the ways in which, by his own admission, he had “received a visible inheritance” from Heideggerian philosophy, though he nevertheless “never really ceased posing many [. . .] very serious, central questions,” doing so “always with a radical disquiet, restless and bottomless.”55
Turning briefly to Heidegger’s philosophy of Being (as Dasein), then, I wish to highlight here how this twentieth-century thinker conceptualized an understanding of Sorge that my Arendtian-inspired, Derridean-informed notion of public, political care ultimately calls into question. Where a Heideggerian understanding of Sorge is futural and self-centric, my theory of care is conditioned by natality and is dedicated to the maintenance, preservation, and development of the public realm: the worldly “space for politics” shared with a plurality of other people. While other schools of philosophic thought also place “care” at the center of their conceptual universe, such as—for example—the field of feminist relational moral theorizing known as the Ethics of Care,56 Sorge is central to Heidegger’s ontology and his distinctive attempt to answer the question: what is the meaning of Being as such?
Responding to a philosophic question he believed had been forgotten throughout the history of Western metaphysics (roughly since Plato), Heidegger developed—most notably in Being and Time (1927)—a phenomenological account of human existence, in which the ontological structure of Being is formed in terms of Sorge. Not simply a broad category of interrelated forms of human activity, Sorge, as Arendt acknowledges in her commentary of Heidegger’s work, is the “basic element” that “underlies all the daily care-taking in the world.”57 Naming the condition after a phenomenon that it facilitates, Heidegger maintains that “care” (as Sorge) signifies the “way the present appears to us on the basis of a past that we reimagine according to a future that we intend.”58 That is, as Joshua Broggi observes, Sorge is the “threefold structure that allows people to care about anything at all,” whereby “‘care’ is actually the background condition for a variety of cases of caring,” even though “there might not be anything especially caring-like about the care which makes every-day caring possible.”59 From Heidegger’s perspective, then, to care about anything in particular is first to care about the general state of one’s beingness in the world.
Concerned with the temporal conditions of human life, Heidegger demonstrated that it is in terms of time that the meaning of Dasein can be found, since people experience their existence temporally in the pre-ontological mode of Sorge. If Being is associated with human temporality, then, for Heidegger, people experience their facticity as beings thrown into the world, and he illustrates how they can be said to realize their unique potential as individuated members of the human community. Sorge is a sense of care, or rather, a fundamental awareness of one’s own finite existence that informs what it means for a person to be a unique human being. “To be, or not to be,” really is “the question,” though it is Heidegger’s response to this query that I contend problematically emphasizes the lonely, self-reflective experience of freedom that he associates with mortality—“when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”60
The distinctive essence of a person, Dasein—a word historically derived from Dass-sein, or the “that-it-is” of a being61 —is that which Heidegger associates with the “who”-ness of a person: the meaning of Being is who you are. In Arendt’s words, the “Who of Dasein” is the “Self,” with “the term ‘Self’ we answer the question of the Who of Dasein.”62 This is something that is ultimately tied to the notion of mortality and the knowledge that one’s own death is certain: “only in death, which will take him from the world, does man have the certainty of being himself.”63 Understood in these terms, the ontological structure of Dasein is both temporal and temporalizing in the sense that one’s life becomes a meaningful totality through an act of projecting one’s self toward that which is entirely one’s own: death. Through what Heidegger describes as “being-towards-death,” the “who” of a person is revealed. By “being-in-the-world” futurally, aware of and concerned with death, Dasein can “find itself [. . .] be ‘shown’ to itself in its possible authenticity.”64 Though “Dasein is already a potentiality-for-Being-its-Self,” Heidegger maintains that there is a need to have this “potentiality attested,” doing so in such a manner that “when one has an understanding of Being-towards-death—towards death as one’s ownmost possibility—one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent.”65 By projecting one’s self toward death, that is, one can come to view one’s life as a complete, unified whole, or as a life that is now—as in presently—capable of being understood and made meaningful in terms of a past which is potentially yet to come. Dasein is thus “its past, it is its possibility in running ahead to this past [and] in this running ahead [one is] authentically time, [one has] time.”66 It is in terms of this having of time—of being able to experience in the eye of one’s mind one’s lived existence as a totality—that Dasein can be said to concern itself with itself, self-reflectively establishing a sense of concern, or care (Sorge), for its Self as a finite being with an ever-diminishing amount of time left on Earth.
It is in the face of the possibility of one’s ultimate end—the terminal point at which all people are confronted with the nothingness of the unknown before them—that one comes to care about “Being-in-the-world,” with the accompanying sense of anxiety, angst, apprehensiveness, concern, etc. associated with having limited time on Earth coming to condition how the meaning of Dasein is disclosed to itself. “Who” someone is and how this sense of Self is revealed is thus conditioned by Sorge, which is felt in the face of a death that is unavoidable. It is in terms of this “anxiety” that existence is experienced and that time can be made meaningful. Because Sorge is ontologically prior to the phenomena and practices of care that it facilitates, Heidegger suggests that the meaning of Dasein is to be found in care, whereby the essence of Being can be accessed with the structure of care that informs humankind’s entire experience of “Being-in-the-world.”
Though Heidegger also theorizes the notion of “Being-with-others,” which forms a significant part of his understanding of “being-in-the-world,” I must underscore here that his phenomenology is rooted in a mode of being that is fundamentally “for-the-sake-of-itself.”67 This is a conceptualization of care which is self-centric: “Dasein exists for the sake of a potentiality-for-Being of itself.”68 According to Arendt, the “nature” of Heidegger’s “Dasein is not that it simply is but, rather, that in its being its primary concern [or care] is its being itself,” and thus that “care-taking has a genuinely self-reflective character.”69 This is not to say that the Heideggerian approach is hedonistic or that Heidegger’s philosophy provides the conceptual framework for an ethic of egoism. Rather, my point is that Sorge is engendered in reference to one’s self and one’s death. For Arendt, it is this aspect of Heidegger’s “death-driven phenomenology”70 —this self-reflective form of existing “for-the-sake-of” one’s “ownmost” potentiality—that she directly challenges when outlining her own understanding of the human condition.
A Heideggerian, futurally focused conceptualization of “being-toward-death” is directly at odds with Arendt’s understanding of human existence, which is ontologically rooted in “natality—that is—the fact that [all people] have entered the world through birth.”71 Although the differences between Heidegger and Arendt’s work are considered more fully in subsequent chapters, it is important to emphasize here that an Arendtian conceptualization of care is world-centric, and Dasein is disclosed in the world among a plurality of people during the doing of political action. Thus, where Heidegger thinks about care in self-reflective terms and in Dasein’s relation to death, Arendt conceptualizes care as a worldly form of practice and Being as that which is disclosed publicly when one speaks and acts with one’s fellow beings. Commenting on Arendt’s doctoral dissertation entitled, Love and Saint Augustine, in which Arendt distances herself from Heidegger’s phenomenology for the first time, Joanna Scott and Judith Stark highlight how “Arendt proposes an alternative definition of care [. . .] central to its meaning is the possibility of ‘reconstituting’ relationships through friendship, forgiveness, and social bonding.”72 Building upon this conceptual foundation, I elaborate upon this Arendtian notion of care—arguably a type of “‘miracle’ possible despite death”73 —in order to develop my theory of a caring cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. My work draws out the notion of care that Arendt alludes to throughout her corpus: that it is important to “care for the world,” as it is in the world that people—as she writes—“show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identity.”74 For Arendt, the answer to the Heideggerian question, “Who is Dasein?,” is revealed in the “world” and thus there is a need to care for spaces where worldly interactions can occur between people.
Interwoven throughout her body of thought, Arendt’s notion of care can be understood in reference to other ideas, such as—for example—the idea of “culture.” Indeed, in Arendt’s conceptualization of “culture,” one can recognize the outlines of an Arendtian understanding of care:
Culture, word and concept, is Roman in origin. The word “culture” derives from colere—to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve—and it relates primarily to the intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for human habitation.75
Arendt’s theorization of “culture” provides an insightful commentary upon links between culture and politics, yet I take from this passage only her conceptualization of “care,” which she relates to the notion of tending to and preserving the natural world. While her etymological exegesis of the word “culture” is associated with the natural world, or the earthly home that all creatures inhabit, this conceptualization is equally pertinent in terms of the non-natural, fabricated world(s) produced by people: the “space for politics.” This is an aspect of Arendt’s work that is examined throughout the remainder of this book. It is necessary here, however, to recognize that the “world” can be understood as a type of public dwelling place where a plurality of people can appear and act together, which—if adequately tended to or preserved—can become a public space fit for human habitation: a “common home”76 for the people of a given sociopolitical community. Whereas a Heideggerian conceptualization suggests that—as Arendt observes about Heidegger’s work—the “fundamental fear of death is reflected [in] not-being-at-home in the world,”77 which is the state of isolation that permits Dasein to be fully itself, an Arendtian account of care focuses on tending to and preserving this “common home.”
Focused on plurality and natality, Arendt maintains that—in contrast to Heidegger’s conceptualization of Sorge—care ought to be rooted in a civic-minded form of “love for the world” (amor mundi). In other words, where Heidegger’s self-reflective, “death-driven” notion of Sorge is the “background condition for a variety of cases of caring,” Arendt’s conceptualization of care—specifically the one that she invokes when writing about “the political”—is rooted in a world-centric form of civic caritas that Elisabeth Young-Bruehl suggests is understood as a love that “unites self and others.”78 This is a non-erotic, non-agapic notion of love, one which is associated with the joy of being with and sharing the public realm with other people. These are individuals Arendt describes in terms of an Aristotelian notion of philia politike, whereby those with whom we must share the public realm of the political are understood as “civic friends” to be respected as people with equal standing in the “world.”79 Caring for the world is thus not driven by a form of existential “anxiety” but by the love of acting publicly with one’s civic friends and of experiencing that which can only be manifested in the political when a plurality of distinct but equal people act in concert: freedom. Differentiating her work from that of Heidegger’s, then, Arendt claims that “care” should be practiced not out of concern for one’s death but, rather, in the spirit of amor mundi and a sense of gratitude for the possibility of freely beginning new courses of public action with other people in the “space for politics.” It is in these terms—amor mundi, plurality, and natality—that I develop my understanding of a caring forgiveness and cosmopolitanism throughout this book, “resuscitating” and reconsidering two ancient ideas from the perspective that there is a pressing need to think and act politically not simply for the sake of the Self but for the sake of the “world,” where all people can experience freedom and consequently where power can be re-engendered.
The first chapter of this book examines the ideas of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism as they are found in Derrida’s work. He does not conceptualize these two ideas in relation to the notion of “care” nor does he assume an Arendtian conceptualization of “care for the world.” With his genealogical practice of deconstruction, however, Derrida cuts to the conceptual core of both the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, revealing the problems, pitfalls, and paradoxes inherent to the underlying logics of these two ideas. By identifying and isolating the issues and aporetic underpinnings which undergird these two concepts, his work effectively locates the boundaries inherent to the concepts of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism; these are the conceptual limits that this book seeks to rethink politically in terms of Arendt’s world-centric understanding of public care.
Against the theoretical backdrop provided by Derrida’s deconstruction of forgiveness, the second chapter of this book conceptualizes the act of forgiving as it is found in Arendt’s body of thought, in order to begin addressing the paradoxes uncovered by a Derridean approach. Returning to the Arendtian form of “care for the word” which was introduced in the opening pages of this book, this chapter theorizes a world-centric, “caring forgiveness” devoted to the maintenance, reparation, and preservation of the human relationships that comprise the public realm of the political. Whereas chapter one reveals the conceptual boundaries identified by a Derridean deconstruction of forgiveness, this chapter employs Arendt’s body of thought to confront the aporetic, binary relationships that give rise to the undecidability of (un)forgivable transgressions, the (un)conditionality of enacting forgiveness, and to demonstrate how a “pure” practice of forgiveness demands a form of power which is simultaneously unconditional and without sovereignty. Although Arendt does not explore forgiveness in terms of a Derridean deconstruction, I contend that it is with her body of thought, and through the prism of public care, that it becomes possible to consider these paradoxes anew, effectively re-thinking the unthinkable—at least as it pertains to the act of forgiving.
In the third chapter of this book, cosmopolitanism is considered in terms of an Arendtian conceptualization of care and a Derridean understanding of cosmopolitan hospitality. Appropriating aspects of Arendt’s understanding of political action, and Derrida’s conceptualization of universal, cosmopolitan hospitality, I construct a world-centric theory of radically welcoming the narrative voice of the (unknown) Other: a caring cosmopolitanism. A caring cosmopolitanism is an ethico-political form of cosmopolitan theory guided by the idea of caring for the worldly space of political action that emerges when a plurality of people speak and act together in the public realm. More specifically, this Arendtian-inspired conception of cosmopolitanism is concerned with the narrative nature of the political interactions that occur in these public spaces. In this sense, cosmopolitan care refers to a form of public practice that cares for the storied realm of political action. This discussion illustrates how caring for the world can be understood in terms of acting hospitably to the (unknown) Other, offering new insights into the ways in which we think about caring for the most human aspect of human beings: an individual’s voice.
In the final chapter of this book’s effort to read Arendt and Derrida’s work together for the purpose of constructing a world-centric theory of public care, I use these two thinkers’ respective understandings of temporality to reconsider the paradoxicality of humankind’s being-ness in time and to theorize the type of temporal orientation needed to negotiate the ever-transitory, never fully present moment of the “now.” Although time and temporality may—on first glance—seem an odd topic on which to conclude a book about the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, it is my belief that that no investigation into these two forms of practice is more important. It is humankind’s being-ness in time that conditions human existence entirely and—ultimately—constrains people’s ability to act politically in the world. As a part of this book’s attempt to rethink the boundaries of the political in terms of a “caring forgiveness” and “caring cosmopolitanism,” then, its fourth chapter uses Arendt and Derrida’s unique understandings of human temporality to rethink the (n)ever-present confrontation occurring in the ever-fleeting moment of the “now,” where the forces of past and future play perpetually on all people as they attempt to “negotiate” (Derrida) the boundaries of their existence in both time and space.
NOTES
1. Megan Phelps-Roper, “I Grew Up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s Why I Left,” TED Talks, 2017, https://www.ted.com.
2. “Westboro Baptist Church,” Extremist Files Database (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018). https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/westboro-baptist-church.
3. Phelps-Roper, “I Grew Up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s Why I Left.”
4. Though the nature and notion of “the political” has long been debated by scholars of the philosophy and politics, most especially by those working in the Anglophone world, I invoke this idea throughout this book specifically in reference to Arendt’s theory of the political. As is subsequently shown, by “the political,” I mean the worldly realm of public “action,” or the “space for politics” where freedom can be experienced and power can be (re)engendered between a plurality of persons and peoples in the mode of human togetherness. For readers interested in the concept of “the political,” I recommend James Wiley’s recent book, Politics and the Concept of the Political: The Political Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2016).
5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 254; Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 14.
6. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 214.
7. Siobhan Kattago, “Hannah Arendt on the World,” in Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts, ed. Patrick Hayden (Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing, 2014), 52–65.
8. Arendt, The Human Condition, 52.
9. Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 358.
10. Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 17.
11. See: Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 28–70. “History of the Lie” was originally a lecture given by Derrida in 1993, as part of a lecture series at The New School of Social Research. The particular lecture series was devoted to Arendt’s thinking about “the political.”
12. See, in particular: Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, eds. Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001); Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptable,” in Questioning God, eds. John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 21–51.
13. Samir Haddad, “Arendt, Derrida, and the Inheritance of Forgiveness,” Philosophy Today 51, no. 4 (2007): 416.
14. For example, see: Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 97–113; Marguerite La Caze, Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013); Marguerite La Caze, “It’s Easier to Lie If You Believe It Yourself: Derrida, Arendt, and the Modern Lie,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 13, no. 2 (2017): 193–210; James R. Martel, “Can There Be Politics Without Sovereignty? Arendt, Derrida and the Question of Sovereign Inevitability,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 6, no. 2 (2010): 153–66; Cláudia Perrone-Moisés, “Forgiveness and Crimes against Humanity: A Dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida,” HannahArendt.Net: Journal for Political Thinking 2, no. 1 (2006); Andrew Schaap, “The Proto-Politics of Reconciliation: Lefort and the Aporia of Forgiveness in Arendt and Derrida,” Australian Journal of Political Science 41, no. 4 (2006): 615–30.
15. A notable exception to this claim can be found in the work of Siobhan Kattago. Underlining the political pertinence of an Arendtian notion of “care for the world” to practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, Kattago gestures toward the line of thought that I have pursued throughout this book. In passing, she highlights how “Arendt’s use of the phrase amor mundi, or ‘love of the world,’ includes care, concern, and responsibility” and that it “shares much with Kant’s cosmopolitanism and sense of hospitality in Perpetual Peace,” offering a “political reading of the Christian precept of love of one’s neighbor writ large.” [Siobhan Kattago, “Why the World Matters: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of New Beginnings,” The European Legacy 18, no. 2 (2013): 175; Kattago, “Hannah Arendt on the World.”]
16. Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney, “Preface,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, eds. Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), viii.
17. Ernesto Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Political Violence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 24.
18. Ella Myers, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (London: Duke University Press, 2013). I return to Myers’s work in chapter three, as part of my theorization of a “caring cosmopolitanism.”
19. The Westboro Baptist Church is a “TULIP” Baptist Church. The acronym TULIP stands for “Total Depravity; Unconditional Election; Limited Atonement; Irresistible Grace; Perseverance of the Saints.” [Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope, Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church (London: Riverrun, 2019), 42.]
20. Rebecca Barrett-Fox, God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 50. As Barrett-Fox notes, the WBC’s hyperbolic doctrines have notable and direct associations with the ideas espoused by British theologian, John Gill (1697–1771).
21. “Westboro Baptist Church,” ADL Report, https://www.adl.org/resources/profiles/westboro-baptist-church.
22. Barrett-Fox, God Hates, 197, n. 20.
23. Ibid., 5.
24. Phelps-Roper, “I Grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s Why I Left.”
25. This reference is to 1 John 2:15-17, from the 1611 King James Bible: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Though the WBC maintains that the King James Bible is the only legitimate book of scripture, the references to biblical texts found throughout the remainder of this book are from the New International Version (NIV).
26. Sam Harris, “Leaving the Church: A Conversation with Megan Phelps-Roper,” Making Sense, July 3, 2015, https://samharris.org/podcasts/leaving-the-church/.
27. It is in the book of Genesis that we find the story of Esau and Jacob, the fraternal twins of Isaac and Rebekah.
28. Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, 8.
29. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26.
30. Arendt, Men in Dark Times. This is a phrase she appropriates from Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “To Posterity,” or “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake” (1939). Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose, eds. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), 318–20.
31. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 201. Original emphasis.
32. Ibid., 201–2.
33. Arendt, The Human Condition, 248–56.
34. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, ix.
35. Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains,’” 20.
36. George Kateb, “Freedom and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 5, no. 2 (1977): 143.
37. Arendt, The Human Condition, 251.
38. Ibid., 22.
39. Hannah Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 403.
40. Douglas B. Klusmeyer, “Hannah Arendt on Authority and Tradition,” in Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts, ed. Patrick Hayden (Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing, 2014), 138.
41. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 26–27.
42. Ibid., 28.
43. Ibid., 95.
44. Norman Jewison, Fiddler on the Roof (United States: United Artists, 1971).
45. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 95.
46. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harvest Book, 1968), ix.
47. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . (A Dialogue), trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 8.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 26.
51. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction: Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 54.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. In terms of such attempts, we need only to recall the so-called Hannah Arendt scandal that sprang up after the publication of Elżbieta Ettinger’s book, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), and the ways in which its controversial claims were embraced by scholars critical of Arendt’s work (such as Richard Wolin). Though I am unable here to rehash the details of this “scandal,” which was not really a scandal at all (given the findings of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt), other scholars have written extensively about both the personal and scholastic relationship between Heidegger and Arendt. See, in particular: Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 61–86.
55. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . (A Dialogue), 13.
56. Because this book shares an interest in the notion of “care” with the approach to moral theory known as the Ethics of Care, or Care Ethics, it is inevitable that there is conceptual crossover between my work and that of scholars like Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, Sara Ruddick, Eva Feder Kittay, and Joan Tronto. Where care ethicists—to speak in (very) broad terms—develop their moral universe in terms of the dynamics of giving and receiving care, as well as the ways in which relations of dependency have historically been constructed along gendered lines, I understand the notion of “care” in decidedly Arendtian terms. In this sense, rather than find my feet in this body of feminist relational theory, I have situated myself in the Continental tradition of philosophic and political thought, doing so specifically in relation to the notion of Sorge developed by Heidegger; as has been discussed, I have built my theory of care in contrast to the Heideggerian approach. This being said, in terms of my investigation of “caring for the world,” I would be remiss in failing to recognize how Tronto’s work has nevertheless colored my thinking about “care” as a public, political form of worldly practice. Her definition of “care,” in particular, has helped give structure to aspects of my own understanding: “[C]aring [should] be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” [Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring,” in Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, eds. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990), 40; Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (London: Routledge, 1993), 103. Original emphasis.]
57. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 179.
58. Joshua D. Broggi, Sacred Language, Sacred World: The Unity of Scriptural and Philosophical Hermeneutics (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 31.
59. Ibid. Original emphasis.
60. William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” in The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Modern Critical Edition, ed. Gary Taylor et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2040.
61. Martin Heidegger, Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 2011), 3.
62. Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” 179. Here, Arendt references Heidegger: “The question of the ‘who’ of Dasein has been answered with the expression of ‘Self.’” [Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1962), 312.]
63. Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” 179.
64. Heidegger, Being and Time, 313.
65. Ibid., 313 and 354.
66. Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1992), 20E–21E.
67. Heidegger, Being and Time, 416. Original emphasis.
68. Ibid. Original emphasis.
69. Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” 179.
70. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, “Rediscovering Hannah Arendt,” in Love and Saint Augustine, eds. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 124.
71. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, eds. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 51.
72. Scott and Stark, “Rediscovering Hannah Arendt,” 181. See also: Kattago, “Why the World Matters,” 172.
73. Scott and Stark, “Rediscovering Hannah Arendt,” 181.
74. Arendt, The Human Condition, 179. Emphasis added.
75. Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” 208. Emphasis added.
76. Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” 358.
77. Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” 179.
78. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 327.
79. Arendt, The Human Condition, 243.
