HannahArendt.net (E-Journal)
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Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff, Demophobie. Muss man die direkte Demokratie fürchten? Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 2023, 212 S., 24,80,- EUR (Ulrich Arnswald)
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Wolfgang R. Heuer, Cosmos and Republic. Arendtian Explorations of the Loss and Recovery of Politics, Bielefeld: transcript 2023, 340 pp., 45,00 EUR (Milan Bernard)
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Bruno Heidlberger: Mit Hannah Arendt Freiheit neu denken. Gefahren der Selbstzerstörung von Demokratien, Transcript 2023, 282 S., 31,99 EUR (Martin Baesler)
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Mathijs Van de Sande, Prefigurative Democracy: Protest, Social Movements and the Political Institution of Society. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023, 224 p., 85,00 GBP (Maria Robaszkiewicz)
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Posters against the Patriarchy: Violence across the Public/Private Binary in Brussels
No full textPhenomenology has been useful in analysing the embodied dimensions of street protests (Cavarero 2021; Butler 2015; Gago 2020). However, because these analysesfocus on the gathering of bodies, little attention has been paid to the agency of inanimate objects. This paper addresses this lacuna by providing an Arendtian phenomenology of feminist street art in Brussels. Focusing on two sets of posters appearing from the late 2010s onwards, I argue for the heuristic importance of the public-private divide in mapping both the differences between and the intertwining of various forms of gender-and sexuality-based violence. Firstly, the ‘laisse les filles tranquilles’ posters provide a critical ‘stop-and-think’ moment with regard to street harassment; secondly, the posters by La Fronde allow the lamentation, denunciation, and comprehension of femicide. I conclude by arguing that because of the posters’ proximity to one another, they function as an assembly or depository (Ahmed 2016) that brings out the structural dimension of the violence inflicted under patriarchy.Street protests create spaces of appearance (Arendt) that galvanize public support for fighting hitherto hidden forms of precarity and oppression. Put in these terms, street protests raise questions about their duration, as they rely on the physical proximity of people; they also raise concerns about who can and cannot participate in this space of appearance and in what way, as public space is subject to various forms of policing (Butler). In this paper, I investigate these limits of embodied resistance by looking at a different form of street protest, namely the feminist collectives that put up posters in the streets of Brussels denouncing gender- and sex-based violence. Some of these focus on feminicide, publishing the name of victims of domestic violence, while others target street harassment by imploring passers-by to “laisse[r] les filles tranquilles” and yet other denounce everyday sexism. In different ways, these interventions relate isolated and privatized experiences of violence to patriarchal structures. While these interventions preceded the COVID-19 lockdowns, the rigid enforcement of the public-private divide during the pandemic underlined their importance. In this paper, I use the public-private distinction as a hereustic device to argue that these various posters taken together provide a cartography of heteropatriarchal violence (Gago).
In the first two sections, I start from the observation that these artefacts are intended as a (semi-)permanent mark on the public space; and they invoke those who face various forms of gender- and sex-based violence, reclaiming the streets as a site of commemoration, refusal and of free movement. I argue that these collectives operate as a swarm (Gago, Connolly): they operate independently from one another but because of the shared object of critique, their actions amplify each other. As such, they underscore the links between violence suffered in the domestic sphere, urban public spaces, as well as in a manifold other locations such as the work place. In the third and final section, I return to the assembly as a physical gathering, arguing that a critical phenomenology of street protests should move beyond the concern with intercorporality to include attention to material objects.
Secondly, I show how they also presuppose passers-by that stop, read and respond to them. I suggest this interpellation should be understood as a moment of critique, in the sense in which critical phenomenologists (Guenther, Al-Saji, Salamon) have defined it as the suspension of everyday comportment and the exposure and contestation of historically contingent structures of oppression. Thirdly, I argue (contra Arendt) that protest does not always require the physical proximity of a group of people engaging in purposeful action-in-concert, but can also develop as a series (Sartre, Young), in this case, as the interpellation of passers-by as possible agents of social change, engaging in acts of indignant remembrance and of leaving women and other targeted groups alone. To summarize, these posters negotiate the limits to embodied resistance while granting visibility to those who are excluded or marginalized in public space
The question of plurality and universal affirmation: A dialogue of thought between Arendt and Badiou
Full text linkBoth Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou refer to a ‘disorientation of the world’ in different moments of their oeuvre. For Arendt, a disorientation emerges if the common sense dissolves; for Badiou, if there is an absolute primacy of negation and an inability to affirm anything universal. This paper takes current protest movements as a serious symptom of a disorientation in the sense of both thinkers. For it seems that today far from affirming any universal point, ‘protests’ seem to turn into ‘contests’ of ‘being against’. Conceptualized as a dialogue of thought between Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou, the paper aims to reveal a profound crisis behind this symptom, that is a critical tension between two concurrent promises of modern democracy, namely ‘equality’ and ‘right to difference’. In that frame, the paper tries to think a renewed politics of equality which can affirm plurality and difference without falling either into indifference of being the same species or into the cult of ‘me’ that is a fantasy of absolute difference.The word protest originates in pro-testari and means “to testify or attest”. So, this word should actuallyentail an affirmative moment of “demonstration of being for something”. It is a remarkable detail,though, that with the establishment of streets protest as a common and legitimate way of expressingpolitical opposition in modernity, the meaning of pro-testari seems to have been inversed to con-testari,which means to dispute or oppose. So, protest has been gaining a predominant negative moment of“demonstration of being against something.”
Alain Badiou notes this inversion. In that manner he has been talking in recent years increasingly of aninability of affirmation in in the street protest movements. According to Badiou, this inability firstbecame clearly visible with the occupy movements and has reached a much more dangerous shape withthe Yellow Vests protests, such that it led Badiou to coin a new term, which is “weak negation.” Thepoint in this coining is that a weak negation remains separated from any universal affirmation and worse:As it cannot affirm anything which transcends the inner constitution of what it negates, it ends upvouching for the existing order of things, which it supposedly negates, as the only possible one.1
During the COVID protests, Badiou’s diagnosis has shifted to an overall disorientation. His recentlypublished booklet, Remarks on the disorientation of the world entails in that regard a striking aspectwhich provokes a very fruitful dialogue of thought with Hannah Arendt. Regarding the fact that theseprotests had such “diverse” participants ranging from self-declared “democrats”, “authenticnationalists”, “classical liberals” to “esoteric ecologists” and a branch of the “far left”, Badiou claimsthat what brought this hitherto unimaginable ensemble together has actually been nothing but a “cultusof me” which expressed itself in a shared obsession with “individual liberties.”
In terms of the logic of what we could call a political action with Arendt, which has its only basis in the“plurality of men inhabiting the world”2, does not the cultus of me bring with itself a quite remarkableparadox here? For regarding the heterogeneity of the groups which allegedly came together in theCOVID protests, what we can detect is the strange fact that everyone’s own me as the most individualand singular, thus the least “common”, has become the sole ground of the “plural.” If we frame theultimate goal of those gatherings in that regard as refusing and preventing any collective action whichtakes into account that others who are not me also exist, then we must arrive at a paradox conclusionwhich is that a group of people may come together to prevent any consideration of “living in the worldtogether”3.
This striking paradox invites us to think on the question of “plurality” in street protests and its link tothe question of negation and affirmation in an “action”: So, what is actually the basis of plurality in a street protest? Is being a mere indifferent equivalency of the infinitely diverse more-than-one sufficientto call a gathering “plural”? Is not a moment necessary in a gathering, which can hold this more-than-one together?
The crux of this issue is exactly here: How to determine this moment, which allows us to call a group“plural” in the sense Arendt would understand the term, rather than a mere indifferent more-than-one?Can “a will to negate” be a sufficient basis to found a plurality, as far as we keep the criterion of pluralityof action as the appearance of a worldly reality which comes into expression when Arendt says that“only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so thatthose who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality trulyand reliably appear”4? So, is a collective negation sufficient for a worldly reality to appear? Or does agathering in order to be called plural, capable of action and letting a worldly reality reappear, require auniversal point of affirmation, which can only realize the “sameness in utter difference?”
Overall: Is the only point that a protest today “attests” the number of people who can gather aroundsomething that they all are against? How can we then comprehend a conception of “plurality” if itrecognizes the interest in one’s me and its individual liberty as the sole possible basis of inter-esse?
1 Alain Badiou: Remarques sur la désorientation du monde, 2022 Paris, P. 222 Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition, 1959 Chicago-London P. 73 Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition, P. 5
