Sites of Appearance, Matters of Thought: Hannah Arendt and Performance Philosophy

Abstract

This special issue of Performance Philosophy examines the thresholds, borders, and dialogues between Hannah Arendt's work and performance philosophy, bringing together contributions that investigate political resistance, thought, and practice. In our call for papers, we began with a provocation: we live in Arendtian times. Though it would give her no comfort to know it, Arendt's 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism has been in near constant citation during this period of strongman politics and resurgent ethnic nationalism. After the 2016 US election, it was reportedly out-ofstock on Amazon (Griswold 2017), and Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz (2017) provides a thorough analysis of its relevance to alt-right politics and the rise of Donald Trump (see also Bernstein 2018).Meanwhile, her diagnosis of the predicament of those fleeing persecution and abandoning their countries of birth-as she herself did ("We Refugees" [1943] 1994)-remains all too relevant with regard to the deprivation of legal status to refugees. As Arendt pointed out, refugees continue to lack the rights that are recognised even for those who have broken the law, but are instead outside the law (Arendt [1951(Arendt [ ] 1973, and her discussion of 'the right to have rights' prefigures recent analyses by Agamben (1995Agamben ( , 2005, Rancière (2004), Gündogdu (2015), and others.Arendt's life-long inquiry into the nature of political experience and rule asks questions not only about the process of thinking and the condition of plurality, but also about appearance, freedom, dissent, and authority. In her thinking from and with history, her engagement with the realms of the social and political, and her probing questions of authority and legislation as much as those of sensing, togetherness, and citizenship, Arendt's work provides a point of entry to thinking through and on appearance as a political problem, and thinking as a problem of appearance.