The Pleasure of your Company: Arendt, Kristeva, and an Ethics of Public Happiness

Abstract

In this essay, I examine Arendt's and Kristeva's account of the archaic event of natality, arguing that each attempts to show how this event is the source of our pleasure in the company of others. I first examine Arendt's understanding of natality, showing that in her early writings, specifically in The Origin of Totalitarianism, the event of natality carries with it a capacity for violence that Arendt does not continue to develop in her later formulations. This lack of development leaves her later thought, specifically her notion of "public happiness" strangely light-minded on the topic of domination, unable to give an account of how violence can be part and parcel of our appearance in the public space itself. I then turn to Kristeva's understanding of the event of natality, arguing that her account, specifically the "violence beneath our desires" contributes significantly to Arendt's account of natality, allowing us to understand how pleasure in the company of others is possible despite such violence. I argue that Kristeva locates our capacity for public happiness in the aspect of natality Arendt abandons in her later thought. I conclude by showing how Kristeva's account of natality provides a foundation for Arendt's understanding of public happiness.

Collective Love as Public Freedom: Dancing Resistance. Ehrenreich, Arendt, Kristeva, andIdle No More

“…As Peg Birmingham writes, “The fragmentation and splitting characteristic of the paranoid‐schizoid position is transformed into gratitude for the ‘whole object’ whose ineradicable loss is now mourned. The transformation of the violence of the death drive into gratitude occurs through the mourning of the object which remains forever foreign and alien in a primordial and irrecoverable separation” (Birmingham , 70). Thus Birmingham argues that Kristeva's analysis of Klein shows that this violence can give way to pleasure through gratitude for the foreigner, replacing destructiveness with reparation and love: “Kristeva, following Klein, shows how both anxiety (associated with the death drive) and gratitude (which, like Arendt, she locates in memory and mourning) are part of the event of natality” (69).…”

“…In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva argues that the capacity to live with and love the foreigner requires the capacity to be the other : “Living with the other, the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of being the other . It is not simply—humanistically—a matter of our being able to accept the other, but of being in his place” (Kristeva , 11; quoted in Birmingham , 71). For Kristeva this requires accepting the otherness within ourselves, and the strangeness of ourselves—“to make oneself other for oneself.” And this is possible only if we are able to mourn the loss of the original object—the mother—and to integrate that loss into a capacity to hold ourselves together.…”

Fenomenología del divorcio (o la esencia de la separación) en mujeres

“…los fenomenólogos contemporáneos conciben la separación como la ruptura emocional que ha ligado dos o más situaciones (Birmingham, 2003;Critchley, 1998;derrida, 1998;Jagger, 1997). En particular, Critchley (1998) se pregunta "si la separación radical de un trauma... requiere de reparación en un trabajo del amor?"…”

“…al igual que levinas, Birmingham (2003) considera la bidireccionalidad de cualquier separación. Para ella, es "la sensación de detestar con repugnancia que el individuo debe encontrar en ciertos rasgos, imágenes y fantasías… y es al mismo tiempo el sentimiento de fascinación, dibujando al sujeto [objeto de repudio] para rechazarlo" (p. 66).…”

Arendt’s Notion of Natality. An Attempt at Clarification

“…Some see it as establishing a link between nature and politics and, hence, as in tension with the opposition of nature and politics that Arendt posits elsewhere (cf. Jay 1985;Birmingham 2003Birmingham , 2006Vatter 2006;Quintana 2009). Others treat "natality" as a synonym for the capacity to begin and thus, implicitly, take the notion to be metaphorical in nature I would like to thank Penelope Deutscher, Bonnie Honig, Mary Dietz, Dagmara Drążewska, and the reviewer for Ideas y Valores for their feedback on earlier versions of the paper.…”