Arendt and the crisis of Modern Politic

Human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities (Arendt 1973, ix).

    It is important for understand the work of Agamben to come to Arendt one. Through is impressive work Anna Arendt had questioned the base of European modern politic. She has insisted that human dignity needs a new guarantee because the old guarantee, from the nineteenth-century, the Kantian idea of peaceful cosmopolitan republics respecting the natural rights of man, had been destroyed. I will focus on her research on the refugee condition and the concept of worldlessness.
For Arendt, the refugee was the archetypical figures that revealed the contraction between universal rights and national sovereignty (Blecher 2005: 731). It is the loss of rights which is the defining attribute of the refugee. To focus on the lost of right Arendt avoid a narrow definition of refugee base on the physical displacement This highlight that movement is a social and political (Cresswell 2006). Still she will insist that the fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world. The refugees are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think what they please, but of the right to opinion.
    The distinctively modern problems of displacement and degradation are what she called "worldlessness." In countering this worldlessness, she addressed a number of issues central to the problem of human rights: the incompatibility of national sovereignty with human dignity and civic responsibility; the need to rethink the ethical foundations of human rights at a time when liberal pieties about natural rights had lost all credibility; and the need to afford political empowerment to ordinary citizens and ground a commitment to human dignity (Isaac:61). By defining the fundamental condition of refugee as a deprivation of "a place in the world", her researches are related to the one space and politic (Taylor 1999; Lefebvre 1968).
Human rights are conventions, forms of recognition produced by human agreement, fragile artifacts of human living together. Arendt didn't link her work on the human condition and on the totalitarian state and it is this link that is in the center of Agamben's research (Minca 2007).

Reference Arendt

Blecher R. 2005 "Citizens without Sovereignty: Transfer and Ethnic Cleansing in Israel", Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, Vol. 47 (4), pp.725-754


Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, p.170

Arendt, H.. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace, p.704

Cresswell T. 2006, On the Move, Routledge,p.328

Isaac J. C. 1996, "A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights", American Political Science Review, Vol.90(1), pp.61-73
 
Lefebvre H. 1968 [2000] Le Droit a la Ville Espace et Politique, 2 edition, Anthropos, p.174

Minca C. 2007, "Agamben's geographies of Modernity", Political Geography, Vol. (26) ,pp.78-97

Taylor, P. J. (1999), "Place, space and Macy's", Progress in Human Geography, Vol.23 (1), pp.7-27