Arendt Event

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European Journal of Social Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431006060462
2006 9: 43 European Journal of Social Theory
Rolando Vzquez
Thinking the Event with Hannah Arendt
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Thinking the Event with Hannah
Arendt
Rolando Vzquez
WARWI CK UNI VERSI TY, UK
Abstract
This article addresses the critique of the modern conception of history and
time through a reading of Hannah Arendt. Arendts work provides an
alternative to the thought with universal pretensions that has dominated
the panorama of modernity. She thinks the historical through contradiction
and gives a place to human experience next to facts. In thinking the event
Arendt shows the insufciency of the modern chronological appropriation
of the past and the limits of using theory as a given framework of interpret-
ation. Understanding the historical event is to challenge the chronology
assumed in our forms of understanding and representing the real. Her work
blurs the tacit boundary that lurks in modern forms of representation
between a dynamic present and a congealed past. Arendts thinking
provides a critique of the modern notions of time and history as of the use
of theory as a xed framework of interpretation.
Key words
Arendt critique of modernity event history time
The Movement of Thinking
Arendts way of thinking is arguably the most oblique and original of her quali-
ties. Her thought remains unbound; it does not accord with a single logic as she
avoids any kind of pre-conceived linear or dialectical progression. She teaches us
that thought is not simply a matter of representation, but rather an arena where
the contradictions of history can be played out. There is probably no better place
to begin an enquiry into her way of thinking than in the address she gave on
accepting the Lessing Prize of the Free City of Hamburg: On Humanity in Dark
Times: Thoughts about Lessing (Arendt, 1970). It seems as if when talking about
the qualities she admires in Lessing she is speaking about herself. Let us see how
she dissociates the movement of thinking from the search for a denite truth:
[Lessing] explicitly renounced the desire for results, insofar as these might mean the
nal solution of problems which his thought posed for itself; his thinking was not a
European Journal of Social Theory 9(1): 4357
Copyright 2006 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1368431006060462
03 060462 Vzquez (bc-t) 10/1/06 2:37 pm Page 43
search for truth, since every truth that is the result of thought process necessarily puts
an end to the movement of thinking. (1970: 10)
If thinking is to keep its movement, it ought to renounce the desire for results,
the search for denite truths. Thinking is thus dissociated from purposeful forms
of rationality. When a reader used to texts built according to logical patterns enters
Arendts writing, they may feel disorientated, or overtaken by an impulse to reject
what at rst view appears deprived of logic or full of contradictions. We will argue
that this somewhat disconcerting character of her work is not due to any short-
coming, but rather to the fact that her thought keeps alive the modern strife
between rational representation and experience. Arendt portrays the endemic
contradictions of modernity in thinking with and through contradictions:
[F]undamental and agrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers, in
whom they can be discounted. In the work of great authors they lead into the very
center of their work and are the most important clue to a true understanding of their
problems and new insights. (Arendt, 1993b: 25)
This is not a blind praise for contradiction, but rather the awareness that the
thinker who has the courage to voice contradictions is one who confronts reality
with humility. The problems that challenge our understanding cannot simply be
reduced to self-consistent representations, nor be settled with easy solutions. The
perplexities of historical reality bring into question our pre-established possibili-
ties of comprehension. In approaching a problem with unpremeditated thought,
we are shocked at the sight of what contradicts what was up until then rmly estab-
lished. A problem is only a problem because it puts into question what is given.
The work of the thinker is not to blindly operate the mechanism of pre-
conceived theoretical frameworks, otherwise they would be reducing the
complexity of reality to the simulation of a self-consistent discourse. Often theory
is employed mechanically, almost as a tool, to appropriate and manipulate the
real. Theoretical frameworks are stretched to accommodate any given circum-
stance. Arendt resists this utilitarian approach to theory. In her writing, theory
emerges not as a tool but as a realm for thinking and as such, it remains dynamic
and open to question. For instance, in her reading of Marx, she is not so much
interested in the categories of Marxs theoretical framework as she is in his
concerns and insights (Arendt, 2002). We are invited to see theory not as a tool
but as a region of thought. The task of the thinker is to step into the unknown,
into the heretofore uncomprehended. Understanding is not about wrapping up
the problems of society in the existing conventions and hence diluting them into
the normalcy of the readily acceptable. Arendt agrees with Lessing in that self-
consistency should be overlooked in favour of thinking:
[W]e are astonished that Lessings partisanship for the world could go so far that he
could even sacrice to it the axiom of noncontradiction, the claim to self-consistency,
which we assume is mandatory to all who write and speak. For he declared in all seri-
ousness: I am not duty-bound to resolve the difculties I create. May my ideas always
be somewhat disjunct, or even appear to contradict one another, if only they are ideas
in which readers will nd material that stirs them to think for themselves. (1970: 8)
European Journal of Social Theory 9(1) 44
The thinkers most difcult task is not so much to solve questions but rather to
raise them. The thinker blows open the comforting faade of appearances, reveal-
ing thus manifold perplexities. By giving expression to contradictions, the limits
of reason and representation are made visible.
The Arendtian contradictions come frequently as a result of her thinking
through multiple layers that include classical and modern philosophy, historical
facts, human emotions, to name but a few. She keeps her thought open to the
multiplicities of the real. Unsurprisingly, when viewed from a strictly rational
perspective her work is perceived as being inconsistent. Hobsbawms critique of
Arendts On Revolution is clear in this respect:
The historian or sociologist, for instance, will be irritated, as the author plainly is not,
by a certain lack of interest in mere fact. This [is ]. . . a preference for metaphysical
construct or poetic feeling over reality.
. . . [S]he has occasional ashes of insight, that is to say, she sometimes makes state-
ments which, while not particularly well-founded on evidence or argument, strike the
reader as true and illuminating. But that is all. And it is not enough. (1973: 205, 208)
Strictly speaking, Hobsbawms comments are correct. For him, Arendt subsumes
factual reality to ashes of insight. This, however, is not an issue of incompetence
on the part of Arendt, but one that points to a quality of her thought. Hobsbawm
is assuming that factual reality, evidence and argumentation are superior to poetic
feeling and illuminating insight. Such a hierarchy conceals the problem of the
mediation between factual reality and poetic feeling. Arendt, in her ambiv-
alence, does not renounce one in favour of the other; she retains both.
While rational argumentation refers to causality and logical consistency,
poetical insight makes us think in images. Let us draw their difference with regard
to their diverging relation to language. Poetical insight is perception in language,
whereas rational argumentation is representation through language, that is to say,
the former is an experience in language, whereas the latter uses language to repre-
sent factual reality. The validity of rational syntax lies in its consistency and its
delity to objective reality. By contrast, the validity of poetical insight rests simply
in the emerging vision of the image. We could then say that their difference is
that between representation and experience. Furthermore, they imply a different
conception of the real. Whereas for rational representation the real resides in
presence, in the world of the measurable; for poetical experience the real reaches
towards the absent, towards memory. Thus, poetical insight, with its distinct
relation to the real, provides a ground to question the rational form of represen-
tation that predominates in modern science and which gives primacy to presence.
To be sure, the facts rationally represented by historicism belong to the past;
they are already absent. However, their truth value is asserted in the evidence of
present data; their certitude is fully contained within the traces found in presence.
The past is thus represented on the basis of the present, it is xated as an object
of presence.
1
In contrast, poetical insight relates to the past as to an open horizon
with a multiplicity of images and with no single truth. Certainly, objects and
traces play an important part in the experiencing of the past, however, our
Vzquez Thinking the Event 45
relation to the past should not be conned to its traces in the present. Our
critique is aimed at an idea of history that, in Benjamins words, corresponds to
a viewpoint according to which the course of the world is an endless series of facts
congealed in the form of things (1999: 14). In the poetical image we nd an
opportunity to subvert the rule of presence and its spatial ordering, for in the
single moment of the poetical image different times are brought together.
The ambivalence of Arendts thought between representation and experience
is expressed in Hans Jonas commentaries on her conjunction of conceptualiza-
tion and depth of human insight and feeling:
From The Origins of Totalitarianism, with which she broke upon the literary scene, she
has forced up the level of discourse in political theory and imposed her standards of
conceptualization on the intellectual community. Even disagreement, contradiction
itself, must follow her to the heights she has set and must meet her there. And these
heights are sustained by depth that depth of human insight and feeling which gave
substance to everything she said and saved it from mere brilliance. (Jonas, 1976: 4)
The stature of Arendts thinking is expressed in its ambivalence. She intertwines
rational and normative forms of conceptualization with a unique sensitivity, a
sensitivity that is always giving a voice to the human heart. Her conception of
reality cannot be sundered from feelings, from human experience. Pleasure,
which is fundamentally the intensied awareness of reality, springs from a
passionate openness to the world and love of it (Arendt, 1970: 6).
The concordance between the various dimensions of her thought is not always
evident and frequently ends in a cul-de-sac. Together with her preoccupation
with human nature
2
and the biological grounding of society, she gives a place to
the obscure dimension of the human heart which cannot be the object of rational
understanding. She gives equal audience to the biological needs of the body and
to the spiritual needs of the heart. Arendt refuses to fall into one-dimensional
analysis and forties her impartiality by orienting her thought to various dimen-
sions. This is not to say that one cannot disagree with her. On the contrary, it
seems as if her thought is built in a polemic manner, so that one has to disagree
in one way or another, because we are driven into a dialogue. Once more, what
she says about Lessing is very much true of herself. Lessings thought is not the
(Platonic) silent dialogue between me and myself, but an anticipated dialogue
with others (Arendt, 1970: 10). Ambivalence and contradiction stand for a tacit
recognition of the plurality of perspectives; they allow thinking to be open to the
dialogue with others.
In giving voice to ambivalence Arendt dees the chronological syntax of
modern history. There is probably no better example of how she oversteps the
rational forms of representation than in her reections on the human heart. Her
concern with the experiences and passions that dwell in the human heart is a
particular trait of a thought that keeps at bay all pretensions to universal validity:
Whatever the passions and the emotions may be, and whatever their true connection
with thought and reason, they certainly are located in the human heart. And not only
is the human heart a place of darkness which, with certainty, no human eye can
penetrate; the qualities of the heart need darkness and protection against the light of
the public to grow and to remain what they are meant to be, innermost motives which
are not for public display. (Arendt, 1990: 956)
The darkness that accompanies the issues of the heart, their occlusion from the
light of reason may explain why the sections where Arendt refers to the darkness
of the heart always come to an abrupt end, as if they were unnished, or rather
as if she had chosen to leave them open, silent. There is no doubt that reason
provides a useful system of representation to perceive the order of the actual, but
its effectiveness is hindered once we try to address that which is beyond the realm
of appearances, beyond the visibility of the actual, beyond representation.
Heidegger, as Arendt, was aware that reason is not sufcient to account for the
whole of human history:
The inner and invisible domain of the heart is not only more inward than the interior
that belongs to calculating representation, and therefore more invisible; it also extends
further than does the realm of merely producible objects. (Heidegger, 1975: 125)
In speaking of the darkness of the heart against the light of reason, Heidegger
reveals that the temporality of love is extended in time. Love religates, binds us
together with both the generations that precede us and those that are to come.
Love is in excess of the time of the present, as of the time of the lone individual:
Only in the invisible innermost of the heart is man inclined toward what there is for
him to love: the forefathers, the dead, the children, those who are to come . . . [T]he
inner space in which everything is for us beyond the arithmetic of calculation, and,
free of such boundaries, can overow into the unbounded whole of the Open. This
overow beyond number rises, in its presence, in the inner and invisible region of the
heart. (Heidegger, 1975: 125)
Arendt saw the need for the qualities of the heart to remain in darkness, hidden
from reason. Her awareness of the limits of the apparent, of the visible, opens the
possibility of recognizing the reality of the invisible, of absence. Her understand-
ing is not a plea for relativism, nor for transcendence, but simply for acknowl-
edging the limits of our rational forms of explanation. Arendts thinking speaks
of the need for a thought that is, as it were, substantially more humble, freed
from all pretensions to universality.
Arendt saw Marx and Hegel as examples of totalizing thinking. She argues that
their philosophical systems by privileging pre-conceived schemas of thought
result in a loss of the insight of the mind. Their attempt to explain the whole of
human history through determinate patterns of action and progression leads to
conceptions of history with universal pretensions.
3
When the question of history
implies its own answer, it becomes a false question. In questioning history we
cannot determine in advance its ordering principles. In the quest for understand-
ing one has to pay attention even to that which is not immediately comprehen-
sible within our given frameworks of interpretation. Questioning history is an
opening up of the past, of what-has-been, in all its uncertainties. It is a way of
exploring modernity at a distance from its self-referential discourses. It brings us
beneath the surface of modernitys rationality, beneath the world of appearances,
face to face with the incomprehensible, the contradictory, the aporetic. History
in its eventfulness is a region where the rational discourses construed around
linear or dialectical progressions prove to be unt for comprehension:
Comprehension . . . does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprece-
dented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities
that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. (Arendt,
1985: xiv)
4
Accordingly, Arendts historical approach is polyvalent. She doesnt establish a
philosophical framework to follow; rather she opens and appropriates different
dimensions of what-has-been, all that comes into her sight. On the one hand,
she approaches the past in search of a ow of ideas. She is receptive to the ideas
that emanate from antiquity. On the other, she stares at the new, fascinated with
the emergence of political events, the occurrence of beginnings. The moment of
revolution is thus seen as the advent of a new beginning in the political, in the
sphere of human affairs.
5
In her account revolutions dont appear as linear, chronologically organized,
historical processes. Instead, she presents a plurality of factors that when laid one
next to the other, do not necessarily make sense. These inconsistencies, as previ-
ously argued, more than revealing a fault or a lack of understanding, show her
particular historical insight.
6
Arendt strives to rescue the dimensions of history,
particularly its eventfulness, which are lost in the teleological chains of expla-
nation that proceed from the modern habits of representation.
I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I nd no parallel to what
is occurring before my eyes; as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future,
the mind of man wanders in obscurity. (De Tocqueville, in Arendt, 1990)
De Tocquevilles observation that the past ceases to shed its light onto the politi-
cal events of modernity is both endorsed and denied by Arendt. On the one hand,
she refuses to dissect the present according to previous frameworks of interpret-
ation and she is fascinated by the emergence of unique and unrepeatable histori-
cal moments, such as revolutions. Revolutions are, for her, both exclusively
modern and radically new. However, on the other hand, she addresses the
problems of the present by gaining insight from the philosophy of antiquity. In
antiquity, Arendt already nds the central preoccupations and the basic forms of
political thinking. Antiquity becomes for her a unique vantage point to perceive
the construction of modernitys notion of time. In looking back at antiquity it
becomes evident that the way we relate to the past, our habits of historical appro-
priation are not given, universal, but specically modern. Interrogating moder-
nity through the past shreds the veil of universality that surrounds the modern
notions of history and time.
The moment of foundation, to which Arendt pays particular attention, also
challenges the notion of history as a series of processes. The question of foun-
dation raises the problem of beginning and permanence. Drawing on ancient
perceptions, Arendt asserts that the moment of foundation is a moment that
endures and which cannot be relegated to the depths of the past. She recalls that
in antiquity the foundation of a body politic was seen as an event that remained
present and bonded to the daily political practice which in its turn preserved the
event. The moment of foundation is a beginning that remains present in the daily
breath of the social body that it precedes. Teleological representations of history
cannot account for the enduring strength and ongoing presence of the moment
of foundation. For in them the past is perceived as an inert object where one may
nd the causes of the present, but which has nonetheless ceased to exist due to
the fact that it is no longer present. The activity of nding historical causes is far
from understanding the ongoing inuence of the past in the present. The present
cannot be reduced to the logical result of a series of past facts, as if it were the
materialization of previously established consequences. In thinking the moment
of foundation the past comes to sight as a living force, not as the region of death
but as the time of natality.
Understanding History
Modern representations of history reify the past, depriving it of its latent force.
In Arendts striving to think the event away from teleological chains of expla-
nation, we nd a stepping stone for a critique of modern chronology. History has
been an instrument of the victors; it has been used to legitimate the prevailing
social and political order. For Arendt, however, history plays a role of higher
importance. It is the place of social memory; it is the home of human interaction,
of political life which otherwise would become ephemeral. Arendt presents the
futility of human interaction against the permanence to be found both in nature
and the products of the human artice, that is, the permanence of materiality.
History preserves human deeds; it safeguards all that happens in the sphere of
human affairs. Arendts writings testify to the survival of ancient philosophy, that
reaches us from its remote origin and informs our actuality.
We have to acknowledge that the awareness of history has never been as promi-
nent as it has been in modernity. It is only in modern times that history acquires
the rank of science. History became a reference point of identity and difference
in every aspect of human life. However, history has often been built into an all-
encompassing system of explanation, that stands for the belief in the possibility
of a total understanding of the world. According to Arendt, it was Hegel who
for the rst time saw the whole of world history as a continuous development, and
this tremendous achievement implied that he himself stood outside all authority-
claiming systems and beliefs of the past, that he was held only by the thread of conti-
nuity in history itself. The thread of historical continuity was the rst substitute for
tradition; by means of it, the overwhelming mass of the most divergent values, the
most contradictory thoughts and conicting authorities, all of which had somehow
been able to function together, were reduced to a unilinear, dialectically consistent
development actually designed to repudiate not tradition as such, but the authority of
all traditions. (Arendt, 1993: 28)
In Arendts account, Hegels break with tradition appears to be bound to a
defence of continuity. Paradoxically, then, modernitys discontinuity, its breaks
with tradition are coupled with a praise of continuity.
7
In Arendts mind, when
Hegel discusses the idea of history, he expresses the epochal consciousness of the
modern world and at the same time confers a historical concreteness and pro-
gression on a tradition whose temporality was up till then bound to generational
cycles of regeneration, that is to the cyclical time of nature:
8
Kant also saw . . . that once you look at history in its entirety (im Grossen), rather than
at single events and the ever-frustrated intentions of human agents, everything
suddenly makes sense, because there is always at least a story to tell . . . By pursuing
their own aims without rhyme or reason men seem to be led by the guiding thread of
reason. (Arendt, 1993a: 82)
The elaboration of history as a rationally consistent discourse that Arendt traces
in Kant and Hegel is a widespread notion in modernity. It entertains a chrono-
logical conception of time that is seldom questioned. This seemingly innocent
awareness of the past is itself historically constructed. To say that historical
consciousness is itself historical is not just a nave observation, nor an automatic
loop of reexivity. The historicality of historical consciousness gives a critical
outlook that deprives the modern conception of history of its already given legit-
imacy. Historical consciousness is thus revealed as a social construction that is
permeated by power interests and biased perspectives. It is a notion of history
which backs the objectivity and irrevocability of the structures of oppression
and their social chimeras such as the promise of progress. In historicizing histori-
cal truths we can unveil, if not their ideological content, at least the limits they
pose to understanding.
In the appropriation of history as the referent and source of legitimacy for the
ruling systems of signication, history is transformed into an object produced
primarily from concrete data. The age-old narrative history as a form of remem-
brance kept by storytellers and poets has been at odds with most professional
historians. Through remembrance, history becomes life experience, every time
it is recalled it comes into dialogue with our daily life. The evocation of the story-
teller, his call for remembrance, is altogether different from the scientic com-
pilation of the historian.
Modernitys objectication of history is only possible within a conception of
time that considers the past to be a congealed object that no longer is. The past
ceases to be a dimension of experience. The past is understood as a residue of the
present. This negative understanding of the past as what is no longer present is,
as we have seen, characteristic of modernity. The past so conceived accords with
one-dimensional thinking and the concomitant visions of absolutes and totali-
ties. Even though the present is increasingly accepted as a dynamic dimension
with a high degree of complexity and multiplicity, the past in the worst of cases
is seen like a unitary system bound by chains of causality and at best like an entity
that due to its complexity has to be dissected into different chains of causality to
study its particular components. However, the complexity recognized in the past
is no different from that attributed to an organism by natural sciences. Ulti-
mately, in both cases the dissected components are seen as endowed with an
ultimate truth, with an objectivity that can be grasped through reason. The quest
of the historian becomes the search for an objective truth that is presupposed in
every historical happening, just as with any closed body of analysis, as if a dissec-
tion in time and space could fragment history into static and less complex parts.
Many critics of the positivist approach to history, the so-called critics of
historicism, have signalled the impossibility of understanding history as a self-
contained and totally objective entity. The arguments range from noting that the
immense amount of information and the discrimination process that is involved
in any historical methodology make subjective criteria unavoidable, to the idea
that any understanding of history is necessarily mediated by the characteristics
of the dynamic present from which it is being studied. We cannot but agree with
the assertion that any approach to history ought to be a dialogue with the present.
However, the observation that the present is always involved in our interpretation
of history does not challenge the perception that the past is xed and consumed.
We suggest that history changes due to its own dynamism in time and not only
as a result of the changes of the present from where it is observed. History is not
simply an object for perception but rather a dimension of human experience. In
this light the strict separation between history and the present appears arbitrary.
History is not just what is summoned in the actual, but it remains itself active
and alive.
Even though history has been raised as a necessary referent for action, it
appears more as an artice, as a product of fabrication than as a dimension of the
real to which we have access. History as a space of experience has been neglected
in favour of history as an archive where one can gather data for the sequential
interpretations of the real as presence. History as life experience, namely that
which we encounter in the meaning of every word, or in the latent past in social
memory, remains secluded and threatened by the oblivion of reason. The
predominant form of reason understands itself as being self-sufcient, non-
temporal, fully contained in the present.
What has so far been discussed may appear as a false problem, as a confusion
in terms, a confusion between history as the account of the past, that is, history
as a body of knowledge, and history referring to the past in itself. This is a
common confusion between knowledge and its object. However, the issue is no
other than to see how in modernity history as knowledge presupposes the percep-
tion of the past as an object. Hence our critique of history as knowledge is also
a critique of the modern experience of history. In other words, our modern
knowledge of history evidences a historical consciousness in which the past is
objectied, reied. Its approach already presupposes an objectknowledge
relation in which there is no place for history as what-has-been, as a real dimen-
sion of experience that doesnt belong to the present.
Arendts relation to history shows how remembrance is implicated in under-
standing the event.
9
Through remembrance she accesses the event, not as the
outcome of a series of facts, but as event. Remembrance is not simply a detailed
recounting of things past, it is not a piling up of data. Above all, it names a
bringing into experience of what-has-been. The scenes in Arendts On Revolution,
such as the hungry in the streets of Paris, or the public meetings in Russia,
summon up an image of the past. Through the image, the event emerges into
view and breaks the continuum of history.
To bring into view the events of the past through remembrance was the art of
story-tellers and poets. Today, in spite of (or maybe because of ) professional
history, remembrance remains more the task of literature: historical novels,
plays, biography writing and poetry, than that of historians. [T]he storehouse of
memory is kept and watched over by the poets, whose business it is to nd and
make the words we live by (Arendt, 1990: 280). It is undeniable that historical
data is relevant to make sense of history; however, what is here questioned is the
confusion of elevating historical traces to the rank of the actual content of history.
It is not the recollection of information that guarantees the permanence of
human deeds, but rather the possibility of remembrance. The presence of history
that enables its preservation from oblivion is achieved through memory.
Although tradition and modernity are often regarded as opposite terms, they
have an intimate relation. Since the Enlightenment antiquity became an obliga-
tory reference for thought. Not only is tradition a category of modern thought
but the very concept of tradition is entwined with that of modernity. We could
venture that modernity forms its epochal identity in contrast with tradition.
Drawing on Arendts observation, we could say that the critique of Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard and Marx was no less a critique of tradition than a critique of moder-
nity. Tradition and modernity appear to be inextricably bound with one another.
When we argue for a recovery of our relation with the past, we are not arguing
in favour of what might look like a conservative approach in which tradition is
seen as a preserver of continuity.
10
Our critique is aimed at the modern concep-
tion of time that characterizes both traditionalist and progressive perspectives.
The conservative relation to tradition is no less modern in its historical under-
standing than the critical breaks with tradition; ultimately both validate an
unproblematized conception of time that leads to universality.
The relation with the past built according to the current notion of tradition
is one of false repetition. Tradition imposes an approach, an interpretation of
the past, that has to be repeated. The relation with the past we are arguing for
could not stand in a sharper contrast. It argues for remembrance, for a leap into
the past always as an emerging experience.
11
There is then no search for repeti-
tion; rather, there is a recognition of the past as a sphere of experience that cannot
be apprehended in the form of a xed tradition. When the past is held open, it
escapes any deterministic conception of its content, it remains dynamic and
incommensurable with our understanding.
The Problem of Beginning
Whatever we may nd out about the factual truth of . . . [foundation] legends, their
historical signicance lies in how the human mind attempted to solve the problem of
the beginning, of an unconnected, new event breaking into the continuous sequence
of historical time.
(Hannah Arendt, On Revolution)
Revolution, a properly modern political event, poses serious challenges to the
dominant notions of time and history. In accordance with a notion of history
conceived as an extension of scientic rationality, the revolutionary processes are
inscribed within interpretative frameworks with clearly dened causal chains.
Modernitys history-making has been unable to approach the event as event. In
its appropriation it deprives the event of its eventfulness. In other words, the
rational representation of history cannot grasp the eventful character of revolu-
tion, for it is at odds with the presupposed continuity of historical progression.
When revolution is accounted for like a concatenation of actions and changes in
the structures of power, it loses its dynamism and becomes another piece in the
museum of modern history. In order to understand the foundational dimension
of revolution, we ought to allow a break in the continuity of chronological time.
The revolutionary event is paradoxical for the modern notion of time that
considers the new to be a eeting moment in times continuity. The new is
damned to be replaced as soon as it comes into presence; it is ephemeral.
12
However, in the event of revolution the new takes the form of a beginning; it
stands for the possibility of foundation. Revolution opens up the possibility for
an entirely new body politic. Novelty is asserted as a source of permanence.
Revolution gives historical concreteness to the problem of beginning for it
proclaims a radical break with what-has-been and at the same time it strives for
permanence; it negates the past while striving to become a denite past for the
generations to come.
Chronological forms of representation are unable to grasp a beginning as a
foundation that breaks the continuum of history and that gives birth to previ-
ously unknown political congurations. Arendts concern with the problem of
beginning dees the teleological representations of history. The task of under-
standing the political event brings into view the question of beginning. For her
the rendering of political events into sequential processes is but the result of
logical reconstructions whose sole ground is the artice of reason.
The event is a beginning and is unpredictable. In illuminating its before and
after, to be sure, the event takes the place of a historical index, it becomes a point
of reference. However, to locate the event within a chain of interpretation as if it
could have been pre-empted bears the risk of veiling the events provenance in the
open past. The unpredictability and irrevocability of a beginning are guaranteed
in the openness of what-has-been, where history appears neither xed nor linear:
It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete
arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain
in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the
beginning has, as it were, nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is as though it came out
of nowhere in either time or space. For a moment, the moment of beginning, it is as
though the beginner had abolished the sequence of temporality itself, or as though the
actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its continuity. (Arendt, 1990: 206)
The modern determination of the past coincides with the idea that the future is
predictable. They correspond to a conception that deprives history of its multi-
plicity. However, to afrm that what-has-been is the space of the unexpected
would imply that it has a future. This is an unsolvable paradox for the modern
conception of time. We would argue, against chronological time, that history
does have a changing actuality and hence that it moves in the open direction of
the future. The past is not deprived of movement, nor is its movement fully deter-
mined by what is present, rather, it is dynamic in its own right. History contains
and preserves the past: memories, words and deeds. It is as part of what-has-been,
as it is a dimension of actuality. It is actual but in an unapparent virtual state, it
belongs to absence.
That the past has not ceased to exist, that it endures as a dimension of experi-
ence, we can witness in language. The lexis, the total stock of words in a language
is never entirely present; it is rather always-already in a virtual state. Its absence
does not mean that it has ceased to exist, but rather that language is not fully
contained in the dimension of presence. We can then rightly say that the past has
ceased to be presence, but that it remains active. Conversely, what belongs to
presence can be seen as the trace of what recedes into the past, of what is virtual.
Presence would then appear as what results from the past, what is left in the
movement of withdrawal of all that has been. Meaning is left over, it is the past
of the withdrawal of words, just as music is left in the withdrawal of sound. There
is a reversible relation between presence and the past. Just as the past is commonly
perceived as a trace of the present, we could perceive the present as the past of
what-has-been, that is as the residue of the movement of withdrawal into absence.
In the relation between absence and presence the traditional time differenti-
ation between past, present and future is blurred. The modern conception of time
is embedded in the metaphysical interpretation of the world, in the thinking of
presence. By questioning the relation between what appears in presence and what
remains in absence, the structure of time, the pastpresentfuture divide falls
apart. A critique of time has to venture into the thinking of the invisible, of
absence. We can now approach this commonsense phrase: we are what we have
been.
Arendts reection on the problem of foundation sheds light on the historical
mediation between presence and absence. In the moment of foundation the
notions of beginning and permanence are entwined. A foundation is both past
and present. Recalling antiquity she remarks:
Roman history has been centred about the idea of foundation, and none of the great
Roman political concepts such as authority, tradition, religion, law, et cetera can be
understood without an insight into the great deed which stands at the beginning of
Roman history and chronology, the fact of urbs condita, of the foundation of the
eternal city. (Arendt, 1990: 207)
The idea of foundation shows that the temporality of a beginning exceeds the
present of its appearance, for it remains active in time. The foundation speaks
of the survival of the event of beginning. It appears, so to speak, as a present
that doesnt depart. It dees the commonly held conception of the present as a
liminal and transitional moment. The very possibility of a founding event chal-
lenges the futility of human affairs and shows the active existence of the past. It
brings to evidence the temporal fabric that holds together our reality in presence,
in space. The relation that Roman politics bear to a beginning in their practice
is illuminating:
Through the Roman Senators, the founders of the city of Rome were present, and
with them the spirit of foundation was present, the beginning, the principium and
principle, of those res gestae which from then on formed the history of the people of
Rome. (Arendt, 1990: 2001)
We do not need to go as far back as the Roman Republic to nd such a temporal
relation with a beginning, we can nd it in the bond we bear to our own birth.
Just as in the political sphere, where the moment of foundation remains present
together with the body politic that was founded, our coming into the world does
not recede into the past, but remains present as long as we are alive:
[M]en are equipped for the logically paradoxical task of making a new beginning
because they themselves are new beginnings and hence beginners, that the very
capacity for beginning is rooted in natality, in the fact that human beings appear in
the world by virtue of birth. (Arendt, 1990: 211)
13
The much celebrated concept of natality in Arendt is the sheer expression of an
understanding of time that sees in the past not the residual land of what is no
more, but the open source of what we are. The time of natality is the time that
in gathering what-has-been preserves the very possibility of beginning. Further-
more, through the idea of natality Arendt afrms the subject as a beginner.
14
The
subject is endowed with the capacity to destroy the continuum of history.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Robert Fine, Simon Campbell and Martin Davies for their comments and
encouragement on earlier versions of this text. This article was made possible thanks to
the funding of CONACYT.
Notes
1 For an essay that explores the debate around the idea of social time within histori-
ography, that is, between chronological objective time and subjective time (both
of which take for granted the primacy of presence), see Hall (1980).
2 Richard Bernstein (1997: 1367) argues that the idea of human nature in Arendt is
not xed.
3 For an account of Arendts understanding of history beyond the idea of process
implied in Marx, see Canovan (1994: 759).
4 For an interpretation of Arendts idea of understanding in relation to politics and
particularly to totalitarianism, see Fine (2001: 1008).
5 Arendts theory of totalitarianism is also an attempt to understand the eventful, see
Canovan (2000).
6 Kristeva, in speaking about Arendt, says: Trapped in this labyrinth of arguments,
thinking may forgo sophisticated renement, but only to resonate more effectively
with memories of different pasts and to delve into the current state of the world
(Kristeva, 2001: 27).
7 The problem of continuity in Hegel can be focused as that of the priority of identity
to think difference. For a philosophical discussion on the possibility of thinking
difference without the logical presupposition of identity see Miguel de Beistegui,
The Time of a Repetition (de Beistegui, 1999).
8 As Dana Villa asserts: Throughout her work, from The Origins of Totalitarianism
to The Life of the Mind, she is at war with all Hegelian-type teleologies, whether of
progress or doom (Villa, 1999: 181).
9 Focusing on the importance of narrative and history for Arendt, Benhabib says that:
Arendt developed a conception of political theory as storytelling. The task of this
kind of political theory is to engage in exercises of thought by digging under the
rubble of history so as to recover those pearls of past experience, with their sedi-
mented and hidden layers of meaning, to cull from them a story that can orient
the mind in the future. (Benhabib, 1996: 87)
10 To read about Arendts ambivalent relation to conservatism and radicalism, see
Canovan (1997).
11 As Dana Villa observes in other words: The pressing problem is not to recover
ancient concepts and categories, or to restore tradition in some form, but rather to
deconstruct and overcome the reications of a dead tradition (Villa, 1996: 9).
12 For a discussion of the problem between the spontaneity of beginning and the
founding of a body politic and the spontaneity of new beginning implied in a
revolution, see Fine (2001: 12730) and Vatter (1998: 668, 80).
13 The last paragraph of The Origins of Totalitarianism shows how important the idea
of beginning is for Arendt:
Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man;
politically, it is identical with mans freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est
that a beginning be made man was created said Augustine. This beginning is
guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man. (Arendt, 1985: 479)
14 To explore the relation between totalitarianism and the destruction of natality and
plurality, see Bernstein (1996: 967, 1823).
References
Arendt, H. (1970) On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing, in H. Arendt
(ed.) Men in Dark Times. London: Jonathan Cape.
(1985) The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edn with added prefaces. San Diego, CA:
Harvest.
(1990) On Revolution. London: Penguin.
(1993a) The Concept of History, Ancient and Modern, in Between Past and Future:
Eight Exercises in Political Thought. London: Penguin.
(1993b) Tradition and the Modern Age, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises
in Political Thought. London: Penguin.
(2002) Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought, Social Research
69: 273319.
Benhabib, S. (1996) The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Benjamin, W. (1999) Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century Expos of 1935,
in The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Bernstein, R.J. (1996) Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge: Polity Press.
(1997) Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind? From Radical Evil to the Banality
of Evil, in L. May and J. Kohn (eds) Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Canovan, M. (1994) Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1997) Hannah Arendt as a Conservative Thinker, in L. May and J. Kohn (eds)
Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(2000) Arendts Theory of Totalitarianism: A Reassessment, in D.R. Villa (ed.) The
Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Beistegui, M. (1999) The Time of a Repetition, Philosophy Today 43(3): 28391.
Fine, R. (2001) Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt. London: Routledge.
Hall, J.R. (1980) The Time of History and the History of Times, History and Theory
19(2): 11331.
Heidegger, M. (1975) What Are Poets For?, in Poetry, Language, Thought. New York:
Harper and Row.
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Jonas, H. (1976) Hannah Arendt 19061975, Social Research Spring: 35.
Kristeva, J. (2001) Hannah Arendt. New York: Columbia University Press.
Vatter, M.E. (1998) Arendts Theory of Revolution and its Aporia, Papers in Social Theory
3: 6483.
Villa, D.R. (1996) Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
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Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rolando Vzquez teaches Critical and Deconstructive Social Theory in the MA
in Social and Political Thought at Warwick University. He has done research linking
the thought of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, particularly in relation to a
critique of the modern notions of history and time. He is now beginning a research
project on the temporality of globalization discourses in current social theory.
Address: Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
[email: rolvas@yahoo.com]

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