Rudi Visker

Beyond representation and

participation
Pushing Arendt into postmodernity

Abstract Whereas Arendts work has been traditionally received, both by

its critics and its admirers, as of one piece, this article uses her proposals
for some sort of organic representation in On Revolution as a lever to
break open that unity and show that it comprises two lines of thought that
as such contradict one another. On the one hand her misgivings about
representation betray a political version of the metaphysics of presence
Derrida has taught us to deconstruct. On the other hand her concept of
political freedom and of the role of the public realm goes against the very
presuppositions of that metaphysics. That this tension goes unnoticed is
largely due to the weight Arendt attached to the theme of participation. By
shifting that weight to some of the less prominent themes in her work, I
try to give it a different relief, more apt to confront the difficult pluralism
of our times.
Key words Hannah Arendt Jacques Derrida meaningfulness
metaphysics of presence presentation recognition who-ness

I
In the last pages of On Revolution (hereafter OR) Arendt ends her
investigation into the fate of modern politics as exemplified in the failure
of the French Revolution and the comparative success of the American
Revolution by singing the praise of an aristocratic form of government that would, she writes, spell the end of general suffrage as we
understand it today.1 The aristocracy Arendt is referring to, is of course
not a nobility that owes its status to its wealth or to its blood-line. Arendt
takes the term literally: the aristoi are those that, politically speaking,
are the best (ibid.) and whose title rests on nothing but the confidence
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 35 no 4 pp. 411426
Copyright The Author(s), 2009.
Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
http://psc.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453708102093

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of their equals (OR 278). The good in which they excel does not have
a moral signification, but rather means something like fit for, suitable,
as when one speaks of good skis or refers to oneself as not good at
that sort of thing or to someone as a good-for-nothing.2 The aristoi
are the most able for politics: The joys of public happiness and the
responsibilities for public business would [in an aristocratic government] become the share of those few from all walks of life who have a
taste for public freedom and cannot be happy without it (OR 279).
There are, then, politically speaking, two kinds of people: those who
are fit for politics an elite that cannot imagine living without it and
those who do not care for politics and put their personal happiness
above the state of the world (ibid.). Arendt stresses that this last groups
exclusion from politics is not in the least derogatory, since their
exclusion is self-chosen (OR 27980). And, to avoid all misunderstanding, she adds that her plea for an aristocratic form of government
does not so much entail that not everybody is fit for politics and that
some are more up to it than others, but rather makes it possible for
those who do not feel that call not to be obliged to become involved
in government: Such self-exclusion, she reasons, would in fact give
substance and reality to one of the most important negative liberties we
have enjoyed since the end of the ancient world, namely freedom from
politics, which was unknown to Rome or Athens and which is politically perhaps the most relevant part of our Christian heritage (OR 280).
This positive appreciation of the political contribution of Christianity and the realistic tone of Arendts acknowledgement that not everybody is equally good for politics will have struck those of her readers
who remember the pages in which her earlier work on The Human
Condition3 (hereafter HC) had played down the political significance
of Christianity: the worldlessness (HC 53) that is the reverse side of
the otherworldliness at the centre of its experience (HC 76) and the
ruinous quality of the good life that it preaches, centred it on an ideal
of the good life which is not only impossible within the confines of the
public realm, but positively destructive of it (HC 77). Christianity,
therefore, in Arendts eyes, seemed, not unlike love, not merely an
apolitical but a deeply anti-political force (HC 242). Moreover, the
general message of The Human Condition had been that action, the
most human of all activities in which no one could engage without the
presence of others, was intrinsically political: the political realm rises
directly out of acting together, the sharing of words and deeds. Thus
action not only has the most intimate relationship to the public part of
the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it
(HC 198). Action creates a plural space of appearance that Arendt
deems to be both public and political: the space where I appear to
others as others appear to me and where men exist not merely like

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other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly
(HC 1989). To be deprived of such a space is a real privation: it is to
lack that without which one cannot be human. Only what appears to
all, Arendt quotes Aristotle, can be called Being (HC 199 quoting EN
1172 b.36 ff.) and whatever lacks such appearance, she continues,
paraphrasing Heraclitus (frag. B.89), comes and passes away like a
dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality (ibid.).
Hence the three characteristics of the public realm that those who are
excluded from it, like slaves or such non-citizens as todays sanspapiers, are doomed to miss in the strongest possible sense of the term:
To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things
essential to a truly human life: [first] to be deprived of the reality that comes
from being seen and heard by others, [second] to be deprived of an objective relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated
from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, [thirdly]
to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent
than life itself. (HC 58)

We shall come back to each of these characteristics as we proceed, but

it should be clear for now that Arendts taking into consideration of an
aristocratic form of government that rests in the hands of those who
have demonstrated that they care for more than their private happiness
and are concerned about the state of the world (OR 279) is not a minor
correction. Indeed, this way to reconcile equality and authority (OR
278), by letting self-inclusion or self-exclusion into the political realm
depend on the strength of ones inclination toward politics, seems to
come at the price of allowing those who value freedom from politics
over the positive benefits of political freedom for those who participate
in it, to lead the kind of life that The Human Condition would have
considered less than human.
In all fairness to Arendt it should be added that she tried to preclude
these kind of consequences by, at a first level, having everyone participate in the elementary republics of a council system (OR 278) from
which, at subsequent levels, deputies for the next higher council would
be self-selected according to the intensity of their political vocation, so
that the lot would take on the shape of a pyramid where authority
would have been generated neither at the top nor at the bottom, but on
each of the pyramids layers (ibid.). Her ideal remains action and participation by all, and her aristocratic model is supposed to grow out of it,
more or less spontaneously (OR 159, 262, 267) giving birth to ever
higher organs (OR 249) so that no one would be left without their
share in public happiness and everyone would have a share in public
power (OR 255). This attempt to make everybody feel, in Jeffersons
words, that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely

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at an election one day in the year, but every day (OR 254) makes
according to Arendt her republican aristocratic model a better way to
collect the voice of the people than the mechanics of representative
government implied in the traditional party system (OR 2545) which
rests on a denial of the very existence of public happiness and public
freedom and sees politics as a burden (OR 269) from which the
majority of the people can be spared by the few who take it on their
shoulders.
This brief reminder about the context of Arendts proposal makes
the short passage on the penultimate page of On Revolution in which
Arendt links the self-exclusion of most to the freedom from politics
which, to repeat the quotation given earlier, is politically perhaps the
most relevant part of our Christian heritage (OR 280), all the more
remarkable. It seems as if Arendt in the end has to admit some sort of
representation and that she tries to solve the problem by making it as
unrepresentation-like as possible. Its organic and spontaneous character seems to be what must guarantee that the loss of presence, i.e. of
participation and thus of freedom, which it inevitably brings with it, is
as minimal as possible. The best representation would be no representation at all, but since Arendt is forced to admit some sort of representation, given the obvious lack of public spaces to which the people at
large would have entrance (OR 277), organic, non-mechanistic, spontaneous representation is her next best candidate. Since this kind of
representation still feeds on the same blood that flows through the veins
of the body that it re-presents, it introduces the least difference one can
hope for. And yet, this representation too is open to the risk of a selfseparation of and perhaps also from the body on which it feeds. For
once the gates are open to representation, the risk is a double one: that
the body cuts itself off from its organs (freedom from politics) or that
the organs forget the body of which they are the limbs: the professionalization of politics that under a democratic guise tends to replace the
government of the people by the people by the government of the
people by an oligarchic elite sprung from the people but severed from
it and, at best, preoccupied to represent each individuals private interests (OR 2689, 377). The graft of representation should never bloom
on its own, but only bear the blossoms that the stalk onto which it is
grafted somehow cannot produce without its help. If either forgets
about that which it is dependent upon, a catastrophe is impending.
The problem of representation which Arendt tries to resolve by
resorting to organic metaphors seems a classical example of what contemporary thought has taught us to deconstruct as metaphysics of
presence. There would be a pre-given presence which, for its representation, is dependent on the mediation by a signifier that ideally should
add nothing of its own to the signified whose presence it is supposed to

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serve by merely exteriorizing it. This opens the risk of a betrayal by the
representing servant and yet the master is apparently not master enough
to do without a servant.4 Arendts discussion of the process of transition
of oral poetry to writing could serve as an illustration of that logic:
[Oral] poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and
the least worldly of arts, the one in which the end product remains closest
to the thought that inspired it. . . . yet, even a poem, no matter how long
it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those
who listened to him, will eventually be made, that is, written down and
transformed into a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and
the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need
tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves. (HC 16970)

The medium that is supposed to ward off death (writing), in its turn,
however, introduces death:
. . . reification and materialization, without which no thought can become
a tangible thing, is always paid for, and the price is life itself: it is always
the dead letter in which the living spirit must survive, a deadness from
which it can be rescued only when the dead letter comes again into contact
with a life willing to resurrect it, although this resurrection of the dead
shares with all living things that it, too, will die again. (HC 169)

Although such passages seem to cry for deconstruction, indeed

already make a first step in its direction (life being already exposed to
death before the letter brings death to it), the contemporary reader
would do well not simply to apply what he or she has been taught
without considering the context of application. In politics for example,
the case seems slightly different: the problem here goes beyond the
simple opposition of the dead letter to the living spirit. Indeed, the letter
of the representing organ seems to be more alive and less perishable
than the spirit. For democratic oligarchy means, for Arendt, that imperishability is achieved by the few, who among themselves constitute a
public space and given up by the many, who spend their lives outside
it and in obscurity (OR 277). In other words, any further fruitful
engagement with Arendt should focus first on the metaphysical and
ontological distinction that she seeks to draw between private happiness (freedom from politics) and public happiness (freedom of politics,
i.e. the freedom that results from politics).

II
Freedom, Arendt believes, is actually the reason that men live together
in a political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would
be meaningless. The raison dtre of politics is freedom and its field of

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experience action.5 The nature of the freedom she is talking about here
is public and essentially different from the kind of private freedom from
unnecessary political interference. Politics for her is not just compatible with freedom only because and insofar as it guarantees a possible
freedom from politics (Between Past and Future [hereafter BPF] 149);
it is to the contrary the only realm in which true freedom can arise.
The freedom that liberalism seeks to protect is the less genuine one. It
is but the private freedom of a life under the sway of necessity (BPF
155) and merely concerned with its own persistence. Such a life is prey
to the rhythm of a process that never stops: it follows the prescribed
cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration and the happiness it strives for is never lasting.6 Arendt likens it to a minimum of
animal contentment that feels the pulse of the life process going through
it: The blessing of labor is that effort and gratification follow each other
as closely as producing and consuming, so that happiness is a concomitant of the process itself (ibid.). The reason why she prefers action to
labour, or to work, is that it is the only kind of activity in which humankind stands a chance of reaching some permanence, of achieving something more permanent than life itself (HC 58). Politics and action
belong together, because action is necessarily plural, it always involves
others to whom one can show oneself in word and deed and is thus
intrinsically public: no one can act alone. Seeing and hearing others,
being seen and being heard by them, is the only way to break out of
the imprison[ment] in the subjectivity of ones own singular experience
and the privation of privacy and of a happiness that is only private lies
in the absence of others; as far as they are concerned, private man does
not appear, and therefore it is as though he does not exist. Whatever he
does remains without significance and consequence to others, and what
matters to him is without interest to other people (ibid.). One does not
share ones conatus essendi.
Arendts ranking of the human activities in ascending order:
labour, work and action is moved by the metaphysical assumption
that we are the kind of beings that long for something transcending
[our] life-span (HC 55). In other words, a being concern[ed] with
immortality (ibid.) and not satisfied with its imprisonment in time:
men entered the public realm because they wanted something of their
own or something they had in common with others to be more permanent than their earthly lives (ibid.). The loss of this concern in the
modern age is, in her eyes, the clearest testimony to the loss of the
public realm that she in turn sees as a direct consequence of its being
taken over by the logic of the life process in contemporary parlance:
the social and economical problems that enter the public realm and
subjugate it to the logic of labour and work that are, according to Arendt,
essentially foreign to it. This rise of the social started, historically, when

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property-owners, instead of claiming access to the public realm because
of their wealth, demanded protection from it for the accumulation of
more wealth (HC 68). Be that as it may and this separation of the
social and the political in Arendt is perhaps what she is most criticized
for let us just note for the moment that the argument given for our
desire for permanence is more historical than ontological. There is, for
the moment, no explanation of what it is in our being that lies at the
basis of our desire for what one could call self-transcendence. But let
us work on this assumption for a moment and try to understand in what
way the public and political realm allows for such a transcendence.
The difference between the public and the private realm is that in
the former the concern for life has lost its validity: in it people find the
occasion to liberate themselves from their worry about life and to
engage themselves for the freedom of the world (BPF 156), that is: of
something that is not erected for one generation and planned for the
living only [but that] must transcend the life-span of mortal men (HC
55). Entering that world requires courage (BPF 156) the courage to
rise above ones own concern with ones own life but its reward is a
share in that worlds permanence: Only the existence of a public realm
and the worlds subsequent transformation into a community which
gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely
on permanence (HC 55). To illustrate the level of reality and permanence realized by a publicly shared world, Arendt in a central passage
resorts to the following example which, to a contemporary reader, may
perhaps be best concretized by that moment in the game of Boggle when
each player is asked to read the meaningful letter-combinations which
he or she has recognized on the same surface of the dice that the others
have seen:
. . . the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of
innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents
itself . . . For though the common world is the common meeting ground of
all, those who are present have different locations in it, and the location
of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the location
of two objects. . . . Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of
aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered
around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality
truly and reliably appear. (HC 57)

Being, Arendt seems to tell us here, can only come into being as something that one can trust to be the same rather than the Heraclitean flux
of the forever changing, if it can be seen by many to be is to be
perceived by more people than me since in and by myself I have nothing
that could lead to anything so solid and durable as a common world
(ibid.). And if such a common world with a reality outside the scope of

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my subjectivity can be established, there may be a way for me to reach
an objectivity for myself that is less fleeting and more lasting than what
I could hope for on my own:
Being seen and being heard by others [appearing to others] derive their
significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different
position. This is the meaning of public life, compared to which even the
richest and most satisfying family life [i.e. private life] can offer only the
prolongation and multiplication of ones own position with its attending
aspects and perspectives. (HC 57)

One could think of the election process in these terms: when the
results come out, the substance of the people as a family, in which each
member thinks of the other as multiplying and prolonging (HC 58)
her or his own experience, falls apart into numbers (Claude Lefort)7 and
one is brutally awakened to the plural reality of public life. Arendt
would, of course, resist this attempt to connect her ideas to what she
deems to be a mechanistic politics for her the voting booth can hardly
be called a public place and as she adds there the only way in which
a citizen today can still function as a citizen is as member of a jury.8
As could be expected, the reason she gives for this is that there is an
intrinsic conflict between the interests of individual mortals and the
interest of the common world which they inhabit. . . . To recognize and
embrace the common good requires not enlightened self-interest but
impartiality; such impartiality, however, is resisted at every turn by the
urgency of ones self-interests, which are always more urgent than the
common good (Public Rights and Private Interests [hereafter PRPI],
105). The most the voting booth and the election process can lead to is
an aggregation of self-interests but even if they harmonize, their sum
total would still differ from the interest of the commonwealth. The latter
is the kind of interest one cannot have on ones own, but only through
a process of exchange with others in a public setting where all members
are equal not because of a common nature or a common opinion but
because they are equalized (ibid.) by that setting, i.e. by something
outside themselves (ibid.). Jurors, for example, are not supposed to act
as party members or as friends but as peers. They must deal with something which is of no private interest to them at all: they are interested
in something in regard to which they are disinterested (ibid.).
One might object that they are also interested in this disinterested
position which will allow each of them to rise above the futility (HC
56) of their individual lives and reach the level of reality that comes
from being seen and heard by others. Instead of pressing that argument
as such, let us take note of the difficulty it points to.

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III
There seems to be a conflict of interest in the human being between, on
the one hand, the urgency and the overwhelming character of the
interests of ones private life (PRPI 105) and, on the other hand, ones
true interest in putting oneself above and beyond that life, of transcending it and becoming someone with a name and a position detached from
the vicissitudes of his or her biological constitution (labour is not for
nothing ascribed by Arendt to the Animal laborans). The desire for
immortality which Arendt invokes is more than the desire for an eternal
life and an eternal youth it is a desire for a different kind of immortality than the one with which Kalypso tried in vain to bind Odysseus
to her cave: it is the desire for a name, a reputation that assures one is
not forgotten by the community (the polis) to which one belongs.9 The
raison dtre of the political-public sphere lies in the fact that it allows
for a transcendence to a freedom that no longer falls under the dictation
of life but that can move away from it. In that, at bottom, ontologicalmetaphysical sense, freedom is freedom of movement: the freedom to
move oneself instead of being the hostage of ones interests. But for
freedom to be a free mans status, a common public space is needed,
a politically organized world, into which each of the free men [can]
insert himself by word and deed (BPF 148): Without a politically
guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its
appearance (BPF 149). The need for such an organization and such a
guarantee means that there must be a structure that, as such, allows this
freedom to appear, as in the case we discussed above where jurors become
equalized by something outside themselves (PRPI 105). It is almost
as if such a structure can force people away from their private freedom
into the public freedom they (or some part in them) yearn for.
There are a few passages in Arendt to support this reading, but in
general there are too few and they are outnumbered by the exactly
opposed argument, e.g. the political realm rises directly out of acting
together (HC 198); The space of appearance comes into being wherever
men are together and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm, . . . that is, the various forms in which the
public realm can be organized (HC 199). Here is, again, a quotation
that starts by contradicting the ones just given: for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs
the formality of the public and that goes on by seemingly playing down
this contradiction: this formality of the public is constituted by ones
peers, it cannot be the familiar presence of ones equals or inferiors (HC
49). And yet these peers are precisely to be distinguished from ones
equals by their being free like I am, that is: by their enjoying a status
which the mere fact of my co-acting with them cannot by itself grant

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them. As On Revolution tells us, a political realm does not automatically come into being wherever men live together (OR 19).
One could go on finding quotes and playing them off against each
other, but I doubt that this will bring us much further. There is, on the
whole, in Arendt a remarkable silence on the institutional side of either
the political or the public realm and the fact that they are never clearly
distinguished clearly derives from the central position that action and
participation are given in her argument. When laws are mentioned, they
are said to derive either in the last instance from the faculty to promise
and to keep promises (BPF 164) (a faculty belonging to action, HC
2437) or from the poietic practice of a lawgiver (Arendt is referring to
Greece), who made the laws the city, to which he remained a foreigner,
was going to live by. Such laws are supposedly drawn around an already
existing public sphere (HC 198), hedging in or curbing action, like a
fence or a wall drawn around it, and yet political life could begin
only after [the legislator] had finished his legislation (HC 64)10 and
without such laws, the public sphere could not endure; could not survive
the moment of action and speech itself (HC 198). But the question is:
could it even come into being without them, without any pre-given
structure? Aside from a few hints, Arendt does not answer that question,
simply because she does not, and in a sense could not, raise it. This is
the moment at which I feel inclined to push her a bit, but let me first
explain what I mean by pushing here.

IV
A text, a series of texts, books or an authors oeuvre is not an inert
object. It consists of a field of forces, vectors that point in different directions and that together constitute the problematic in which an author
takes up a certain position.11 Thus we have seen Arendt struggling, as
it were, but not necessarily noticing the struggle, with a number of
arguments, each of which, taken for itself, seems to point in a different
direction: the legacy of the metaphysics of presence behind the ideas on
organic representation and the contrary move that portrays the public
sphere as a medium that, far from merely preserving as much as possible
the already present freedom of each of its members, has the explicit task
of producing a new kind of freedom and thus instead of simply doubling
(re-presenting) what there is, ex-pressing it, should mould it into something new and not yet there. We found this tension between two different lines of thought reduplicated in the contrary views that Arendt
seemed to take on the relation between the public realm and action
and, perhaps to a lesser degree, in the strange passage on the legacy of
Christianity with which we started. Depending on ones position, one

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may judge Arendts attempts to smooth out these contradictions more
or less successful and thus be inclined either to defend or to attack her.
But I believe it to be more fruitful to think of her as more or less effortlessly managing to have all these contrary forces point in the same direction. The contradictions are not so much her own as those of the vectors
at work in her argument. The delicate balance between these forces
seems to a large extent due to the weight she ascribed to either action
or participation. Changing metaphors for a moment: rather than being
an inert object, a text is somewhat like a water-bed that changes shape
according to the weight of the one walking over it, including the
author.12 This weight is a mixture of ones intellectual luggage, ones
interests, ones experiences and of the spirit of ones age. Thus Arendt,
when walking over her own text, will inevitably create a different landscape, different ridges, different valleys, than any other reader after her,
with the result that, for each of them, there will be different parts that
stick out and cast their shadow over others that remain less visible and
are perhaps not noticed at all. Let me give an example of a passage that
is of particular significance to me and that, I think, remains, not by coincidence, largely in the shade of Arendts own relief.
Arendt introduces it by way of a metaphor for what she calls the
personal element in a man,13 an element beyond the control of the
subject and which she seeks to distinguish from mere subjectivity (in
that context, the antonym of objectivity): this personal element, she
writes, perhaps most closely resembles the Greek daimon, the guardian
spirit which accompanies every man throughout his life, but is always
looking over his shoulder, with the result that it is more easily recognized by everyone a man meets than by himself (ibid.). The two or three
other passages in which this daimon is mentioned are almost literally
identical, except that there the daimon is said to be visible only to
others (HC 193, 180). In all these instances Arendt introduces the
metaphor as an illustration of the difference between a persons whoness and his what-ness and she always stresses that for that who-ness
to appear a public space is needed, a world where others are already
present (Labour, Work, Action [hereafter] LWA 39):
This disclosure of who in contradistinction to what somebody is his
qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings which he may display or hide
is implicit in everything somebody says and does. It can be hidden only in
complete silence and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never
be achieved as a wilful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose
of this who in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities.
(HC 179)

Our who-ness, then, involves an asymmetry while it appears clearly

and unmistakably to others, it remains hidden from the person himself

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(HC 179) and it thus exposes us to a risk that, Arendt thinks, we must
be willing to take: Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he
discloses himself in deed or in word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure (HC 180). No reason is given but the context seems to suggest
that refusing that risk is paid with isolation from the human community.
When we do not appear to others, we are doomed to remain anonymous and thus without a name and without human dignity (LWA 40).
The revelation of who we are is, in one of these passages, linked to a
delight that necessarily follows Arendt is quoting Dante here14 the
disclosure of [ones] own image (ibid.), but elsewhere we are told that
the misery of the mortals lies in their blindness toward their own
daimon (HC 193).
The daimon figure is thus kept by Arendt at the level of a metaphor
that serves to illustrate her theory of action. Had she given it more
thought and taken it to the level of a concept, she might have found in
it an occasion to perhaps rearticulate that theory and to remove some
of its imprecisions. She might even have found herself on a postmodern
ground,15 long before the term had even been invented. In other words,
the relief of her texts might have changed. Let us see what the metaphor
has in store for us, once we press it, however gently.
There seem to be two parts in the subject: the what-ness it is in
control of and its who-ness that is beyond such a control. The latter is
also called the latent self (LWA 40, quoting Dante) and it stands for
the unique and distinct identity (HC 180) that is revealed only to
others or, at any rate, more easily to them than to oneself. Unlike Sartres
for-the-other which is similarly revealed to others but a non-revealed
to the for-itself,16 it is not, for Arendt, a new dimension added to our
being by the Other. But like Sartres non-revealed it has something to
do with us with who we are and it is not an empty or a false
image of us in the mind of another which we should like to contest
(Being and Nothingness 2212). As we have seen, it appears clearly
and unmistakably (HC 179) to them. We do not experience shame or
anxiety over that appearance, but seem to take delight in it. These few
elements introduce an unexpected complexity into the basic distinction
between the private and the public realm on which the whole of Arendts
work is built. Instead of a distinction between things that should be
shown [to others] and things that should be hidden [from them] (HC
72), there is also a dimension about us that is hidden to ourselves,
precisely what we cannot but show to others. What is private to us is
beyond our control and when acting we cannot but disclose it to others.
Why would such others get a clear and unmistaken view on it? What is
implied in its being visible or not? When something is visible for someone,
that person is able to grasp it, to perceive it, to recognize it as what it
is and thus to identify its meaning, the part of it that corresponds to its

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what-ness. And yet it is not our what-ness that makes us unique, but
our who-ness. If we look in a mirror, we see what we are but not who
we are. The latter cannot be grasped in terms of meaning. At least not
by ourselves. Think of the difference between what we call meaningful
and what merely has a meaning. The first is, contrary to what the word
suggests, not more full of meaning than the second. The reason its
meaning cannot be spelled out is that it stands for what, by essence,
cannot be grasped in terms of meaning. As Levinas says somewhere, the
great moments of our life are those that have properly speaking never
been lived;17 they were never really experienced, for, to experience
them would mean in this context: to digest them, to grasp their meaning.
As we say, they were too significant, too impressive for us to be able to
retain the distance needed to perceive their meaning. What is im-pressive
has impressed itself on us, it has come too close to simply experience it.
It falls outside the realm of meaning altogether. There is, however, no
reason to assume that that realm would merely consist of experiences
that im-pacted us and took us by surprise from outside. What we fail
to see when we look in the mirror and see a not particularly beautiful,
middle-aged man of a white colour, etc., is precisely what in these qualities (male, white and so on) is irreducible to meaning. My being a man,
your being a woman, black, with such or such values, this or that biography including that part of your life that inscribed itself on you are all
qualities of our who-ness, the meaning of which necessarily lies beyond
our own grasp. If they did not, if their meaning were clear to us, they
would not be part of who we are but of what we are and we would not
care for them or be that vulnerable to them (think of compliments or
insults). The risk of disclosing them would not be so great, since they
would be as disclosed to me as they would be to others.
If one would take this reconstruction of the daimon metaphor one
step further and this would be the push by questioning Arendts
assumption that others can see my who-ness rather than my what-ness,
one would find oneself in the midst of the kind of pluralism with which
I have elsewhere shown our contemporary, highly heterogeneous, multicultural societies wrestle.18 What makes this pluralism so difficult is that
what is meaningful for the one, seems to only have meaning for another.
Thus, while we are able to understand other cultures, other practices,
other singularities, etc., and are even able to understand that these are
experienced by others as meaningful, we do not necessarily find
ourselves able to experience the same meaningfulness, to show understanding for it, to care for it the way they seem to care for it. What to
them is special, holy, sacred about their practices meaningful is something we can only experience from the outside, as having meaning. And
this rift between our capacity to understand and to show understanding
also confronts us with that part of us that remains beyond our own

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control, for apparently it does not suffice to understand that what we
value as meaningful ourselves can be different, to make us stop valuing
it and adopt the other practice instead. The otherness of the other
confronts us with what in us is beyond our control and belongs to a
dimension outside the realm of meaning and thus outside our grasp and
yet our own. Postmodernist pluralism is thus all but a relativism: its
problem is not that difference becomes indifferent (anything goes) but
that what is being understood as different instead of inferior is not
necessarily something we can share or exchange. The difference of the
other confronts us with the non-indifference that keeps us attached to
our own difference to what Arendt calls our who-ness.
If one adds one more step that of linking this dispossession of
what we thought we were at least able to explain to ourselves (cf. the
first understanding of meaningful) to an embarrassment by that uncanny something about us that lies beyond our control19 one can
begin to reappreciate what the function of a public and/or political sphere
could be for us today, and why this sphere needs a structure and a formality of its own to be able to locate that about each of us which lies beyond
our grasp. There is one passage where Arendt almost says what needs to
be said she invokes there the etymology of the word person which
derives from the Latin persona and then remarks that such a mask had
obviously two functions: it had to hide, or rather to replace, the actors
own face and countenance, but in a way that would make it possible for
the voice to sound through (OR 106). There is, of course, no such mask
without a script that affixes to the one wearing it the part he or she can
play on the public scene (OR 107). And once one is assigned or has
obtained such a mask, one will be respected for the part one has to play
in public.20 Thinking of our contemporary predicament, I would only
add that the kind of public sphere we need, is one in which such masks
are available as ways to place our who-ness outside each of us and allow
it to circulate in a realm of its own where the question that plagues each
of us who am I? is recognized as one that neither we nor the other
can answer and therefore worthy of being recognized in public as a difference that deserves respect. It is this visibility of their invisibility where
the first does not cancel but points to the second, that is, ultimately, what
people are deprived of when they find themselves secluded from a public
world in which they can deposit the weight of a question they cannot
lift on their own. For the halls of the private, as we have seen, are not
just intimate in them resounds an echo that would drive one mad were
one to stay alone with it. The mortals are such that they need a space
outside of them to be able to sustain what must remain hidden within
them. As the poet said: the darkness is too big for each alone.
Institute of Philosophy, Leuven, Belgium

PSC

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Visker: Beyond representation and participation
Notes
1 H. Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1990), p. 279;
henceforth cited as OR. Throughout this article all emphases in quotations
are my own.
2 This is, incidentally, also how Heidegger understands the proper and
original meaning of agathon [of which aristos is the superlative] in his
1931/2 lectures on Platos allegory of the cave: The Greeks took good
in the sense we mean when we say: we buy ourselves a pair of good skis;
M. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 34: Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons
Hhlengleichnis und Thetet (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann),
1988), p. 106.
3 H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1958); hereafter cited as HC.
4 Cf. R. Bernet, Derrida and His Masters Voice, in W. R. McKenna and
J. C. Evans (eds) Derrida and Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995),
pp. 121.
5 H. Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought
(Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1993), p. 146; henceforth cited as BPF.
6 H. Arendt, Labour, Work, Action, in J. W. Bernauer (ed.) Amor Mundi:
Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt (Dordrecht:
M. Nijhoff, 1987), p. 34; henceforth cited as LWA.
7 C. Lefort, Essais sur le politique. XIXeXXe sicles (Paris: Seuil, 1986),
e.g. p. 29, 286.
8 H. Arendt, Public Rights and Private Interests. In Response to Charles
Frankel, in M. Mooney and F. Stuber (eds) Small Comforts for Hard Times
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 104; henceforth cited as
PRPI.
9 J.-P. Vernant, Le refus dUlysse, Le Temps de la Rflexion 3 (1982): 1318.
10 Cf. also H. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. J. Kohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 2005), pp. 1812 (on the nomothetes).
11 Cf. my Philosophy and Pluralism, Philosophy Today 48(2) (2004): 11527
for more on the model of reading that I am suggesting here.
12 Hence the novices failure to bring any depth to his or her reading: being
relatively weightless the only thing one can do is to summarize what one
sees.
13 H. Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1983),
p. 73.
14 De Monarchia I.3; Arendt translates rather freely (one can find the Latin
text as a motto in HC 175).
15 On what I mean by postmodern ground and on my reasons for taking
ground in the Foucaultian sense of a positive unconscious of knowledge
(Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences [London: Tavistock, 1970], p. XI), see my The Inhuman Condition:
Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger (Pittsburgh, PA:
Duquesne University Press, 2008).
16 J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology
(London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 2689.

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
17 E. Levinas, Enigma and Phenomenon, in Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Peperzak et al. (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 72.
18 E.g. in my The Inhuman Condition, pp. 73 ff., 284 ff. and my In Praise
of Visibility, Levinas Studies. An Annual Review 3(2008), 17191, 2379.
19 Cf. my The Foreign, the Uncanny, and the Foreigner: Concepts of the Self
and the Other in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Philosophy, in James
J. Bono, Tim Dean and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (eds) A Time for the
Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), pp. 10921, 2379.
20 Cf. Dana Villas interesting Theatricality and the Public Realm, in Dana
Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 12854.

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