Conditions of Dissensus: Arendt and Ranciere on Slavery and Statelessness

• In Event: Conditions of Agonistic Politics 2

Abstract

Hannah Arendt famously remarked that the plight of stateless people is ‘not that they are oppressed but that that nobody even wants to oppress them’. Without the artificial equality that citizenship establishes, stateless people are unable to distinguish themselves as human through public action. This situation of stateless people is like that of slaves (who were oppressed), she says, since both categories of people have been deprived of two of the most essential characteristics of human life: the relevance of speech and participation in politics. However, she suggests, stateless people are even worse off than slaves in antiquity who remained ‘within the pale of humanity’ whose labour was needed and exploited; in contrast stateless people are the ‘most symptomatic group in modern politics’ because they have been made entirely superfluous. Rancière takes issue with Arendt’s claim that stateless people are situated ‘beyond oppression’, asserting that, in fact, 'there were people who wanted to repress these refugee populations and laws to do so’. In this paper I take Rancière’s disagreement with Arendt as an opening for a reflection on the conditions of agonistic politics. I show how each of thinker engages with Aristotle’s justification of slavery in order to develop their respective accounts both of the specificity of politics and its enabling condition. Following Balibar, I will show how Ranciere takes the situation of the slave as paradigmatic of the social condition of oppression to which an emancipatory politics is a response. In contrast, for Arendt, the superfluousness of the stateless person exemplifies the extreme violence that politics of civility treats as its limit condition.

Author

• Andrew Schaap, University of Exeter