Not Political: Violence and Education in Hannah Arendt

• In Event: Education at the Borders: Rights, Refugees, and Responsibilities

Abstract

Context and Problem:
What would it mean to suspend the ordinary language of politics for the sake of thinking about the political in a differentiated and meaningful way? For Hannah Arendt, neither violence nor education take place within the political realm. In the case of violence, the exception is beyond the political whereas, in education, the exception is before the political. For Arendt, violence is anti-political whereas education is pre-political. Violence is the adult failure of politics while education is a fragile initiation of children into the world of adult politics. These Arendtian accounts may seem highly unpersuasive today when we face the situation of children in camps at the US-Mexican border. We may be inclined to see this violence against children as deeply political and in need of a hyperpolitical notion and praxis of education. However, part of this tragedy is that the children are being forced into the anti-politics of violence which denies them their ontological newness, their natality, and, consequently, the pre-political education that responsible adults must love the world enough to provide. When we read the situation at the border in this way, we are able to take into account the child as such, their phenomenological personhood, and avoid temptations to use them as instrumental political objects—even for the sake of their own liberation. In other words, my argument will be for an Arendtian understanding of violence and education in order to not only indulge in action but to also avoid forgetting to think what we are doing, above all what we are doing to the detained children at the Mexico-U.S. border.

Approach and Sources:
My approach will be philosophical; I will rely on Arendt’s well-known essay, “The Crisis of Education” and her books On Violence and The Human Condition.

Significance:
The significance of this paper should be twofold. First, while Arendt’s thought has become relatively well-known within educational studies, the categorical distinctions that operate within her political theory that at the very least clash prima facie with Deweyan or Freirean or Derridean and other overtly political conceptions of violence and/or education, has not been fully appreciated. Unlike the slogan “everything is political,” Arendt’s ideas do not present an undifferentiated and overdetermined notion of politics, and this allows us to think of education’s value and purpose in a new and different way. Second, this paper should help to avoid similar overextensions in the unique role that children play in the immigration crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border. We might analogize between the imagery of this moment of the image of the body of Emmet Till during the Civil Rights era. I do not mean to pose normative questions, but to remind us to never forget the phenomenological heart of the tragedy in the objectification of the unique personhood of the child that should never be forgotten.

Author

• Samuel Rocha, The University of British Columbia