Refuge in Rootedness: Hannah Arendt & Simone Weil on Refugee Subjectivities

• In Event: Migration and the Wall

Abstract

In 1943, two Jewish women, driven from their homelands by the Nazi’s, turned their attention to the conditions of their exile. In Hannah Arendt’s seminal essay, “We Refugees,” she describes the remarkable ease with which the Jewish refugees of the 1930s and 1940s embraced their new countries. When the Jews became German, they forgot their Jewishness. When they became French they forgot their Germanness. When they became Americans, they forgot their French patriotism. In L’Enracinement, Simone Weil declared the rooted collectivity to be a vital need of the soul. She wrote, emphatically, “Every human being needs to have multiple roots,” in part because she recognized this phenomenon nowhere in the Europe of her times. For Arendt, the problem is that new roots are so easily planted that the old ones are let to whither and die. For Weil, on the other hand, roots are just as difficult to plant as they are to maintain. This paper will outline the positions of these two thinkers with an eye towards the contemporary era in which the status of the uprooted and the refugee can accurately be described as part and parcel of the modern condition. In order to contextualize these readings for the 21st Century migration crises I will place Weil and Arendt in conversation with contemporary discourse on borders and boundaries in the writings of Ayten Gondogdu and Hagar Kotef. Moreover, it will pose the questions of what rootedness looks like in the contemporary era, if refugees can so easily forget the places from which they are separated now as they did in Arendt’s times, and what would it mean for uprooted people to plant and maintain multiple, non-geographical, roots in a time when regimes in many countries seek to displace or refuse them.

Author

• Scott Benjamin Ritner, Temple University