Dark Times: Jewishness as a Matrix of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought : Jewishness and Politics according to Hannah Arendt

Résumé 0

H. Arendt discovered politics in 1933, after the rise of Nazism in Germany. The point of departure for her political thought was an examination of the “Pariah ”, a figure she interprets as a “stateless ” human being deprived of all rights. During the war, this analysis was to inspire her theory of totalitarianism as a power system that destroys political life. From the 1950s onwards, her attention was mainly devoted to the concept of “public space ” – the antithesis of totalitarianism – which she reformulates by renewing the tradition of Atlantic republicanism. This article tries to grasp both the strength and the limitations of a political thought elaborated through the prism of the “Jewish question ” : on the one hand, a conception of politics as the realm of visibility and commitment as opposed to the “worldlessness ” of the Pariah ; on the other hand, the refusal to see social oppression as an obstacle to constructing a republican conception of citizenship.