Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint

89 Pages·2012·0.4 MB·English

by  William V. Spanos

Exiles in the City
To all the exiles in the world:
this testament to the witness
of two, who,
“between domains,
between forms,
between homes,
and between languages,”
saw and spoke the truth
to power
G
Exiles in the City
Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint
William v. Spanos
ThE OhiO ST aTE UnivErSiTy PrESS • COlUmb US
Copyright © 2012 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spanos, William V.
Exiles in the city : Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in counterpoint / William V. Spanos.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8142-1193-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-1193-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN
978-0-8142-9294-5 (cd-rom)
1. Politics and literature. 2. Criticism—Political aspects. 3. Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975—Criti-
cism and interpretation. 4. Said, Edward W.—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Emigration and
immigration—Political aspects. 6. Exiles. I. Title.
PN51.S637 2012
320.092'2—dc23
2011048193
Cover design by Thao Thai
Type set Adobe Minion Prio
Text design by Juliet Williams
Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na-
tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
ANSI Z39.48–1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Those few refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency”
[the “conscious pariahs”], get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advan-
tage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege
of Gentiles. . . . Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their
people—if they keep their identity.
—Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” (1943)
Yet it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the
resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, is now
shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamic of culture to its
unhoused, de-centered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the
migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the polit-
ical figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages.
—Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
Irreparable means that these things [the beings of being] are consigned without rem-
edy to their being-thus, that they are precisely and only their thus . . . ; but irreparable
also means that for them there is literally no shelter possible, that in their being-thus
they are absolutely exposed, absolutely abandoned.
—Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community
G
COnTEnTS
acknowledgments ix
inTrOdUCTiOn 1
ChaPTEr 1 The devastation of language under the dictatorship of the
Public realm: reading Global american with hannah arendt 5
ChaPTEr 2 The Exilic Consciousness and the imperatives of betweenness 49
ChaPTEr 3 The Calling and the Question Concerning the Secular 64
ChaPTEr 4 The Exodus Story and the Zionist march 104
ChaPTEr 5 hannah arendt and Edward W. Said: an affiliation in Counterpoint 141
notes 207
bibliography 252
index 259
G
aCknOWlEdGmEnTS
Exiles in the City had its origins in a distant and now rather murky past, but
one moment of that inaugural time stands out clearly in my mind. It was in
May of 1982, when David Farrell Krell, one of Martin Heidegger’s ablest crit-
ics and translators, invited me to give a series of lectures on the American
reception of the controversial philosopher at the universities of Mannheim,
Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Freiburg in Germany. By that time, the French
discovery of Heidegger, particularly his “deconstructive” side, had gone far to
minimize his Nazi affiliations. But in Germany, at least in German academia,
he was still suspect, as I found in the always polite but invariably resistant
responses to my efforts to draw out the radically progressive implications of
his “de-struction” of the Western philosophical tradition. After my last lec-
ture at Freiburg, my generous host drove me to Todtnauberg to visit the cabin
high up in the Black Forest where Heidegger did most of his writing. We were
standing by a trough drinking spring water pouring out of a carved head of
a bear or wolf adjacent to the cabin and talking about the Holzwegen—the
indissoluble relationality of light and shadow so fundamental to Heidegger’s
thinking. Out of what seemed the clear blue, but, I learned shortly after, was
actually triggered by the suspicion with which my talks had been met by my
German audiences, David told me of the recent publication of For Love of
the World, a massive, richly documented biography of Hannah Arendt by
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, in which, in the process of acknowledging her intel-
lectual debts, informed her readers that she had not been given access to the
life-long Arendt–Heidegger correspondence that had its origins in the love
affair they had when she was his student at Marburg University beginning in
ix
x • acknowledgments
1925. In contrast, David told me in confidence, but without going into the
reasons, that the Heidegger family, despite its having sequestered the cor-
respondence for three generations, had recently allowed him to look at it,
and that the eventual publication of the correspondence would disclose an
image of Heidegger that was quite different from the anti-Semitic and Nazi
Heidegger who, through the “scholarship” of the traditionalist humanists he
and the French poststructuralists had called into question, was beginning to
re-emerge.
David’s prediction, clearly, did not turned out to be the case. But his
summary of the life-long relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin
Heidegger—one, he underscored, that was maintained primarily by Han-
nah’s initiative—in the context of a complex human history that had been
reduced to “Jew” and “German anti-Semitic Gentile” made her seem to me
an extraordinarily attractive figure. And this impression was deepened by
David’s enthusiastic portrayal of Arendt’s generous mind and, not least, by his
nuanced affirmation of the continuity between her and Heidegger’s efforts to
rethink thinking—the legacy of the Western tradition—of which I was only
vaguely aware at the time. As a result of David’s compelling conjuration of
the image of Hannah Arendt into the shadows and light of the Holzwegen, I
decided then and there to immerse myself in her writing after I returned to
the United States.
In the fall of 1997, after teaching a number of graduate courses on Hei-
degger in which I had invoked Arendt’s work, particularly The Human Condi-
tion, in a preliminary way, I decided that I was ready to teach a first graduate
seminar on Heidegger and Arendt. In that course, we explored, as the course
description attests, “the relationship between Heidegger’s ontological inquiry
into the question of being and Hannah Arendt’s political inquiry into the
question of the polis in the light of the mounting representation of Heidegger’s
philosophical writing (by important thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas) as
complicitous with Nazism and anti-Semitism.” This was followed by a gradu-
ate seminar on Michel Foucault and Edward Said in the fall of 1999, and,
then, in the spring of 2000, a seminar on Arendt alone, this time attempt-
ing to show that “a too exclusive focus on Arendt’s ‘Habermasian’ affinities
deflects attention away from the train of thought from which her thinking
derived: that which proceeds from Nietzsche through Heidegger and culmi-
nates in the poststructuralist theory.” Following two further graduate courses
on “The Criticism of Foucault and Said” (Fall 2004) and “Foucault, Said, and
Globalization” (Spring 2007), which occasionally invoked Arendt, this peda-
gogical itinerary that had begun in Todtnauberg in 1982 culminated in the
fall of 2009 in a graduate seminar on Arendt, Foucault, and Said, in which
acknowledgments • xi
we considered “1) the contested relationship between Michel Foucault and
Edward Said as it pertains to the question of the secular/humanism; and 2)
the relationship, all too often unremarked, between Said’s and Arendt’s par-
ticular interest in the now globally central issue of the Middle East, not least,
the highly fraught question of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian people.”
What seemed on the surface to have been a long errant process turned out to
be an improvisational one that, in fact, brought the singular voices of Arendt
and Said, “conscious pariah” and “exilic consciousness” or “non-Jewish Jew”
and “non-Palestinian Palestinian,” together in intimate strife—or counter-
point—in my mind. Thus, this belated retrieval of that inaugural occasion in
Todtnauberg in illo tempore and my expression of gratitude to David Farrell
Krell.
During that long period of time between David Krell’s introduction of
Hannah Arendt’s work to me and the completion of this book, I not only
incurred many intellectual debts, but also instigated the opposition of various
other colleagues who have thought my reconstellation of Edward Said into
an affiliative context that includes Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger,
Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou to
be misconceived. Though I have not change my mind, I nevertheless, and in
the spirit of dialogue, offer these unnamed latter critics my sincere thanks
for compelling me to consider more deeply my all-too-easy original ver-
sion of this affiliation. As to the former they are far too many to acknowl-
edge adequately in this limited space. But it would be remiss of me not to
express my gratitude to a number of students in those seminars who con-
tributed, without knowing it, to that improvisational process that eventu-
ally brought the singular voices of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said into
contrapuntal play in my mind. They include Assimina Karavanta, Andrew
Martino, Soenke Zehle, Marina Zaharopol (1997); Robin Andreason, Monica
O’Brien; Evi Haggipavlu, Michael Logan, James Martin, Firat Oruc, Ruth
Schnabel (2000); Evrim Engin, Saygun Gokariksel, Susan McGee, Taras Sak,
Ayse Temiz (2004); Tamkin Hussain, David Michelson, Jame Stanescu, Kevin
Volk, Charles Wesley, Laura White (2007); and James Capozzi, Shawn Jascin-
ski, Mary DiNapoli, Guy Risko, Melissa Sande, and Ubaraj Katawal (2009).
On a more personal level, I wish to express a very special thanks to my
longstanding SUNY Binghamton colleagues and friends Jim Stark of the Art
Department and David Bartine and Susan Strehle of the English Department.
To David, for his abiding interest in and support of my work, but also for
the substantial contributions he made to this book by way of the numerous
biweekly conversations we had over beer at The Ale House while I was writ-
ing it. I am, above all, grateful to him for sharing with me his encyclopedic
xii • acknowledgments
expertise in the technical aspects of classical music and, more particularly, his
deep and subtle understanding of Edward Said’s writing in that field. I would
be happy to know that my contributions to those intense and often startlingly
luminous conversations were half as productive for him as they were for me.
To Susan, not only for graciously tolerating my obsessive harangues in the
process of writing, but also for those sudden insights that changed the direc-
tion of my thinking. To Jim, for the resonant cover of this book. Above all,
I, once again—and with measureless and abiding love—want to express my
deepest thanks to my son, Adam, for being there. Without his interest and
invariably wise commentary on the book while it was in progress, particu-
larly on those parts pertaining to the Palestinian struggle—and, not least, his
uncanny attunement to the agonic polyphonic play struggling to articulate
itself in its pages—it would no doubt have ended in utter cacophony. If this
play has not been fully realized in what follows, it is not the consequence of
his being misguided, but of the clumsiness of my own efforts.
Finally, I thank, with pleasure, Sandy Crooms, senior editor of The Ohio
State University Press for her faith in my controversial project and to the staff
members of the press for their patience, generosity, and efficiency in guid-
ing the original manuscript through the publication process. Chapters 1 and
4, are considerably revised versions of previously published essays originally
entitled “Global American: The Devastation of Language under the Dictator-
ship of the Public Realm,” Symplokē, vol. 16, no. 1–2 (Spring–Fall 2009); and
“Edward W. Said and Zionism: Rethinking the Exodus Story,” boundary 2,
vol. 37, no. 1 (Spring 2010). I wish to thank the editors of these journals, Jef-
frey Di Leo and Paul A. Bové, respectively, for permission to reprint.