Abstrakt:

Anthropology, like Hannah Arendt, wrestles with its relationship to modernity. The discipline’s struggle is perhaps best exemplified in the ongoing calls from decolonial anthropology to rethink the atomized, bounded subject of Western political philosophy. This subject, as Fanon makes clear, underpins Western epistemic violence against the colonized. Arendt reached a similar conclusion about Europe’s own violence against itself, but from a different, though inter-related, historical experience. If centuries of dehumanization diminished the colonized as political beings, at least, then its counterpart appeared in totalitarianism and the Holocaust on European soil during several intense decades of the twentieth century. In both experiences, specific practices reduced people to bounded, atomized, and homogenized subjects that prepared them for their exploitation and disposal. By implication, then, people are not, by nature, such bounded entities even if liberal philosophy insists otherwise. Much of Arendt’s subsequent career after the 1951 publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism was therefore committed to articulating a view of political life premised upon a fuller and more empirically accurate view of human subjectivity. In this quest, she identified relational subjects who could empower themselves to (re)constitute their polities and each other through political action. This talk will unpack Arendt’s views on these matters, and argue, counterintuitively, that her work supports anthropology’s commitments to decolonization and the search for alternative forms of democracy.

Bio:

Greg Feldman is a political anthropologist and Professor of Political Science at the University of Windsor in Canada. He focuses on populist politics, political action, fascism and totalitarianism, migration along with critical perspectives on sovereignty and security. He is the editor of Today’s Totalitarianism, a web-based forum discussing the global trends toward the centralization of executive power, the silencing of political opposition, and the promotion of cultural chauvinism. He is the author of four books including The Gray Zone: Sovereignty, Human Smuggling, and Undercover Police Investigation in Europe (Stanford University Press 2019) and The Subject of Sovereignty: Relationality and the Pivot Past Liberalism (Berghahn Books 2024). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled The Logic of the Ludicrous: How Mainstream Assumptions Animate Extremist Arguments.