European Journal of Political Theory-2012-Gündo-du-4-24

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'Perplexities of the rights of man': Arendt on the aporias of human rights

Ayten Gndogdu
European Journal of Political Theory 2012 11: 4 originally published online 21 September
2011
DOI: 10.1177/1474885111417781
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Perplexities of the rights of

man: Arendt on the aporias
of human rights
European Journal of Political Theory

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DOI: 10.1177/1474885111417781
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Ayten Gundogdu
Barnard College-Columbia University
Abstract
This article provides a new interpretation of Hannah Arendts critical analysis of the
perplexities of the Rights of Man by drawing attention to its overlooked methodological orientations, especially its aporetic nature. Arendts critique is aporetic as it centres on the paradoxes of human rights and analyses them by putting into practice a
mode of inquiry that she associates with Socrates. The article challenges the conventional understanding of aporia as a paralysing impasse and suggests that aporetic thinking
can create possibilities of rethinking key concepts especially in times of crises. To make
this point, I respond to Jacques Rancie`res criticism that the paradoxes introduced by
Arendt paralyse thinking and doom human rights to an inevitable destiny of failure. I
argue that, precisely because of its aporetic nature, Arendts critique attends to possibilities of rethinking and reinventing human rights, as can be seen in her articulation of
a right to have rights.
Keywords
aporia, Arendt, human rights, Rancie`re, Rights of Man, Socrates
Writing after the Second World War, Hannah Arendt inquired into the challenges
posed by massive scales of population displacements in the 20th century, which
rendered millions of people stateless. Those who were stateless, she argued, found
themselves in a condition of rightlessness as they lost not only their citizenship
rights but also their human rights.1 Arendt identied a paradox in this precarious
condition: precisely when the stateless appeared as nothing more than human, it
proved very dicult, if not impossible, for them to claim the allegedly inalienable
rights they were entitled to by virtue of being born human. She took this paradox
as a symptom of the perplexities of the Rights of Man and oered one of the most
powerful criticisms of human rights.
Corresponding author:
Ayten Gundogdu, Department of Political Science, Barnard College-Columbia University, 418-A Lehman Hall,
3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598, USA
Email: agundogdu@barnard.edu
Gundogdu
Arendts critical analysis of human rights has received much scholarly attention.
While some political theorists have turned to her critique to grapple with the
challenging problems posed by the contemporary plight of non-citizens to the
existing institutional and normative frameworks of human rights,2 others have
deployed it to rethink politics of human rights in terms of democratic and associational practices of claiming rights.3 Yet another group of scholars have drawn on
Arendts critique for the purposes of nding less conventional foundations and
justications for human rights.4
This article joins these scholarly eorts to rethink human rights along Arendtian
lines. However, it also makes the argument that this rethinking is enabled by an
overlooked dimension of Arendts critique: its aporetic nature. Arendts critique is
aporetic as it is centred on the perplexities or paradoxes pervading its object of
study, as the title of the section on human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism
indicates (i.e. perplexities of the Rights of Man or die Aporien der
Menschenrechte in the German version).5 In addition, it is aporetic in the sense
that it puts into practice a mode of thinking that Arendt associates mainly with
Socrates. Aporetic thinking starts with ordinary concepts of political life (e.g. justice, happiness, courage), calls into question their conventional understandings and
opens up the possibilities of thinking them anew. I argue that Arendt undertakes
such an aporetic inquiry in response to the crisis of human rights in the early 20th
century.
Attending to this aporetic dimension, illuminating the methodological orientations of Arendts inquiry, is crucial since her analysis, which has proved to be
inspiring for many, has not been immune to criticism. In one of the most powerful
criticisms provided to date, Jacques Rancie`re has argued that Arendts analysis of
human rights paralyses our political imagination with the paradoxes it introduces
and makes it impossible for us to consider the democratic potential of modern
rights declarations. In Rancie`res reading, Arendts critique traces the origins of
problems such as statelessness to the paradoxes in the early formulations of human
rights and attributes to these rights an inevitable destiny of inecacy or failure.6
Examining the methodological orientations of Arendts critique is crucial to
address this deeply embedded scepticism about its premises and conclusions.
In the rst section of the article, I delineate the main contours of aporetic
inquiry by turning to Arendts discussion of Socrates in The Life of The Mind
and Promise of Politics. Arendts understanding of aporia is crucially dierent
from its conventional understanding as a paralysing structure. Indeed, as her discussion of Socrates indicates, facing up to the perplexities arising from our prevailing assumptions about key concepts is the very condition of possibility for
thinking these concepts anew. Since the goal of this section is to identify and
explain what Arendt nds promising in the example of Socrates, I focus exclusively
on her interpretation of Socrates, without questioning the validity of her claims
about the Socratic method.7 The second section reconstructs the main arguments
of Arendts critique of human rights, elaborated particularly in The Origins of
Totalitarianism and On Revolution, in the light of the discussion of Socratic
European Journal of Political Theory 11(1)
aporetic inquiry. On the basis of this interpretive work, the third section analyses
the distinctive aspects of Arendts critique of human rights particularly in response
to the criticisms raised by Jacques Rancie`re. Read as an aporetic inquiry, Arendts
critique does not attribute an inevitable destiny to the paradoxes of human rights.
As dierent from more recent criticisms of human rights, especially the one oered
by Giorgio Agamben, Arendts analysis attends to the multiple, equivocal and
contingent historical trajectories of these rights. Most importantly, it recognizes
the possibility that the paradoxes of human rights can be politically navigated to
contest inequality, as can be seen in Arendts analysis of the Dreyfus aair and her
articulation of a right to have rights.
Aporetic thinking: methodological orientations

of Arendts critique
Arendts critique of human rights takes its starting point from the puzzling condition of the stateless who found themselves deprived of not only citizenship rights
but also human rights. Resisting the temptation to understand this troubling condition as an unfortunate exception to an otherwise sane and normal rule, Arendt
analyses it as a symptom of some paradoxes deeply embedded in human rights
since their early formulations in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen.8
On the one hand, these rights were assumed to be natural; individuals were
entitled to them by virtue of being born as human beings.9 As distinct from
rights that took their ground from history and changed from one community to
the other, the rights of man were derived from human nature that was assumed to
be universally shared and relatively stable.10 They were the rights attached to all
human beings abstracted from any belonging or membership in a political community.11 On the other hand, the declaration of these allegedly natural, abstract
and inalienable rights was coeval with the emergence of the nation-state. Within the
context of the nation-state, rights of man came to stand for national rights.12 In
an international system organized around the principle of nationality, human
rights seemed to be unenforceable in the case of individuals deprived of citizenship
in any sovereign state, as manifested in the condition of millions of stateless people
who lost their political membership and became nothing but human.13
Arendts inquiry is centred on the paradoxes, perplexities or aporias of human
rights, and we usually associate these terms with some kind of an irresolvable
logical quandary that is in many ways paralysing for thought. Indeed, this is the
meaning that is implicit in Jacques Rancie`res recent criticisms of Arendt:
She makes them [Rights of Man] a quandary, which can be put as follows: either the
rights of the citizen are the rights of man but the rights of man are the rights of the
unpoliticized person; they are the rights of those who have no rights, which amounts
to nothing or the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, the rights attached to the
fact of being a citizen of such or such constitutional state. This means that they are the
Gundogdu
rights of those who have rights, which amounts to a tautology. . . . Either a void or a
tautology, and, in both cases, a deceptive trick, such is the lock that she [Arendt]
builds.14
In this rendering, an analysis centred on paradoxes is debilitating as it locks

thought in a binary logic human rights are either the rights of those who are cast
as subjects without any rights (e.g. stateless or poor) or merely the rights of citizens
who already have rights. Arendts reading, Rancie`re argues, blinds us to the political possibilities that release us from the paralysing grip of these conundrums as it
fails to see how the equivocality in the declaration, arising from the simultaneous
invocation of man and citizen as the subject of rights, opens up spaces for
political contestation.
In what follows, I provide an alternative account that foregrounds the critical
potential of Arendts inquiry by revisiting her analysis of aporetic thinking in her
discussion of Socrates. In my rendering, thinking through perplexities and paradoxes is far from paralysing. In fact, aporetic thinking can be seen as the very
condition of possibility for rearticulating human rights beyond the binaries that
prevail in the conventional understandings of these rights (e.g. man/citizen, universal/particular, nature/history). This reinterpretation recasts tension and contradiction, as Jill Frank puts it in a dierent context, not as stymying the possibilities
for political action nor as making moot frameworks of falsity and truth, but rather
as opening the way to less binary ways of thinking about age-old problems and
dilemmas.15
In her analysis of thinking in The Life of the Mind, Arendt describes Socratic
dialogues, inquiring into key concepts of political vocabulary, as aporetic for two
reasons. First, they are aporetic as they are centred on perplexities arising from our
conventional assumptions about ordinary concepts. Second, they are aporetic also
because of their resistance to resolving these perplexities by turning to an absolute
principle or conclusive truth.
Socratic dialogues centre on very simple, everyday concepts that are part and
parcel of everyday speech.16 For Arendt, they are valuable precisely because of this
focus; since we invoke these terms very frequently, we rarely think about their
meanings. In each dialogue, Socrates urges his interlocutors to give an account
of the terms of their everyday vocabulary, and points to the perplexities that these
accounts result in. Arendt underscores that these perplexities are not riddles to
which Socrates has readymade answers; Socrates himself is deeply puzzled by
them and sincerely interested in seeing whether his puzzlement is shared by his
interlocutors.17
In Arendts reading, Socratic dialogues are aporetic also because they refrain
from resorting to an incontrovertible truth to resolve these perplexities. At times,
Arendt describes the way Socrates proceeds as circular, and this seems to indicate
that aporetic thinking leads to nothing other than the innite regress of logical
paradoxes.18 Yet, in Arendts rendering, this movement from one perplexity to the
other is promising precisely because of its resistance to impose some kind of an
absolute principle for nding a nal resolution to these challenging political and
ethical dilemmas. As Socrates inquires into perplexities arising from unexamined
beliefs, his goal is not to give his interlocutors the truth. Refraining from the philosophical temptation to resolve the challenges arising from the contingencies of
politics by resorting to an incontestable truth, Socrates urges his interlocutors to
nd the truthfulness of their own opinions by carefully examining them in an
incessant dialogue. All opinions, according to Arendt, are in need of such intersubjective armation that involves critical assessment.19
The critical import of aporetic thinking becomes clear especially in Arendts
discussion of the metaphors used to describe Socrates. As a gady, Socrates
demands his interlocutors to give an account of their taken-for-granted opinions,
as he stings and provokes them into thinking. For Arendt, aporetic thinking
consists not merely of a provocation or prodding though; it also entails midwifery
or [delivering] others of their thoughts.20 Socrates purges his interlocutors of
their unexamined pre-judgments that would prevent them from thinking.21
Probably, the most interesting analogy is that of the electric ray. Thinking of
Socrates as this sh that can paralyse and benumb with its electric discharges
evokes a negative image of aporetic inquiry precisely the image that I am questioning. However, as Arendt underscores, what looks paralysing from outside,
from the standpoint of ordinary human aairs, is indeed a productive moment
as it is felt as the highest state of being active and alive.22
When these three metaphors are taken together, aporetic thinking assumes a
much more critical function than what the conventional meaning of aporia indicates. The Greek word aporos literally means without passage, and denotes an
uncrossable and untreadable path, or an impasse.23 Conventionally understood as
a paralysing structure blocking the way and setting obstacles to thinking, aporia, in
Arendts work, becomes the very condition of possibility for thinking our key
concepts anew. Aporetic thinking assumes a crucial political and ethical import
particularly in times of crisis when one can no longer rely on existing rules or laws
to tell the right from wrong, beautiful from ugly.24 Under these conditions,
aporetic thinking can have a liberating eect on the faculty of judgement,
which, according to Arendt, is the most political of mans abilities as it helps us
decide in the absence of given rules under which a particular case or phenomenon
can be subsumed.25
As I will discuss, Arendts critique of human rights engages in the practice of
aporetic thinking she associates with Socrates. Similar to Socrates, Arendt takes a
crucial term of our political vocabulary i.e. human rights and looks at the
conventional accounts of what this term means. The very title of her article on
human rights, published shortly before Origins, resonates with the ti esti (i.e. what
is it?) questions that instigate aporetic inquiry in Socratic dialogues: The Rights
of Man: What are They?26 Just like the everyday concepts that Socrates inquired
into, the term human rights had become slippery:27 [R]ecent attempts to frame a
new bill of human rights have demonstrated that no one seems able to dene with
any assurance what these general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of
Gundogdu
citizens, really are.28 More crucially, these attempts failed to attend to the one
human right that the plight of the stateless seemed to reveal: the right to belong to
a political community (i.e. a right to have rights).29 In response to this problem,
Arendt undertakes an aporetic inquiry that centres on the perplexities of human
rights one that engages in a rethinking so as to render the concept meaningful
again.30
Hence, the goal of Arendts aporetic inquiry is not to demonstrate that human
rights are either void or tautological, to use Rancie`res terms,31 but instead to open
a critical space for their revaluation. In ways similar to the Socratic dialogues,
which underscore that all of our opinions are in need of intersubjective armation
to become truthful, Arendts critique highlights that human rights lose their meaningfulness without practices of scrutinizing our conventional assumptions about
them. Only such practices can alert us to how these assumptions as unexamined
pre-judgments stand in the way of a new articulation that would allow human
rights to be more responsive to crises inaugurated by unprecedented forms of
injustice such as the ones encountered by the stateless in the early 20th century.
Perplexities of the Rights of Man

Arendts analysis of the plight of the stateless results in a critical inquiry that
centres on the constitutive tensions of human rights as manifested in modern
rights declarations, especially the 1789 Declaration. In what follows I will discuss
two ways in which aporias gure in Arendts analysis of human rights. First,
human rights give rise to perplexities because of their ultimate groundlessness.
Despite endless search for normative foundations to clarify their subject, scope
and ground, they continue to be dened in terms of the tensions between man/
citizen, universal/particular, natural/historical tensions that can turn out to be
explosive in some contexts. Second, human rights are perplexing also due to their
tense, and at times even conictual, relationship with the institutional structures
established to protect them. To have at least some permanence, they are in need of
institutions, and yet these same institutions can also end up undermining the possibilities of claiming and exercising human rights. I suggest that Arendts critique is
aporetic as it centres on these perplexities to understand the problems encountered
by the stateless and resists the temptation to resolve them by resorting to an
absolute.
Particularly Arendts discussion of the Rights of Man in On Revolution calls
attention to the perplexities arising from the groundlessness of modern rights declarations. Whereas in the past a new body politic could legitimate its founding with
reference to divine authority, secularization in the modern age leaves political
actors with the problem of nding a new authority for the laws, rights and institutions they establish.32 This problem attending the founding of any body politic in
the modern era becomes manifest especially in the declarations of rights: There is
no period in history to which the Declaration of the Rights of Man could have
harkened back. . . inalienable political rights of all men by virtue of birth would
10
have appeared to all ages prior to our own as they appeared to Burke a contradiction in terms.33 As utterances bringing forth the rights that they assert to be
already existing, modern declarations, to use the words of Costas Douzinas, install
the radical contingency of linguistic proclamation into the heart of constitutional
arrangements.34 This radical contingency can be seen, for example, in Arendts
account of the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence, which
announces the rights declared to be self-evident yet also adds, We hold these
truths to be self-evident.35 Arendts emphasis on we hold indicates that rights
owe their existence ultimately to our acts of declaring and claiming them and that
these rights cannot be derived from any pre-existing ground.36
The perplexities arising from this groundlessness can be seen in the equivocal
formulations of rights, especially in the 1789 Declaration that proclaims the subjects of these rights to be both man and citizen. This aporia reverberates in the
other constitutive tensions pervading the declaration; the scope of these rights,
whether they are universal or particular, is undecided: if they are the rights of
man, they are universal entitlements regardless of membership in a political community; if they are, however, rights of citizen, then they are rights guaranteed by
particular communities. The nature of these rights is similarly ambivalent; the
declaration presenting them as natural, prepolitical rights is proclaimed by a specic political community in a particular historical context (as can be seen in the
American Declarations emphasis on we hold).
There is the temptation to turn to an absolute to resolve the perplexities attending such declarations, or any new beginning, in the modern era, as can be seen in
the recourse to nature as a new transcendent source of authority or an absolute
from which to derive authority for law and power.37 However, Arendt nds this
resolution problematic particularly in the light of statelessness as it relies on an
abstract human being who seemed to exist nowhere and evades the importance
of political community for guaranteeing human rights.38 Positing nature to resolve
the aporias arising from the groundlessness of human rights creates the illusion that
individuals are subjects of rights in their natural condition. Yet, the condition of
the stateless deprived of any political status reveals the problems of this assumption. Finding themselves in a kind of state of nature, the stateless persons are at
best perceived as objects of charity deserving our compassion as fellow human
beings sharing the same innate qualities with us and at worst, as savages whose
humanity is barely recognizable and whose alienness is perceived as threatening.39
Nature has long been discredited as the foundation of human rights. However,
Arendts aporetic inquiry has crucial implications even in a postmetaphysical age
that has moved away from such absolute grounds. The continuing theoretical
debates on the normative foundations of human rights suggest that the perplexities
arising from the groundlessness of these rights are still not easy to come to grips
with. Indeed, the appeal of resolving the political and ethical dilemmas of such
groundlessness by establishing foundations, albeit not metaphysical ones, is demonstrated by the scholarly debates on Arendts understanding of human rights.
Arendts critical readers, including Seyla Benhabib, see the lack of normative
Gundogdu
11
foundations in her analysis of human rights as an unresolved problem.40 Scholars

such as Peg Birmingham and Serena Parekh, however, defend Arendt against these
criticisms precisely by deriving normative foundations for human rights from her
political theory.41 When Arendts critique is read as an aporetic inquiry, however,
the lack of foundations is not a problem awaiting a solution; it is indeed in tune
with a mode of thinking that refuses to establish nal resolutions for the political
and ethical dilemmas arising from the groundlessness of human rights. Taking us
away from a project of philosophical foundation-giving,42 this thinking instead
turns our attention to how political actors themselves navigate these political and
ethical dilemmas as they declare, invent or claim rights within changing historical
circumstances (as will be seen in the analysis of Dreyfus aair in the next section).
Arendts resistance to invoking an absolute to resolve the perplexities of modern
declarations, linking her analysis of human rights to Socratic aporetic inquiry, is
also motivated by a practical concern. A thinking centred on foundations can give
us the illusion of security and stability and turn our attention away from questions
of how human rights can be politically guaranteed. For Arendt, human rights are
in need of political practices and institutions that can provide relatively permanent
guarantees: We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the
strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.43 Only articial, conventional or man-made laws can give permanence to these mutual guarantees of political equality. Human rights are in need of such articial inventions if
they are to be eective; indeed, Arendt underlines the inecacy of all declarations,
proclamations, or enumerations of human rights that were not immediately incorporated into positive law, the law of the land.44 Yet her account also suggests that
the very institutional structures that we establish to have relatively permanent
guarantees can end up undermining these rights.45 Arendts analysis of this constitutive tension between human rights and the institutional structures established
to protect them also underscores the aporetic dimension of her critique.
The 1789 Declaration itself is an embodiment of this paradox to the extent that
it simultaneously posits nature as the foundation of the Rights of Man and implicitly acknowledges that these rights are in need of articial institutions with its
coeval articulation of national sovereignty. The Declaration announces a set of
inalienable rights and suggests that the nation was subject to the laws that would
ow from the Rights of Man. It establishes the Rights of Man as the source of all
political power and the foundation-stone of the body politic.46 Yet, it simultaneously declares that nation to be sovereign and entrusts it with the guarantee of
rights.
Arendts analysis of the nation-state reveals the tension between human rights
and the institutions that are entrusted with their protection. The institutional
framework of the nation-state rests on a precarious balance between nation and
state. State legitimizes itself as the supreme legal institution in charge of the
protection of all inhabitants in its territory, regardless of their nationality.
Nation, however, is an exclusive community composed of those who belong by
right of origin and fact of birth.47 Arendt argues that the precarious balance
12
established between nation and state was imperilled particularly with the rise of
national consciousness, which turned the nation into a new absolute. Analysing
the conquest of state by the nation, she underscores how the state lost its representative function and gradually became an instrument of the nation. Through this
gradual conquest, nationalism identied citizens only with those who were
nationals.48 As a result, the equivocality between the rights of man and the
rights of citizen, which could have been politically navigated to claim equality,
was increasingly eaced in the name of the rights of nationals within the context
of the nation-state. As the egalitarian promises of modern rights were further
undermined with the rise of imperialism and emergence of tribal or ethnic nationalisms, it became even more dicult to turn the equivocal invocation of the rights
of man and citizen into a site of political contestation to claim rights for those who
are not nationals.
Can we think of other institutional structures that provide better guarantees for
human rights and attenuate the violent eects of these constitutive tensions that we
see in the nation-state? Very briey put, the aporetic inquiry outlined here suggests
that, although some institutional structures might be more promising in terms of
oering eective guarantees for equal rights, no institutional form, including a
denationalized, post-national or cosmopolitan one, will fully resolve the tensions
between rights and their institutional protections. To illustrate this point, I will
briey discuss Arendts arguments in favour of limited sovereignty and her reections on world government and citizenship.
Although Arendt provides us with one of the most powerful criticisms of sovereignty,49 in a puzzling section of The Human Condition, she also makes room for
what she describes as limited sovereignty: Sovereignty, which is always spurious
if claimed by an isolated single entity, be it the individual entity of the person or
the collective entity of a nation, assumes, in the case of many men mutually bound
by promises, a certain limited reality.50 This limited sovereignty, bound by mutual
promises given by those constituting the political community, one can argue,
would provide more eective guarantees for human rights. Indeed, some scholars
suggest that Arendts analysis points to a territorially bound state with the institutional framework of a republican federation as the guarantor of rights.51 Would
such a republican framework resolve the aporias of human rights? Although
Arendt does not address this question explicitly, given that the mutual promises
are not completely immune to the contingency and fragility characteristic of
human action, they can provide guarantees that are only relatively permanent.
In the face of this contingency and fragility, political actors still need to be attentive to how the republican structures established to furnish guarantees for equality
can end up losing their potency, or even worse, create their own violent
exclusions.52
Could post-national, or even cosmopolitan, structures oer resolutions to the
constitutive tensions that seem to pervade institutional forms centred on the principle of sovereign territoriality? Could such structures provide conclusive answers
to the aporias of human rights, especially those arising from what Seyla Benhabib
Gundogdu
13
refers to as the paradox of democratic self-determination?53 Arendts very brief

discussions of world government, world citizenship and world-wide federation in
dierent contexts indicate that even a cosmopolitan framework would not fully
resolve the aporias arising from the tense relationship between human rights and
their institutional guarantees. These aporias would certainly be transformed and
redened in a cosmopolitan setting, and even then, not always to the eect of
providing more stable guarantees for human rights. For example, Arendts brief
invocation of the possibility of a world government at the very end of her analysis
of human rights in Origins suggests that even post-national structures can end up
drawing violent distinctions between insiders and outsiders. From Arendts perspective, a world government does not eliminate the possibility that a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude. . . that for humanity as a whole it
would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.54 Even short of such liquidation,
there is no guarantee that a world government would protect human rights and
maintain human plurality. Indeed, as this world government tries to achieve
common bonds among dierent peoples, it can end up destroying dierences, creating a horridly shallow unity and giving rise to the forbidding nightmare of
tyranny.55 Similarly, a world citizenship does not necessarily free us from the
constitutive tensions between rights and their institutional protections, especially
given the possibility that it can end up eradicating dierences between citizens of a
diverse range of political communities.56 Even more nuanced articulations of cosmopolitanism do not seem to be impervious to such dangers. A good example in
this regard is Karl Jasperss idea of a world-wide federated structure, which aims
to sustain human plurality by advocating the ideal of limitless communication;
although Arendt seems to be quite enthusiastic about this institutional proposal,
she is still hesitant to fully endorse it as can be seen in her criticism of Jasperss
proposal to abolish war.57 Her critique suggests that this world-wide federated
structure would harbor its own peculiar dangers, including the alarming prospect
of federated police forces.58
As this brief discussion looking at Arendts invocation of non-national institutional possibilities in dierent contexts demonstrates, the constitutive tensions
between human rights and their institutional guarantees do not exist only in the
framework of the nation-state. Even if the guarantees of these rights could be
completely detached from the nation-state and assumed by other institutions,
there is still a need to undertake critical inquiries of the dynamic and tense relationship between human rights and the institutional orders established to protect
them. What is at stake here is an aporia that is characteristic of any politics of
human rights. On the one hand, despite their prevailing conceptualisation as
abstract, natural and inalienable rights, human rights are in need of intersubjective
guarantees that can have some relative permanence only within an institutional
structure. On the other hand, the institutions we establish for guaranteeing these
rights can end up eroding them or rendering them ineective. Arendts aporetic
inquiry is characterized by this antinomic relationship, to use Etienne Balibars
terms, between rights and institutions.59 Her recognition of this antinomy in her
14
discussion of several institutional forms renders her analysis relevant for contemporary readers interested in post-national and cosmopolitan possibilities.
Arendts critical analysis implies that the perplexities arising from the founding
premises and institutional entanglements of human rights constitute the very terrain that political actors continue to navigate as they claim, exercise and debate
human rights. One needs to carefully examine this terrain and attend to these
perplexities to understand how problems such as statelessness leave some people
without any rights. Such re-examination is the condition of possibility for rethinking human rights in response to these problems, as will be seen in Arendts own
invocation of a right to have rights.
Aporias of human rights: recapturing equivocalities

and contingencies
As Arendt attempts to read the systemic problems encountered by the stateless as a
symptom of the perplexities of the Rights of Man, does her aporetic inquiry end
up attributing to modern rights declarations a fatalistic trajectory? Does her
account leave us with a very deterministic account, suggesting that the paradoxes
of human rights inevitably lead to problems such as those encountered by the
stateless? These questions have been recently raised by Jacques Rancie`re who suggests that Arendts analysis leaves us with an overwhelming historico-ontological
destiny from which only a God is likely to save us.60 Indeed, Rancie`re suggests that
it is Arendts analysis that provides the intellectual underpinnings of Giorgio
Agambens recent critique that ties human rights inextricably to sovereign violence.
Although Rancie`re is right to point out that Agamben is inspired by Arendt, he
overlooks some of the distinctive aspects of Arendts critique. Agamben and
Arendt have similar starting points as they both take the problems such as those
encountered by refugees as symptoms revealing the deeply embedded paradoxes of
human rights in a nation-state system. Yet, whereas Agamben sees these paradoxes, including the constitutive tension between man and citizen, as a reinscription of the centuries-old metaphysical divide between bios (politically qualied life)
and zoe (natural life) that has held human life in the grip of sovereign power and
subjected it inescapably to violence,61 Arendts analysis casts them as challenging
modern political and ethical dilemmas that can be navigated and renegotiated in
dierent ways. Her aporetic inquiry, attuned to the complex historical trajectories
of human rights and aiming at their rethinking, signicantly diers from
Agambens sweeping statements speaking to the 24 centuries of Western political
history.62 Furthermore, whereas Agamben calls for a politics that renounces all
concepts tied to sovereignty, including human rights and citizenship,63 Arendts
critique aims to grapple with the paradoxes of human rights precisely to think them
anew.
To outline these distinctive aspects of Arendts aporetic inquiry in response to
Rancie`res critique, I discuss two interrelated points. First, far from being a onesided, deterministic account, Arendts critique foregrounds the equivocal eects of
Gundogdu
15
human rights their political promises and risks precisely because it is centred on
their aporias. Second, these aporias are not ahistorical contradictions dooming
human rights to an ontological destiny from the very beginning; instead, they
are political and ethical dilemmas that are shaped and transformed signicantly
by historically contingent events and conditions, which can enable or undermine the
democratic struggles of rights. In this reading, perplexities of human rights are not
logical contradictions or ontological traps ensnaring us perpetually, as Rancie`res
reading of Arendt suggests; they are instead complex and demanding political and
ethical questions that we continue to grapple with as we invoke, claim and exercise
human rights.
This response draws on Arendts attempts to understand historical events in
terms of equivocality and contingency:64 Arendt does not turn to the 1789
Declaration to locate a chain of causes that would inevitably lead to the massive
scales of rightlessness for the stateless persons in the 20th century. Rightlessness is
neither historically inevitable nor completely haphazard or accidental given the
perplexities of the Rights of Man. It owes its structure to a crystallization of a
set of elements, and yet none of these elements in this particular conguration
determines the outcome in advance.65 In other words, perplexities in the founding
premises and institutional orders of human rights can signicantly, yet not completely, explain the complex conguration of rightlessness encountered by the stateless in the early 20th century. To fully understand this problem, one needs to look
at other elements in this constellation, including how political actors negotiate
these perplexities and how historical events shape and transform politics of human
rights. In this reading, just as any other element in this conguration, the Rights of
Man do not have a single, xed trajectory but contain an innite number of
abstract possibilities and have an equivocal past.66
Suggesting that Arendt attends to the multiple possibilities and equivocal
eects of the Rights of Man is almost counterintuitive given her scathing criticism
of the French Revolution and the 1789 Declaration, especially in On Revolution.
However, even this work allows an understanding of the French Revolution and
the Rights of Man in terms of equivocal histories containing multiple possibilities. Most importantly, Arendt interprets both the French Revolution and the
1789 Declaration as new beginnings, as events exemplifying the experience of
mans faculty to begin something new or the experience of interrupting the historical time that is assumed to be linear and continuous and of reclaiming political freedom as a shared human possibility.67 As new beginnings, both the French
Revolution and the Rights of Man contain multiple possibilities and can be
appropriated in dierent ways by political actors depending on historical circumstances. For example, Arendts account of the Paris Commune reveals that the
French Revolution can be, and has been, appropriated in new and unanticipated
ways by political actors. Arendt nds in the Commune, which she describes as an
unexpected and largely spontaneous outcome of the Revolution itself, the possibility of reclaiming this new beginning for a political organization that can
actualize the republican promise of equality and freedom through self-
16
governance.68 She also credits both the French and American Revolutions
for making world politics imaginable for the rst time, ushering an era
in which politics would concern all men qua men, no matter where they
lived, what their circumstances were, or what nationality they possessed.69 As
one of the events ushering world politics in this sense, the 1789 Declaration
contains the promise of claiming equal rights for all regardless of nationality,
ethnicity or race.
Arendts acknowledgement of this possibility, despite her criticism of the transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of nationals within the context of
the nation-state, comes to light particularly in her analysis of the Dreyfus aair.
Arendt describes this case as one testing the impartiality of law, which was assumed
to be the greatest achievement of the 19th century.70 For the most part, she reads
the case as one grimly arming that there was no such impartiality and that those
who were pariahs in the society did not share in the promise of equal rights.71 Yet,
Arendts description of the grounds on which Dreyfus should have been defended
reveals her attentiveness to the equivocalities of the 1789 Declaration and the
possibility that human rights can be turned into a political site of contestation
for making claims to equality:
There was only one basis on which Dreyfus could or should have been saved . . . the
stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human rights that republican view of
communal life which asserts that (in the words of Clemenceau) by infringing on the
rights of one you infringe on the rights of all.72
This statement is confusing given Arendts criticism of the 1789 Declaration,

particularly its Jacobin interpretation. Yet, if the Declaration is understood as
equivocal, in line with Arendts interpretation of historical events in general, it
contains multiple possibilities, including political dangers and promises.
Particularly the constitutive tension between man and citizen carries within it
a risk. Within the context of the nation-state, this tension was generally resolved in
favour of the rights of citizen, making it dicult for those who were not seen as
members of the political community to claim human rights. Especially the rise of
national consciousness, as mentioned earlier, can render this constitutive tension
between man and citizen explosive at the expense of the rights of man. Yet, as an
equivocal event, the declaration contains other possibilities, including the political
possibility of contesting these narrow interpretations, as Clemenceaus defence of
Dreyfus demonstrates. Arendt applauds Clemenceau for his insistence on jacobinischer Menschenrechtspatriotismus in the German version of Origins, or Jacobin
patriotism of human rights as highlighted by Hauke Brunkhorst.73 This perplexing
formulation is particularly striking as it simultaneously reveals the paradoxes of
human rights (man/citizen, universal/particular, natural/historical) and shows the
possibilities of politically navigating these to contest injustice and claim equality
regardless of ethnicity, race or religion. As this case reveals, Arendts aporetic
inquiry recognizes the equivocal eects of the 1789 Declaration by attending to
Gundogdu
17
not only the risks it harbours in its underlying assumptions but also the new
political possibilities that its ambivalent formulations can give rise to.
It is precisely the recognition of such possibilities that Jacques Rancie`re overlooks in his critique of Arendt. Attributing to her a narrow understanding of politics that necessarily excludes rights struggles from its scope, Rancie`re suggests that
Arendts critique fails to take into account the democratic possibilities inscribed in
the equivocalities of the Rights of Man.74 For Rancie`re, the interval between man
and citizen in the 1789 Declaration can become the site of a political dispute
whereby those who have no part put to test the principle of equality inscribed
in the Declaration; indeed, this polemical space is crucial for understanding the
democratic struggles in the modern era.75
As this brief discussion of the Dreyfus aair shows, Arendt would agree, though
with some caveats. Although Arendts emphasis on the equivocal eects of historical events opens up the possibility of an analysis that is in tune with Rancie`res
insistence on the need to recognize the democratic potential of these rights declarations as abstract inscriptions of equality, her critical inquiry also underscores the
need to look at the historical conditions that can undermine or enable such possibilities of renegotiating the aporias of human rights and this brings me to the
second point about Arendts approach, i.e. attentiveness to contingency.76 Rights
struggles do not take place in a historical vacuum; historical conditions such as the
rise of imperialism and racism, both of which Arendt saw as destructive for the
notion of humanity that is central to the concept of human rights, can indeed
make it very dicult to politically negotiate the aporetic terrain of human rights so
as to contest rightlessness and claim equal rights.77 Arendts critique then turns our
attention to not only the political practices of navigating the paradoxes of human
rights but also the historical conditions that continuously shape the possibilities of
claiming and exercising these rights.
This emphasis on contingency counters Rancie`re who suggests that Arendt
casts the rightlessness of the stateless as an inevitable doom dictated by the
perplexities of the Rights of Man. The goal of Arendts aporetic inquiry is
not to nd out the logical contradictions that have determined the eects of
human rights in some formalistic and atemporal sense. To use Richard
Beardsworths apt description of Derrida, Arendts critique is instead concerned to untie aporia from logical determination.78 It underscores the need
to analyse the deeply embedded paradoxes in the 18th-century rights declarations to understand the late modern phenomenon of statelessness. However,
it does not suggest that these constitutive tensions necessarily lead to the
rightlessness of the stateless or the totalitarian catastrophe. The plight of the
stateless is instead a contingent yet structured (hence, not accidental) constellation one that is crystallized through the conguration of several elements,
including the paradoxes in the underlying assumptions of modern rights declarations, tensions in the institutional structures established to guarantee these
rights (e.g. nation-state) and historical transformations that aporias of human
rights undergo as a result of events such as the rise of imperialism.
18
Conclusion: human rights and aporetic critique

Rancie`re suggests that Arendts paralysing quandary, stuck within binary conceptions of man/citizen, nature/history, abstract/concrete, universal/particular, renders rights of man either void or tautological, and his critique ends with a
provocative call: If we want to get out of this ontological trap, we have to reset
the question of the Rights of Man.79 In the light of this reconstruction of Arendts
critique of the Rights of Man, I argue that aporias, perplexities and paradoxes,
understood usually in negative terms as paralysing quandaries, can indeed be crucial in rethinking human rights beyond their conventional binaries especially in
times of crisis. In the face of the crisis triggered by massive scales of statelessness,
Arendt shows how conventional accounts relying on these binaries, particularly the
binary of nature versus history, render human rights either void or tautological in
Rancie`res terms. Understood as natural rights grounded in some kind of a universally shared, abstract nature, human rights are assumed to exist independent of
human plurality; yet, without intersubjective guarantees and mutual agreements
that are possible only within a community of actors, human rights can be rendered
meaningless and void, as the plight of the stateless reveals. Understood as historically grounded rights that we inherit as members of particularistic communities,
however, human rights risk becoming tautological as they indicate nothing more
than the rights of citizens and leave out those who are deprived of citizenship.
To use Rancie`res terms again, for purposes counter to his, Arendt resets
the question of human rights to think them anew beyond these conventional
binaries that fail to respond to the crisis triggered by statelessness. This
rethinking is exemplied by her eorts to rearticulate human rights as a
right to have rights a rearticulation that is conspicuous by its absence in
Rancie`res critique. Arendt tries to clarify this perplexing rearticulation in several ways; it indicates a right to belong to some kind of organized community, to live in a framework where one is judged by ones actions and
opinions in short, the right of men to citizenship and the right of every
individual to belong to humanity.80 Even more so than the Jacobin patriotism
of human rights that Arendt applauds in Clemenceaus defence of Dreyfus,
this new formulation resists reducing human rights to either the rights of man
or the rights of citizens by insisting on the importance of both citizenship and
humanity for guaranteeing rights. This attempt to refuse the either/or logic of
the conventional binaries such as man/citizen, universal/particular, and nature/
history81 can be seen especially in the striking formulation in the British
edition of Origins, The Burden of Our Time:
The Rights of Man can become implemented only if they become the prepolitical
foundation of a new polity, the prelegal basis of a new legal structure, the, so to
speak, prehistorical fundament from which the history of mankind will derive its
essential meaning in much the same way Western civilization did from its own
fundamental origin myths.82
Gundogdu
19
As seen in this perplexing articulation, which is not without its own productive
aporias, Arendts critique concludes with a rethinking of human rights that refuses
to unequivocally determine the scope, subject and ground of these rights. Arendts
own declaration of a right that is deeply political yet cannot be fully guaranteed
by any existing political community, a right that is in need of laws yet cannot be
contained in any specic legal order, a right that is historically contingent yet resists
any historicist determination demonstrates that there are no easy resolutions to
the perplexities of human rights. The goal of aporetic inquiry is not to nd such
resolutions in the form of underlying foundations or institutional models but
instead to grapple with these perplexities to understand how they are manifested
in new forms of rightlessness as well as in new struggles for equality that can
reinvent the meaning of human rights.
This rearticulation of a right to have rights is also important in terms of understanding the distinctive goals of Arendts aporetic critique of human rights. Similar
to Socratic dialogues urging Athenian citizens to nd the truthfulness of their own
opinions by carefully examining them, Arendts critique does not aim at abandoning human rights but instead rendering them meaningful again. Setting the task of
critique as rethinking, Arendts inquiry raises cautions against some of the more
recent criticisms of human rights such as the one oered by Giorgio Agamben.
Theoretically, as Arendts aporetic approach indicates, a critique attributing to
human rights a singular, uniform logic fails to attend to the multiple, equivocal
and contingent eects of human rights as a discourse characterized by aporias.
Politically, calling for an emancipatory politics severed completely from human
rights, such a critique risks overlooking the struggles that reclaim these rights in
imaginative ways.83 With its equivocal and contingent understanding of aporias, an
Arendtian critique of human rights not only subjects their underlying assumptions
and paradoxical eects to a relentless scrutiny but also attends to (indeed, as the
brief discussion of Arendts perplexing notion of a right to have rights indicates,
participates in) such inventive practices of rearticulating these rights.
Notes
I am grateful to Cigdem Cdam for reading several versions of this article and providing
detailed comments at different stages of writing. I would also like to thank Mary Dietz, Bud
Duvall, Bill Scheuerman and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and
suggestions on an early draft. The article has benefited significantly from the substantial
feedback provided by the members of my writing group at Barnard College. Different versions of the article have been presented at the Old Europe, New Orders: Post-1945 German
Thought on War, Peace, and International Law (Indiana University, Bloomington, March
2009) and the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association; I would
like to thank the participants of these meetings for their helpful comments.
1. Hannah Arendt ([1951] 1968) The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 2912. New York:
Harcourt.
2. Seyla Benhabib (2004) The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press.
20
3. James Ingram (2008) What is a Right to Have Rights? Three Images of the Politics of
Human Rights, American Political Science Review 102(4): 40116. Jeffrey Isaac (1996)
A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and The Politics of
Human Rights, American Political Science Review 90(1): 6173.
4. Peg Birmingham (2006) Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common
Responsibility. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Serena Parekh (2008)
Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights.
New York: Routledge.
5. Arendt (n. 1), p. 290. Arendt (1955) Elemente und Ursprunge Totaler Herrschaft, p. 465.
Frankfurt am Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt. Christoph Menke also notes the use of
the term aporia in the German version of Arendts Origins; however, he does not
provide an analysis of the methodological implications of this term. See Menke
(2007) The Aporias of Human Rights and the One Human Right: Regarding
the Coherence of Hannah Arendts Argument, Social Research 74(3): 73962.
6. Jacques Rancie`re (2004) Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?, The South Atlantic
Quarterly 103(2/3): 297310.
7. Hence I do not address the extensive literature on Socratic inquiry. For the seminal
essay on Socratic elenchus, see Gregory Vlastos (1994) The Socratic Elenchus: Method
is All, in Myles Burnyeat (ed.) Socratic Studies, pp. 129. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. For a more recent analysis focusing on the critical import of aporia
in Socratic dialogues, see in particular Vasilis Politis, Aporia and Searching in the Early
Plato, in Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis (eds) Remembering Socrates, pp. 88
109. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
8. Arendt (n. 1), pp. 2678.
9. Arendt ([1963] 1990) On Revolution, p. 149. London and New York: Penguin.
10. Arendt (n. 1), p. 298; Arendt (1949) The Rights of Man: What are They?, Modern
Review 3 (1): 2437, at p. 35.
11. Arendt (n. 9), p. 149.
12. Arendt (n. 1), p. 230.
13. Ibid. p. 299.
14. Rancie`re (n. 6), p. 302.
15. Jill Frank (2006) The Political Theory of Classical Greece, in John S. Dryzek, Bonnie
Honig and Anne Phillips (eds) Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, pp. 17592, at p.
178. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
16. Arendt (1978) Life of the Mind: Thinking, p. 170. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
17. Ibid. p. 172.
18. Ibid. p. 16970.
19. Arendt (2005) Socrates, in Jerome Kohn (ed.) The Promise of Politics, pp. 539, at pp.
145. New York: Schocken Books. See also Dana Villa (2001) Socratic Citizenship, p.
261. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
20. Arendt (n. 16), p. 172.
21. Ibid. p. 173.
22. Ibid.
23. Richard Beardsworth (1996) Derrida and the Political, p. 32. London and New York:
Routledge. My reading is partly informed by Derridas argument that aporia is not
necessarily a failure or a simple paralysis, the sterile negativity of the impasse. See
Jacques Derrida (1993) Aporias: Dying Awaiting (One Another at) the Limits of
Gundogdu
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
21
Truth, tr. Thomas Dutoit, p. 32. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Most importantly, for both Arendt and Derrida, aporetic thinking helps the faculty of judgement in
the absence of a given rule, norm or ground.
Arendt (n. 16), p. 193.
Ibid. p. 192. For an in-depth analysis of Arendts notion of judgement, see, among
others, Linda Zerilli (2005) Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Arendt (1949, in n. 10).
Arendt (n. 16), p. 170.
Arendt (1949, in n. 10), p. 26.
Ibid. p. 37.
Ibid. p. 34.
Rancie`re (n. 6), p. 302.
Arendt (n. 9), pp. 39, 15960.
Ibid. p. 45.
Costas Douzinas (2000) The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of
the Century, p. 95. Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing.
Arendt (n. 9), p. 193.
A similar analysis of modern declarations can be found in Jacques
Derrida (1986) Declarations of Independence, New Political Science 15: 715. For
an analysis of the similarities and differences between Arendt and Derrida on this
score, see Bonnie Honig (1991) Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida
on the Problem of Founding a Republic, American Political Science Review 85(1):
97113.
Arendt (n. 9), pp. 192, 161.
Arendt (n. 1), p. 291.
Ibid. p. 301.
Seyla Benhabib ([1996] 2003) The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, pp. 82, 185,
1945. Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Birmingham turns to natality and Parekh identifies conscience as the foundation for
human rights in Arendts work. Birmingham (n. 4); Parekh (n. 4), p. 153.
Patchen Markell (2008) Review of Peg Birmingham, Serena Parekh, Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews. Available online at http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id14788
(consulted June 2010).
Arendt (n. 1), p. 301.
Arendt (n. 9), p. 149.
For similar assessments of Arendts position on institutions, see Etienne Balibar
(2007) (De)constructing the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on the
Coherence of Hannah Arendts Practical Philosophy, Social Research 74(3): 72738,
at pp. 7334. Bonnie Honig (2006) Another Cosmopolitanism? Law and Politics in the
New Europe, in Robert Post (ed.) Another Cosmopolitanism, pp. 10227. Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press.
Arendt (n. 9), p. 109.
Arendt (n. 1), p. 230.
Ibid.
Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen (2009) Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External
Sovereignty in Arendt, Constellations 16(2): 30730.
22
50. Hannah Arendt ([1958] 1998) The Human Condition, p. 245. 2nd edn. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
51. Roland Axtmann (2006) Globality, Plurality and Freedom: The Arendtian Perspective,
Review of International Studies 32(1): 93117, at pp. 107110. Ronald Beiner (2000)
Arendt and Nationalism, in Dana Villa (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Hannah
Arendt, pp. 4462, at p. 55. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Seyla Benhabib (2006) The Philosophical Foundations of Cosmopolitan Norms, in
Robert Post (ed.) Another Cosmopolitanism, pp. 1344, at p. 15. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press. Jean L. Cohen (1996) Rights, Citizenship, and the
Modern Form of the Social: Dilemmas of Arendtian Republicanism, Constellations
3(2): 16489, at pp. 170, 175.
52. Arendts analysis of the American Revolution gives credence to both of these
points. First, as the tragic fate of the American Revolution demonstrates, even
republican arrangements that have their origins in mutual promises can end up losing their potency when they fail to establish common spaces where citizens
can act together. Second, Arendt also attends to the possible violent exclusions of a republican arrangement; in an often overlooked section of On Revolution,
for example, she criticizes the Americans for failing to address poverty as a political
problem, which left the poor excluded from the light of the public realm. See Arendt
(n. 9), p. 69.
53. Benhabib (n. 2), p. 66.
54. Arendt (n. 1), p. 298.
55. Hannah Arendt (1968) Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World? in Men in Dark Times,
pp. 8194, at pp. 87, 81. New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Co.
56. Ibid. p. 89.
57. Ibid. pp. 845, 934.
58. Ibid. pp. 934. For extensive discussions of Hannah Arendts arguments about federalism at the international level, see Axtmann (n. 51), pp. 111ff. Douglas Klusmeyer
(2000) Hannah Arendts Case for Federalism, Publius 40(1): 3158.
59. Balibar (n. 45), p. 734. This reading does not cast Arendt as an anti-institutionalist as it
underscores her recognition of the need for institutional protections for rights. However,
attending to the equivocal effects of such protections, it also diverges from readings that
portray Arendt in a more institutionalist vein. For the latter, see in particular Jeremy
Waldron (2000) Arendts Constitutional Politics, in Dana Villa (ed.) The Cambridge
Companion to Hannah Arendt, pp. 201219. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
60. Rancie`re (n. 6), p. 302; emphasis mine. For a similar criticism, see also Hauke
Brunkhorst (1996) Are Human Rights Self-Contradictory? Critical Remarks on a
Hypothesis by Hannah Arendt, Constellations 3(2): 1909.
61. Giorgio Agamben (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel HellerRoazen, p. 127. Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press.
62. Ibid. p. 11.
63. Giorgio Agamben (2000) Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, tr. Vincenzo Binetti
and Cesare Casarino, pp. 1526. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press.
64. This emphasis on equivocality and contingency can be seen in Arendts historiographical reflections, especially in response to Eric Voegelins critique of Origins.
Gundogdu
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
23
See Hannah Arendt (1994) A Reply to Eric Voegelin, in Jerome Kohn (ed.) Essays in
Understanding, 19301954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, pp. 4018. New York:
Schocken Books. For a discussion of Arendts historiographical approach, see, among
others, Benhabib (n. 40), pp. 639; Lisa Jane Disch (1994) Hannah Arendt and the Limits
of Philosophy, ch. 4. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press.
Arendt (1994) Understanding and Politics, in Jerome Kohn (ed.) Essays in
Understanding, 19301954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, pp. 30727, at p.
325. New York: Schocken Books. For crystallization, see Benhabib (n. 40), p. 64,
and Disch (n. 64), p. 148.
Arendt (n. 65), p. 325.
Arendt (n. 9), p. 34.
Ibid. p. 239.
Ibid. p. 53.
Arendt (n. 1), p. 91.
Ibid. p. 117.
Ibid. p. 106.
Hauke Brunkhorst (2006) Reply to Critics, Philosophy and Social Criticism 32(7): 825
38, at p. 827.
Rancie`re argues that Arendts well-known distinction between political and social
consigns issues such as economic inequality to the social realm and forbids their politicization. Rancie`re (n. 6), pp. 2989, 301302. This reading, however, overlooks the fact
that Arendt uses the term social in many different, and often conflicting, ways, not
always suggesting a distinct realm with a given set of issues and actors. For further
discussion, see especially Hanna Pitkin (1998) The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendts
Concept of the Social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In addition, Rancie`res
claim that Arendts archipolitical vision hinders a positive assessment of democratic
rights struggles is quite questionable given her favourable account of the labour movement in The Human Condition. See Arendt (n. 50), pp. 21220.
This attentiveness to historical conditions of political struggles is at times missing in
Rancie`res analysis a point that cannot be fully developed here given the scope of this
article. For a similar criticism though, see Bruno Bosteels (2009) Rancie`res Leftism, or,
Politics and its Discontents, in Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (eds) Jacques
Rancie`re: History, Politics, Aesthetics, pp. 158175, at pp. 169, 175. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Arendt (n. 1), pp. 157, 161.
Beardsworth (n. 23), p. 47.
Arendt (n. 1), pp. 2957; Arendt (1949, in n. 10), pp. 30, 37; Arendt (n. 1), p. 299. There
is now a vast literature on Arendts notion of a right to have rights a perplexing
formulation that cannot be fully explained given the scope of this article. See, among
others, the works mentioned in notes 24. For the purposes of this article, this rearticulation is important as it shows that Arendts rethinking of human rights is enabled by
her aporetic mode of inquiry.
Rancie`re himself questions the syllogistic logic of the either/or especially in conventional understandings of the Rights of Man, which force us to unequivocally determine
24
the subject of these rights either as man or citizen. See Rancie`re (1992) Politics,
Identification, and Subjectivization, October 61: 5864, at p. 62.
82. Arendt (1951) The Burden of Our Time, p. 439. London: Secker & Warburg (emphasis
mine).
83. I have developed these criticisms elsewhere; see Gundogdu (forthcoming), Potentialities
of Human Rights: Agamben and the Narrative of Fated Necessity, Contemporary
Political Theory.

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'Perplexities of the rights of man': Arendt on the aporias of human rights

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Perplexities of the rights of