EA trigger warning should be said in advance: The following sentences come from Hannah Arendt, from her famous book “Elements and Origins of Total Dominance”, first published in English in 1951: “The Boers’ concept of race arises from the horror of beings that neither human nor animal seemingly and ghostly, without any tangible civilizational or political reality, populated and overpopulated the black continent. The horror that such beings could also be human led to the decision not to belong to the same species of human beings.”
What Arendt was trying to establish in this passage is nothing less than a theory of the origin of the concept of “race”. Arendt uses the experiences of “European humanity in Africa” as the background to this theory; the predominantly white settlers and colonizers are confronted with native dark-skinned “beings” whose moral status as an equal part of the human species has apparently had to be passionately contested. To a certain extent, people invent the idea of different races – as a “makeshift” – in order to legitimize demarcations and exclusions and to reserve the concept of full human beings for certain members of the species.
With great meticulousness and affection
That’s shocking, no doubt. But does Arendt only reflect an attitude that she ascribes to the Boers mentioned in the passage? So is she just quoting the attitudes of others? Or do the chosen formulations also reveal Arendt’s own views? For Juliane Rebentisch, Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, the answer is clear: Arendt’s theses are themselves “clearly” racist. Rebentisch mentions further evidence in her book that shows that Arendt himself repeatedly falls into racist clichés and occasionally even uses parts of her political-theoretical repertoire of terms to prove the existence of different “races”. So later in the totalitarianism study it says that the people in Africa and Australia are the “only people who are completely without history and do nothing”, they have not “built” a world – formulations with which Arendt directly refers to concepts such as that of production and that of action, which she has theoretically substantiated in more detail in her main philosophical work, “Vita Activa”.
That’s one. But Rebentisch does not stop at this point, her book does not want to put Arendt’s work on the theory index. Rather, with great meticulousness and affection, she develops a reading that is able to protect Arendt from herself, from her own prejudices and narrowing, and works out all sorts of ambivalences. Above all, Arendt’s reflections on plurality can serve to expose the racist passages as untenable. Basically, according to Rebentisch, Arendt had a great aversion “to all types of communities that are based on similarity, be they forced or elective”.
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