September 5, 2005
Hannah Arendt is commonly seen as a political philosopher of nostalgia an antimodernist admirer of the Greek polis. She has been charged with an elitist nostalgia for the politics of ancient Greece, engendering a fatal split between the 'political' and the 'social' in her thinking.
Arendt does return to the ancient Greek polis and a public assembly where propertied equals debate issues of moment. Arendt's celebration of heroic, agonistic political action as a form of theatre does capture something that helps us to understand contemporary politics
Arendt's conception of politics as performance places the emphasis on political theatre and the consumate political actor. It is to be contrasted with the instrumental conception of politics as administration and the ethical critieria of everyday life (eg., compassion, honesty, generosity, and sensitivity to suffering.)
The public self for Arendt is constituted exclusively through words and deeds, engaged with others in a novel enterprise whose greatness and distinction are manifest, but whose meaning and destiny is impossible to fix in advance due to lack of control over events or fortuna. The political actor does not have control over what he/she initiates.
Arendt's "space of appearance" marks a site where there is a consciousness between participants of their rights of expression and the acknowledgment that the site of this engagement, the public space, produces an expectation of performance. The space of appearance can be interpreted as a theater, with politicians taking the role of actors and the political moment--a meeting of the Federal parliament in Canberra--as the venue, or political "stage." We citizens and journalists adopt the position of spectator who watch and judge the display and spectacle for its political import
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