Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Christopher Peys
of totalitarianism—as its title unfortunately claims—but gives a historical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitarianism.”39 Rejecting the idea that it is possible to trace totalitarianism’s chain of causality to a definitive, singular source, Arendt underscores that the totalitarian “sandstorms” of the twentieth century formed gradually and in the wake of what she describes as the break in the Western tradition: with the severance of the “discursive construct of beliefs and conventions based on the presumption of historical continuity in the transmission of inherited patterns across generations.”40 According to Arendt, the break in the Western tradition—though having been completed in the twentieth century with the catastrophic events of the World War I and World War II—took place incrementally as the authority-claiming systems and structures of belief that had long-maintained order in the West eroded: as processes of secularization intensified following the Protestant Reformation; as mass society took shape with the coming of the Industrial Revolution; and as the power of nation-states overcame established forms of political, legal, and moral order.41 For her, the significance of this rupture—which saw the three-strand, rope-like line of continuity formed by the “trinity” of religion, authority, and tradition cut completely—cannot be overstated because it meant that it was no longer possible to rely on the ideas, beliefs, and mores of the past in the task of understanding, addressing, and overcoming the problems posed by contemporary life.
It is, arguably, neither inherently good nor bad that the tradition has been cut, though new questions about how to proceed in a life of uncertainty are raised when the stability offered by traditional practices, culture, and faith are lost. That is, while we have—as Arendt observes—“the great chance to look upon the past with eyes undistracted by any tradition,”42 our positions in the world have been fundamentally destabilized, in the sense that the loss of tradition and traditional systems of authority is “tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world.”43 Not unlike the metaphorical “fiddler on the roof,” who plays for the sake of tradition, people living in the wake of the break in the tradition must—to borrow the words of Tevye, the protagonist of the 1971 film of the same name—try to “scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking [their] neck.”44 But what happens when there is no longer any roof for the fiddler to stand on, no platform upon which to play his song? What does it mean, in other words, to stand one’s ground in a world which is without grounds, doing so—moreover—in a manner that allows one to continue playing a “pleasant, simple tune”?
Adamant that the break in the tradition “does not entail [. . .] the loss of the human capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world,”45 Arendt recognizes the possibility of acting caringly for the public realm of “the political.” That said, the voided nature of the past has left those wishing to understand and/or practice care publicly wondering what exactly they should be caring for, as well as how they might go about doing so in “dark times.” What, in particular, are people doing when they act caringly within and for the sake of the public realm of “the political”? In what ways can acts of public, political care be said to counteract the forms of civic alienation and enmity that give rise to worldlessness, to the withering away and tearing apart of the very fabric that maintains the “space for politics”? How, even, can “care”—a seemingly conservative notion—be understood when, as Arendt writes in the preface of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “we can no longer afford to take that which is good in the past and simply call it our heritage”?46 This is, perhaps, the challenge of our time: to care for the world when it is no longer clear what it means to care; no longer apparent why we should care at all; and no longer possible or desirable to suggest that there is any singular, ideal means of caring for our “common home.” It is certainly a complicated task, and it is difficult to know where to begin and how to conceptualize care as a public, political form of practice when “nobody cares any longer what the world looks like” and when the traditional “groundwork of the world” has been pulled from beneath our feet.
In addition to identifying what might be described as a crisis in care, which is a plight related to and not unlike the “crisis of culture” that Arendt first wrote about in the early 1960s, she also provides her readers with a means of beginning to think and act caringly for the sake of world sans the support supplied by the “groundwork” of the tradition. She does so by theorizing a means of re-engaging with the past and retrieving those ideas, understandings, and practices that might aid us in our present struggles, in the fight to ward off the forces of civic alienation capable of tearing the world asunder. Not only does the approach outlined by Arendt provide a means of selectively and judiciously drawing from history aspects of the past that might be of benefit in today’s world, it is also a means of reaching back in time that is commensurable with Derrida’s efforts to read the “text” deconstructively, which—for him—constitutes the Western canon of philosophy and politics. This “text” is, in his view, a sort of inheritance, le héritage, or as he explains: “the heritage, too, is a ‘text,’ in the broad but precise sense I give to this word.”47 It “implies not only a reaffirmation and a double injunction, but at every moment, in a different context, a filtering, a choice, a strategy.”48 The person presented with this decision, the “heir,” is “not only someone who receives, he or she is someone who chooses, and who takes the risk of deciding.”49 Though more is said about Derrida’s approach to the “text” in the subsequent chapter, where I examine in greater detail his deconstructions of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, it is in terms of his reading of le héritage that it becomes possible to investigate ideas in such a manner that their particular legacies, undergirding logics, and underlying arrangements of power can be revealed, reconsidered, and innovatively reconstrued. This is not to say that Arendt and Derrida agree entirely about how the tradition should be understood; they do not, with the former identifying the break in the tradition as an “accomplished fact,”50 while the latter sees no such rupture at all. In locating a conceptual common ground between Arendt and Derrida, however, I bring together their respective readings of the Western philosophic and political canon as a means of re-theorizing cosmopolitanism and forgiveness.
Drawing upon a different metaphor, one which serves as a starting point for reconsidering what can be done in a world where anything is possible, Arendt—echoing Walter Benjamin—presents the image of a pearl diver. This is someone who “descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface.”51 Navigating the dark “depths of the past,” represented by the sea, the diver must carefully select the thoughts and ideas that have “crystallized” into something valuable: the pearls and pieces of coral that “remain immune to the elements.”52 The diver does so with the “conviction” that although “the living” are “subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization,” allowing certain thoughts and ideas to be retrieved and admired while others are left at the bottom of the sea.53 In my efforts to think anew about the “world” and what it means to care for the worldly realm of “the political,” I consider the notions of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness as two “pearls,” two treasures worth salvaging from the ravages of the past, presenting them—as in bringing them into the present—as valuable forms of public action.
2. Care and “Caring for the World”
It is in the first chapter of this book that I “resuscitate”—to borrow Arendt’s Benjaminian-inspired usage of the word—the notions of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, doing so specifically with the help of Derrida and what might be described as his own deconstructive style of “pearl” diving. In the remainder of this section, however, I briefly consider the notion of “care” itself, an idea and form of practice which holds a privileged place in Arendt’s body of thought. As a means of framing this book’s Arendtian understanding of public care, it is especially necessary here to conceptualize care within the Continental vein of philosophic and political thought from which both Arendt and Derrida’s thinking emerged. Specifically, there is a need to highlight how an Arendtian conceptualization