Arendt's famous commentary on the Eichmann trial in 1962 contains within
it a statement of principle regarding rights of co-habitation that has to
be derived from the rhetorical and theatrical dimensions of her text.  In
explaining why Eichmann deserves to die, she accuses him of having
abrogated a fundamental principle of human rights: no one has the right to
choose with whom to co-habit the earth.  This 'right' like the 'right to
have rights' elaborated in On Totalitarianism is grounded neither in
natural nor positive law.  Indeed, the right as asserted on the
presupposition that a plural subject exercises a performative power to
bring the right into being. The power of this performative raises
questions about the status of sovereign power in Arendt's writing.  She very clearly
promotes a notion of democracy based on a social plurality, and explicitly
recommends federalism as a way of distributing political power without
central sovereign authority.  And yet, her claim that no one has the right
to choose with whom to co-habit the earth sets a limit on rights based on
individual volition at the same time that it asserts a right to
co-habitation, a distinctively social right. Does the articulation of that
right presuppose sovereign power, or does this performative work only on
the condition that sovereignty is dispersed?  Arendt's view provides a
timely counter to that of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben whose citation
of Arendt is clearly selective.  How might we rethink the performative as
a dispersion of sovereignty?
 
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric
and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical
Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D.
in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984 on the French Reception of Hegel.
She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in
Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender
Trouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic
Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997),
Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life
and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Precarious Life: Powers of
Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the
Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak in
2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), and Is Critique Secular?
(co-written in 2009). She is also active in gender and sexual politics and
human rights, anti-war politics, and Jewish Voice for Peace. She is
presently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished
Academic Achievement in the Humanities. She has recently accepted a
visiting appointment at Columbia University.

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By: Diana Franklin
Last updated: Monday, 31 January 2011