Vasti Roodt

The purpose of this paper is to engage in critical reflection on identity politics as a mode of resistance to the experience of oppression, marginalisation or social exclusion. I argue that the notion of an identity-driven politics springs from a fundamentaldisaffection with the world as it is given to us, and that this disaffection is reinforced in the very attempt to overcome it. In support of my criticism I then try to sketchan alternative conception of identity and politics that does not run aground on the same difficulties. My argument consists of three parts. First, I delineate the theoreticalbackground to contemporary identity politics and point out a number of problematic assumptions that underlie such a conception of identity and politics. Second, I try to substantiate this initial critical assessment of identity politics by appealing to Hannah Arendt's analysis of the interplay between identity and worldliness. The purpose here isto show that identity is bound up with the world that lies between us as opposed to being tied to an exclusive place anyone occupies within the world. In the third and last part of the article I relate this notion of worldliness to Arendt's notion of amor mundi. I argue in this regard that amor mundi involves a reconciliation with the world as ithas been given to us, which nevertheless finds expression in judgements about what ought to appear in this world rather than a passive acceptance of the world as we find it. On the basis of this insight, I eventually try to demonstrate that Arendt offers us thepossibility of resisting marginalisation and oppression for the sake of the world we share with one another rather than for the sake of the affirmation of any pre-determined identity

The purpose of this article is twofold: to examine the origins and ruinous consequences of the teleological conception of history that characterises modernity, and to explore an alternative, non-instrumental conception of history and historical judgement that does not fall prey to the snares inherent in the modern project. To this end, the article draws on insights generated by Nietzsche and Arendt in their respective analyses of the link between history, action and the worldly domain of cultural and/or political engagement. The argument is divided into three sections: the first section explores the significance of history as portrayed by Nietzsche and Arendt, followed, in section two, by an analysis of their respective criticisms of a teleological conception of history that underlies the philosophical and political practices of modernity. The third part of the paper then explores action, narrative and judgement as constituent elements in an alternative conception of the relationship between historicity and worldliness. This alternative, it is argued, constitutes a challenge to the privatised individuals of late-modernity to re-think our relations with one another in the context of a shared, public domain; that is to say, to re-think history and praxis beyond the confines of subjectivity or teleology for the love of the world that lies between us

Theories of happiness usually consider happiness as something that matters to us from a first-person perspective. In this paper, I defend a conception of public happiness that is distinct from private or first-person happiness. Public happiness is presented as a feature of the system of right that defines the political relationship between citizens, as opposed to their personal mental states, desires or well-being. I begin by outlining the main features of public happiness as an Enlightenment ideal. Next, I relate the distinction between the political and the personal to the distinction between having normative reasons for a particular political arrangement and merely having a ‘pro-attitude’ towards a state of affairs that accords with one's preferred definition of happiness. Following this, I demonstrate why well-being, understood as a normative rather than a purely descriptive conception of personal happiness, nevertheless cannot serve as a normative reason in the political domain. In the final section, I show why normative reason-giving matters for the relationship between citizens, and how such reason-giving relates to public happiness.

First, a remark on the topic of my paper, which contains an 'and' where one would expect an 'or'. It might seem highly questionable to want to establish a relation between the self-proclaimed 'last anti-political German', teacher of self-overcoming and solitude, and a political thinker with an express commitment to political action and citizen equality. Would a genuine concern with both thinkers not precisely preclude any attempt to fabricate an alliance between them?One way of circumventing this difficulty might be to argue that Nietzsche is really a political thinker, and, more problematically, that he is some version of a radical democrat. Conversely, one might try to demonstrate that Arendt is really a closet Nietzschean — provided, of course, that one takes Nietzsche to be amenable to a modicum of democratic theory.However, such an attempt to force their divergent projects into the straitjacket of mutual consistency would lose more in integrity — and ultimately, in relevance — than it would gain in cohesion. It is not my intention, therefore, to try and merge their respective undertakings into either a watered-down Nietzsche or a spiced-up Arendt, or to cobble together a new political theory out of their different philosophies.Instead of aiming at an ultimate synthesis, my concern in this paper is with a particular field of inquiry where Nietzsche’s thinking finds, to some extent, its analogue in that of Arendt. The purpose of this exercise is not to simply show up a few points of similarity, but rather, to illuminate a particular problem from two perspectives that stand in an analogical, rather than dialectical, relationship to one another.This analogical relationship does not resolve itself into an ultimate synthesis, and is not predicated on a seamless fit between two different fields of reference. On the contrary, this relationship, like any analogy, has an inevitable remainder, something held in abeyance that transcends the relationship with the analogon. Moreover, as will become clear, it is the differences as much as the affinities between Nietzsche and Arendt’s thinking that serve to illuminate the question this paper aims to address.This question concerns modernity as a condition of disintegration or loss, and particularly the loss of a coherent cultural complex — that is, an inter-human domain of “structured sense”, to borrow a term from Nancy — which necessarily circumscribes the meaning of the human. The premise of the paper, then, is that what has been lost in modernity are the cultural conditions for being — or becoming — human, as opposed to enduring only as a form of animal life or, on the other side of the scale, descending into barbarism . This premise derives from the analogous critiques of modernity developed by Nietzsche and Arendt, in so far as both thinkers examine the problem of modernity through the optics of culture.My argument proceeds in three stages. The first part of the paper examines the meaning and status of 'modernity' in Nietzsche's and Arendt’s respective projects. Here I investigate the time of modernity as falling literally 'between past and future', in which the present exists as only as a gap or aporia between the 'no longer' and the 'not yet'. This focus also serves as an introduction to the problem of the meaning of the human in the absence of any conception of a durable world. Part two examines Nietzsche's and Arendt’s analogical understanding of the human in relation to limitation and transcendence, which allows for a consideration, in part three of the paper, of the extent to which modernity entails a negation of both limitation and transcendence, and a concomitant loss of the human.By way of conclusion, I offer a brief consideration of the future of the human, at which point it also becomes clear in which respects the Nietzschean and Arendtian projects ultimately diverge