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25The Subject of RightsEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (1): 139-156. 2011.It is often pointed out that Agamben’s most profound disagreement with Hannah Arendt is his rejection of anything like a “right to have rights” that would guarantee the belonging to a political space. I want to suggest, however, that the subject of rights in Agamben’s thought is more complicated, arguing in this essay that Agamben’s critique is not with the concept of human rights per se, but with the declaration of modern rights. In other words, this essay will explore how Agamben’s analysis of…Read more
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Entschlossenheit: Martin Heidegger and the Question of the WillDissertation, Duquesne University. 1986.Beginning with Being and Time and continuing throughout the later writings, Heidegger develops a radical critique and rethinking of the Western Metaphysical understanding of subjectivity. The question which arises in this critique is the question concerning the will. ;Broadly speaking, the will, in the history of Western Metaphysics, is that which accounts for the enduring "I". Moreover, the will is that which directs all acts of volition, and therefore accounts for the character of self and its…Read more
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63Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common ResponsibilityIndiana University Press. 2006.Hannah Arendt’s most important contribution to political thought may be her well-known and often-cited notion of the "right to have rights." In this incisive and wide-ranging book, Peg Birmingham explores the theoretical and social foundations of Arendt’s philosophy on human rights. Devoting special consideration to questions and issues surrounding Arendt’s ideas of common humanity, human responsibility, and natality, Birmingham formulates a more complex view of how these basic concepts support …Read more
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47Elated citizenry: Deception and the democratic task of bearing witnessResearch in Phenomenology 38 (2): 198-215. 2008.It has become nearly a truism for contemporary theorists of democracy to understand the democratic space as agonistic and contested. The shadow that haunts thinkers of democracy today, and out of which this assumption emerges, is the specter of totalitarianism with its claims to a totalizing knowledge in the form of ideology and a totalizing power of a sovereign will that claims to be the embodiment of the law. Caught up in these totalizing claims, the citizenry becomes elated. The only remedy t…Read more
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7A lying world order : political deception and the threat of totalitarianismIn Roger Berkowitz (ed.), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, Fordham University Press. pp. 71-78. 2010.
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65Toward a Genealogy of Science. Review of "La Puissance du Rationnel" by Dominique Janicaud (review)Research in Phenomenology 17 (1): 281. 1987.
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30Natal Finitude: Syncopated Temporality and the Endurance of the NewResearch in Phenomenology 43 (1): 141-148. 2013.
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4Hannah Arendt : The spectator's visionIn Joke J. Hermsen & Dana Richard Villa (eds.), The judge and the spectator: Hannah Arendt's political philosophy, Peeters. 1999.
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182Arendt and Hobbes: Glory, Sacrificial Violence, and the Political ImaginationResearch in Phenomenology 41 (1): 1-22. 2011.The dominant narrative today of modern political power, inspired by Foucault, is one that traces the move from the spectacle of the scaffold to the disciplining of bodies whereby the modern political subject, animated by a fundamental fear and the will to live, is promised security in exchange for obedience and productivity. In this essay, I call into question this narrative, arguing that that the modern political imagination, rooted in Hobbes, is animated not by fear but instead by the desire f…Read more
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Reading Experimentally. Review of "The Language of Difference" by Charles E. Scott (review)Research in Phenomenology 18 (1): 283. 1988.
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302Hannah Arendt's dismissal of the ethicalIn Philippe van Haute & Peg Birmingham (eds.), Dissensus communis: between ethics and politics, Kok Pharos. 1995.
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22Europe, Universality, Philosophy: A Monstrous Promise?Comparative and Continental Philosophy 3 (1). 2011.
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44The joyous struggle of the sublime and the musical essence of joyResearch in Phenomenology 25 (1): 68-89. 1995.
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1Agamben on Violence, Language, and Human RightsIn Nathan Eckstrand & Christopher S. Yates (eds.), Philosophy and the return of violence: studies from this widening gyre, Continuum International Publishing Group. 2011.
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75The pleasure of your company: Arendt, Kristeva, and an ethics of public happinessResearch in Phenomenology 33 (1): 53-74. 2003.In this essay, I examine Arendt's and Kristeva's account of the archaic event of natality, arguing that each attempts to show how this event is the source of our pleasure in the company of others. I first examine Arendt's understanding of natality, showing that in her early writings, specifically in The Origin of Totalitarianism, the event of natality carries with it a capacity for violence that Arendt does not continue to develop in her later formulations. This lack of development leaves her la…Read more
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80On violence, politics, and the lawJournal of Speculative Philosophy 24 (1): 1-20. 2010.If each age has its particular point of entry to the central political problems of authority, power, and obligation, then the present age has its point of access in the relation among violence, politics, and the law. Ours is an age that has largely replaced its theological underpinnings with political revolutions, while at the same time it has grown skeptical of natural right and natural law claims. If the political order is no longer founded in the theological and is unable to appeal to natural…Read more
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Hannah arendtiIn Alan D. Schrift (ed.), The History of Continental Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 4--133. 2010.
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19Hannah Arendt and Political Glory: Earthly Immortality and a Post-Theological Concept of the PoliticalRowman & Littlefield International. 2015.Leading philosopher Peg Birmingham explores the relation between political deception, violence, and law in an attempt to renew the concept of the political.
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608The An-Archic Event of Natality and the" Right to Have Rights"Social Research: An International Quarterly 74 (3): 763-776. 2007.My claim is that Arendt founds the 'right to have rights' in the anarchic event of natality. Arendt is very explicit that the event of natality is an ontological event. In The Human Condition, she writes: "The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal "natural" ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted." At the same time, she is equally insistent that this ontological event is not metaphysical; it is not the or…Read more
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261Holes of oblivion: The banality of radical evilHypatia 18 (1): 80-103. 2003.: This essay offers a reflection on Arendt's notion of radical evil, arguing that her later understanding of the banality of evil is already at work in her earlier reflections on the nature of radical evil as banal, and furthermore, that Arendt's understanding of the "banality of radical evil" has its source in the very event that offers a possible remedy to it, namely, the event of natality. Kristeva's recent work (2001) on Arendt is important to this proposal insofar as her notion of "abjectio…Read more
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78Feminist fictions: Discourse, desire and the lawPhilosophy and Social Criticism 22 (4): 81-93. 1996.
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43A ravaged site: On time and the law (review)Continental Philosophy Review 40 (4): 435-446. 2007.