Katie B. Howard

Judith Butler's recent work in political theory, especially the 2015 book Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, explores the bodily dimensions of action not limited to vocalization. This performative action-theory relies heavily on Hannah Arendt's concept of the “space of appearance” and on her notion of “action in concert.” And yet, if part of Butler's purpose is to understand better how “bodily acts become performative,” then a fuller turn toward the affective dimensions of embodiment is necessary. Using recent work in affect theory to study the spatialization and physicality of emotion, the paper analyzes examples of assemblies, including the transnational SlutWalk movement and the 2006 noncitizen mass protests in the U.S., which provide a framework for thinking how the affective dimensions of assembling in public become political.

Readers of Hannah Arendt’s now classic formulation of the statelessness problem in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism abound at a moment when the number of stateless peoples worldwide continues to rise exponentially. Along with statelessness, few concepts in Arendt scholarship have spawned such a volume of literature, and perhaps none have provoked as much interest outside of the field of philosophy, as ‘the right to have rights.’ Interpreting this enigmatic term exposes the heart of our beliefs about the nature of the political and has important consequences for how we practice politics on a global scale because it implicitly takes plural human beings, and not the citizen, as its subjects. Arendt’s conceptualization of this problem remains unsurpassed in its diagnosis of the political situation of statelessness, as well as its intimate description of the human cost of what she refers to as ‘world loss,’ a phenomenon that the prevailing human rights and global justice discourse does not take into account. And yet, as an alternative framework for thinking about global politics, the right to have rights resists easy interpretation, let alone practical application.