Maria Robaszkiewicz

In this paper, I focus on feminist protests (exemplary, in Argentina and Poland) defending women's right to access to prenatal diagnostics and abortion, which I reflect upon from the perspective of Hannah Arendt's theory of politics. After briefly referring to Arendt's difficult relationship with feminism, linking it to the struggle of Argentinian women for legalizing abortion, I look at Arendt's theorizing of the body in and beyond the private. I then argue for politicization of abortion as extrinsically enforced and rethink the role of the private in the context of abortion regulations and practices. In the closing section of my paper, I offer a micronarrative of the feminist street protests in Poland, and discuss it as an example of feminist revolutionary moment.

Let me begin by telling a story: on the 24 October 1975, women of IcelandIceland went on strike. For one day, 90% of women refused to work, cook and take care of children. Instead, they came together to demonstrate and demand gender equality. In Reykjavik alone, 25,000 women gathered in the Downtown Square. Impressive bird’s-eye photographs of the rally show thousands of women of all ages, carrying banners calling for gender equality and equal pay, but most of all protesting against the political under-representation of women. It was the largest of more than 20 rallies throughout the country.

Maria Robaszkiewicz fragt in ihrem Buch worin politische Kompetenz besteht, welche Fähigkeiten der Beteiligung am politischen Geschehen zugrunde liegen und wie eine politische Sphäre geschaffen werden kann, die trotz der Pluralität von Meinungen, einen Raum für politische Gemeinschaft bietet. Sie greift dabei auf Hannah Arendts Konzept des politischen Denkens zurück, das mögliche Antworten auf diese Fragen gibt. Allerdings ist die Fähigkeit des politischen Denkens den Menschen nicht gegeben, sondern muss erst durch Übungen entwickelt werden. Arendts Texte können als Beispiele derartiger Übungen fungieren: Als solche bieten sie eine Einleitung der Politik als weltbildender Praxis.

Hannah Arendt was, among many other things, a migrant. This borderline experience had impact not only on her biography, but also on her work. In this chapter, I argue that although every migration story is situated in a specific individual, historical, and political context, on a deeper level there is a common phenomenal structure that enables us to recognize them as experiences of migration. I then suggest that Hannah Arendt's writings can help us to retrieve this structure. Arendt's political phenomenology offers a basis for mapping stories of migration in their plurality and opens possibilities to a better understanding of migration as a phenomenon. In this chapter I refer to Arendt's metaphors of darkness and light as guideposts for such understanding.

This volume explores challenges posed by plurality, as understood by Hannah Arendt, but also the opportunities it offers. It is an interdisciplinary collection of chapters, including contributions from different traditions of philosophy, political science, and history. The book offers novel perspectives on central issues in research on Arendt, reconfiguring the existing interpretations and reinforcing the line of interpretation illuminating the phenomenological facets of Arendt’s theory. The authors of the contributions to this volume decisively put the notion of plurality in the center of the collected interpretations, pointing out that plurality in its dialectic form of commonality, and difference is not only, as assumed by default, one of the most important notions in Arendt’s theory, but the very central one. At the same time, plurality is a central issue in many current debates, from populism and hate speech to migration and privacy. This collection therefore connects the theoretical advancements regarding Arendt and other political thinkers with some of the most pressing contemporary issues. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students from philosophy, political theory and related fields studying contemporary challenges of plurality as well as scholars interested in the work of Hannah Arendt.