Drag to reposition

In the 1980s extra-parliamentary social movements and critical theories of race, class, and gender added a new sociocultural understanding of justice—recognition—to the much older socioeconomic one. The best-known form of the struggle for recognition is the identity politics of disadvantaged groups. I argue that there is still another option to conceptualize their predicament, neglected in recent political philosophy, which understands exclusion not in terms of injustice, more particularly a lack of sociocultural recognition, but in terms of a lack of freedom. I draw my inspiration from Hannah Arendt's model of political action. Arendt diagnoses exclusion not solely as a mode of injustice, but as a lack of participation and public freedom. Consequently, she advocates a struggle for participation, political equality, and freedom as a strategy for emancipation or empowerment. Arendt could help feminists see that collective empowerment is made possible not by a shared identity (the target of poststructuralist critics) but by common action in the service of a particular worldly issue or common end. In other words, feminists would do well to appreciate the revolutionary quality and heritage of the feminist movement better, that is, its character as a set of practices of freedom

This article first aims to reconstruct an Arendtian ‘politics of in/visibility.’ Section one interprets Arendt’s reflections on stateless aliens in inter-war Europe, and the next section provides a conceptual background by situating the politics of visibility within Arendt’s more theoretical-philosophical writings on politics. By juxtaposing her account with current Dutch policies and practices concerning aliens in the last section, this article next aims to investigate the relevance and currency of the Arendtian politics of in/visibility. Arguing for the continuing relevance of Arendt’s account, the article nevertheless shows that technologically advanced regimes of exposing have emerged which Arendt neither has nor could take account of. Moreover, this article argues that these regimes, which reinforce the naturalism of the nation-state system even further, have invited particular groups of aliens – i.e., illegal migrants – to adopt counterstrategies of individual self-obscuration that would have been incomprehensible to Arendt.