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607The 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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297Hannah 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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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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177Arendt 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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78On 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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78Feminist fictions: Discourse, desire and the lawPhilosophy and Social Criticism 22 (4): 81-93. 1996.
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77Toward 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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75The 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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73The 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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64Hannah 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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63Superfluity and PrecarityPhilosophy Today 62 (2): 319-335. 2018.In this essay I take up Butler’s and Arendt’s respective accounts of the production of precarity and superfluity, asking whether they are proximate accounts, as they seem to be, or whether Butler’s turn to precarity misses the radical nature of Arendt’s genealogy of the production of superfluity, a genealogy that begins at the inauguration of modernity, attempts to find a “perfect superfluousness” in the death camps, and continues unabated in the contemporary global world. Reading Arendt against…Read more
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49Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics, by Bernard Flynn (review)Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 16 (2): 499-509. 1993.
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49Holes 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 on Arendt is important to this proposal insofar as her notion of “abjection” illumi…Read more
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47A Discussion of Rodolphe Gasché's Europe, or The Infinite TaskComparative and Continental Philosophy 3 (1): 27-57. 2011.One of the challenges facing Continental Philosophy is how to maintain its identity as “Continental” (and thus as “European”) while avoiding the dangers of Euro-centrism. This challenge calls for many approaches, but one entry point is through the question of Europe—can we think a European identity that is pluralistic and radically open to its others, a Europe that is not Euro-centric? Rodolphe Gasché, in his recently published Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (St…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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45Building from ruins: The wandering space of the feminineResearch in Phenomenology 22 (1): 73-79. 1992.
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43A ravaged site: On time and the law (review)Continental Philosophy Review 40 (4): 435-446. 2007.
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41Worldly Immortality in an Age of Superfluity: Arendt’s The Human ConditionArendt Studies 2 25-35. 2018.
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41The joyous struggle of the sublime and the musical essence of joyResearch in Phenomenology 25 (1): 68-89. 1995.
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32Dissensus communis: between ethics and politics (edited book)Kok Pharos. 1995.This book reflects on the problematic relation of ethics to politics in our 'democratic' era.
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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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26Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of ModernitySubstance 20 (1): 131. 1991.
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24Topic: Democracy and the idea of citizenshipResearch in Phenomenology 38 (2): 157-173. 2008.This paper analyzes the reasons behind what it calls the erosion of democracy under George W. Bush's presidency since September 11, 2001, and claims that they are twofold: first, the erosion in question can be attributed to a crisis of the state and the belief that security is its only genuine function. In other words, the erosion of democracy is an erosion of the very idea of the public sphere beyond security and war. Secondly, the erosion of the ethical sphere goes hand in hand with an extraor…Read more
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24Dennis Schmidt and the Origin of the Ethical LifeEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (1): 53-66. 2017.This essay explores Dennis Schmidt’s notion of an “original ethics,” asking how language, freedom and history are at work in this original ethics. The essay first examines Schmidt’s claim that philosophy has traditionally understood ethical and political life as rooted in a subject ruled entirely by what he calls “the law of the common.” The essay specifically looks at how Plato and Hobbes embrace the law of the common, expelling thereby the law of the idiom from their respective ethical and pol…Read more