Stefania Maffeis

The article outlines the core elements of the approach to the transnational circulation of ideas and highlights its potential for a methodology of philosophical exile research. Exile is understood not merely as a biographical event, but as an epistemic condition in which new forms of philosophical practice emerge. Based on the premise that philosophising is a social practice, this approach makes visible the trajectories of ideas across languages, public spheres, and institutions, as well as their transformative potential within specific contexts of circulation. The focus lies on the thought of Hannah Arendt, whose exile writings from the 1940s exemplify how political self-positioning, acts of translation, and transgressions of boundaries condense into a critical philosophy of the in-between. The article advocates for a methodology of exile research that is not guided by predetermined disciplinary or nation-state categories, but by the social and epistemic practices of philosophers in exile.

The text approaches the phenomenon of transnational migration movements in the globalized world as a question related to the specific borders and mobilities of philosophy. The circulation of philosophical ideas and subjectivities between different countries and languages is challenged as a form of transnational citizenship. This main thesis will be examined in the light of the building process of the concept of belonging in the political theory of Hannah Arendt in relation to her German and US-American audiences. I will first explain the approach of the transnational circulation of ideas as well as its presumption, the consideration of philosophy as a specific social practice. I will then explore the mutations of Arendt’s thinking on belonging along a close reading and a contextualization of some of her German and English texts. The contradictions in Arendt’s conceptualizations of the idea of belonging will be finally reexamined as practices of constructing transnational social and intellectual frames.

This paper proposes a political understanding of human rights which allows not to dissolve the contradiction between the positive and the normative aspect entailed in the idea and the institution of human rights, but rather to keep them together dialectically. I discuss the relationality of human rights through Hannah Arendt’s idea of the right to have rights and I develop it further through Jacques Rancière’s concept of subjectivity. This allows me to explain the dialectic of the human rights as a conflict between existing positive rights, which assign specific subjects or groups to specific territories and legal spheres, and a universal claim of human equality and freedom, which is challenged from excluded, unclassified social groups and which is performed in situations of protests. I further explain the radical democratic potential of human rights on the paradigmatic case of struggles for a right to global movement and to political belonging. In order to grasp the complexity of those subjectivity practices, I distinguish four different dimensions of subjectivity: a legal and political one, an affective one, an epistemic one and finally an ethical transcultural one.