Tal Correm

Hannah Arendt’s critical acceptance of the Jewish national liberation movement and her support for the formation of a Jewish Army during the Second World War stand in contrast to her later critique of armed anticolonial struggles. I address this tension in three steps. First, I explain the role of violence in her theory of liberation. Next, I address the problem with liberation in terms of a sovereign nation-state and the alternative of federation. Finally, I return to the case of Jewish liberation to show that the apparent tension can be resolved if it is understood within the framework of federalism. Instead of understanding national liberation as self-determination, federalism allows for a non-sovereign freedom that supports the plurality of nations within a shared political community.

Critics take issue with Arendt’s writings on the question of race in the United States, especially in On Violence [1970] and her controversial essays on school desegregation and education “Reflections on Little Rock” [1959] and “The Crisis in Education” [1958]. Recent works, such as that of Kathryn Sophia Belle, Patricia Owens, and Chad Kautzer, call to reevaluate Arendt’s canonical status through the lens of her anti-Black racism and warns that her thought sanctions state violence against racial groups. Anne Norton and Robert Bernasconi argued before against Arendt’s failure to acknowledge Black agency and thought and how anti-Black racism structures the political realm in American society. While I agree with these critiques about Arendt’s shortsighted and questionable judgments, I find in her writings on guilt and political responsibility a resource to think resistance to anti-Black racism. This is not an obvious claim as the literature on Arendt’s notion of political responsibility focuses mainly on her writings about post-war Germany and the controversy following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem [1963] rather than her controversial writings on race and racism in the US. Yet we can find this connection in Arendt’s writing when she questions “white guilt” as an instance of collective guilt in On Violence (64-65) or when she criticizes in “Reflections” the abandonment of responsibility in its two senses: the responsibility to protect the children and the responsibility for the world (50). In the following I explain the relevance of political responsibility to confronting structural and historical racial injustices. I address critiques about the asymmetrical burden of responsibility and white ignorance and show support for the constructive, actional, backward- and forward-looking dimensions of political responsibility in the visions and platforms of the Movement for Black Lives.

This article addresses the ambivalent role of violence in liberation struggles by staging a mutually enriching dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon. It challenges the binary distinction between justifiable resistance that allows for only short-term, instrumental use of violence, and unwarranted resistance where violence is intrinsically justified as a creative, organic life-force of the oppressed. Instead, it discusses the constitutive role of violence as a condition of possibility of politics – highlighting the impossibility of separating the bloody moments of revolution from the constitution of the political community as a space of public freedom. The reconstructed debate on the relation between violence and freedom presents a fresh perspective on the justifiability and costs of violent resistance in circumstances of radical inequality and the extent to which liberation may remain an ongoing project to sustain the fragile achievement of freedom.