University Scholars Programme

This essay traces a line of thought from Kant’s phenomenology of laughter in Critique of Judgment through Hannah Arendt’s appropriation and modification of Kantian reflective judgment in order to explore how laughter may inform a mode and style of political judgment I call the politics of laughter. I argue that laughter is a pleasurable affective response to the contingency of experience, an affect which can infuse political judgment and open the possibility of a more affirmative democratic politics. The last section of the essay imagines a series of conversations emerging from a viewing of the movie Borat in order to show what issues would be raised, and in what tone conversation would proceed, in a politics of laughter.

... 1. Introduction: interpreting the violent state Austin Sarat and Jennifer Culbert, Part I. On the Forms of State Killing: 2. The innocuousness of state lethality in an age of national security Robin Wagner-Pacifici, 3. Oedipal sovereignty Jeremy Arnold, 4. Consecrating violence Mateo ...

Contemporary American discourse is saturated with worries about, or hopes for, America's decline. However, fears of America's decline have been a persistent theme of American writing since the second generation of New England Puritans, worries contained in the genre of the Americanized jeremiad. I will argue that Arendt's On Revolution should be read as a jeremiad that both repeats and problematizes the spiritual/material opposition of the classic American decline narrative. Seeing On Revolution as a jeremiad—a literary form central to American writing and dominated by a mood of despair and lamentation over decline that also issues in a positive call to remembrance and action—enables us to better account for a persistently misunderstood feature of Arendt's argument and to use the text as a political and theoretical resource for responding to powerful and unsettling political movements dominating American politics.

In this paper, I compare two prominent positions within contemporary “Analytic” and “Continental” political philosophy: philosophical anarchism and the paradox of politics. I compare each through an analysis of their respective criticisms of state legitimacy and the internal difficulties each position has in accounting for the legitimacy of state violence. I argue that these internal difficulties force each position to ask questions and criticize assumptions commonly found in the other position. I hope to show through this comparison that work across the analytic/continental divide can tell us a great deal about a range of intractable political phenomena.

I argue that paying closer attention to the questionable pleasures of natality raised at the end of Willing in The Life of the Mind ought to significantly change our understanding of Arendtian judgment and, with that question as an interpretive key, Arendt's scattered writings on judgment and in the Lectures suggest a very different account of, and purpose for, judgment. The essay proceeds in four parts. First, I show how Arendt's question is rooted in a political and existential problem—the problem of nihilism—that pervades and motivates a great deal of her work. Second, I turn briefly to Willing in order to show why Arendt was led, in the course of her analysis of the Will, to her final question. Third, I return to the Lectures in order to show that there is much textual support even in the lectures for an interpretation of Arendtian judgment that would answer Arendt's final question. Finally, I argue that the seemingly apolitical question motivating Arendt's turn to judgment does in fact have significant political relevance, both diagnostically and normatively.

The division between analytic and continental political theory remains as sharp as it is wide, rendering basic problems seemingly intractable. Across the Great Divide offers an accessible and compelling account of how this split has shaped the field of political philosophy and suggests means of addressing it. Rather than advocating a synthesis of these philosophical modes, author Jeremy Arnold argues for aporetic cross-tradition theorizing: bringing together both traditions in order to show how each is at once necessary and limited.

Across the Great Divide engages with a range of fundamental political concepts and theorists—from state legitimacy and violence in the work of Stanley Cavell, to personal freedom and its civic institutionalization in Philip Pettit and Hannah Arendt, and justice in John Rawls and Jacques Derrida—not only illustrating the shortcomings of theoretical synthesis but also demonstrating a productive alternative. By outlining the failings of "political realism" as a synthetic cross-tradition approach to political theory and by modeling an aporetic mode of engagement, Arnold shows how we can better understand and address the pressing political issues of civil freedom and state justice today.