Abstract
Hannah Arendt was, among many other things, a migrant. This borderline experience had impact not only on her biography, but also on her work. In this chapter, I argue that although every migration story is situated in a specific individual, historical, and political context, on a deeper level there is a common phenomenal structure that enables us to recognize them as experiences of migration. I then suggest that Hannah Arendt's writings can help us to retrieve this structure. Arendt's political phenomenology offers a basis for mapping stories of migration in their plurality and opens possibilities to a better understanding of migration as a phenomenon. In this chapter I refer to Arendt's metaphors of darkness and light as guideposts for such understanding.
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Notes
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Arendt refers to human beings in general as ‘men’. In the German versions of her writings, this translates to ‘Menschen’, which is an arguably gender-neutral way of referring to human beings, in the sense of the term not being per se assigned to any gender specifically. In this paper, I use the expression ‘women and men’ whenever human beings in general are meant. This should also include other genders, which I do not distinguish for the sake of simplicity of the text, but I do recognize them as a valid subject situation.
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The metaphor of the theatre serves Arendt to establish a connection between action and reflective judgment, which points towards the role of spectators in this imagery. As Linda Zerilli states: “‘Spectator’ is not another person, but simply a different mode of relating to, or being in, the common world.” (Zerilli, 2005, 179) see also Robaszkiewicz (2017, 141–147, esp. 145).
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Arendt’s division between the private and the public was one of the gravest points of critique by second wave feminists as e.g. O’Brien (1981, 100), Rich (1979, 211–212), Pitkin (1981, 338). In her lifetime and shortly after her death, Arendt was only marginally mentioned and mostly ignored by feminist authors: Millett (1969, 35), Markus (1987, 76), Young-Bruehl (1996, 307). The residuals of this, largely overridden, critical interpretation reoccur in conversations with some feminist scholars even today.
- 5.
Arendt’s reflections echo Karl Jaspers’ concept of limit situations (“Grenzsituationen”) in the sense of a situation of commotion, awakening the subject to her Dasein: Jaspers (1956a, 56). Such an awakening seems to resonate with Arendt’s distinction between behavior, based on daily routines, and action, requiring what Jaspers calls “entering a situation with eyes wide-open”, Jaspers (1956b, 204); see also Arendt (1998, 40).
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A notorious example of persecution of Jews shortly after the end of the Second World War was the pogrom in the polish city of Kielce in 1946, where 42 Jewish people, including children, women and elders, were murdered by the Polish mob, who believed a fabricated story about a Polish child having been kidnapped by a Jew in order to produce matzo. This tragedy was all the worse, as the murdered people—who narrowly escaped death during Holocaust—were preparing to leave Poland for a kibbutz in Palestine only a couple of months later, see Gross (2018).
- 7.
I adopt this figure of thought from Marieke Borren, who examines the harmful visibility and invisibility of illegal migrants. However, due to the scope of this essay, I decisively transform her interpretation, abstracting from the legal status of respective persons: Borren (2018, 231).
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The origins of this term are to be found in Arendt’s reading of Saint Augustine: “It is through love of the world that man explicitly makes himself at home in the world, and then desirously looks to it alone for his good and evil. Not until then do the world and man grow ‘worldly’”, Arendt (1996, 67), see also Kattago (2014, 53–54).
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Robaszkiewicz, M. (2022). From the Darkness to the Light: Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenology of Migration. In: Robaszkiewicz, M., Matzner, T. (eds) Hannah Arendt: Challenges of Plurality. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81712-1_6
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