Intersubjectivity and the Political: Butler's Deconstructive Reading of Arendt's Thought

Hannah Arendt's views on the political and the results that flow from them are central themes that occupy an important place in contemporary political thought and have given rise to new fields in politics and ethics. In her recent approaches, Judith Butler has been influenced by Hannah Arendt's political thought for nearly two decades in some of her most important works. At the outset, one might think that Butler's influence of Foucault's ideas, especially regarding the power and importance of individual agency, as well as her tendency to analyze and examine gendered approaches, prevent her from being considered an Arendt thinker. If we consider his views on the importance of the public sphere and the analysis and study of contemporary political, economic, and social assembly, its influence on Arendt's political thought cannot be denied, especially in her recent books, the place Arendt's political thought has in creating important and influential concepts. She has referred to coordinated action, collective action, group resistance, plurality, and the space of appearance, concepts neglected in Foucault's thought. Here, Butler proposes new forms of politics and social ontology and attempts to answer the central question of what conditions we need for the possibility of action. Instead of focusing on Arendt's philosophical question, who is man and what is his capacity for action? In the context of contemporary social changes, it answers the philosophical question of who can fundamentally be considered human.

In this study, using a descriptive-analytical and comparative method, we will first describe and analyze, in two separate parts, the concept of the intersubjectivity of the political, as well as its connection with the central themes of appearance space, plurality, coordinated actions, embodied actions, and performativity in Arendt's and Butler's thought. Then, in the evaluation section, while comparing and analyzing the opinions of these two thinkers, we will see what possibilities Butler offers as a result of examining the possibility or impossibility of the political in Arendt's thought in order to rethink new forms of social identities with a deconstructive approach.

Butler cannot be presented as Arendtian thinker because, unlike Arendt, his concern in dealing with politics and conceptualization in political sphere is not to stay in the field or to call it original, but to deal with the new political, social and economic phenomena. And she considers it important to rethink political concepts from the point of view of finding a way out of the current crises. Therefore, agency cannot be reduced only to the public sphere, but its root must also be sought in the social ontology of life. Starting from these lines, her critical reading deals with issues such as the irreconcilable conflict between the public and the private, the transformation of the concept of plurality and its extension to the meaning of otherness, and the place of the embodied actor in the assembly, in order to confirm the positions of those commentators who, in their opinion, Butler used Arendt's thought against Arendt. Butler finds in Arendt’s thinking resources to read Arendt against herself, a methodology that allows Butler to correct and complement Arendt’s work. From this point of view, it is not possible to define the stratum only by its rhetoric and coordinated action. Agency and power in society has given (Arendt), but it should be considered with different performances by the body and by those whose lives are often and perhaps never with the project of accumulating new definitions of human concepts, agency and presented contemporary movements (Butler). The realization of coordinated action (Arendt) and the implementation of assemblies (Butler) requires overcoming the concept of individualism. Although change can occur at the individual level, the experience of contemporary political and social movements has shown that people change in the context of relationships, creating new structures and dismantling previous ones.

Arendt's remarks on coordinated action are limited to people acting in a coordinated way to achieve the will of the political unit. Butler extends the question of how different groups with different aspirations can act harmoniously in an all-round and comprehensive reading of the performative dimension of otherness. Contemporary politics needs more than anything else the will of the people, not an individual will, a will that can only be strengthened through the gathering of performances and the acceptance of the internal conflicts of groups. The internal conflict about the meaning of otherness in social and political life will also be particularly linked to the debates about radical democracy, social justice and identity politics.