Intervention as Radical Struggle: On Arendt, Negativity and Resistance

By Javier Sethness

Truthout | Op-Ed  - Sunday, 06 October 2013

"What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing." Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. 
Doubtless, there exists much reason to study disobedience, "the spark behind all knowledge," as Gaston Bachelard claims in his Fragments of a Poetics of Fire. I would argue that Albert Camus is right to claim rebellion - which, as he says, can only ever be a social project infused by notions of solidarity, rather than individualism - to be intimately related to the defense of human existence - survival, in the first place - as well as to the political task of advancing human flourishing. Alarmingly, both such struggles today confront especially severe threats: As Noam Chomsky describes it plainly, the prospect of decent human survival is presently imperiled by the twin specters of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Given the totally inadequate approaches that constituted power have presented vis-à-vis these world-historical problems - radical denial on the one hand, and conscious exacerbation on the other - the question becomes whether we can hope for revolutionary interventions from below, emanating from that which Giorgio Agamben terms "the non-State, which is humanity," to address these pressing dangers in rational and humane fashion. As we have seen in recent years with the shattering entrance onto the public stage of oppressed humanity seeking to manage its affairs autonomously from and antagonistically against the State and capital, such hope does not seem entirely without merit.

In this sense, Arendt is correct to note, as she did in reflecting on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, that the tide of history can shift radically and rapidly, once established hierarchies are disrupted by the broad-based delegitimization of prevailing power relations. Indeed, such a perspective seems to be one of the major, optimistic conclusions to be gleaned from George Katsiaficas' sweeping study of People's Power movements throughout much of Asia - that despotism is doomed, once the demos struggles together to overthrow it, and that the militaristic repression perennially visited on dissident movements reflects the oppressors' fears of the power of the people. Hence, I completely reject the nihilistic notion that intervention constitutes little more than a "decoy or distraction in the face of futility" or a "cover or compensation for hopeless battles and setups." Consider for a moment the Great French Revolution of 1789-1794: One would be at a loss to think of a similarly shattering event in human history, one that abolished monarchy and feudalism at a stroke - not to mention recognizing the end to formal slavery in Saint Domingue/Haiti, following the radical struggle of the slaves there themselves to destroy the system oppressing them. I claim that G.W.F. Hegel was right to celebrate this intervention as "a glorious mental dawn," one that led "[a]ll thinking beings" to experience "jubilation." Similarly, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just justifiably declared the Revolution as promoting the concept of happiness, which heretofore had been denied by existing social arrangements; it was for this reason "a new idea in Europe," and a new reality.

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