In a small memoir on photographs that sit in his office, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben laments an unheeded warning in Hannah Arendt’s work. To Agamben, Arendt’s time to be read has passed:
If it is true, as Benjamin writes, that every book carries with it a historical index that marks the moment when it should be read, then when those same leaders decided to read her many years later, it was too late: the hour of her legibility had long since passed.
(Agamben 2025, 25)
Agamben became acquainted with the work of Hannah Arendt at the same time that he studied with Martin Heidegger at Le Thor. In keeping with this fact, I believe that we ought to chide my dear Agamben here and try to become historical in our relation to this fire alarm hidden in The Origins of Totalitarianism. In keeping also with Agamben’s nod to Benjamin, we must also not cease to gather up those warnings, those scratch marks on the wall of the history of philosophy that point to its end, an end that we have, in turn, not ceased to toil in with very little meaningful resistance. That those “leaders” arrived too late to Origins of Totalitarianism makes perfect sense, because it is not calling out to them. It cannot.
What Arendt is revealing in this book is not simply a series of events, accidents, along the way to a disaster. Instead, in her analysis of the Rights of Man and the nation-state, what we find is that the conditions of their emergence coincide with the expression of the presuppositions that are the source of their downfall. The nation-state and the Rights of Man put humanity at stake in the question of its politics. The nation-state and the Rights of Man formalize the abjection of depoliticized existence, and set the conditions for the demand of its elimination. In this sense, one may want to read the end of the rights of man as an attainment of its very ends. The realization of a politics grounded in humanity sets the terms for a mobilization, one which we are still in the throes of.
Arendt’s attunement to the Danger of her age makes any warning she may have completely inaudible to those whose entire world-view is an expression of the presuppositions of their age, which Arendt subjects to historical scrutiny. Arendt’s unprejudiced polemic against political modernity remains perfectly illegible to the political order precisely because it lays out the very terms of legibility of our politics. In her analysis of the decline of the nation state and the ends of the Rights of Man, a strange confluence of events and the collision of metaphysical predicates make possible the emergence of a total politics that mobilizes the nation and sends it hurtling towards a kind of unending war. It is a kind of war for which any particular war cannot provide a decision. Which is why the Great War, for Arendt, is but one moment in a “chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop” (286).
Much has been made of Arendt’s supposedly unsatisfactory answer to the question of “what” the nation-state is. This kind of definitional demand, made frequently by Arendt’s critics, misses what makes the nation-state such a potent object. What is missed is that the condition of its “decline” is found in its very origin. The nation-state cannot help but decline, because the realization of its presuppositions is alive in the abject status of the figure of the “displaced person”. The nation-state is not an entity, not even a paradoxical one. Even less is it an aporia or a promise of something to come. It is instead a condition of the political as such. Let’s examine this by breaking down two moments of reflection at two different stages of the nation-state’s supposed decline.
First, let us analyze Arendt’s account of the fate of the Minority Treaties. A byproduct of the anxieties surrounding the question of just what the League of Nations actually had as its object of concern beyond generic continental comity, the Minority Treaties attempted to forge the conditions of a national emancipation (selective at best) by bypassing state institutions and ensuring a supranational protection. It is in what the Minority Treaties tacitly, but formally, accepts that Arendt believes is worth honing in on:
… the nationally frustrated population was firmly convinced—as was everybody else—that […] true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights. […] this conviction […] could base itself on the fact that the French Revolution had combined the declaration of the Rights of Man with national sovereignty…
Origins of Totalitarianism, 291
Arendt’s position is not that these treaties were “insufficient” or “failed” in their assigned (ultimately impossible) task. Instead, her argument is far more fundamental. The Minority Treaties, in effect, formalized the condition of statelessness for a human being by tethering their protection to something beyond the law of the particular successor state. Her comment about the French Revolution and the Declaration is the key to understanding what is happening in modernity. In this new liberalism, Man, itself, is intertwined in the question of sovereignty. That sovereignty, now popular and disseminated across the human terrain of the social body, springs from the very humanity of the population over which the sovereign reigns. In one of his many analyses of Arendt, Agamben writes that Arendt allows us to stop talking about 1789’s declaration as some sort of “meta-juridical” analysis about legislators and the values they ought to uphold. We ought to instead understand that this document and the formalization of human rights “represent first of all the originary figure for the inscription of natural naked life in the political-juridical order of the nation-state”. The disquieting myth of the nation-state and the rights of man is that these rights “are attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition […] of the citizen” (Agamben 2000, 20-21). What Agamben is saying here is essential and in need of slight correction. The formalization of human rights does not simply introduce something like “bare life” into bourgeois politics. It puts humanity at stake in the question of politics. That the human being is human insofar as it possesses the capacity for citizenship rather than simply citizenship as such. What this introduces is the inhumanity of the human being at the boundary of politics and the juridical. What bare life’s inclusion here achieves has nothing to do with bourgeois right, but sovereign right. Bourgeois right is the mechanism by which I may fall out of the polity. With my right as a citizen being gone, I am set me aside to dwell in a kind of inhumanity that only the sovereign can have a foot in; the right to protect life is the mechanism by which I am eliminated.
What should be added to Agamben’s analysis is the foundational aspect of utilité publique in the very first clause of the Declaration. Public utility is the closest thing human beings in a polity have to the voice of god expressed through the history of the voicings of a general will, and it is in the protection of the public good that those things threatening the bare life of the population are destroyed. Simply put, by failing to be a citizen, one fails to be a human being – failing to be a human being, one is eliminated as a hazard. The unity of the nation is threatened by this absolute exteriority hidden within, fragmenting it and sending it into civil war. This is only thinkable in a world where the rights of Man are the basis of sovereignty itself. These things that make up a nation, the potentialities, powers, capacities, labor, etc., are expressed only through a sovereign power that guarantees them protection. Hence the “deterioration” of the language surrounding this person cast from political life from being “stateless” to being simply “displaced”. Politics humanizing itself reveals only its swift dependence on the inhuman.
This leads us to the second reflection of Arendt’s, this time on the status of the criminal:
The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm. The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law. As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else .
(Origins of Totalitarianism, 305)
Upon initial analysis, this seems simple enough. Through the last resort of crime, a person can secure a juridical relation that lends them, for a time, a kind of political subject function that they would otherwise not be afforded: a formal record, a title. Their position is no longer arbitrary. For at the very least the criminal is draped temporarily in the predicates of the juridical subject which implies, at least in the Systemzeit of the Weimar, a kind of political subjecthood which allows them to not be at the arbitrary will of the police. It would take the formalization of the state of exception in Germany to make the liquidation of such stateless peoples an actionable possibility within the laws of the state.
If the nation-state as a concept and the Declaration of the Rights of Man share the same fate, it is because the conditions of their dissolution are what they each respectively demand. On the one hand, the nation-state as sovereign reduces the population to bare life in its absolute protection, making something like a lebensborn thinkable and therefore necessary. The Minority Treaties reveal nationality to be something absolutely prior to something like a state law, and yet, in the age of the nation-state, lawgiving power issues forth from public national right as the voice of the general will. On the other hand The Rights of Man reveal the extent to which one is a human only goes as far as their potentiality for a politics and governability. Man as a political animal is no longer an assumption, but an active threshold which, at any moment, a human being can no longer meet. With a kind of irony, Arendt reveals that the bourgeois discovery and assertion of the rights of man puts man in deeper peril, and ultimately destroys it just as it becomes the foundation of a democratic politics. As Foucault and Agamben both reveal, but Arendt and Benjamin prefigure, modernity is defined by an entry of a politics that puts the life of the population at stake and the humanity of the political subject at an exceptional threshold. Arendt remains perfectly legible, but only to those who stand at the edge of this threshold. If the time of Arendt’s legibility has passed, then it is up to us to retain those fragments in their untimeliness.
