Event overview
This paper argues that Hannah Arendt’s notion of the polis and political action is founded on the exclusion of those deemed to be in a state of necessity or mere subsistence, where life is reduced to a struggle to satisfy basic biological needs. The latter, Arendt claims, is what the Ancient Greek oikos or household addressed in order to enable men to enter the polis and realise their freedom as extraordinary words and deeds. The exclusionary nature of this theory of the polis as action has largely either been ignored or at best treated with kid gloves by Arendt’s commentators. The paper endeavours to rectify this situation and show that it is the ordinary which is extraordinary and the key to grasping the human. In doing so, reference will be made to Heidegger’s notion of the polis as the emergence, via language, of the essence of human beings and to Agamben’s reworking of the whole idea of ‘oikos’.
Bio: John Lechte is currently Adjunct Professor in Sociology at Macquarie University in Sydney. His most recent books, Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image and (with Saul Newman) Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights have recently come out in paperback.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Mar 2015 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
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