Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin

303 Pages·2018·5.03 MB·English

by  Seyla Benhabib

exile, s tatelessness,
and m igration

Exile, Statelessness,
and Migration
Playing C hess w ith H istory f rom
Hannah A rendt t o I saiah Be rlin
Seyla B enhabib
Princeton University Press
Princeton & Oxford
Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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press.princeton.edu
Cover image: Dani Karavan, Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin, detail of
environmental sculpture, 1990–1994, Portbou, Spain. © Studio Karavan.
All Rights Reserved
LCCN 2018930584
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 16724- 4
ISBN (pbk.) 978- 0- 691- 16725- 1
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Arno Pro
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
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For Jim
After twenty years

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Chapter Acknowledgments xiii
Preface xv
1 Intertwined Lives and Themes among Jewish Exiles 1
2 Equality and Difference: Human Dignity and Popular
Sovereignty in the Mirror of Political Modernity 9
3 The Elusiveness of the Particular: Hannah Arendt,
Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno 34
4 Whose Trial? Adolf Eichmann’s or Hannah Arendt’s?
The Eichmann Controversy Revisited 61
5 Ethics without Normativity and Politics without
Historicity: On Judith Butler’s Parting Ways. Jewishness
and the Critique of Zionism 80
6 From the “Right to Have Rights” to the “Critique of
Humanitarian Reason” 101
7 Legalism and Its Paradoxes in Judith Shklar’s Work 125
8 Exile and Social Science: On Albert Hirschman 145
9 Isaiah Berlin: A Judaism between Decisionism
and Pluralism 164
vii
viii contents
Conclusion: The Universal and the Particular.
Then and Now 185
Notes 197
References 249
Index 271
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the dedi-
cated cooperation of many of my graduate students. Stefan Eich was
there from the beginning when in 2012 I received the Leopold Lucas
Prize of the Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen that set
me upon the path of autobiographical reflection on Jewish history and
culture in Germany and Turkey. He helped identify sources, translated
texts, and edited the prize lecture that has now been revised as chapter
2 of this volume.
Members of my Doctoral Colloquium that met Tuesday evenings for
several years—Umur Basdas, Carmen Dege, Blake Emerson, Devin
Goure, Anna Jurkevics, Elizabeth Krontiris, Paul Linden- Retek, and
Clara Picker—have inspired me through their questions, writing, and
conversations and have provided invaluable help for the research behind
many of these chapters.
My thanks go to Nica Siegel, also a graduate student in the Yale politi-
cal theory program, for her efficient and thorough work in the prepara-
tion of the bibliography in multiple languages.
A sabbatical leave from Yale University in spring 2016 and an invita-
tion to the University of Cambridge as Diane Middlebrook and Carl
Djerassi Visiting Professor of Gender Studies in spring 2017 enabled me
to put the finishing touches on this volume. I would like to thank Profes-
sor Jude Brown of the Program in Gender Studies for her kind invita-
tion. The time I spent in Cambridge, UK, proved particularly auspicious
for my research. I arrived there with drafts of chapter 6—“From the
‘Right to Have Rights’ to the ‘Critique of Humanitarian Reason’ ”—and
chapter 7—“Legalism and Its Paradoxes in Judith Shklar’s Work”—par-
tially completed. I had some trepidation about basing my guest lecture
ix