The Politics of Theatricality

McCool, Daniel J.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95648-0_3

Daniel J. McCool²

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Abstract

McCool summarizes the theory and history behind the politics of theatricality in the modern world. Hannah Arendt is the main representative of this politics. Whereas the politics of authenticity is about speaking openly and honestly about what one thinks or feels inside, the politics of theatricality sees politics as a performance in which we wear external masks and are only united in our external titles of “citizen.” Arendt blames mass society, the horrors of Jacobinism, and totalitarianism on the overemphasis on compassion, motives, and intention by which modern individuals came to judge each other after Rousseau. Theatricality, as the wearing of public costumes, can repoliticize the modern world by creating a dynamic, agonistic public realm.

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Notes

1.
Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 71, no. 3 (2004): 427.
2.
Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 431.
3.
Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).
4.
Matthew Sharpe, “A Question of Two Truths? Remarks on Parrhesia and the ‘Political-Philosophical’ Difference,” Parrhesia 2 (2007): 90.
5.
Hannah Arendt, “Socrates” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), 12.
6.
Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 431.
7.
Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 360.
8.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Marion Faber. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 8–9.
9.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), 33.
10.
Arendt, Human Condition, 28.
11.
Arendt, Human Condition, 45.
12.
Arendt, Human Condition, 41.
13.
Arendt, Human Condition, 43.
14.
Arendt, Human Condition, 179.
15.
Arendt, Human Condition, 33.
16.
Arendt, Human Condition, 38–39.
17.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 67.
18.
Dana Richard Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999), 138.
19.
Arendt, On Revolution, 96.
20.
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972), 69–70.
21.
Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (London: Verso, 2009), 115.
22.
Arendt, On Revolution, 88.
23.
Kateb, George, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 93–94.
24.
Arendt, On Revolution, 79.
25.
Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge England: Cambridge UP, 1992), 170.
26.
Arendt, On Revolution, 76–77.
27.
see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1998).
28.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 311.
29.
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 199.
30.
Arendt, Between Past and Future, 199.
31.
Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002), 97.
32.
Arendt, Between Past and Future, 199.
33.
Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 92.
34.
Thomas L. Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 37.
35.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 466.
36.
Norma Claire Moruzzi. Speaking through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000), 122.
37.
Arendt, Human Condition, 247.
38.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 466.
39.
Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life, 36.
40.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 475–76.
41.
Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, 8.
42.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 54.
43.
Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz and Thomas Keenan, Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (New York: Fordham UP, 2010), 237.
44.
Berkowitz, Thinking in Dark Times, 237.
45.
Berkowitz, Thinking in Dark Times, 244.
46.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 476.
47.
Arendt, “Socrates,” 21.
48.
Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 170.
49.
Arendt, Human Condition, 7.
50.
While Nietzsche’s “pathos of distance” tends to reject egalitarian democracy and romanticizes a society based on rank, Arendt more readily accepts democracy’s leveling effects. What they share in their reverence for a “pathos of distance” is distance per se between citizens, not difference in rank.
51.
Arendt, Human Condition, 27.
52.
Arendt, Human Condition, 7.
53.
Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 94.
54.
Arendt, On Revolution, 97.
55.
Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 3.
56.
Arendt, Human Condition, 183.
57.
Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 26.
58.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 476.
59.
Arendt, Human Condition, 58.
60.
Arendt, On Revolution, 97.
61.
Brent J. Steele, Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics: The Scars of Violence (London: Routledge, 2013), 79.
62.
Gordon Wood, ”The Democratization of Mind in the American Revolution,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. Robert H. Horwitz (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 118–19.
63.
Wood, “Democratization,” 117.
64.
William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U, 1981), 294.
65.
Steele, Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics, 97.
66.
Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), 3.
67.
Honig, Political Theory, 5.
68.
Honig, Political Theory, 6.
69.
Honig, Political Theory, 4.
70.
Jane Monica Drexler, “Politics Improper: Iris Marion Young, Hannah Arendt, and the Power of Performativity.” Hypatia 22:4 (2007), 4.
71.
Drexler, “Politics Improper,” 5–6.
72.
Drexler, “Politics Improper,” 6.
73.
Drexler, “Politics Improper,” 8.
74.
Drexler, “Politics Improper,” 9.
75.
Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock” in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 231–46.
76.
Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life, 37.
77.
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 91.

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Framingham State University, Framingham, MA, USA
Daniel J. McCool

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McCool, D.J. (2019). The Politics of Theatricality. In: Three Frames of Modern Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95648-0_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95648-0_3
Published: 09 September 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95647-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95648-0
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