Hannah Arendt. Politics and defactualization

Abstract

The debate about the war in Iraq urges us to rethink Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the crisis of our time, namely on a world in which the elements that led to the rise of totalitarian regimes grew stronger, even though that kind of regime, in the precise shape that she described it, was irrevocably left in the past. If the ideal subject of the totalitarian regime was that who could not distinguish between fact and fiction, the ideal subject of the degraded politics of our time is that who cultivates indifference towards what he calls «the relativity of events», while at the same time founding his decisions on the formal analytical grids that defactualize those same events. The reason to bring to light the elements which characterize the crisis that we are currently facing can be traced to Arendt’s reflections on the Vietnam War. To sum it up, the degradation of politics stems from the debate being undermined by the defactualization of events. Such is the thesis that will be presented in this paper.