Saying "Okay" to the World: Natality, Captured Dissent, and the Case for Arendt Now
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25180/lj.v28i1.396Keywords:
Hannah Arendt;, Václav Havel;, Giorgio Agamben;, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl;Abstract
Twenty years after Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's Why Arendt Matters restated Arendt's relevance for the war on terror, this article argues that the vocabulary of anti-totalitarian resistance has itself become an instrument of authoritarian politics, and asks what in Arendt's thought explains the capture. It examines two cases: the migration of Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical vocabulary from the critique of the security state into far-right conspiracism, and the reactionary appropriation of Václav Havel's parable of the greengrocer to recast exclusion as dissent. Both, it argues, share a philosophical substrate — thrownness without natality — which Arendt's account of natality and speech alone can answer. The article turns to literature to read this substrate through David Szalay's (2025) Booker Prize-winning novel Flesh against Havel's greengrocer, showing that care with language is not an intellectual ornament over and above bare life, but a political capacity whose loss is central to an unravelling world order.
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