"A strange and unknowable version of ourselves"

"What Is Politics?" p/d 4 of 5

“What Is Politics?” is a sample devotion from the manuscript of my book series, Political Devotions, that inspires this Substack. This is the fourth post in “What Is Politics?” To read that devotion’s other posts, click its subtitle’s p/d number: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

The experience of true politics for Hannah Arendt is existential: people are not fully alive until they inhabit public space with deeds and words.¹ People cannot be assured of “the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world” without life in public.² Arendt’s existential understanding of politics is like that of Roland Barthes—“the very dimension of the real”—and of Aristotle, who famously defined human beings as political animals.

When France was liberated, the Resistance members went back to “normal life” and seemed to lose this sense of reality. When the Resistance’s leaders “were incorporated into national politics,” as historian Matthew Cobb puts it, and when the Resistance’s power disappeared,³ its members, Arendt says, were

thrown back into what they now knew to be the weightless irrelevance of their personal affairs, once more separated from “the world of reality” by an épaisseur triste, the “sad opaqueness” of a private life centered about nothing but itself.

France was freed from tyranny, but France’s pre-war politics of repetition reasserted itself. Resistance members, Arendt says, “could only return to the empty strife of conflicting ideologies . . . “⁴

However, Resistance members did retain their now-strange memories. Cobb ends his history of the French Resistance with this retrospective by Resistance leader Jean Cassia:

For each résistant the Resistance was a way of living, a style of life, a life that we invented. It lives in our memory as a unique period, different from all others, unsayable, like a dream. We see ourselves, naked and free, a strange and unknowable version of ourselves, one of those people that you can never find again. . . . If each of us who went through that experience had to define it, we would give it a surprising name that we would not give to the ordinary aspects of our lives. We would say the word quietly, to ourselves. Some would say “adventure.” I would call that moment of my life “happiness.”⁵

Left to only his private life again, Cassia experiences his former public happiness as a dream.

One gets a sense of this épaisseur triste, this sad readjustment to private life, in the story of the disciples’ return to fishing after Jesus’ death.⁶ Some of these seven fisherman were plying their trade when Jesus first calls them to public life.⁷ As if to suggest the emptiness of this return, John tells us that despite fishing all night, the disciples catch nothing.

Then, as in an early-morning dream, Jesus appears and fills their nets with fish. The miracles of public life weren’t over after all.⁸

The disciples speak of their political hopes and disappointments both before and after they learn of Jesus’s resurrection.⁹ Jesus does little to discourage such talk.¹⁰ Before his death, he focuses on a then-current concept—the kingdom of God¹¹—which his audience has understood as the restoration of God’s presence and politics in the world through Israel.¹² Jesus spends a great deal of time redefining for his generation how that hope was coming to pass.

Despite that work, Jesus is subjected to a political show trial and is crucified between two violent revolutionaries who have learned nothing from Jesus’s talk about the politics of God.¹³ Jesus’s death looks like another moment when, in Barthes’s words, “the political changes into the same old story.”¹⁴

But the opposite happens. Matthew’s Gospel ends with good news: God’s kingdom is to come from Israel to the world through the disciples’ agency. And Jesus’s extension of God’s politics to the world comes with a promise of presence: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”¹⁵

Perhaps, having never experienced it, we can’t even dream of public life. Jesus’s call to public life—his “go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God”¹⁶—may bring us into something as unexpected and fulfilling, something as joyous and dangerous as the public space stumbled into by the disciples after Pentecost, by the French résistants, and by the members of the last two centuries’ upstart revolutionary councils.

True politics, as Cassia suggests, isn’t a means to national or even local fame. Instead, it’s “a way of living” and the public space for such a way of life. In that space, Barthes says, “the very dimension of the real” appears, and objective reality is again possible. In that space, politics comes in the presence of the actor and viewer, the speaker and listener before one another.

Politics isn’t politics without that presence. “What we need,” Barthes says, “is a mode of presence within the discourse of the political which would not be repetitive.”¹⁷ Politics is “a mode of presence” where the community encounters itself anew.

This is the fourth of five posts that make up the devotion “What Is Politics?” Click here to read the devotion’s next post, its discussion questions.

1. Arendt, Human Condition, 181-84.

2. Arendt, 208.

3. Cobb, Resistance, 279.

4. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 3.

5. Cobb, 293.

6. John 21:2-3.

7. Mark 1:16-20.

8. John 21:1-11.

9. E.g., Luke 24:18-21; Acts 1:6.

10. E.g., John 12:12-16. Just before his ascension, Jesus’s disciples ask him, “Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6, NNAS). N. T. Wright points out that Jesus’s response (Acts 1:7-8) isn’t dismissive: “Jesus reaffirms the expectation, but alters the interpretation.” Wright, New Testament People of God, 374.

11. E.g., Matthew 13.

12. See gen. Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 171-74.

13. Regarding the two men crucified with Jesus, N.T. Wright says, “The two lestai crucified with him are simply a foretaste of the thousands of lestai—brigands, revolutionaries—who will suffer the same fate by the time the next generation is through. Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 332.

14. Barthes, Grain of the Voice, 218.

15. Matthew 28:20 NNAS.

16. Luke 9:60 NNAS.

17. Barthes, 218.