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

EXILE, STATELESSNESS, AND MIGRATION

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration

PLAYING CHESS WITH HISTORY FROM HANNAH ARENDT TO ISAIAH BERLIN

SEYLA BENHABIB

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2018 by Princeton University Press

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Cover image: Dani Karavan, Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin, detail of environmental sculpture, 19901994, Portbou, Spain. Studio Karavan.

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LCCN 2018930584

ISBN 978-0-691-16724-4

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For Jim

After twenty years

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE without the dedicated 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 Tbingen 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 of this volume.

Members of my Doctoral Colloquium that met Tuesday evenings for several yearsUmur Basdas, Carmen Dege, Blake Emerson, Devin Goure, Anna Jurkevics, Elizabeth Krontiris, Paul Linden-Retek, and Clara Pickerhave 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 political theory program, for her efficient and thorough work in the preparation of the bibliography in multiple languages.

A sabbatical leave from Yale University in spring 2016 and an invitation 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 Professor Jude Brown of the Program in Gender Studies for her kind invitation. The time I spent in Cambridge, UK, proved particularly auspicious for my research. I arrived there with drafts of .

Particularly helpful was a colloquium held on Judith Shklars work on February 20, 2017, upon the invitation of Duncan Kelly within the context of his History of Political Thought seminars. Katrina Forresters comments on this occasion were very important for clarifying Shklars relation to realism. Thanks also to Duncan Kelly for bringing Peter Lassmans book on Pluralism to my attention.

William E. Scheuerman, on whose dissertation committeechaired by Judith Shklar at HarvardI had served as a second reader nearly three decades ago, provided me with very incisive comments on the full manuscript and was particularly helpful with comments on .

During my Cambridge sojourn, I met Samuel Zeitlin, a graduate student from Berkeley working on his dissertation. Sam proofread and commented upon the first seven chapters of this manuscript and provided me with many valuable insights, some of which I tried to acknowledge in the text. He is a young scholar of immense erudition and is making his mark through his superbly annotated translations of Carl Schmitts texts. Thanks are due to him for his outstanding help.

My interest in the themes of European, and in particular, German-Jewish intellectual history goes back to my first years in Germany when I arrived in 1979 as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Upon settling in Frankfurt in the early 1980s, I met an extraordinary group of politically engaged Jewish intellectuals: Micha Brumlik, Dan Diner, Gertrud Koch, Cilly Kugelman, and Moishe Postone. We have remained friends for more than three decades and I learned a great deal from them about the European Jewish experience of the interwar and postwar years. They are my secret interlocutors in many chapters.

Conversations with Yirmiyahu Yovel during his tenure as professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research have been extremely significant for me and is dedicated to him and his wife, Shoshana Yovel.

Over the years I have had dialogues on these issues with friends and colleagues, among them Asaf Angermann, Roger Berkowitz, Richard J. Bernstein, Susan Buck-Morss, Drucilla Cornell, Carolin Emcke, Rainer Forst, Peter Gordon, Jrgen Habermas, Dick Howard, Martin Jay, Karuna Mantena, and Jason Stanley. They have inspired me through their work and reflections.

Thanks also to Rob Tempio from Princeton University Press, in exchanges with whom the idea for this book emerged and for his patience in awaiting its completion.

This book is dedicated to James A. Sleeper with gratitude for two decades of conversations and insights that have probed with me the individual and collective Jewish experiences that shape thinkers lives.

Alford, Massachusetts

New York City

October 2017

CHAPTER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IS BASED upon a lecture delivered when I was awarded the Leopold Lucas Prize of the Theological Faculty of the University of Tbingen in spring 2012. The revised lecture has appeared in a German-English edition as Gleichheit und Differenz. Die Wrde des Menschen und die Souvernitsansprche der Vlker in Spiegel der politischen Moderne [Equality and Difference. Human Dignity and Popular Sovereignty in the Mirror of Political Modernity] (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 696. A shortened and revised version was previously published as Judith Shklars Dystopic Liberalism, in Social Research 61:2 (1994): 47788. 1994 The New School for Social Research. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Both versions have been significantly rewritten for inclusion in this volume.

.

An earlier version of appeared as Whose Trial? Adolf Eichmanns or Hannah Arendts? The Eichmann Controversy Revisited, in The Trial that Never Ends: Hannah Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem in Retrospect, edited by Richard J. Golsan and Sarah M. Misemer (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 20929. Copyright 2017 by University of Toronto Press. Reprinted by permission.

the Critique of Zionism. Copyright 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reprinted by permission. It has been revised for inclusion in this volume.

was first presented at the New School for Social Research upon the establishment of the Ari Zolberg Center for Migration Studies in spring 2015. It was delivered in Essen-Duisburg Universitys Center for Migrant Studies on January 28, 2016, and as my Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship lecture in Cambridge University, UK, on February 13, 2017, and at Leeds University Law School on February 23, 2017. It is being published for the first time in this volume.

Earlier versions of were read at the Political Theory Conference organized by Tel-Aviv University on June 5, 2016; at the Minerva Center for Human Rights of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on June 7, 2016; at the New School for Social Research on November 16, 2006; and at the Yale Political Theory Colloquium, November 30, 2016. Parts of it were also presented at the Cambridge Colloquium on the History of Political Thought on February 20, 2017. This is its first full publication.

A much shorter version of has previously appeared as Oracles Odyssey. Review of