Politics without a Proper Locus: Political Agency between Action and Practice

Hannah Arendt’s political theory builds on the notion of action in order to describe individual as well as collective power to intervene in a given order. But Arendt’s specific concept of action comes with a number of assumptions and conditions, which constitute a universalised idea of the human subject as generally rational and striving for political progress. This notion, we argue, cannot account for circumstances of violent domination under which some populations live and therefore runs the risk to exclude these parts of society from the field of political agency Arendt sketches. With this observation, the idea of political agency itself is put under scrutiny and has to be reviewed with regard to alternative concepts. In contrast to Arendt’s vocabulary, Saidiya Hartman’s notion of practice aims to describe human activity under extreme circumstances of undermined autonomy and thereby suggests an altered view on politics, action, and the construction of political subjectivity.