LITMIR.BIZ

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is—the fact that [all people] have entered the world through birth.”⁷¹ Although the differences between Heidegger and Arendt’s work are considered more fully in subsequent chapters, it is important to emphasize here that an Arendtian conceptualization of care is world-centric, and Dasein is disclosed in the world among a plurality of people during the doing of political action. Thus, where Heidegger thinks about care in self-reflective terms and in Dasein’s relation to death, Arendt conceptualizes care as a worldly form of practice and Being as that which is disclosed publicly when one speaks and acts with one’s fellow beings. Commenting on Arendt’s doctoral dissertation entitled, Love and Saint Augustine, in which Arendt distances herself from Heidegger’s phenomenology for the first time, Joanna Scott and Judith Stark highlight how “Arendt proposes an alternative definition of care [. . .] central to its meaning is the possibility of ‘reconstituting’ relationships through friendship, forgiveness, and social bonding.”⁷² Building upon this conceptual foundation, I elaborate upon this Arendtian notion of care—arguably a type of “‘miracle’ possible despite death”⁷³ —in order to develop my theory of a caring cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. My work draws out the notion of care that Arendt alludes to throughout her corpus: that it is important to “care for the world,” as it is in the world that people—as she writes—“show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identity.”⁷⁴ For Arendt, the answer to the Heideggerian question, “Who is Dasein?,” is revealed in the “world” and thus there is a need to care for spaces where worldly interactions can occur between people.

      Interwoven throughout her body of thought, Arendt’s notion of care can be understood in reference to other ideas, such as—for example—the idea of “culture.” Indeed, in Arendt’s conceptualization of “culture,” one can recognize the outlines of an Arendtian understanding of care:

      Culture, word and concept, is Roman in origin. The word “culture” derives from colere—to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve—and it relates primarily to the intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for human habitation.⁷⁵

      Arendt’s theorization of “culture” provides an insightful commentary upon links between culture and politics, yet I take from this passage only her conceptualization of “care,” which she relates to the notion of tending to and preserving the natural world. While her etymological exegesis of the word “culture” is associated with the natural world, or the earthly home that all creatures inhabit, this conceptualization is equally pertinent in terms of the non-natural, fabricated world(s) produced by people: the “space for politics.” This is an aspect of Arendt’s work that is examined throughout the remainder of this book. It is necessary here, however, to recognize that the “world” can be understood as a type of public dwelling place where a plurality of people can appear and act together, which—if adequately tended to or preserved—can become a public space fit for human habitation: a “common home”⁷⁶ for the people of a given sociopolitical community. Whereas a Heideggerian conceptualization suggests that—as Arendt observes about Heidegger’s work—the “fundamental fear of death is reflected [in] not-being-at-home in the world,”⁷⁷ which is the state of isolation that permits Dasein to be fully itself, an Arendtian account of care focuses on tending to and preserving this “common home.”

      Focused on plurality and natality, Arendt maintains that—in contrast to Heidegger’s conceptualization of Sorge—care ought to be rooted in a civic-minded form of “love for the world” (amor mundi). In other words, where Heidegger’s self-reflective, “death-driven” notion of Sorge is the “background condition for a variety of cases of caring,” Arendt’s conceptualization of care—specifically the one that she invokes when writing about “the political”—is rooted in a world-centric form of civic caritas that Elisabeth Young-Bruehl suggests is understood as a love that “unites self and others.”⁷⁸ This is a non-erotic, non-agapic notion of love, one which is associated with the joy of being with and sharing the public realm with other people. These are individuals Arendt describes in terms of an Aristotelian notion of philia politike, whereby those with whom we must share the public realm of the political are understood as “civic friends” to be respected as people with equal standing in the “world.”⁷⁹ Caring for the world is thus not driven by a form of existential “anxiety” but by the love of acting publicly with one’s civic friends and of experiencing that which can only be manifested in the political when a plurality of distinct but equal people act in concert: freedom. Differentiating her work from that of Heidegger’s, then, Arendt claims that “care” should be practiced not out of concern for one’s death but, rather, in the spirit of amor mundi and a sense of gratitude for the possibility of freely beginning new courses of public action with other people in the “space for politics.” It is in these terms—amor mundi, plurality, and natality—that I develop my understanding of a caring forgiveness and cosmopolitanism throughout this book, “resuscitating” and reconsidering two ancient ideas from the perspective that there is a pressing need to think and act politically not simply for the sake of the Self but for the sake of the “world,” where all people can experience freedom and consequently where power can be re-engendered.

3. Book Structure

      The first chapter of this book examines the ideas of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism as they are found in Derrida’s work. He does not conceptualize these two ideas in relation to the notion of “care” nor does he assume an Arendtian conceptualization of “care for the world.” With his genealogical practice of deconstruction, however, Derrida cuts to the conceptual core of both the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, revealing the problems, pitfalls, and paradoxes inherent to the underlying logics of these two ideas. By identifying and isolating the issues and aporetic underpinnings which undergird these two concepts, his work effectively locates the boundaries inherent to the concepts of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism; these are the conceptual limits that this book seeks to rethink politically in terms of Arendt’s world-centric understanding of public care.

      Against the theoretical backdrop provided by Derrida’s deconstruction of forgiveness, the second chapter of this book conceptualizes the act of forgiving as it is found in Arendt’s body of thought, in order to begin addressing the paradoxes uncovered by a Derridean approach. Returning to the Arendtian form of “care for the word” which was introduced in the opening pages of this book, this chapter theorizes a world-centric, “caring forgiveness” devoted to the maintenance, reparation, and preservation of the human relationships that comprise the public realm of the political. Whereas chapter one reveals the conceptual boundaries identified by a Derridean deconstruction of forgiveness, this chapter employs Arendt’s body of thought to confront the aporetic, binary relationships that give rise to the undecidability of (un)forgivable transgressions, the (un)conditionality of enacting forgiveness, and to demonstrate how a “pure” practice of forgiveness demands a form of power which is simultaneously unconditional and without sovereignty. Although Arendt does not explore forgiveness in terms of a Derridean deconstruction, I contend that it is with her body of thought, and through the prism of public care, that it becomes possible to consider these paradoxes anew, effectively re-thinking the unthinkable—at least as it pertains to the act of forgiving.

      In the third chapter of this book, cosmopolitanism is considered in terms of an Arendtian conceptualization of care and a Derridean understanding of cosmopolitan hospitality. Appropriating aspects of Arendt’s understanding of political action, and Derrida’s conceptualization of universal, cosmopolitan hospitality, I construct a world-centric theory of radically welcoming the narrative voice of the (unknown) Other: a caring cosmopolitanism. A caring cosmopolitanism is an ethico-political form of cosmopolitan theory guided by the idea of caring for the worldly space of political action that emerges when a plurality of people speak and act together in the public realm. More specifically, this Arendtian-inspired conception of cosmopolitanism is concerned with the narrative nature of the political interactions that occur in these public spaces. In this sense, cosmopolitan care refers to a form of public practice that cares for the storied realm of political action. This discussion illustrates how caring for the world

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