A Sea‐Change for (International) Legal Theory
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12034 |
| Published date | 01 July 2013 |
| Date | 01 July 2013 |
REVIEW ARTICLE
A Sea-Change for (International) Legal Theory
Deborah Whitehall*
Alison Kesby,The Right to Have Rights: Citizenship, Humanity, and Interna-
tional Law, Oxford: OUP, 2012, 192 pp, hb £60.00.
Marco Goldoni and Christopher McCorkindale (eds),Hannah Arendt and the Law,
Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012, 382 pp, hb £55.00.
UNDERSTANDING AS AN ACT OF GRACE
Hannah Arendt’s political theory reflects the particularities of her personal
situation, as a German Jew and survivor of National Socialism, who felt the
full force of historical shock but refused to succumb to its trauma or forget it.
Her thematic focus on totalitarianism, performative politics, revolutionary
foundation, and the potential for community, tracks her search for new ways
to belong to the world. Understanding is key to this enterprise. Understanding
is a technique of discovering something new or hidden in the given, particu-
larly in past experience, and through discovery, of rethinking one’s relationship
to it. The revelatory aspect of understanding makes it a method of critique
that is also an act of grace insofar as the past becomes coherent and as such,
bearable. Two recent texts about Arendt undertake a similar task by investi-
gating how her vantage as a political theorist matters to legal theory today. My
sense is that each publication marks an innovative turn in legal scholarship that
gathers new meaning by juxtaposing insights from political theory against the
disciplinary concerns of law. More specifically, my reading of Alison Kesby’s
monograph and the collection edited by Marco Goldoni and Christopher
McCorkindale, asks how Arendt’s reflections on critical method might illu-
minate what methodology is at stake in these contemporary writings and what
it reveals for law. If Arendt figures understanding as an act of grace, then I
want to measure these new texts by that benchmark. Do the publications
succeed in sharpening our self-understanding, as participants, observers and
theorists of post-millennium law, through an exploration of the politics of
Arendt’s post-war vision?
Arendt’s methodology is apparent from her examination of the critical
method of her friend and German-Jewish compatriot, Walter Benjamin. In her
*PhD Candidate, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. The author is grateful to Chris
Tam and Sara Dehm for their encouragement and to two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful
comments on a draft of this text.
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© 2013 The Author. The Modern Law Review © 2013 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2013) 76(4) MLR 757–777
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
introduction to his 1968 collection, Illuminations, Arendt identifies Benjamin
with the Shakespearean image of the ‘pearl diver’ who appears through Ariel’s
song in The Tempest:1
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
The Tempest, I, 2
The pearl diver is a reminder that remembering can also be an act of grace as it
brings the ‘debris of the past’ into view, not as something broken or neglected, but
as something that has ‘sea-changed into pearls and coral’ or rather, as something
entirely unexpected. Remembering can also be a way to understand or give
meaning to history. Arendt’s consideration of political phenomena is never
whimsical though her methods are evocative of Shakespeare’s paradigm of the
pearl diver. She says, of Benjamin as much as for herself, that the political tragedies
of the first half of the twentieth century made it necessary ‘to discover new ways
of dealing with the past.’2Elsewhere she explains the need to make sense of history
with the idea, ‘I want to understand’,3and further that understanding is an
‘unending activity’ by which ‘we come to terms and reconcile ourselves to reality,
that is, try to be at home in the world’.4The reconciliation of the present to the
past is the act of grace that is possible when we find meaning amidst the unexpected
and sometimes catastrophic moments in human experience.5
Arendt never refers directly to grace. Nevertheless, her account of Shake-
speare’s pearl diver prompts me to identify an idea of grace at work that is a
consequence of the search for meaning and of the shifts in knowledge that result
from reading or seeing historical experience differently. Grace is about receiving
and reconveying memory. This interpretation recasts for a new context the
classical association of the Charites through whom the idea of grace is connected
with refinement, beauty, joy and pleasure.6That is, grace expresses the ‘sea-
change’ or difference that invites equilibrium back into the world by confirming
a future possibility or by giving new currency to what previously lay waste.
1 H. Arendt, ‘Introduction’ in W. Benjamin, Illuminations (1968) 1–58, reproduced in H. Arendt,
‘Walter Benjamin 1892–1940’ in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1968,
1983 ed) 153, 193 and 201.
2ibid, 201.
3 H. Arendt, ‘What remains? The language remains: A conversation with Günter Gaus’ in Essays in
Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Co, 1994) (Essays)1,12.
4 H. Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)’ in Essays ibid, 307,
308.
5 For alternative readings of Arendt’s pearl diver see M. Passeren d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy
of Hannah Arendt (New York: Routledge, 1994) 31–32; and S. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism
of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) 93–94 and 173.
6 See eg, R. Graves, The Greek Myths (London: Penguin, 1955, 1960 ed) 373.
A Sea-Change for (International) Legal Theory
© 2013 The Author. The Modern Law Review © 2013 The Modern Law Review Limited.
758 (2013) 76(4) MLR 757–777
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