Arendt and Spivak

198 Pages·2017·0.89 MB·English

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College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Theses and Dissertations
7-2015
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Rosalie Siemon Lochner
DePaul University, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd
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Lochner, Rosalie Siemon, "Arendt and Spivak: a feminist approach to political worlding and appearing"
(2015). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 182.
https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/182
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ARENDT AND SPIVAK:
A FEMINIST APPROACH TO POLITICAL WORLDING AND
APPEARING

A Thesis
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirement for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

November, 2014

By
Rosalie Siemon Lochner

Department of Philosophy
College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois
Copyright © 2014 by Rosalie Siemon Lochner
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
AcTo
To my family
Each utterance is its own occasion and as such is firmly anchored in the worldy
context in which it is applied.

Edward Said, “The Text, the World and the Critic”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The seeds of this project began to flourish while attending Peg Birmingham’s
seminars on Hannah Arendt and political philosophy and Namita Goswami’s seminars on
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and postcolonial theory. However, these seeds were planted
a few years earlier in Jasbir Puar’s “Feminist Genealogies” seminar at Rutger’s
University and while writing a thesis for a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender
Studies. I am therefore indebted to the faculty at Rutgers and would like to thank Jasbir
Puar, Mary Gossy, and Harriet Davidson for setting me on this particular path.
While the ideas for this project began to form at Rutgers and developed and
flourished at DePaul, my love of philosophy and my determination to work in the field is
in large part due to the support of David Roochnik, Donna Giancola, and P.J. Ivanhoe. I
am indebted to these three and cannot even begin to express my gratitude for their
attention and support. I am particularly grateful to David Roochnik. His encouragement
and support allowed me to develop my interest in feminist philosophy while an
undergraduate at Boston University.
I am, of course, indebted to DePaul University and I owe the most to my
committee. I was very lucky to have the support of Peg Birmingham, who chaired my
committee. Her willingness to allow me to take intellectual risks in uncharted territory,
her generosity with my ideas, and her thoughtful engagement with my work was
something I depended on as I built and clarified my argument. Tina Chanter’s support
was also invaluable, without her willingness to push me on the feminist stakes of my
argument this project would not have developed as it did. Finally, I would like to thank
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Elizabeth Rottenberg for her help. Her expertise in comparative literature was stimulating
and invaluable.
In addition to my committee, I would like to thank a few other faculty members at
DePaul who have contributed a great deal to my success: Sean Kirkland, Darrell Moore,
and Franklin Perkins. I am fortunate to have had them to rely on. Beyond their academic
support, I am also indebted to them for their help as I completed this project from afar.
They enabled me to work in Los Angeles while being a student in Chicago. Finally, I
would like to thank the staff at DePaul, Mary Amico and Jennifer Burke. Without their
patient support I would be truly lost.
I am also indebted to the faculty at Loyola Marymount University for seeing my
potential and offering me a space to tryout my ideas. I would particularly like to thank
Brad Elliot Stone who believed in me and provided a sounding board and moral support.
I would also like to thank Brian Treanor and Dan Speak for their support. Finally, I
would have been at a loss without the constant support of Alexis Dolan who helped me
feel at home at LMU.
The next group of people I would like to thank is made up of the colleagues and
friends with whom I shared the daily grind. These are the people whom I thought and
worked alongside of. They are dear to both my heart and my work. Thank you to my
blog and writing partner: Marie Draz, my coffee and cooking partner: James Manos, and
my running partner: Andrew Dilts, and a special thanks to Perry Zurn, Sina Kramer, and
Rick Elmore.
I wish to thank my father, James Siemon, who always was willing to listen to my
de Manian ravings and answer my editing questions, to thank my mother Alexandra
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Siemon for helping me to keep afloat in times of doubt, and to thank my sisters for
keeping things from getting too serious. Finally, thank you to Erich for having the
patience to see me through. Your kindness and love, and your support and good humor
have made all of this possible. Lastly, thank you to Henry, for pushing me to finish so
that we could start something new.

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Abstract
“Arendt and Spivak: A Feminist Approach to Political Worlding and Appearing”
offers the first systematic and comparative reading of Hannah Arendt and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. Beginning with their mutual interests in political speech and
appearance (the ability for individuals to represent themselves as individuals and not be
reduced to their social identity) this dissertation argues two points. First, considering the
political in terms of worlding (the fact that humans are both conditioned and conditioning
beings) means taking a two-handed approach to the political: addressing the seemingly
contradictory need for both political equality and an understanding of the impossibility of
escaping those privileges that undercut equality. Second, framing political appearance in
terms of Arendtian and Spivakian temporality offers a feminist model of political
appearance that challenges the connection between politics and patronymic inheritance.
The dissertation begins by arguing that a feminist model of political equality must
engage with “worlding,” a term adapted from Martin Heidegger. Engaging with
worlding through a feminist lens requires engaging with the ways in which intersectional
privileges (race, gender, class, etc.) shape models of political equality and mediate each
individual’s access to the political. Gaining access to the political helps facilitate an
individual’s ability (or inability) to appear and be heard as a unique political being.
Furthermore, awareness of such intersectional conditioning facilitates a theorist’s own
account of privilege, political access, and worlding itself. As a result, I argue that any
account of political equality must continually engage with the impossibility of equal
political appearance.
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In order to challenge the problem of the transparency of the political
philosopher—as opposed to generally marking the limitations of philosophy—and in
order to locate philosophy within the world, the second and third chapters of this
dissertation examine Arendt’s and Spivak’s respective understandings of the determining
and determined effects of patronymic political inheritance and the temporality of thought.
I argue that their understanding of the worlding of patronymic inheritance demonstrates
the limitations of current models of political appearance and that their models of
temporality offer a new feminist approach to theorizing political appearance. They
challenge linear, patronymic models of political history and political theory, and their
work can shift the way that we relate to the past, present, and future by emphasizing the
tension and productive relationship between theory and world. Their models reframe
political appearance and equality, challenging an additive model based on linear progress
where failures are seen as passing obstacles and successes are seen as endemic to the
political. For instance, an additive model of equal rights assumes that the United States
has becomes more equal and that the inequalities of legal segregation, and restricted
voting were temporary problems overcome as the United States has made linear progress
toward its already inherent perfection. By contrast, the models of temporality developed
by Arendt and Spivak, require continual redirection and self-critique while challenging
political inequality.
In the final chapter, I argue that bringing together Arendtian plurality and the
Spivakian double bind may yield a feminist model of political appearance. According to
Arendt, plurality serves as the foundation for political appearance and is grounded in its
twofold nature of equality and distinction. According to Spivak, double binds offer a
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