Abstract

BARRIO, Catalina. The Who of Political Action in Hannah Arendt: The Spectator-Narrator Figure and Reflective Judgments. arete [online]. 2016, vol.28, n.1, pp.105-125. ISSN 1016-913X.

This article focuses on Arendt’s concept of spectator understood as the narrator of the unfolded history. The hypothesis of this article is that political action can be comprehended in the conflictual character of the common world that the narrator of the story embodies; that is, the subject of political and critical action. To support this principle, it is necessary to understand two issues. Firstly, according to Arendt, there is a subject who grounds a sensible and visible space and gives meaning to experience through narration or storytelling. Secondly, the narrated experience becomes visible through the most political faculty of all: Kantian reflexive judgment, taken as Arendtian political judgment. In this way, grounding the space of the sensible as the true bearer of the meaning of political action does not involve established concepts such as what right and wrong actions are or how should we act under a certain political regime. Rather, the conceptual underdeterminations of political space understood as "conflictivity" based in judgments, are the ones that give testimony and define a who that narrates or a critical spectator of the action. This last issue approaches to a political thinking in Arendt that aims at a strictly philosophical and phenomenological formulation of political action.

Keywords : subject; spectator; action; narrative; reflective judgment.

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