Lucy Benjamin (University of Edinburgh)
4-6pm, Wednesday 26 November
Room 2G12, Dalhousie Building
And online via Teams:
Philosophy Research Seminar Lucy Benjamin | Meeting-Join | Microsoft Teams
All welcome, and no need to book.
Abstract:
Hannah Arendt offered a divisive account of political life, staging action, the product of spontaneous and collective action as political, and labour, or the maintenance of the body and its demands, as its apolitical predicate. Alienating entire traditions that have sought to ‘make the private public,’ by demonstrating the political basis inherent to questions of biology, domesticity and privacy, the redemptive force of Arendt’s account lies in her claim that some matters should not be debated. What Arendt defined in terms of the ‘right to have rights’ in other words can be seen to reflect the kind of moral imperative that sees some rights – access to housing, healthcare, education, food and safe water – as beyond debateable. There is no question of their necessity. Yet where that reading seems to redeem Arendt’s stark theoretical division between the political and the apolitical, it also risks removing any possibility of deliberating over their access and just distribution. How, in other words, can an Arendtian account of politics be recognised with the politically determined fight for something like the equal distribution of housing?
I explore this question in connection to the recent demolition of an East London housing estate and its simultaneous resurrection in the atrium of the newly opened V&A East. Reflecting national trends in public housing ‘regeneration’ (demolition, resident displacement, and the sale of public land), the acquisition simultaneously risks neutralising the injustice of these policies and relegating them to the historical past of the museum. Navigating that apparent contradiction in dialogue with the equally fraught terrain of Arendt’s political landscape, my aim is to recover the ground for collective political debate.
Bio:
Lucy Benjamin is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Her first book explores the planetary writings of Hannah Arendt (Planetary Politics, 2025). She is currently working on a project exploring the architectural relevance of Arendt.