Norbert Lechner and the Uses of Arendt in Argentina

By Anabella Di Pego

Terminologically speaking, the effort to recapture the lost spirit of revolution must, to
a certain extent, consist in the attempt at thinking together and combining meaningfully
what our present vocabulary presents to us in terms of opposition and contradiction.
[] The political spirit of modernity was born when men were no longer satisfied that
empires would rise and fall in sempiternal change; it is as though men wished to
establish a world which could be trusted to last forever, precisely because they knew
how novel everything was that their age attempted to do.
-- Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

The applications of Arendt's writings in Argentina, now diverse since the fall of the
Berlin Wall, date back to the years of democratic transition in the 1980s. It is no
coincidence that Arendts reading in our region is associated originally with the
transition rooted in revolution to the political vision of "democracy," as evident in the
thinking of political scientist Norbert Lechner (1939-2004). Though he began living in
Chile in the early 1970s, Lechner was born in Germany, and he maintained a continuous
critical dialogue with classical German thought (from Kant to Marx) as well as with
contemporary German thought (Luxemburg, Lukcs, Bloch, Adorno, Arendt, Luhmann,
and Habermas among others).
A turning point in the intellectual route of Lechner occurred after the publication of his
book The Crisis of the State in Latin America (1977), which originally registered
Lechner in the stream of Western Marxism. Although he would never separate himself
from this stream, Lechner would undertake, in subsequent years, a dialogue and a
critical review that involved, inter alia, a critique of structuralism's scope and ability to
account for the intersubjectivity and the dimension of political actors. At this point
precisely, he made use of Arendts thought, within which he found elements that
allowed him to rethink the dominant understanding of politics in the 1970s.
The Arendtian conceptualizion of action was relevant to Lechner insofar as it refers to a
non-technical, instrumental dimension of politics. This led Lechner to label insufficient
the Marxist problematization of the specificity of praxis as a field of a proper human
interaction for its grounding merely in the categories of labor and work. Action
immersed in plurality locates politics as an activity that entails the recognition of others
as equals, but at the same time, it allows for the revelation of the unique distinctness of
each person. Equality and distinction are not opposite terms, for they constitute the arc
of tension of the political as the place for the disclosure of who somebody is and the
shaping of shared sense frames.
Politics thus conceived implies a double displacement: from the centrality of the subject
towards plurality, and from an instrumental logic towards agonistic dynamics of
interaction. Lechner retrieveed these elements of Arendts vision of the political,
features which enabled him both to forge a critical distance away from Marxism and to
begin to understand politics as a human activity inherently conflictive and plural yet
nevertheless irreduced by any framework dominated by strategic calculation (rational
choice). In this sense, his book The Conflictive and Unfinished Construction of the
Desired Order (1984) can be conceived as an attempt to deploy a new understanding of
politics that, positing Arendtian plurality, recognizes its irreducible conflict without
ignoring the construction of an order, albeit perhaps unfinished. Lechner seems thus to
recover the lost spirit of revolution, disassembling the false political oppositions
between innovation or establishment of an order, conflict or consensus, subjectivity or
structure.
As Arendt pointed out in On Revolution, it is necessary to think together the concepts
that political tradition has presented to us in terms of opposition and contradiction in
order to understand politics as a constitutive tension between the manifestation of
novelty and the establishment of a stable order--i.e., between the irruption of the
unexpected action and the institutions as reproduction of the established--in agonistic
dynamics of conflictivity and dialogue. This perspective helps to re-position democracy
as an institutional framework that makes the controversial game of plurality possible
and that puts its limits into question in so far as the political always exceeds them with
the emergence of the new and unexpected. The desired order of Lechner is also that
horizon that moves and seems unattainable but that stimulates politics beyond what is
established. Perhaps this conception of politics as the conflictive and unfinished
construction of a desired order allowed us to foresee what would become evident over
the next few decades: the challenges of "transition" would not be depleted in the
consolidation of democratic institutions.
Therefore, it may be necessary to rethink the meaning of revolution in democratic times,
and in this way, the words of Arendts quote and the uses of Lechner still resonate
significantly and illuminate the tasks of politics in today's world.

Anabella Di Pego received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of La Plata
(Argentina) in 2013 and she has previously been a doctoral fellow of the German
Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) at the Freie Universitt Berlin. At present, she is
a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (Conicet).
Her current research focuses on twentieth century philosophy, especially on Hannah
Arendt and Walter Benjamin. Her book, "The Modernity in Question. Totalitarianism
and Mass Society in Hannah Arendt," was just recently released.

Published on 19 October 2015 in:

http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=16800.