HANNAH ARENDT SOBRE LA PHILÍA Y LA IGUALDAD. UNA DISCUSIÓN CON JACQUES RANCIÈRE

Abstract

Our work seeks to clarify the categories of equality and freedom as key topics of the political phenomenon in Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière. Both of them identify the event of the political in experiences prior to the great tradition of political philosophy, however they highlight different aspects. Arendt receives the Greek philia as a bond instituted between equals who inhabit a defined domain: the public space. Rancière highlights the contentious aspect of an equality never fully achieved, in whose name every instituted power structure is permanently questioned. Politics does not occur spatially, but in the right to that spatiality. We will divide the body of the article into three sections. First, we argue that the category of the political in Hannah Arendt is inseparable from a reading of the political life of ancient Greece, which seeks to avoid the approach of political philosophy. In this context, he resorts to Aristotelian political friendship. Second, we expose Arendt's recovery of the Aristotelian philia politike as a device that renders the different equivalents. Our thesis is that this equality granted by philia is political. Third, we examine Jacques Rancière's assessment of the scandal and exceptionality that leads to the emergence of politics, and the way in which political philosophy seeks to regulate this aporia. In conclusion, we examine the limits of Rancière's main critique of Arendt.