The Right to Have Rights as the Right to Asylum
In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt offers a profound reflection on the refugee question. The hallmark of Arendt’s analysis has been believed to be her emphasis on the refugee’s loss of political status,1 captured by the core phrase of the ‘fundamental deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective.’2 This allegedly features what Arendt famously coined as the right to have rights. Against the backdrop of the deprivation of ‘the right to action’ and ‘the right to opinion’3 it would seem as if the historic-political context of refugee displacement occasioned the right to have rights but that, ultimately, exclusion from politics provides the conceptual background thereto. Whereas Arendt explicitly targeted the dire predicament of refugees, contemporary readings of her work have tailored the right to have rights to various inclusion and exclusion dilemmas in the context of human equality. On the assumption that the right to have rights contains the nucleus of Arendt’s later reflections on the meaning of politics, it is believed to hinge on the always unstable public/ private divide that in many respects is central to her work. As a consequence, the right to have rights not only – or even no longer – covers the refugee’s plight but equally attaches to those subjects who are tormented in their speaking capacity and are pushed back to the margins of society where the light of the public realm simply does not reach. Cast as the lens through which different forms of life and marginalized identities might gain public visibility, the right to have rights is appropriated by a contestatory politics that seeks to vindicate fundamental rights for – in the words of Bonnie Honig – ‘minorities, the stateless, the powerless and the hapless’;4 principled on access to the public space it became a right to politics;5 acting out a rival ‘We’ this right is rallied to the call of what Benhabib