“Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!”

Abstract

Hannah Arendt was worried that politics might disappear completely from the world.The century had seen such disasters that the question of whether "politics still has any meaning at all" had become unavoidable.The issues at stake in these fears were eminently practical: "The lack of meaning in which the whole of politics has ended up is confirmed by the dead end into which specific political questions are flocking."¹For her, the form taken by this feared disappearance of politics was totalitarianism.Today we are confronted with a different form of the danger: totalitarianism, the human face of market tyranny.Here politics finds itself crushed between the order of financial markets-which is made to seem natural-and the moralizing prescriptions of ventriloquist capitalism.The end of politics and the end of history then coincide in the infernal repetition of the eternity of the commodity, in which echo the toneless voices of Fukuyama and Furet.According to them, "the idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject.Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it is."²This is worse than melancholy-it is despair, as Blanqui might have said, this eternity of mankind through the Dow Jones and the FT 100.Hannah Arendt thought she could set a date on the beginning and end of politics: inaugurated by Plato and Aristotle, it found "its definitive end in the theories of Marx."³Announcing the end of philosophy, Marx is also, by some jest of the dialectic, said to have pronounced that Daniel Bensaïd 8 "Leaps!Leaps!

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