Hannah Arendt’s ‘Conscious Pariah’ and Post-metaphysical ‘Atheistic Theology’

In her ‘Jewish Writings’ Arendt depicted Jews as either pariahs or ‘parvenus’, both living private, ‘worldless’ lives – the former denied access to the Christian world, the later, like her heroine Rahel Varnhagen, unable to enter as themselves. The Rechtsstaat offered citizenship only on condition of renunciation of a Jewishness of which they would always anyway be ‘reminded’. Against both these figures Arendt contrasted the rebellious ‘conscious pariah’, that disclosed our ‘who’; unapologetically asserting Jewishness and insisting on the pluralization of the public sphere. The conscious pariah paradoxically retains a sense of being ‘at home’ (Heimatgefühl) but also enters a critical, cosmopolitan homelessness. Strangeness and singularity stand for plurality against what Benjamin called ‘mere life’. The figure of the conscious pariah, though appearing early in Arendt’s work, embodies and prefigures aspects of her later political philosophy – public vs private spheres, natality as rebirth, the vita active, judgement and citizenship – all as resistance to totalitarianism. However, Arendt’s account leaves at least two ambiguities. First, the unanswered question ‘what is a Jew’? especially pertinent in view of her insistence on a secular political sphere and of her lack of interest in religiously-defined Judaism. Second, how do the figures of parvenu/pariah play out now, in an age of identity politics, in which the assertion of particular identity is less an act of rebellion and more in keeping with fluid displays of self and identity? This paper offers reflections these questions and considers the suggestion that Arendt offers a post-metaphysical atheistic theology.