Hannah Arendt is among the first and staunchest defenders of the demarcation of ‘politics’, yet she is also criticized for offering an ultimately void notion of political action. This paper probes into Arendt’s distinction between public and private, and argues that it offers a rich understanding of public life in general and political action in particular. I try to do so by connecting two sets of concepts: one the one hand, the idea of ‘persona’ and the idea of personhood; on the other hand, her distinction between love and friendship.
Firstly, I analyze Arendt’s metaphor of persona, in On Revolution, as a mask that citizens put on when appearing in public. Starting from this metaphor, I focus on the idea that political action requires individuals to cover up, or leave behind, certain parts of themselves at the moment they enter the public space. Divorcing the concept from its Roman context and inserting it into contemporary, modern society, how should we understand that what is covered up or left behind?
Secondly, I address this question by turning to Arendt’s remarks on love and friendship that are scattered throughout her oeuvre. Love, I argue, denotes for Arendt the attitude towards other individuals within the private sphere, whereas friendship refers to the attitude towards one’s fellow citizens in the public sphere. I argue that Arendt consistently highlighted the private sphere as the location of love, which is a relation in which individuals accept each other in their particularity. Friendship, on the other hand, is a relation in which citizens help each other to critically think through their opinion on public affairs, and which prevents the disintegration of the polis. In conjunction, the concepts of love, friendship and persona offer a rich understanding of subjectivity.
