Between Action and Agency in Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt's diagnosis of authority's "recession" (1956, p.414) reads as fatal to politics: without enduring institutions to provide stable boundaries, freedom withers and politics becomes impossible. The radical doubting of authority's validity produces what Lefort termed the "dissolution of the markers of certainty" (1986, p.19)—a "fenceless wilderness of fear and suspicion" (Arendt, 1953, p.312). Yet this apparent catastrophe reveals a productive tension. Through a post-foundational reading, this paper argues that authority's dissolution does not signal political death, but rather the redemptive moment when action, liberated from institutionalized constraints, discloses the ontological ground on which Arendt's conception of the political actually rests. I begin by asking whether action, as creative beginning, is held in abeyance when authority withdraws. Does the removal of agency as authorized belonging also entail the loss of action from the human world? Arendt's treatment of agency and action as synonymous complicates this. Authority stabilizes the common world as prerequisite for political agency; one becomes political by inserting actions into a bounded context where they can be remembered. If freedom is realized only through authority's constraints, then agent and actor fold back into each other. A post-foundational reading suggests we cannot conflate the two. Consistent with Arendt, post-foundationalism highlights that politics is functionally "unthinkable" (Butler, 1992, p.3) without foundational authority. Yet it also acknowledges that wherever foundations exist, they imply "foundering and contestation" (Butler, 1992, p.16). Failing to recognize this, Arendt cannot see that while contingent agency may recede with authority's institutions, action as beginning separates from its ontic institution and reveals itself as an ontological phenomenon through which politics can be rewritten. This distinction becomes intelligible when we recognize two registers: the ontic level, where the political agent appears within instituted frameworks, and the ontological level, where action operates as the "world-disclosive" capacity through which any political order comes into being. Arendt's concept of founding supports this reading. When people erect the "fences of belonging"—laws, constitutions, institutions—founding appears as political action of the first order. If founding is action, then politics cannot depend entirely on the authority founding establishes. Authority appears as a contingent product of political action, not its transcendent prerequisite. Action operates at an ontological register, prior to institutionalization as agency within any regime of authorized membership. Where Rancière critiques Arendt for trapping politics within instituted orders, and Benhabib seeks rescue through cosmopolitan extensions, this paper suggests reading Arendt's concepts against the conservative conclusions she draws from them. Finally, this reading offers new answers to debates such as Arendt's account of the stateless as non-actors. If action precedes and exceeds agency-as-authorized-membership, then noncitizens who contest exclusion—from Sans-papiers occupying churches to migrants crossing fortified borders—enact the ontological capacity through which political orders are constituted and contested. Denied agency, they nonetheless enact founding: beginning anew, creating political space outside instituted authority. Their action gives new significance to Arendt's notion that "even the smallest deed" can "change every constellation" (1958, p.190)—not despite authority's recession but because of it.