Time for a New Beginning. Arendt, Benjamin, and the Messianic Conception of Political Temporality

Like no other thinker, Hannah Arendt was occupied by the idea of the beginning and the question of how to begin something through acting. This gives some indication of the distance that separates Arendt from the philosophical tradition within which it was only on very rare occasions that the mysterious ability to make a beginning, to start something new, has attracted attention. One may think, as Hannah Arendt does herself, of Augustine and Kant, but also of Heidegger’s ideas on Being as Anfang.2 Yet no other philosopher has ever made the beginning as beginning the centre of his or her thought. This oblivion or “forgottenness” with respect to the phenomenon of beginning (which in German one may call Anfangsvergessenheit) has something to do, as Arendt suspects, with the philosophical idea of man. While philosophers have always reflected on human mortality, no philosopher has ever seriously focused on what Arendt calls “natality”: the fact that with every birth a new beginning comes into the world. Consequently, it is natality which for Arendt (1968, 167) assumes the status of a quasi-transcendental condition of possibility for every future form of acting, precisely because acting – in the sense of beginning something new – is nothing other than the practical re-affirmation of man’s own condition as a being constituted as beginning: “Because he is a beginning, man can begin”.3