Hannah Arendt’s concept of action (as related to the human condition of plurality) delineates a particular space for the enactment of politics. According to Arendt, it is through action and speech that humans distinguish themselves from each other and disclose their agency. It is in this sense that speech and action are revelatory and inherently reliant on the condition of human “togetherness”. Action is described as a beginning, an act that initially discloses its agent. Although this “beginning” is an enactment of agency, its consequences are beyond the subject’s control – they are distinctly boundless and unpredictable. Arendt says that “action has no end” (233), and we can only resort to the faculties of promise (a kind of contract) and forgiveness to gain some semblance of sovereignty over the events set in motion through action. It is in the “space of appearance” (the space for action, as opposed to those for fabrication or labor) that politics emerges – from the spaces in-between actors and out of their respective actions. It is then in the (willful) misinterpretation of this space, the alternative association of the political with the realm of fabrication (associated with control and molding), that Arendt situates the emergence of fascist and otherwise oppressive regimes.
The opening chapters of Judith Butler’s Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly already establish the book’s direct engagement with Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of action, speech and the space of appearance. While these concepts are developed and discussed throughout, Butler also presents a critique of the Arendtian conception of public space and distances herself from what she regards as a masculinist ordering of particular human activities. For Butler, Arendt’s reliance on the distinction between the public and the private “leaves the sphere of politics to men and reproductive labor to women” (75) and restricts the potential political considerations that may surround labor of keeping oneself alive. Arendt’s distinction between action and speech is also questioned in Butler’s text through the ideas of “speech acts” and the performative. Despite these points of divergence and Butler’s more persistent emphasis on the particular conditions that allow for spaces of appearance, Arendt’s elaborate conceptualization of action and her particular account of the relationship between politics and power remain central to Butler’s conceptualization of assembly and resistance.