Toward Critical Belonging: Heidegger,Arendt,and Glissant’s Other of Thought

Abstract

In this essay, Benjamin P. Davis responds to Jared Highlen’s review essay, ‘Entanglement as Responsibility: Decolonizing Human Rights in Choose Your Bearing’. Davis draws out Louiza Odysseos’s concept of ‘critical belonging’ in dialogue with Glissant and Arendt to argue for a sense of difference that inspires action.

To begin with thanks: to Louiza Odysseos for showing me the work Millenium is doing to open up the field of international studies, and for thinking with me via challenging yet constructive questions – in writing and in person when I visited Brighton; and to Jared Highlen for a generative review of Choose Your Bearing, my 2023 book that reads Édouard Glissant’s concept of a ‘right to opacity’ as a summary heading for various (but related) struggles for land and cultural rights across the world. ¹ In his review, Highlen raises two pressing questions: (1) in regard to my connecting Glissant’s right to opacity to individual duties, ‘Does this emphasis on individual ethical responsibility, combined with the refusal to address rights claims to the state, threaten to truncate the political force of the right to opacity?’; and (2) in regard to how I think about a given rights claim, ‘[W]hat criteria determine the legitimacy of its claim and its content?’

In what follows, I will respond to these two questions and then conclude by taking up Highlen’s invitation to think phenomenology and human rights together, thus returning to the work of Odysseos as well as to that of Hannah Arendt. Ultimately, I will make a brief intervention into theorizing difference in international relations today, drawing out Odysseos’s concept of ‘critical belonging’ in dialogue with Glissant and Arendt to argue for a sense of difference that inspires action.

The Question of the Individual

First, I will respond to Highlen’s question regarding whether a focus on the individual strengthens or truncates the power of rights claims. The anthropologist Richard Price notes that cultural creolization occurs in practice through everyday interactions: ‘Human beings meet and engage one another; cultures do not. Individuals who claim multiple identities interact with one another; ethnicities do not’. ² Likely because they have to talk to real people instead of just reading books, anthropologists are often better than philosophers at understanding this point: even the largest changes in human societies occur through small-scale, ordinary interactions. The great philosopher of the small was Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan scholar of rhetoric and jurisprudence. Vico was an inspiration for Sylvia Wynter and a hero of Edward Said. (Wynter and Said were generally philosophers of a much larger scale – the cosmos and the world, respectively; and the species for both – a tension about scale to which I will return in my conclusion.)

Wynter and Said both drew extensively upon Vico because he offers a method focused on the importance of ordinary actions in cultural (Wynter) or secular (Said) life. For Vico, these ordinary actions are where we should begin in trying to explain the bigger systems that both surround and influence us. Following this method (and herself reading Glissant), Wynter argues that humans today suffer from ‘a colonization of the cultural imaginary’ that has been hugely successful ‘at the level of the assimilation of the psyche’. ³ What is needed in turn is a new ‘science of the human’, one that would study what it means to live amidst the ‘long processes’ of humanity. ⁴ Accordingly, we need not only to recognize that we are part of these longer processes, which often feel out of our control, but we need also to recognize our agency or autonomy in this specific moment. In her later work, Wynter explains explicitly that she garnered this lesson from reading Vico: ‘This recognition is. . . the fact – in Vico’s Nuova Scienza terms – that that which we have made we can unmake and consciously now remake’. ⁵ Wynter’s new science of the human, then, can be read as following Vico’s New Science, just updated for our century and hemmed in not so much by the Church as by Eurocentric educational systems – with ‘systems’ here including (well beyond formal schools) companies, advertisements, and cultural pressures.

Edward Said also talked about humanity in terms of a longer process, what he called in Culture and Imperialism ‘the slower process of culture and society’ that has been unfolding around us and that ‘can only be seen from the perspective of the whole of secular human history’. ⁶ In Representations of the Intellectual, Said too makes explicit his debts to Vico, offering a few paragraphs about Vico’s influence on his thinking. Here is one of them:

Vico argues that this is the only point of view to take about the secular world, which he repeats over and over again is historical, with its own laws and processes, not divinely ordained. This entails respect, but not reverence, for human society. You look at the grandest of powers in terms of its beginnings, and where it might be headed; you are not awed by the august personality, or the magnificent institution which to a native, someone who has always seen (and therefore venerated) the grandeur but not the perforce humbler human origins from which it derived, often compels silence and stunned subservience. The intellectual in exile is necessarily ironic, skeptical, even playful – but not cynical. ⁷

In this paragraph, Said starts with Vico’s method, but he ends with a larger point about intellectual life, which he puts in the more specific terms of intellectual exile. Said follows Vico to offer a method for social theory, a method that Said would call ‘secular’, meaning not that it is against religion but that it examines a given social phenomenon – such as war in Ukraine or in Palestine – starting from the ‘humbler human origins from which it derived’. For Said, it is our task as social theorists to seek small causes, and it is our task as social actors to create new beginnings.

Vico’s claim that all human institutions are made by us, as it is understood by Wynter and Said, has tremendous implications for political theory and our studies of international relations. Based on his years in the academy and consulting privately, the legal scholar David Kennedy has noted about liberals and humanitarians that ‘we prefer to think of ourselves as outside power’. ⁸ Said consistently asked us to refuse this way of thinking and living. In a strikingly simple sense, following Said’s and Wynter’s reading of Vico means that when we look at an authoritarian ruler or a war, we would do well to ask: How am I a part of making this? And: How could I be part of consciously un-making and re-making this reality? Many of us avoid speaking on this level, which would involve giving an account for our lives and, often, could take us to a place of intellectual exile. (I will return to the question of exile.)

***

Let me try to re-state this key point about individual duties with fewer citations. Sometimes, at conferences or in written work, scholars make the undoubtedly correct point that we are all implicated in colonialism or that we are all caught in ‘the system’. Too often, however, this statement is presented as a concluding point; it would be more fruitful for decolonial practice if it were a starting point for further inquiry and experimental practice.

To return the inquiry of colonial entanglement back to the level of the individual, I am trying to write toward life as it is lived. Here we could extend Price’s point about creolization to forms of life: for those justice-oriented actors (myself included) who finally move from waiting tables or slinging espresso to a more stable academic or non-profit job with benefits, we might then have a conversation with a partner about whether to invest in the stock market. For many of us who have been involved in raising kids, we have conversations about whether children should grow up witnessing protests or whether a family should stop going to protests for reasons of safety now that they have children. These conversations occur between individuals. And our investments and our protests – along with so many other ordinary examples – drive or limit war. By returning us to the individual level, my hope is to ignite conversations about our responsibility for war and thus our responsibilities – mine and yours – to others all over the world. That is the ordinary ethical bind (but also the political opportunity) of the radical material entanglement we are living in via the clothes, food, phones, computers, and tax-funded arms shipments etc. that are already the stuff of our daily lives today.

For example, today, some of us start by looking out at the current iteration of the war on Palestine and lament what is happening. At present (the start of August 2025), the professional and social cost has dropped significantly for speaking about Gaza and has dropped less so (but still dropped a little) for speaking about Palestine and Palestinians. In turn, will political theory and international relations play a role in contextualizing this particular moment of genocide and starvation into a larger logic of colonial war? Will we clarify for wide audiences how these current genocidal tactics aspire to the complete normalization of colonial dispossession and displacement, for which the United States remains the model? And what work do these tasks imply for academics in turn? In other words, will we carry out the work that would demonstrate renewed faith in what Edward Said called ‘the idea of Palestine’? ⁹ This work responds to specific contemporary struggles over land from 1948 and before, and it is also about showing how the genocide in Palestine today is one part of a larger colonial structure, a racist way of thinking, an education into the disposability of others, all of which we witness (and often participate in) all over the world.

My belief is that this world would look different if each of us started from the question: How am I contributing to and working against this genocide, already, in my daily actions? Is this war – as Palestinians have been stressing – already in my printer, my shoes, my retirement account, my soda water, and my sense of myself as civilized, intelligent, wealthy, and successful? Better: we could pose this question with those around us to begin what would hopefully – here is where the small matters to the big – become a sustained and productive dialogue about how contemporary war is a product of (our) colonial forms of life. This might involve pointing some fingers and making some accusations; blame is an important part of ethical life, as is taking responsibility for our actions. Nevertheless, it would be important to have these conversations with what Jacqueline Rose, reading Stuart Hall, calls ‘light and air’. ¹⁰ In this way, to begin reflexively at the individual level is neither the apotheosis of self-importance nor the summation of neoliberalism; it is, rather, a check against the assumption that violence, power, war, and genocide are merely unfortunate occurrences untethered from my own actions. ¹¹

The Question of Legitimacy

Second, I will respond to the question that seeks criteria that could justify some claims to cultural rights while excluding the legitimacy of others. This question reflects one of the most longstanding tensions in human rights discourse: the rights of some are experienced as the rights violations of others. For example, a right to healthcare that is paid for by taxes is understood, felt, and articulated by a libertarian as a violation of his rights to property and privacy – and by extension his rights to mobility and protection from state intervention and seizure. In response, I cannot refute this point. Such a tension is part of the inherent dynamism of rights discourse. This is why Simone Weil said that rights claims ultimately carry with them a ‘commercial flavor’ of exchange and bargain rather than the weight of justice. ¹²

I do not, then, intend to set out a criterion that could appear initially helpful to disqualify some rights claims (i.e. those of actors whose politics I oppose). Instead, to enter the world of rights claims is to enter the world of struggle, of contradiction, of politics. I accept this limitation of rights discourse because rights claims – as demands not only on states but also on individual actors; as discursive markers of how people feel capitalism and late fascism impacting their lives – can also be connected and read as providing a tool: taken together, rights claims across the world provide a map of how war and political economy are experienced in the present. ¹³ To underscore this point, I began Choose Your Bearing with an epigraph from Edward Said, who argued that to be for human rights is not first and foremost about advancing a cause; to be for human rights means to see and to explain, for the widest possible audience, how the world today is already linked – how it is already entangled, to use Glissant’s term. The task, in turn, is not to exclude the rights claims of those with whom we disagree, but to do the much more difficult philosophical work of raising consciousness and showing (in an accessible way) how and why true flourishing for anyone cannot exist in contexts of coercion and domination.

This is also to recognize a certain partisanship: to make a claim for state-provided education and healthcare for all is to deny the felt and stated rights claim of the libertarian or anarchist. To make a claim for the Palestinian right of return is to challenge Israel’s right to dominate/exist in its current anti-democratic, ethnocratic understanding of that existence. ¹⁴ Showing how some of these partisan claims are also in fact part of a universal practice of achieving the potential of humanity is another philosophical task I find more worthwhile and important, indeed urgent, than trying to deny the legitimacy of any rights claim. This is a Socratic point: to begin, I grant that piety or justice or the right to culture legitimately looks how you say it looks. Given your stated understanding, would you also grant that respecting the right to culture means that a nation-state cannot deny the right to worship of those who live within it? Is the bombing of a mosque the denial of a right to worship? Is stopping (via Qalandia Checkpoint) Muslims or Christians from praying also a violation of that right, one that belies a claim to democracy? And, can we turn these questions (mutatis mutandis) back on our own countries?

Returns to Odysseos and Arendt

Third, Highlen points out that I could further develop what remains an under-developed strand of my book: the connection between human rights and phenomenology. I appreciate the chance to think further on this question, and addressing this connection returns me to the work of Louiza Odysseos as well as to that of Hannah Arendt.

In her 2007 book The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations, Odysseos looks to Heidegger to retrieve an emphasis on heteronomy in international studies. Her concern is how political theory, by and large, has adopted a Hobbesian subject and thus reduced the robust idea of coexistence ‘to mere copresence, to the fragile composition of already constituted selves’. ¹⁵ In response, Odysseos argues that Heidegger offers a way to think about becoming a self in terms of recognizing a state of already being in relation. Against readings of Heidegger’s authenticity as tied to individualism, one’s own decisions, and an isolated subject of solitude and fortitude, Odysseos reads Heidegger as stressing the question of coexistence – the question of ‘the other-constituted character of existence’ – for international relations. If this sounds like more of a turn to Levinas than to Heidegger, she anticipates this objection, displaying a certain gratitude to Levinas for the following reason: if Levinas was worried ‘that phenomenology. . . is a philosophy of power and violence’ and raises such objections, he then also ‘sensitized us to the question of the other within Heidegger’s thought’. ¹⁶ ‘The turn to Heidegger, therefore’ Odysseos goes on, ‘is advocated precisely in light of Levinas’s critique’. ¹⁷

Put differently, for Odysseos ‘Levinas’s challenge that phenomenology and ontology are philosophies of violence lead us to return to Heidegger’ for a particular reason, namely, ‘to show precisely that within the ontological and hermeneutic turn that Heidegger gives to phenomenology in Being and Time, there can be found an account of the self. . . as an other-constituted and coexistential being, a being determined through and through by otherness’. ¹⁸ Further, whereas Levinas doubles down on an infinite responsibility to the Other, Heidegger offers a path through questioning, and Odysseos contends that such questioning of self and other is the necessary disposition to foster what she calls ‘critical belonging’ – ‘a practice of disavowal, displacement, and resistance’ that ‘rests on the centrality of critique and agonism in social life’. ¹⁹

Critical belonging is part of what Odysseos calls ‘a “thicker” understanding of community’ that is both disruptive and productive. ²⁰ It would also be refreshing. After all, how many academics, politicians, and people of faith are able to criticize other scholars, political parties, and religions without making the effort to turn that critical eye onto what they themselves are a part of? And further, how many of us are willing to state those reflexive criticisms publicly, where it could make a difference – and could lead us into a form of exile? Indeed, how many communities in turn allow for, accept, and change in light of such critiques? Would not critical belonging, then, be a counter ethics to our many contexts of repression today? And isn’t this practice especially necessary for those of us who live in over-developed countries, where ideology has, from a very young age, linked our understanding of success and flourishing to owning property, wearing a certain kind of watch or carrying a certain kind of bag, and otherwise living high on a class (and racial and civilizational) hierarchy? This ideology has been so successful today that many people focus their efforts on personally gaining passive income via a rentier economy that transmits money to a very few instead of focusing on building a welfare system that would protect all of us. ²¹ Remember: we are not taught to ask these questions about our current feelings of precarity and alienation; we are taught to stop complaining, work harder, and blame ourselves. In this context, questioning is a radical practice for true belonging. ²²

It is not a coincidence, given her emphasis on questioning in Heidegger and unusual capacity for reflexivity within her own academic field, that Odysseos has been one of the first readers of Sylvia Wynter into questions not only of decolonial ethics but also of international relations more broadly. All the while, Odysseos has stressed – in this journal – the need to insist upon the question of decolonial ethics. That is an insightful, against-the-identitarian-grain method, drawing from both Heidegger and Wynter in a reconstructive, contrapuntal dialogue about politics today. ²³ In the remainder of this essay, I will develop directly Odysseos’s sense of critical belonging, which she began to articulate in The Subject of Coexistence and arguably has elaborated upon indirectly in much of her subsequent work.

***

Critical belonging is a particular approach to our already heteronomous lives. It matters how we theorize this difference; the question here is how absolute or relative are personal and cultural difference. There are myriad options for relating to different traditions, cultures, and practices; my worry in Choose Your Bearing – why I stay with Glissant instead of Levinas – is that the ethical relation can become too romanticized, too quasi-religious, too removed in never-crossing spheres of irreducible difference, which is its own logic of purity as opposed to creolization. The effect is to make ethics withdraw too far from the political world as it is lived. This was Glissant’s opening concern in Poetics of Relation, which begins with a meditation on philosophy’s tendency to withdraw too far. My view is that the most robust theory of the transaction between self and difference (including interior difference) is not the most absolutized one but rather one that would account for entanglement and displacement.

I suggest that a more politically fruitful understanding of difference, one that would nourish a practice of critical belonging, can be found in what Glissant calls ‘the Other of thought’. Glissant’s ‘Other of thought’ offers a particular version of what Odysseos describes as ‘being determined through and through by otherness’. Glissant’s approach toward difference, which he framed in terms of a ‘right to opacity’, ought to push us into politics, I argue, not only because it is based on a rights claim and so begins from politics, but also because any worthwhile ethics today involves what Aijaz Ahmad called the ‘transformation of an ethically intolerable world’. ²⁴ I remain invested in a mode of critical belonging, as Stuart Hall concludes his memoir, that proceeds at least ‘partly through politics’. ²⁵ This is to not argue that somehow we live with capital-O Otherness per se, nor does it stay withdrawn; to live partly through politics is to think and act in public with concrete others, with the additional acceptance that we also remain strangers to ourselves, and thus to return the political to political phenomenology. ²⁶

Glissant’s ‘Other of thought’, while abstract in its conceptualization, names action as the marker of a genuine contact with difference. ²⁷ For Glissant, mere ‘thought of the Other’ remains ‘sterile without the Other of thought’. ²⁸ He explains this distinction in terms of action:

The thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not simple and straightforward, with only one truth – mine. But thought of the Other can dwell within me without making me alter course, without ‘prizing me open’, without changing me within myself. An ethical principle, it is enough that I not violate it. The Other of thought is precisely this altering. Then I have to act. ²⁹

Future research could develop these lines in conversation with Arendt’s philosophy of action, especially through reading Glissant’s ‘right to opacity’ with Arendt’s ambivalent critiques and endorsements of rights discourse. Indeed, more than Weil, a contemporary who was much better on colonialism and civilization than Arendt but who also rejected rights claims, Arendt suggested that political theorists tarry with rights claims in all their limitations and perplexities. ³⁰ Let me attempt to begin – and I can only begin – this encounter between Glissant and Arendt here, an encounter others have started to stage elsewhere. ³¹ The actions of this encounter involve changing our personal and philosophical patterns.

***

Robert Bernasconi has described Arendt as ‘[p]erhaps the foremost representative of political theory within the phenomenological movement broadly conceived’. ³² ‘Just as Heidegger sought to retrieve the experiences that underlay the concepts of Western ontology and that have guided thinking ever since’, Bernasconi explains, ‘so Arendt focused on the experiences that underlay the Western conception of politics’. ³³ Another commentator on how Arendt links phenomenology and politics, Rainer Forst, reads Arendt’s work as suggesting that ‘one cannot do without concepts such as individual responsibility’. ³⁴ Forst explains: ‘Since we can only start from where we are, the task is not so much to invent a new vocabulary but to construct one with the help of a critical reinterpretation of our concepts and categories, which are to some extent always “traditional”’. ³⁵ This reconstructive method, however, could be characterized as pragmatic at least as much as phenomenological, so the question remains: How could phenomenology specifically, as method or tradition, inform contemporary struggles for human rights? ³⁶ Indeed, Forst goes on to disagree slightly with Bernasconi’s claim about Heidegger’s general influence on Arendt. This disagreement brings into relief a wider frustration with how phenomenology goes about examining politics – and the level of specificity or concreteness at which it does so. Because Arendt locates intersubjective action ‘as being public and political’, for Forst there exists a ‘narrowness of her phenomenology of the intersubjective that makes it difficult to place it at the same level as Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology”’. ³⁷ On this account, to seek the most fundamental experiences and concepts is a strength. But perhaps Arendt’s narrowness is itself a contribution.

***

I am, by temperament and like many theorists who stay with human rights, someone who likes to think the large; this is the scale of what many consider to be the passé 20th-century political vocabulary of self-determination, dependency, and decolonization as independence, that is, as a term tied first to political economy. This way of thinking tends to be mildly allergic to the micropolitical turn toward affect, personal politics, and claims to self-knowledge of identities. When Marxists, or historical materialists, or dependency theorists – or whatever we call ourselves – do think with the individual, it is often to situate individuals into structures, as for instance Du Bois did in connecting individual life to ongoing colonization in his 1947 speech ‘Human Rights for All Minorities’, which I read closely in both Choose Your Bearing and again in its sequel, Another Humanity. ³⁸ The phenomenologists I know, by temperament and by contrast, tend to prefer the small – and they are very good at it. A skillful phenomenologist can write powerfully about a painting as much as about the temporality of wine or the cultivation of trust; they can reveal the nuances and ambiguities of objects and feelings around us. ³⁹ Connecting these nuances and ambiguities to questions of political economy would make the phenomenologist more political, I would say, in answering the question that Bernasconi’s and Forst’s essay titles raise in a way different from how they answer with Arendt. After all, Arendt called this a ‘venture into the public realm’. ⁴⁰ Such a public explanation of material entanglements would also be a response to Pierre Bourdieu’s criticism, in a footnote from Outline of a Theory of Practice, that ‘[t]he phenomenologists systematically forget to carry out an ultimate “reduction,” the one which would reveal to them the social conditions of the possibility of the reduction and the epoche’. ⁴¹ In spite of this critique, I maintain that how phenomenologists reveal relations could remain politically important precisely due to its limited scope of analysis. Arendt’s so-called ‘narrowness’ demonstrates this.

While Arendt remained critical of Marx, she nevertheless exhibited a remarkable ability in her writing to move between history and experience. For this reason, she can be read as a bridge between political theory across its different scales; she is, after all, a thinker of natality and relationality, and so she invites us to begin again and to make connections (or to notice them in the first place). Even if you do not read her work as bridging these tensions of scale (she was also in favor of a public-private split), then at least she asked us to examine the relationship between philosophy (including phenomenology) and politics. In her famous televised interview in which she is smoking, she said, ‘I want to see politics with eyes unclouded by philosophy’. ⁴² But could not phenomenology assist us in habituating this way of seeing? If I were to defend this philosophical tradition, I would ask: Doesn’t phenomenology, in its method of suspension or bracketing, proceed precisely through this unclouding? ⁴³

In regard to the question of the connection between phenomenology and politics, Andrew Benjamin has argued that ‘[w]orking through Arendt is indispensable if what has to be addressed is that rethinking of a philosophical anthropology that takes relationality not just as a point of departure but as that which has priority over the posited primacy of the singular individual’. ⁴⁴ What would this ‘priority’ look like in both phenomenology and in political theory today? Could phenomenologists use their method to respond to Bourdieu by explaining, in clear and concrete terms for their general readers (often a challenge for professional phenomenologists), how the details and objects and folds of everyday life disclose relational, which is to say political, entanglements? This would be to become, as W. G. Sebald said of Robert Walser, a ‘clairvoyant of the small’, but one who never loses sight of how that particular small is structured by the big, because our intuitions and identities and consciousness are often false, as Marx reminded us, and they are always mediated, as feminist theorists have stressed, often by ethno-class desire, as Wynter adds. ⁴⁵

Such a public and political style could open up personal and collective entanglements – in Glissant’s second sense, now not just descriptive but prescriptive entanglements – for those of us who have done the hard work of beginning critical belonging but don’t know where to go from here, perhaps because we have run up against a community that has exiled us. In spite of, or in response to, this exile, such concrete and historicized descriptive work would be the style of a political phenomenology that not only illuminates experiences and concepts, but one that also speaks to the current human condition insofar as it is marked by our search for planetary politics. ⁴⁶ I am hungry – to put it differently – for the insights we would gain and the paths that could be disclosed, not if phenomenology turned its attention from the small to the big, but if it described precisely how one experiences their relation.