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Acts of Identity: a Political Theory of Biography UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Acts of Identity: A Political Theory of Biography Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88g0c619 Author Stahl, William Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Acts of Identity: A Political Theory of Biography A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science by William Samuel Stahl 2018 Ó Copyright by William Samuel Stahl 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Acts of Identity: A Political Theory of Biography by William Samuel Stahl Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Joshua F. Dienstag, Chair My dissertation, Acts of Identity: A Political Theory of Biography, is prompted by the puzzle: why have so many political theorists shown interest in the genre of biography, seemingly such a private and apolitical genre? I answer that biography is a powerful lens through which to analyze the link between individual identity formation and political action. I develop this answer through four chapters that engage with a selection of political theorists who have written biographic works. In the first chapter, I examine Hannah Arendt’s claim that human beings are unlike other living things because each one of us develops a unique identity from the singularity of our biography. For her, who we are – and what makes us human – is what we say and do. In chapter two, I analyze Giorgio Agamben’s challenge to Arendt: he concludes that what makes us human is not what we say or do, but what we have the potential to do. This implies that our biography does not define who we are or make us human. I agree with the latter implication, but not the former. While the form of human life may not be biographic, individual identity is. Henceforth, I argue that individual ii identity is an artifact of language – a product of biographizing. In the third chapter, I illustrate this contention through two dossiers edited by Michel Foucault: I, Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin. These dossiers – the former about a “village idiot” who commits a terrible crime, the latter about an intersexed convent teacher who is declared to be a “man” after being raised as a “girl” – demonstrate that who we are is not just what we do, but the conceptual framing of what we do. In the fourth chapter, I argue for the democratization of biographizing. I engage with Jacques Rancière, who suggests that biography should adopt the style of modern literature, which treats all literary subjects as worthy of space on the page. In sum, Acts of Identity provides a novel account of biography that contributes to democratic theory and discussions of identity, action, and equality. iii The dissertation of William Samuel Stahl is approved. Laure Murat Melvin Rogers Giulia Sissa Joshua F. Dienstag, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iv To Phi Hong Su v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..………1 Chapter 1: The Miracle of Life: Hannah Arendt and the Story-Form of Human Being…………...25 Chapter 2: To Be or To Be Able to Be? Giorgio Agamben on the Potentiality of Humanity……..72 Chapter 3: To Err Is Human: Biography versus Biopolitics in Michel Foucault………………….97 Chapter 4: Life, Literarity, and Equality for All: Biography as Democracy in Jacques Rancière 133 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................163 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………167 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the strong support of my committee. Giulia Sissa, Melvin Rogers, and Laure Murat have all shaped this work with their incisive comments and wealth of expertise, and I am grateful for their generosity and wisdom. I owe special thanks to Joshua Dienstag, my chair and advisor, who has supported me since I started at UCLA. I have learned an enormous amount from his mentorship and our many conversations. His good humor and empowering pessimistic spirit have enlivened and enriched my own thinking. I owe gratitude as well to my undergraduate professors and advisors at the University of Chicago: to Nathan Tarcov, whose seminars on Plato, Machiavelli, and Leo Strauss were a revelation; Julie E. Cooper, whose seminar on Rousseau still influences my thinking, as the first chapter of this dissertation clearly shows; and finally Patchen Markell, who advised my undergraduate honor’s thesis. His mentorship and support at that crucial moment in my career has made all the difference. The completion of this project has been made possible by the financial support of the UCLA Department of Political Science and the Dissertation Year Fellowship of the UCLA Graduate Division. In particular I would like to thank Joseph Brown for his extraordinary support. In addition, I want to thank my peers and colleagues who have supported me as scholars and in friendship: Libby Barringer, Hollie Blake, Anuja Bose, John Branstetter, Andre Comandon, Arash Davari, Megan Gallagher, Emily Hallock, Naveed Mansoori, and Christopher Walker- Krisman. To my family, who have always supported my education, no matter how far it has flung me across the globe, and above all to Phi: your love has made this not only possible, but worthwhile. You have brought a happiness into my life that will never cease to stun and amaze me. vii VITA William Samuel Stahl graduated with honors from the University of Chicago in June, 2009, with a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy. After a year of service providing literacy tutoring and after-school programming at an elementary school on the South Side of Chicago, he began as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2017, he published “To Err Is Human: Biography vs. Biopolitics in Michel Foucault” in the peer-reviewed journal, Contemporary Political Theory. For the 2017-2018 academic year, he has been awarded the Dissertation Year Fellowship by the UCLA Graduate Division. For the 2018- 2019 academic year, he will be in residence as a visiting scholar at New York University, Abu Dhabi. viii Introduction Political theory addresses questions of public concern. What is justice? What is freedom? Under what conditions may the exercise of power be considered legitimate and incur the obligation to obey? Given this, we are presented with a puzzle: why have so many political theorists shown interest in the genre of biography, which would seem to be such a personal and apolitical literary form? From Plato’s episodic accounts of the life of Socrates to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, political theory has often, and paradoxically, fixed its focus on the life of a single person. The answer to this puzzle, I think, is that biography reveals the connection between individual identity and political action. It connects the “who” and the “what” of politics. More pointedly, it reveals that who we are is determined by what we do. This is evident from its form: the basis for a biographic plot is the course of action that an individual has taken through life. Through recounting an individual’s course of action, a biography reveals to us who that individual is. It might sound straightforward, but this formulation of the relation between identity and action is at odds with our modern commonsense understanding of what it means to be a “self.” One of the defining features of the modern age in which we live is its subjectivism. On this, the genealogists of modernity can agree, whether they call it “emotivism” (MacIntyre 2007), “inwardness” (Taylor 1989), or bald “self-assertion” (Blumenberg 1983). One aspect of this inward turn is what J.B. Schneewind calls “the invention of autonomy” (Schneewind 1998). Autonomy is the notion that our outward acts are authorized by our inward selves. Thus, in this model, individual identity – the consistency of the self with itself – is the source of action, not the result. 1 The “invention of autonomy” has had an enormous impact on modern political thought. Liberalism, republicanism, and even critical schools of thought like Marxism and existentialism have posited autonomy, whether taken in an individual or collective sense, as a normative ideal. In liberalism, with its values of individual freedom and independence; republicanism, with its veneration of popular sovereignty; Marxism, with its goal of transforming the proletariat from a class “in itself” to a class “for itself;” and existentialism, with its anxious quest for authenticity, political action has been conceived as the self-expression of a determinate subject. In these models, political action is “correct” when it is an accurate and authentic reflection of the acting subject. What I wish to argue, in this study of biography, is that things are the other way around. What we do is not a reflection of who we are. Instead, who we are is a reflection of what we do. We become who we are through what we do, and we have no identity until we have a story. In political terms, this means that we do not carry our private selves, already fully formed, over into politics. Our identity is formed, not in our own private thoughts, but through our role in public life. This thesis is at odds with current identity politics just as it is with the ideal of autonomy. In contemporary political life, identity is often conceived in terms of categorization and labeling: an individual is identified with a particular class, race, sex, gender, religion, nationality, etc. However, while these labels may or may not accurately categorize “what” a person is, they do not tell us “who” a person is. To understand “who” someone is, we need to know their life story. We are more than the sum of our parts or a cross-tabulation of our characteristics.
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