ABSTRACT
This chapter brings both Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler together through the mediation of the notion of the political. While they do not so much offer a systematized, formal theory about the political as engage in critical interrogations of its conditions of possibility and impossibility, the argument is that Butler's most recent reflections on the political are shaped by her reading of Arendt, and it is this reading that permits Butler to illustrate how her renowned concepts of performativity and precarity complement one another. The chapter emphasizes two aspects of their relationship: first, both insist that the political should not be thought as a property or substance, but as a relation. Second, the relational political ontology underpins their conceptions of political subjectivity, with the consequence that subjects in the public space have a relational identity and not a fixed essence, cannot be sovereign when engaged in political action, and are the result of a performative exercise.
