Judith Butler’s engagement with Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Kafka examines how freedom emerges within historical ruptures and how this experience can be transmitted to subsequent generations. In dark times, the relationship to the past, expectations of the future, and the capacity to act together all become problematic at once. When confidence in historical continuity is shaken, the absence of a tradition capable of transmitting the experience of freedom, or of a vision capable of orienting the future, presents a challenge to thought. Butler takes this difficulty as a starting point for reconsidering the relationships between time, political action, law, and hope.
The intellectual background to this discussion lies in Butler’s work on identity, power, language, embodiment, and social life. Published in 1990, Gender Trouble questions how identities assumed to be natural and self-evident are produced and maintained through social practices. Bodies That Matter investigates the conditions under which bodies become intelligible, recognizable, and subject to regulation. The question underlying these investigations concerns the conditions under which a life can be recognized, which lives are considered worthy of protection, and whose loss can be publicly mourned.
Precarious Life examines how political discourse and media narratives shape the perception of violence and suffering, while The Force of Nonviolence understands nonviolence as an active ethical and political commitment arising from human interdependence. The transformation of gender into an object of fear and the mobilization of authoritarian movements around the notion of “gender ideology” also extend this inquiry. Familiar terms such as human, natural, free, violent, vulnerable, and democratic thus become objects of investigation. The engagement with Arendt, Benjamin, and Kafka opens these categories governing collective life to examination in relation to time and freedom.
Dark Times and the Loss of Orientation
Butler’s point of departure is a sense of disorientation that makes even the definition of the present historical period difficult. The idea of the “end times” expresses an experience in which the future can no longer be imagined with confidence. The fact that young people may fear the future they envision, or struggle to imagine any future at all, indicates a transformation in their relationship to time. The future may cease to be an expectation that sustains present life and instead become a domain of fear and uncertainty.
Butler considers this experience within conditions marked by rising authoritarianism, genocides, forced displacement, and climate catastrophe. Arendt’s concept of “dark times” helps us think about periods in which sustaining hopes for freedom and democratic life becomes increasingly difficult. Here, the meaning of time cannot be separated from lived experience or from people’s political hopes and fears. The chronological ordering of historical events cannot, by itself, explain why people lose their orientation or how they recover the possibility of acting together.
Arendt’s thought does not seek to neutralize every rupture by incorporating it into a broader narrative of continuity. The collapse of political regimes, the emergence of resistance movements, and revolutionary beginnings can disrupt the familiar order of time. Under such circumstances, nostalgia for the past and historical determinism concerning the future prove equally inadequate. Nostalgia assumes that a lost world can be restored, while determinism treats what has not yet occurred as already decided. Experimental thought is concerned with how a new beginning can become possible without relying on either assurance.
The Interval Between Past and Future
One of the central problems in Arendt’s Between Past and Future concerns the nature of the time ordinarily called the “present.” It is difficult to conceive of the present as a bounded moment that can be grasped and held in place. When we identify a moment as the present, that moment has already begun to recede into the past and give way to another. The present, therefore, cannot be understood as a stationary entity situated on a chronological line.
Butler reads Arendt’s interval between past and future through this difficulty. The interval constitutes a gap or rupture within linear continuity. The assumption that the past determines the future without interruption loses its validity here. People may find themselves in circumstances that cannot be fully understood through the explanations provided by the preceding order. The disruption of temporal continuity also unsettles the established spatial organization of collective life; where and under what relations people can gather must be determined anew.
Such a rupture does not mean that all the effects of the past disappear. Historical conditions establish the circumstances in which action takes place, but they cannot fully explain its novelty. The freedom collectively brought into being by those participating in resistance cannot be calculated as the necessary outcome of preceding events. The concept of the interval preserves precisely this unpredictability. The possibility of something new reveals both the limits of historical explanation and the still-undetermined direction of action.
An Inheritance Without a Testament and the Transmission of Resistance
The words Arendt takes from René Char, “Our inheritance was left to us by no testament,” express this discontinuous relationship to the past. The problem articulated by Char in the context of the French Resistance against Nazism concerns how the freedom and solidarity experienced during collective struggle can be transmitted. At a particular historical moment, people acted together, established a public world, and experienced a form of association previously unknown to them. When the struggle ended, the question of how this experience could endure into the future remained unresolved.
The absence of a testament does not mean that no documents concerning the past exist. Rather, the problem lies in the absence of a binding structure of transmission capable of defining the freedom that was experienced and determining how subsequent generations might inherit it. Property can pass from an owner to an heir through a legal procedure. The freedom that emerges through collective action cannot be possessed or transferred in the same way. Recording or archiving the experience does not automatically reconstruct the relationships that made it possible.
The inheritance of a revolutionary past therefore raises the question of how an event that interrupts continuity can itself be carried through time. If resistance broke with the ordinary course of its historical period, its transmission to later generations cannot be explained through a model of uninterrupted succession. Inheriting the past requires the reopening of an interval under new conditions. The remembrance of earlier action acquires political significance insofar as people in the present can establish a relationship with it. In the absence of a ready-made testament, experimental thought investigates how such a relationship can be formed.
Revolution and the Beginning of Shared Freedom
In Arendt’s On Revolution, revolution involves not only the destruction of an old order but also the problem of initiating a new political organization. The overthrow of a regime opens the question of how people will determine the rules governing their collective life. The political character of a beginning lies in the capacity of people to come together and establish their own relationships and forms of coexistence. Constituent action makes it possible for freedom to take shape within a public world.
This understanding of beginnings bears an affinity with Rosa Luxemburg’s conception of spontaneity as it emerges in the general strike. The form that collective action will take becomes apparent through the relationships established by those participating in the action itself.
In Arendt’s essay “What Is Freedom?”, freedom is not reduced to a quality of thought or an inner power of the will. One may think about freedom or desire to be free; political freedom, however, becomes visible in action undertaken with others. The principle guiding freedom does not exist as a fully formed content independent of action. Rather, the principle becomes manifest in the performance of the act itself. For this reason, freedom cannot be understood merely as an ability or privilege belonging to an isolated individual; it is realized within social relationships.
This approach also clarifies the distinction between liberation from oppression and the establishment of freedom. Liberation from domination, forced labor, sexual violation, and dispossession constitutes a necessary dimension of freedom. Yet there must also emerge the capacity to move, speak, assemble, and establish a shared political world. The relationship between freedom from something and freedom to do something determines the conditions under which emancipation can develop into public freedom.
Butler’s reference to the continuation of debt relations and legal domination after emancipation from slavery in the United States illustrates the historical significance of this distinction. The legal abolition of a relationship of dependency does not necessarily prevent those who have been emancipated from becoming subject to new forms of coercion. Evaluating the consequences of emancipation requires examining the material and legal conditions under which people continue their lives. Shared freedom concerns the actual possibility of acting within those conditions.
The Public Space Opened by Free Action
The emergence of freedom through action also transforms the question of how public space is constituted. In Butler’s reading of Arendt, free action does not depend upon a particular architectural structure prepared in advance. By speaking, moving, and making collective decisions together, people can transform the place they occupy into a space of freedom. The public character of a space becomes manifest through the action that takes place within it.
This approach does not eliminate the importance of space or public architecture. People require conditions under which they can become visible to one another, make their voices heard, and find a response to their actions within a shared world. The existence of a prepared structure does not itself produce freedom; nevertheless, freedom cannot acquire political reality without a common space in which it can become visible. The relationship between space and action must be understood through this mutual necessity.
The spatial dimension of the interval becomes clear at this point. Relationships among people open a space in which collective action can take place. Freedom becomes visible within this network of relations and is renewed through it. Public space can thus be understood not merely as a location that people enter, but as a form of relationship created and sustained through acting together.
Legal Violence and Constituent Power
Benjamin’s Critique of Violence examines the relationship between law and violence through the distinction between lawmaking and law-preserving forces. Lawmaking violence establishes the boundaries of a new legal order, while law-preserving violence maintains the established order. In this relationship, law does not merely function as an external constraint upon coercion. It can also secure its own foundation and continuity through coercive means.
In Butler’s discussion, contracts, indebtedness, imprisonment, and exploitation emerge as concrete domains in which the legal order exerts coercive effects upon life. The assumption of a legal form by violence does not mean that violence has disappeared. If the new order established after the overthrow of a regime maintains the same coercive relationships, the transformation has failed to break the cycle of legal violence. Benjamin’s critique of mythical violence addresses this recurring connection between the establishment and preservation of law.
The concepts of the general strike and divine violence arise within the question of how this cycle might be interrupted. The problem that concerns Butler is a rupture that goes beyond the mere transfer of existing instruments of coercion into the hands of another government. Within this discussion, the general strike opens the possibility of suspending legal coercion without bloodshed, while divine violence introduces the theological dimension of a rupture with law. The question is how to conceive an interruption capable of bringing an end to the violence produced by the legal order, at the point where changing that order through its own instruments reaches its limits.
Butler pays particular attention to Benjamin’s refusal to provide an imaginable model of the order that would follow this interruption. What comes after the abolition of legal violence is not explained through a clear narrative of the future. In Butler’s reading, the ending of the text itself conveys this rupture: thought arrives at a limit where familiar transitions can no longer carry it forward. The absence of an image of what follows is frightening, yet it also preserves the possibility of not determining the new in advance through the categories of the old order.
Arendt’s understanding of revolution diverges from Benjamin’s at this point. By distinguishing political power arising from collective action from violence, Arendt maintains that lawmaking can be an expression of freedom. The capacity of people to establish the conditions of their coexistence can possess a political source distinct from the organization of coercion. Power rests upon the capacity to act together; violence is not identical with the principle that brings this collective capacity into being.
This distinction does not mean that Arendt equates every existing legal order with freedom. The character of a political foundation must be sought in the human relationships that make it possible. The source of power arising from shared freedom is not coercion exercised over others. When a new political formation begins to sustain itself solely through the coercive force of the state, it may lose the relationship of freedom that characterized its beginning. The possibility opened by Arendt lies in institutions continuing to sustain the human capacity for collective action.
Political Melancholia and the Vitality of Institutions
The fact that a political foundation has been established does not guarantee that freedom will continue with the same vitality in the future. One of the problems Arendt identifies is how easily the sphere of political action can be abandoned following a change of regime. People who have struggled together may return to their private lives. As the solidarity formed during resistance weakens, their relationship to the shared world also changes.
The experience Butler associates with political melancholia emerges in the aftermath of this loss. The end of a struggle may bring neither simple relief nor an unqualified sense of success. The disappearance of the intense public life generated by acting together may be experienced through mourning, regret, and disorientation. Alongside the results they have achieved, people also feel the absence of a form of association in which they no longer participate.
The rigidification of institutions represents another dimension of this problem. The action that made freedom visible at the founding moment is not automatically preserved within institutions. The continued existence of rules and structures does not mean that the collective relationships that brought them into being have also endured. Revitalizing institutions requires people to continue assuming responsibility for political action. The relationship between institutional continuity and the continuity of freedom therefore remains an open question even after the founding moment has passed.
Transience and the Inexhaustibility of Freedom
The transience of the experience of freedom does not mean that freedom is exhausted in a single historical moment. The notion of inexhaustible iteration, which Butler emphasizes through Arendt, indicates that a principle does not expend all its possibilities when it is realized in action. The same capacity for freedom can emerge again, with different people and under different conditions. Exercising this capacity in solidarity with others strengthens the ability to act together.
Iteration here does not mean the exact repetition of a past event. Every action takes place within new relationships and produces different consequences. This open-endedness means that no political organization can be regarded as the final and completed form of freedom. The task of establishing a shared world cannot be entrusted entirely to a single founding moment. The inexhaustibility of freedom is connected to the continuing need for action within political life.
Butler also asks whether this language of infinity and inexhaustibility contains a theological dimension. In Benjamin, the rupture with legal violence is explicitly described as divine violence, drawing upon a theological vocabulary. In Arendt, the relationship between eternity, infinity, and transience appears in a different form. Bringing these two approaches into proximity does not mean that they advocate the same theological doctrine; rather, it requires investigating the concepts through which possibilities beyond linear time can be thought.
Arendt’s encounter with the theological problem of time reaches back to her 1929 study of Augustine. The idea emphasized by Butler in this context is that time is not merely an index measuring or indicating transience; time itself must be understood as transience. Understood in this way, the passing of an experience of freedom is not judged according to a permanent model standing outside time. The relationship between the ending of an action and the possibility of acting anew is considered within the very structure of temporality.
Messianic Time and the Citability of the Past
Butler argues that Arendt’s intellectual debt to Benjamin is more extensive than is often acknowledged. Their friendship and Arendt’s efforts to help Benjamin escape from France provide the historical background to this relationship. The main emphasis of Butler’s comparison, however, concerns how the past can reach the present and the place of interruption within thought.
In Benjamin’s Theologico-Political Fragment, the messianic cannot be understood as an outcome that will emerge through the internal progress of history. If conceived in this way, redemption would become a predictable stage of the historical process. The messianic dimension maintains a distance from the idea that history will necessarily complete itself. Messianic time, therefore, cannot be reduced to a promise of fulfillment located at some future date.
In the Theses on the Philosophy of History, the past of the oppressed is understood through an image that suddenly flashes up within the present. The past does not accumulate within homogeneous, empty time and thereby arrive at the present; rather, it becomes a matter of the present at a moment of danger. This encounter disrupts established historical continuity. An experience previously considered closed or left behind can acquire new meaning and urgency within the present.
In Arendt, the citability of the past becomes important when traditional transmission has broken down. A statement, a law, or an idea belonging to the past can be extracted from the context that once sustained it. Citation brings the extracted element into the present while interrupting its former unity. In this way, a relationship with the past becomes possible without reconstructing the authority of an entire tradition. An element removed from its historical context can participate in making the present thinkable in a different way.
This act of extraction occupies a particular place in Butler’s approach to hope. An element that provides hope within a destructive historical period can reach the present by being separated from the encompassing narrative of that period. Even if the past as a whole offers no assurance, particular experiences, words, and actions within it can disclose another possibility. An inheritance without a testament does not, in this sense, signify the severing of every connection with the past. It involves the reestablishment of that relationship under conditions in which transmission can no longer depend upon an authoritative and uninterrupted line of succession.
Kafka and the Limits of Inheritance
Kafka’s parabolic narratives open the problem of transmission at the level of generations and family relationships. A continuity extending from father to son offers a familiar model for the transfer of inheritance. Kafka’s figures, however, occupy the limits of this model. What can be inherited, what may continue through a line of descent, and what remains after a human life all become uncertain.
Odradek, in the story The Cares of a Family Man, enters Butler’s discussion in precisely this respect. This being, which does not easily fit the established distinction between human and object, challenges the expectations of familial and patriarchal transmission. Its persistence cannot be explained through the familiar measures of human life and generational succession. The problem of inheritance is thereby carried beyond an order assumed to belong exclusively to human beings.
In Butler’s reading, Odradek’s unusual existence makes it possible to think about the relationship between transience and repetition, as well as unexpected forms of hope. The possibility opened by this figure emerges at the limits of the human desire to imagine the future entirely as a continuation of itself. The question of what it means to be human becomes connected to the question of what forms of persistence and collective life can be conceived. Hope is no longer confined to the transmission of an inheritance that has been recognized and secured in advance.
Hope and the Possibility of Acting Anew
For Butler, the inability to imagine a future on the basis of present conditions does not mark the final limit of thought. Hope cannot be reduced to the expectation that ideals of freedom and justice will necessarily be realized. It concerns the renewed undertaking of the struggle required for those ideals, without knowing when or in what form that struggle will reach its conclusion. The continuity of shared freedom depends upon the persistence of actions whose outcomes cannot be guaranteed in advance. Uncertainty does not eliminate the responsibility to act together.
Experiences of public happiness and solidarity are transient. This transience neither means that the same experiences will automatically return nor demonstrates that they can never occur again. Their renewed possibility depends upon people participating once more in the conditions of shared life. The inquiry sustained by experimental thought in dark times concerns how these possibilities inherited from the past can find renewed expression within the relationships of the present.
