What is it about?
Hannah Arendt interprets the story of Cain and Abel as an allegory for the origins of politics. Its moral? Politics' paradigmatic freedom cannot abide necessity in any form—natural or moral. Thus, political fraternity is secured only through the fratricidal narrowing of ethical responsibility. This chapter permits Arendt's allegorical reading but emphasizes the slain brother's lingering, ghostly presence and, by extension, resists the notion that politics can or ought to be liberated from ethical necessity.
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Why is it important?
More than a matter of biblical exegesis, this argument bears critical implications for our thinking about the processes of admission and exclusion by which collectively self-determining polities take shape. If fratricide does not release freedom from responsibility, then exclusions cannot be considered morally indifferent political imperatives. Even if the polity does not know what to do with those it excludes, its character is nevertheless implicated in what becomes of them.
Perspectives
I wrote this chapter as the opening for a larger argument about the United States' Border Security strategy known as 'Prevention Through Deterrence.' This strategy, I go on to argue, attempts to free the US from responsibility for the migrants it excludes by sending them off to an anonymous demise in the Sonoran Desert. In so doing, however, it repeats Cain's crime, and when this crime is brought to light, we are confronted with the intolerable human cost of securing American self-determination.
Bryan Ellrod
Wake Forest University
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This page is a summary of: Politics Haunted, February 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004721524_005.
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