2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) It could still be argued that Arendt is simply describing the perspective of ‘European men’ in this passage: when she refers to ‘“natural” human beings’, she puts the word ‘natural’ in quotation marks, and adds the qualifier, ‘as it were’. 67 Yet at the same time, Arendt needs the opposition between ‘“natural” human beings’ and humans whose ‘specifically human character’ consists in having ‘created a human world’, in order to explain the expulsion from humanity of concentration camp inmates and stateless people. 68 In the penultimate chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues again that there is ‘something highly unnatural’ about ‘human’ (in quotation marks) ‘nature’ (in quotation marks) in general: Actually the experience of the concentration camps does show that human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human animal, and that man’s ‘nature’ is only ‘human’ insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man. 69 However, all these quotation marks, and Arendt’s repeated use of free indirect speech, do not change the fact that, as Michael Rothberg has argued, Arendt does not analyse ‘the traumatic nature of the physical and epistemic violence of colonialism as productive of the natural/unnatural humanity opposition’. 70 V THINKING THE POLITICS OF COUNTERING STATELESSNESS WITH ARENDT AGAINST ARENDT: THE DARK BACKGROUND OF MERE GIVENNESS Arendt understood the predicament of stateless people to be that they are excluded from politics. That is, Arendt understood the predicament of stateless people to be that they are excluded from participating as equals in a political space where their speech can appear as meaningful and their actions have consequences, which leaves them without agency and without effective legal protection and thus exposes them to arbitrary force. Yet scholars of statelessness nevertheless keep returning to Arendt, primarily because of Arendt’s notion of a ‘right to have rights’, which gestures towards ways in which a politics of stateless people might not be a contradiction in terms. However, I will argue in this section that thinking a politics of stateless people that is not a contradiction in terms requires a critique of the conception of politics with which Arendt concludes ‘Imperialism’. On the penultimate page of ‘Imperialism’, Arendt argues that ‘our political life’ depends, ‘since the Greeks’, 71 on a strict separation between the private and the public sphere: This whole sphere of the merely given, relegated to private life in civilized society, is a permanent threat to the public sphere, because the public sphere is as consistently based on the law of equality as the private sphere is based on the law of universal difference and differentiation. … Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals. The dark background of mere givenness, the background formed 67 68 69 70 71 ibid. ibid. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 455. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009) 61. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 301. 206