2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) One way to read this analogy is to treat it as a sign of Arendt’s Eurocentric, even racist, worldview. Accordingly, the analogy indicates that Arendt privileges activities of making, especially cultural fabrication and artistic production, as the measure of civilizational superiority and the standard of humanity. 50 Gündoğdu reads this interpretation in Jimmy Casas Klausen’s article, Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism. 51 However, Gündoğdu argues, Klausen’s interpretation mistakenly assumes that Arendt believes in ‘essential characteristics of human existence’. 52 She argues that for Arendt, by contrast, [a] life without labor, work, and action does not simply cease to be human, but it becomes much more difficult for that life to be recognized as human by others. Read in this way, Arendt’s controversial analogy between the stateless and the ‘savages’ alerts us to the conditions that can stand in the way of such recognition.53 However, Gündoğdu’s interpretation of Arendt’s comparison is unsatisfying. For what makes Arendt’s text so valuable for scholars of statelessness and of refugee politics and refugee rights is that Arendt does not focus on ‘the conditions that can stand in the way’ of being recognised as human, but on the political mechanisms that produce such conditions, that is, on political mechanisms of derecognition and dehumanisation. The questions that Gündoğdu fails to address are: first, what is the connection between the political mechanisms of derecognising/dehumanising some people as non-nationals, on the one hand, and the political mechanisms of derecognising/dehumanising some people as ‘savages’, on the other? And second, why does Arendt repeatedly compare stateless people and refugees to ‘savages’? In fact, Klausen concludes the article that Gündoğdu criticises by gesturing precisely towards these questions: The greater irony, which is just as tragic as ironic, is that Arendt deploys Hottentots to heighten awareness of the political exclusions generated by the failure of the nation-state system and attendant predicament of rights regimes — yet, for all that, she never turns the analogy around to reevaluate the antiprimitivist exclusions inherent in her own categories. 54 In the passage cited above, Arendt writes that the greatest danger of camp inmates and stateless people was ‘the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human’, 55 and that it is ‘because of it’ (because of this abstract nakedness) that they were regarded as savages. 56 However, consider cultural theorist Paul Gilroy’s critique of this passage: Arendt misrecognized the abstractly naked human as the natural or essential human. Instead, that vulnerable figure might be described more accurately and more usefully as a racialised human: a particular, infra-human invention rather than 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 ibid 148. Jimmy Casas Klausen, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism’ (2010) 38(3) Political Theory 394. See also Gündoğdu’s critique of Klausen: Ayten Gündoğdu, ‘Arendt on Culture and Imperialism: Response to Klausen’ (2011) 39(5) Political Theory 661, as well as: Jimmy Casas Klausen, ‘Reply to Gündoğdu’ (2011) 39(5) Political Theory 668. Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, 148. ibid. Klausen, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism’ (n 51) 416 (citations omitted). Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 300. ibid. 204