Equal Freedom: Body and Space of Appearance in Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler

In her most recent works, Judith Butler has returned, again and again, to Hannah Arendt's ideas of the "space of appearance" and the "right to have rights". This return was never acritical, however. The distancing is rooted in a critique of an Arendt that is usually read as the author of an extreme and unmodifiable separation between both the public and the private and the body in its relation to the world of necessity and the body in its relation to freedom. Butler's double movement is, nevertheless, particular it goes from a recovering of the notions of the space of appearance and the right to have rights as crucial in any attempt to understand contemporary forms of oppression, to the rejection of those strict Arendtian distinctions between space and body private and public. It is from the starting point of this double movement, and in parallel with a reading of the Merleau-Ponty of the reversibility of bodies and the intercorporeal space, that Butler promotes a novel model for the thinking and defense of what here we call "equal freedom".