Two political gestures were recently observed on the world stage. On May 10, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, destroyed the cover of the UN Charter in the General Assembly building in New York, while, just three weeks before that, the far-right Slovak MEP Miroslav RadaÄ ovský , had released a white dove in a plenary session of the European Parliament, in Strasbourg.
These performances are quite suitable for the news era clickbait e memes that go viral on social media. But what do they say about the nature of politics today?
Complaints about the constant degradation of the public sphere give the appearance of conservative lamentations, resurfacing in each new generation.
Is it really true that things were much better (more dignified, more thoughtful…) in the past, compared to the current fashion of parochial populisms that oppose technocratic “globalistsâ€?
Aren’t we imagining a false Golden Age and constructing a narrative of the fall from that perfect condition to the tragic absurdities of the 21st century?
Although there are several definitions of the political, the one we find in the works of Hannah Arendt stands out for its universality and continued relevance. For Arendt, the basis of institutional politics is the politician’s experience.
As with Aristotle, this experience goes to the heart of what it means to be human: it signals nothing less than our “second birth†, which comes after our biological appearance in the world in the case of the “first birth†€. More specifically, the politician’s experience is that of being with other humans thanks to shared words and actions.
Arendt’s version of what counts as politics is both very common and highly unusual: it is a feature of everyday life that does not involve parties or parliaments, and it is a rare occasion in which the words really matter and when union with other people produces a feat, elevating each person (if only momentarily) from their mindless immersion in private matters.
In truth, parliaments are parliaments – places where speech (from the French verb talk) is important – only given the institution’s roots in a more primordial verbal experience of the politician.
More than that, Arendt’s political approach is also not ideologically limited, since she refrains from determining the purpose of speech and action, which can be directed towards causes of either right or left.
With politics reduced to spectacular gestures, we witness the eclipse of everything that motivates and continues to drive politicians. Gestures that are not exactly speeches and are not exactly actions, close the space for political involvement. In this effect, gestures join forces with technocratic rationality and algorithmic governance, with which populisms openly collide.
They acquire a disproportionate significance because they occur within the walls of venerable political institutions, but they also undermine these same institutions, as well as the field of political life, described by Arendt with great precision. In a word, then, political gestures are paradoxically anti-political.
Bombastic, flashy and abbreviated, such gestures are impediments to thought, analysis and interpretation. At the most superficial level, they are unreflective with regard to their immediate and material consequences.
What happens to the frightened dove, released into a large interior space? What message does the physical destruction of the UN Charter on the podium at UN headquarters send?
Taking this last question further, it is important to examine the remarks made by the Israeli ambassador immediately before and during his pretentious act. Erdan said, addressing representatives of other countries, while producing a miniature paper shredder: “You can see what you are inflicting on the UN Charter with this destructive vote… You are destroying the UN Charter. UN with your own hands†. Of course, he was the one doing what he criticized, and the grinding was not done manually, but by a machine.
This was, in fact, a clear case of psychological projection – an attribution of one’s own behavior to others – and Erdan confirms this diagnosis by referring to his conduct as a “mirror†€ (although the mirroring didn’t work the way he intended).
The pompous political gestures, to which populist leaders and their circle freely resort, block the work of thought also at the other level. The speech that accompanies these gestures is totally absorbed in the materiality of the act, while the act itself is not a joint action, but an instance of acting, a behavioral tic elevated to a quasi-universality.
After all, political gestures can be copied, executed by a group, parodied, parroted and, however, they cannot constitute a project carried out together.
This observation applies equally to activist protests that tend to become increasingly gestural, such as climate protesters’ attacks on famous works of art in galleries and museums around the world.
The gestural attack on word and action is symptomatic of a broader trend in which these are increasingly shaped into a political gesture – equally bombastic, meme-like or intended to shock.
Let us consider the statements made by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev on his Telegram channel. Mixing frequent threats of nuclear attacks with personal insults against Western and Ukrainian leaders, Medvedev operates exclusively with political gestures that extend and encompass the verbal register of language. It is within this framework that the behavior of Russian officials, from the heads of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Vladimir Putin himself, must be examined.
The choice between right-wing populism and neoliberal technocracy, which appears consistently in election campaigns around the world, is false. In different ways, the two “alternatives†obliterate word and action, without which, according to Arendt, humans would be reduced to nothing more than their biological appearance in the world.
From national to international arenas, the degradation of the public sphere goes hand in hand with the destruction of ecosystems and the evisceration of the common good, irreducible to private or group interests. If it is still possible to save anything from global devastation, we must start by cobbling together shared words and actions, irreducible to bombastic and empty gestures.
