Arendt, Autonomism and Withdrawal

There is a common assumption that for an activity to be considered properly political, resistant or otherwise, there must be direct and active engagement with, or against, the governmental institutions of the state. Disengagement or withdrawal would be tantamount to a cessation of political activities. This is a position taken emphatically by the post-Marxist thinker Chantal Mouffe who, arguing against the “strategy of withdrawal” she locates in autonomist Marxist political thought, says that it lacks both efficacy and the characteristics of an explicitly political movement. She agues that any political challenge to the established social order must be in the form of a direct antagonistic engagement with the dominant relations of power which keep the order in place. In this paper, I argue to the contrary, and highlight, utilizing Hannah Arendt’s work on politics and power, the fact that withdrawal can very much be openly antagonistic in nature, underlying a dimension of politics as understood by Mouffe. Moreover, I show that the kind of withdrawal advocated by many autonomist thinkers highlights a dimension of the political underappreciated by Mouffe. That is, withdrawal may be generative and productive of the very type of society those withdrawing wish to supersede the one they are withdrawing from, and this may make withdrawal political even in the absence of any antagonistic dimension. And this, moreover, ultimately confirms what makes withdrawal so distinctive as a form of political resistance.