It happens ‘in-between’: on the spatial birth of politics in Arendt's On Revolution

Hannah Arendt's On Revolution is a remarkable reflection on the meaning of the concept and the perplexities of the revolutionary events that have defined the spiritual and institutional shape of modernity. The book, to be sure, does not rank high in the literature of political sociology that customarily addresses the causes of success and failure of modern revolutions; it actually challenges the very terms upon which this type of analysis is made (Fine, 2001; Walsh, 2008). At its centre lies Arendt's concern with the question of whether ‘freedom’ can still be considered to be, as she believes it should, the primary and ultimate goal of politics. While facing the consequences of the totalitarian destruction of human life and the cold war reduction of politics to ideology and violence, Arendt's account of the equivocal course of the French and the American Revolutions seems to follow quite closely the story of a ‘defeated cause’ (Tassin, 2007). For if we stick to the historical record, the revolutionary quest for ‘the foundation of a body politic which guarantees the space where freedom can appear’ has often ended in tragedy or oblivion rather than in a worldly and tangible reality (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 125). However, what motivates Arendt's writing is not sheer despair but, rather, the conviction that ‘revolutions [still] are the only events which confront us directly with the problem of beginning’ (p. 21).

In order to understand what the ‘problem of beginning’ consists in, we need to ask what is actually begun by the deeds of revolutionary actors. Arendt's distinctive answer – that ‘the central idea of revolution is the foundation of freedom’ (p. 125) – is not easy to grasp, as it brings together apparently incompatible attributes of political life: an idea of political freedom as the potential of human action for spontaneous ‘new beginnings’, and a conception of political foundation as the concerted act of establishing a body of ‘lasting institutions’. The point of this ‘central idea’, though, is not to outline a normative theory of revolutions that reconciles both moments, but rather to direct our reflection to their conflictive and uncertain relation in political reality. The phrase actually expresses a fundamental difficulty that haunts modern politics, namely, the absence of a proper foundation (Lefort, 1988; Marchart, 2007). At the moment of revolutionary beginning, actors and observers are equally confronted with the striking fact that there is no ‘political substance’ or ultimate ‘ground’ to which they may hold on, for they deal ‘not with anything substantial but with an apparition’ (Arendt, 2006/1961, p. 4). The ‘apparition’ Arendt talks about has nothing to do with the revelation of some transcendent truth or the discovery of a hidden historical law, but with the ability of individuals acting together to ‘call something into being which did not exist before’ (Arendt, 1998/1958, p. 150). Still, if what is called into being in the event of revolution is nothing ‘substantial’, what is it then?

In this paper, I want to focus on what I consider to underlie Arendt's approach to this troubled question about political foundation: the idea that politics is a ‘spatial construct’. If we follow her meditation on the foundation of freedom, we may venture to say that what defines the revolutionary birth of politics is, quite literally, the ‘opening’ of a topos for political existence, the drawing of a grammar for life in common, the grounding of a space for freedom. Her insistence on this point throughout the pages of On Revolution is far from trivial as it establishes a way of understanding political foundation as an act of spacing. This means that the political can only be founded upon an opening ‘gap’, the space of a fissure that both separates and binds us together, and which must be sustained and renewed since politics ceases wherever this gap no longer exists. In many of her writings, Arendt calls this interstitial space the ‘in-between’ (Zwischen).¹ Although this notion is not the explicit focus of attention in Arendt's book, it does exert a pivotal presence in her conceptual and historical account of modern revolutions. My argument, simply put, is that the construction of a space ‘in-between’ human beings turns out to be the political goal of revolution and, at the same time, is the existential condition that makes revolution possible as an experiment in political freedom. But what sort of thing is this space exactly and why is it significant for revolutionary politics?

In what follows, I propose a reading of this central notion of the ‘in-between’ on two planes in Arendt's reflection on the foundation of politics. Firstly, I argue that the ‘in-between’ is the social-ontological premise of her understanding of politics as a space of plurality; that is, the indispensable ground upon which political actions gain meaning and power. Thus, the ‘in-between’ entails a non-subjective, relational conception of the human world, which from the start is structured as a space of sociation and coexistence. Yet this does not mean that the ‘in-between’ is a fixed terrain. In Arendt's account, the ‘in-between’ is an emergent domain, a historical–political achievement that must be created and secured by human action on terms that are not given. Under this form, the ‘in-between’ is actually the key to a peculiar ‘phenomenology’ of the political creation of a common world that unfolds at the heart of On Revolution (Fine, 2014).²

Following this interpretation, the ‘in-between’ appears as an emergent ontological domain that requires human effort to be maintained open and alive. The event of revolution amounts to a critical reopening of the world that enacts this space in a twofold manner: in the actual experience of rupture of time, it opens a space where something ‘new’ can appear, and in the practice of establishing lasting social relations, it institutes a space based on laws. The constellation of both moments, the temporality of freedom and the legality of foundation, configures what I propose to call the politics of the in-between.

A central implication of this reading of On Revolution, one that we should not overlook in the present time, is that constituting and preserving politics as a space ‘in-between’ compels us to acknowledge that the human world is a place without a principle of closure. This absence of a final foundation is a factor that may explain why the formation of a unanimous whole is often a desired political goal and why sheer violence, while threatening our ability to live in common, may appear as a necessary means to ensure its full realization. And yet the very absence of absolute principles is also, according to Arendt, what sets in motion the subjective desire to gain political freedom and what ultimately grounds the objective right to resist a world that turns into a suffocating totality. In this light, the event of revolution reveals a compelling truth about political life: that the space ‘in-between’ is perhaps the only sphere where human beings have ‘the right to expect miracles’ (Arendt, 2005, p. 114). After all, to found freedom means to institute a place and form of life in which, even if only for a short time span, we can become political actors and freedom can appear again.

To begin tracing the meaning of the ‘in-between’, we can direct our attention to some of Arendt's texts from the 1950s, the period immediately after the writing of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and before the publication of On Revolution (1963). In December 1952, Arendt writes in her thought diary (Denktagebuch):

In a later fragment from the unfinished project Introduction to Politics (Einführung in die Politik) – intended to be a two-volume book, On Revolution being one of them (Kohn, 2005) – Arendt expands her explanation of the nature and significance of the ‘in-between’:

The passages cited suggest that the ‘in-between’ is, strictly speaking, a space that ‘comes into being’ among human beings, as it emerges from the existential condition of being together in the world as a ‘plurality’ of individuals through the mediation of speech and action (Arendt, 1998/1958, p. 199). In Arendt's thought, the ‘in-between’ is thus equivalent to the world and, in turn, the world can only exist structured as an ‘in-between’. This means that the world, as a space that is common and does not belong to anyone in particular, relates people to each other precisely because it creates a gap that separates them. Thus, the ‘in-between’ is the essential principle that makes social life possible, as it constitutes the middle ground where we can ultimately appear before, act with, be seen by and move among others, as well as the abyss that reveals that society is not founded on an essence, centre or final ground. This conception immediately prevents us from indulging in the idea that the world is a solid unity and essential whole; it is, rather, akin to the shape of a fragile crystal that requires care to ensure its luminosity and permanence. The interstitial space of the ‘in-between’ atrophies whenever the plurality of its members is dismantled, either by their radical fusion into a homogeneous mass that eliminates singularity or by an absolute separation that condemns them to solitary existence. The materialization of both possibilities is the core of Arendt's critique of capitalist mass society and her analysis of the ‘originality’ of totalitarian terror.

As Arendt describes it in The Human Condition, the ‘in-between’ is far from being reducible to an empirical, physical space. To be sure, material things give the world its distinct ‘objectivity’ and ‘durability’ as they generate ‘specific worldly interests’ which lie ‘between people and therefore can relate and bind them together’ (Arendt, 1998/1958, p. 182). Without the ‘stabilizing’ function of this world of material things and human artefacts, there would be only the ‘eternal movement’ of nature, but neither objectivity nor remembrance (p. 137). However, this material constitution does not exhaust the meaning of the world ‘in-between’, it is actually ‘overgrown with an altogether different in-between [that] owes its origin exclusively to men's acting and speaking directly to one another’ (p. 182). This ‘in-between’ configures what Arendt calls ‘the “web” of human relationships’, which, ‘for all its intangibility, is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common’ (p. 183). We can see in these remarks that the ‘in-between’ is a category that designates a world of relationships constituted by the presence of others rather than by a substantive identity that draws us back to an original unity and forth to a common destiny. It entails a radical social ontology in which our individual existence is, right from the beginning, coexistence and sociation with other individuals capable of speech and action. The ‘in-between’, therefore, names the constitutive distance between individuals where a specifically human life can begin and where life in society becomes worth living. Insofar as the world appears different to every person according to their position in it, there is room for symbolization, meaning-making and judgement, that is to say, for words to be heard, deeds to be seen and events to be discussed and remembered. So the ‘in-between’ indicates that the world is an open space of ‘perspectives’ in which it becomes possible to recognize that ‘both you and I are human’ (Arendt, 2005, p. 14).

The social-ontological category of the ‘in-between’ allows Arendt to rethink the origin of politics and the relative ‘autonomy of the political’, in a way that both distances her from the tradition of political theory and challenges orthodox positivist sociology (Baehr, 2010; Villa, 2010; Walsh, 2011).³ As she writes, ‘politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships’ (Arendt, 2005, p. 95). This strong emphasis on the relational, non-subjective foundation of political life entails a defence of politics as a realm that relies on the human capacity to act in concert and give birth to a new state of affairs (initium). According to this view, what is at stake in politics is not biological life, particular interests or subjective ideas, but the existence of a public world where freedom can make its appearance (Arendt, 1998/1958, pp. 246–247).

In On Revolution, Arendt is emphatic that the domain of the ‘in-between’ ‘does not automatically come into being wherever men live together’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 19). As a ‘de-deified’ and ‘non-ideal’ space, the real existence of the ‘in-between’ is ‘a product of human effort’ and a ‘property of a man-made world’ (p. 31). In other words, ‘the in-between is the truly historical–political’ (Arendt, 2006, p. 171), which is to say that, despite its strong ontological connotation, this space must be instituted and maintained by human action on terms which are not given.

Now, the revolutionary road to a new grammar for political existence is paved with perplexities and dangers. As Arendt's comparative analysis of the French and the American revolutions shows, ‘the foundation of freedom has always been uncertain, if not altogether futile’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 29). We may attribute the particular course of a revolution towards glittering success or blunt failure to a constellation of historical, cultural and social conditions; Arendt's own account is full of insights. Yet the uncertainty that haunts revolutions is rooted in ‘[t]he absence of a maker’ in the political realm and therefore in ‘the extraordinary frailty and unreliability of strictly human affairs’ (Arendt, 2000/1964, p. 180; see 1998/1958, chap. 5). In this regard, it is an error to believe that revolutions are the sort of phenomena that can be carefully planned in advance, like an architect's design for a building, or executed according to predefined roles like a playwright's script. As revolutions depend on the power that arises from acting together, neither the architect nor the playwright represents for Arendt an adequate figure to account for the creation of the non-tangible space ‘in-between’.

In Arendt's theorizing of the birth of politics as a spatial construct, the ‘in-between’ is directly linked to the play of faculties inherent in human action: the faculty of achieving the ‘unlikely’ through spontaneous action and the faculty of establishing relationships through the practice of ‘mutual promising’. While the former interrupts the course of time and so opens an abyss in historical experience, that is, the fleeting moment of liberation that breaks with the existing order of things, the latter sets into motion the constitution of a political body based on the binding power of laws, that is, the normative texture that helps to keep open and ‘regulate the realm of the in-between’ (Arendt, 2006, p. 145).

The suggestion that revolutionary beginnings unfold through an act of spacing appeals to the idea that the foundation of political freedom can only take place in and as the space of a gap. At first glance, this non-tangible gap may be difficult to grasp given that it is a space ‘enacted on the spur of time’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 173). Whether it is the collapse of a regime and the progressive loss of authority of its whole power structure, the momentous gathering of people on the streets and public spaces demanding their rights or the emergence of organized struggles against oppressive rule driven by the promise of a freedom to come, the outbreak of a revolution is a moment that takes individuals by surprise and its actual location is as unpredictable as a lightning flash. It is like an unexpected presence that in the ‘blink of an eye’ (Augenblick) calls for attention and response (Friese, 2001).

The experience of revolutionary action is equivalent to the experience of a cut, that is, the ‘infinitely improbable’ event that like a ‘miracle’ interrupts the course of the world, breaks the steady flow of everyday life and creates an ‘interval’ between things that are ‘no longer’ and things that are ‘not yet’ (Arendt, 1998/1958, p. 178; 2005, pp. 111–114; 2006/1961, pp. 9–11). Without this ‘abyss’ in temporality, the men and women involved in revolutionary politics would never be able to claim the power to achieve the unlikely (resist and bring down oppressive rule) and call forth the freedom to bring into being something that did not exist before (founding a new political body) (Arendt, 1977, pp. 195–217). The opening of this gap gives the impression that the revolutionaries and the revolution itself are suspended in the middle of a temporal space where there is ‘nothing to hold on to’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 206). In this context, the concrete dilemma for political actors is that once the world itself is experienced as lacking solid ground, their actions can no longer be explained as links in a causal chain or modelled upon absolute ideas. For the extraordinary moment that breaks the mere succession between past experiences and future expectations (e.g. acts of liberation, the abrupt downfall of political institutions or the sudden rise of novel forms of political organization) unfolds ‘as if the initiator had abolished the temporal sequence itself, or as if the agents were expelled from the temporal order and its continuity’ (Arendt, 1990/1963).⁴

So it is understandable why the American and French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century, deprived of the protection of traditional standards and religious trust in authority to account for their own actions, showed such a ‘strange enthusiasm’ for the ‘founding legends’ of ancient Rome. For faced with the problem of ‘absolute’ beginnings, they found in Roman faithfulness to the ‘authority’ of the ‘act of foundation’ a formidable source of inspiration (Arendt, 1977, vol. II, pp. 207–209; 1990/1963, pp. 196–199, 204–205). Arendt argues that the particularity of this solution lies in the activation of a ‘memory’, a sort of epochal bilingualism that becomes manifest in the ‘extraordinary capacity to look upon yesterday with the eyes of the centuries to come’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 198). Yet this comment should not be taken as a celebration of a longing for the past, as Arendt is well aware that it could easily turn into the pathological ‘imitation of past events’. Actually, this is what, in her view, characterizes the failures and excesses of ‘professional revolutionaries’ who, haunted by the belief that the act of foundation could be executed following the teachings of the ‘school of past revolutions’, eradicate the radical contingency of concerted action (pp. 56–57, 258–260).⁵

Arendt's main concern is how to keep open the ‘in-between’ space, without the abyss of temporality swallowing the revolution and, with it, the sphere of action and power to which it momentarily gave rise. The answer to this question comes in the form of a tension that she discovers at the heart of revolutionary politics, namely, that in order to allow the occurrence of new beginnings – the possibility of subversion and interruption of the course of political–historical time – the revolution needs to give stability and durability to a new form of government, which means giving the revolution a legal-constitutional form. This implies that the constitution of freedom always brings with it a necessary dose of closure that limits the genuine occurrence of new beginnings and therefore contradicts the revolutionary act. On this point, Esposito concludes that revolution ‘cannot simultaneously be an original rupture and constitutio libertatis’ because ‘for that to be possible it would have to remain in a fluid state of continuous rupture’ (1999, p. 35). What Esposito overlooks, though, is that for Arendt the apparent incompatibility of these two elements is actually a historical result of the revolutionary experience itself. She sees the clearest indication of this unsolved tension in the dichotomous logic that dominates modern political thought according to which the new and the permanent are unrelated opposites.

The problem, as I read Arendt's argument, is that without understanding the internal relationship between these two components of the revolutionary phenomenon – the fleeting event of political freedom and the constitution of lasting institutions of government – the costs of sharply disjoining them in political life cannot be properly understood and confronted (Arendt, 1990/1963, pp. 202, 223). Seen in this light, On Revolution is a text that takes the temporal gap opened by revolutionary experience as a condition and means for investigating the divorce between the eventful beginning and the formal grounding of political life (Vatter, 2000). What holds them together, I suggest, is that both moments are shaped by the same grammar: the spatial grammar of the ‘in-between’.

As we have seen, there is no easy answer to the problem of how to keep the space ‘in-between’ open and alive after the ‘fleeting moment’ of revolutionary action has passed (the temporal ‘abyss of freedom’). In principle, the demand to give institutional shape to a political space seems to be inscribed in the longing for political freedom that fuels the act of beginning. And yet the paradox of this space structured as an ‘in-between’ is that, in order to exist at all, it must remain a ‘relational’, ‘de-deified’, ‘non-ideal’ and ‘open’ space. In Arendt's opinion, classical solutions in political and social theory dramatically fail to address the problem of where to ground the legitimacy and permanence of a political body. To solve the riddle, they resort to transcendent entities (such as a superior will, sovereign power, natural law or some other type of political substance that claims universality) that offer superior principles of ‘rule’, but which in practice do away with the very conditions that make the birth of a space for political life possible: the inescapable plurality and togetherness of human existence (Arendt, 2007a, 2007b).

My reading of Arendt's analysis of the experience of modern revolutions emphasizes that the grammar of the ‘in-between’, the intangible distance that allows life in common, is not only simply an ontological condition but also a political achievement that must be secured. Arendt's major claim in this regard is that we have no other means at hand than ‘action’ and ‘power’ to enact and maintain this political space. This is because action, even with all its uncertainties and dangers, is ‘the only faculty that demands the plurality of men’, and because power, which should not be reduced to the will to command or to violence, is ‘the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 175). Actually, both human attributes interpenetrate each other in the field of politics to the extent that action in concert with others is the living source from which power actually springs, while power is the relational force that keeps people together for the purpose of action. This co-originality means, to put it in Kantian form, that action without power is empty and lost, and power without action is blind and tyrannical. Interestingly enough, the peculiarity of action and power is that both are highly ‘unreliable’ human attributes, so they could easily undermine the very aim of ‘constituting a stable structure to house’ our common existence; yet Arendt's crucial suggestion is that they ‘combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the making and keeping of promises’ (p. 175). This practice is a highly relevant virtue in politics insofar as promising – the capacity of individuals to commit themselves to living together under certain normative conditions – is a means of dealing with ‘the ocean of future uncertainty’, a means which does not need adherence to any absolute or transcendent source of authority. By establishing and keeping mutually binding pacts, the faculty of promising weaves the normative texture that provides stability and brings about the laws that regulate the realm of the ‘in-between’. It does so without closing this space off since ‘the promise is the only thing that can stabilize without suffocating’ (Kristeva, 2001, p. 235).

This grounding of the law in the human power of promising constitutes Arendt's particular mode of contesting a whole tradition of political theory that roots the authority of law in the concept of sovereignty (the omnipotence of God, the will of the people and so on). For in the absence of the normative assurance of last principles, she argues, the task of foundation, the setting of a new beginning, is inevitably coupled with the task of lawgiving. The important issue here is that this task ‘can never be absolute’ since ‘laws residing on human power’ are by definition ‘relative’ to a space of relations that they create and maintain (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 39). In her view, it is clear that, from the perspective of a relational conception of politics as a space of plurality that lies ‘in-between’ human beings, the conventional idea of law in terms of ‘precepts and prohibitions whose sole purpose is to demand obedience’ is inadequate and even anti-political. Since its main core is the ruling of action rather than the assemblage of a domain for political coexistence, this sovereign understanding of law (which underlies natural law and positivist law) should be displaced in favour of a concept that restores its original yet forgotten ‘spatial character’ (Arendt, 2005, p. 189). In line with her reading of Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, Arendt's major claim is that, because no political community and political existence is imaginable without space, the creation of a space is the first task of laws as human artifice. In this sense, we should understand the ‘in-between’ as a space of normativity and, in turn, normativity as a mode of spacing, for ‘what lies outside this space is lawless and, even more precisely, without world; … it is a desert’ (p. 190; see Arendt, 2007a).

Previous to the writing of On Revolution, Arendt was very attracted to the Greek notion of nomos as an alternative conception of the law beyond prohibition and prescription. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958), she considers the strong spatial connotation of this term whose literal meaning is linked to the setting of a permanent and visible ‘border’, ‘limit’ or ‘wall’ within which individuals could move and relate to one another with a sense of stability and commonality. This is the worldly space of the city-state which for the Greeks, ‘because of the stabilizing force of its wall of law, could impart to human affairs the solidity that human action itself, in its intrinsic futility … can never possess’ (Arendt, 2007a, pp. 716–17). In other words, nomos designates a space ‘in-between’ whose constitution, as a realm of free political existence, is a direct result of the positing of law by a lawgiver who, in this case, ‘resembles the architect of the city and its builder, not the politikos and citizen’ (Arendt, 2005, p. 181).

Although Arendt praises the Greeks for emphasizing the creation of a topos for political existence among equals (isonomia), she is rather uneasy about the inadequacies of this conception of law for the purposes of revolutionary politics: on the one hand, because it places a strong emphasis on the idea of preserving politics as a limit, since in this approach the law is what contains and gives order within certain boundaries rather than a productive means for enlarging political space and forging new relationships;⁶ on the other hand, because the concept of law as nomos strongly suggests a pre-political, transcendent origin of law and political community, for the legislator is the architect who comes from outside the city.⁷

On Revolution marks a departure from this concept insofar as Arendt's argument about foundation becomes hereafter very much shaped by the spirit of the Roman notion of law, lex, which means ‘“intimate connection” or relationship, namely something that connects two things or two partners whom external circumstances have brought together’ (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 187).⁸ This understanding of the law as ‘alliance’ departs from a notion of law that produces order by limiting power, to another that generates and augments (augere) power by establishing relations between individuals. This logic configures the structure of a political domain that no longer requires the unifying adhesive of a higher authority, but represents a normative constellation that connects the actions of human beings while establishing a proper distance between them. By bringing the spatial sense of laws to the fore, Arendt wants to highlight that the creation of an ‘in-between’ space, the drawing of a grammar for life in common upon terms that are not given, is the truly historical–political event that defines the revolutionary birth of politics.

Now, despite the stabilizing quality that Arendt finds in the practice of promising, she is well aware that the institution of freedom is a rather ‘uncertain’, even ‘futile’ achievement. As the experience of the popular bodies of participation that spontaneously emerged in each of the modern revolutions shows, these spaces tend to be short-lived incarnations of freedom, often demoted by professional party politics. What's more, even if the formation of a Republic via a written constitution is the formal condition of the great majority of nation states around the world, the spirit that gave them birth has been quickly forgotten and government has been reduced to the administrative-juridical rule of the few in the interest of the many (Arendt, 1990/1963, pp. 238–239). This experience demonstrates not only how difficult it is to secure the ‘in-between’ space opened by revolutionary action, but also that, once it is established, the normative texture of this space is intrinsically fragile and inevitably threatened by the relational principle sustaining it. In this respect, ‘the tragedy’ for Arendt

It is not difficult, then, to understand that the possibility of dismantling the ‘in-between’ is directly related to the closure of the space where things in common are located. This is the point where Arendt observes that, oddly enough, revolutionary politics, when turned into sheer violence and terror, seems to coincide with totalitarian politics, since both end up abolishing the constitutive and necessary distance between individuals. The ‘onslaught of elemental evil’ consists precisely in the totalitarian use of the means of law (reduced to the ‘law of movement’) to sweep away the normativity that stabilizes communication between people and to deprive individuals of legal protection to the point of making them superfluous beings (Arendt, 2004/1951, pp. 599–600).⁹ On the other hand, ‘the impact of absolute innocence’ is immediately felt in the non-tangible structure of the ‘in-between’ once revolutionaries decide to elevate ‘compassion’ to a political virtue of the revolution and thus begin replacing the authority of law with the boundless law of moral superiority and the tyranny of suspicion (Arendt, 1990/1963, pp. 88–109).¹⁰ Yet, for all its possible distortions, Arendt insists that law is the only resource, together with our capacity to interrupt the course of things and dare to begin something new in the world, that we can rely on to keep open the ‘in-between’ space and to secure the foundation of freedom.

On Revolution reminds us that, regardless of the relative success of modern revolutions in ‘giving all the power to the people’ on paper, the radical experiences of the twentieth century show that the existence of political freedom as a tangible experience cannot be simply held safe like a ‘lost treasure’ in ‘islands in an ocean’ of need or in ‘oases in a desert’ devastated by violence (Arendt, 1990/1963, p. 275–276). To be sure, these small spaces of freedom may provide shelter in moments of political emergency and even throw some light upon the future in dark times, but they cannot prevent the social world from becoming a suffocating totality that subjects individuals to a life without alternatives. After all, revolutions are, with all their perplexities and impurities, almost the only political events that still can offer the possibility to reopen the world so as to make room to invoke the basic right to redraw the normative grammar of the institutions and laws that bind us, and the power to crystallize a new foundation for life in common in the uncertain struggle to gain political freedom. This right, I should add, is not grounded in any transcendent source but in the competence of human beings to act with others and begin something new. And this may only happen in the emergent domain of the ‘in-between’.

In this paper, I have read On Revolution through the pivotal notion of the ‘in-between’, which in Arendt's work refers to the interstitial space that separates and binds individuals together. The ‘in-between’ configures the existential condition and the basic structure of the world as a space of plurality. In the absence of a principle of unity or a proper foundation, it is permanently exposed to attempts at closure and is therefore a fragile domain that requires human effort to be maintained open and alive. Put in this way, the ‘in-between’ is both a social-ontological condition of political life and a historical–political achievement that must be instituted on terms that can never be given. Indeed, it is the term that in Arendt's work designates the foundation of life in common and the constitution of the political as a ‘spatial construct’ whose elemental structure is not sustained by any originary substance or common identity (such as the nation, the state and the people) but by a gap that allows a mundane assemblage of relations. This gap is coeval with the coexistence of human beings, and politics ceases wherever this gap no longer exists.

Drawing on this formulation, the main suggestion of the paper has been that what defines the revolutionary birth of politics is the very act of spacing. According to my reading of On Revolution, this meaning is inscribed in Arendt's strong claim that the central idea of revolution consists in the ‘foundation of freedom’. It configures the conflicting form of what I called the politics of the ‘in-between’ that lies at the centre of the revolutionary quest of constructing a political space: the boundlessness of action and the binding force of mutual promises, the encounter with the unexpected and the forging of expectations, the fleeting moment of the new and the weaving of a durable normative texture, the temporal abyss of liberation and the legal grammar of government, the pathos of revolutionary spirit and the lex of constitutional body. However, the point of my reading has not been simply to assert that each of these moments represents distinct modalities of the ‘in-between’, one linked to the temporality of freedom (i.e. caesural action) and the other to the legality of foundation (i.e. lasting ties). What the politics of the ‘in-between’ elucidates is the inner aporia of the experience of revolution, namely, that the ‘in-between’ is the ground that boosts the vitality of political life as much as the abyss that threatens it from within.

The riddle of revolutionary politics, that one moment of the ‘in-between’ may reverse and eventually cancel the other, reminds us of Kafka's parable cited by Arendt in the preface to Between Past and Future, where an individual is confronted with antagonist forces: ‘the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead’ (Arendt, 2006/1961, p. 7). By bringing this image to the fore, Arendt is trying to draw attention to how difficult it is to maintain a position somewhere in the middle without either jumping out of the ‘fighting line’ or choosing one side, thereby abandoning the space ‘in-between’ freedom and foundation altogether. The issue is that, without the assurance of any tradition, this must appear an almost impossible demand for ordinary citizens in constitutional democracies who are neither heroes nor soldiers. And yet Arendt's view is that both terms (the uncertainty of freedom and the security of foundation) have meaning and significance only in the continuous and non-solvable character of this relationship, which is why the idea that one has to choose between them is the recipe that first undermines and then kills political communities.

All in all, the notion of the ‘in-between’ is at the centre of On Revolution insofar as it constitutes the true matter and radical form of Arendtian thought, which sees the world as a human place to inhabit precisely because it does not have a principle of final closure. This social-ontological claim, as I have argued, does not work against the political task of instituting and keeping such space open. On the contrary, it is the very reason why, even if the political attempt to found freedom and secure lasting institutions proves to be a total failure, it is from the very interstices of the non-tangible yet objective ground that lies ‘in-between’ human beings that one may still appeal to the right to resist in word and deed a reality that closes itself while denying freedom and human dignity.

I thank the participants at the conference Hannah Arendt's On Revolution after 50 years, held in October 2013 at Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago, Chile), for their comments and questions. A special mention goes to Robert Fine, Wolfhart Totschnig and Daniel Chernilo for their suggestions and criticism.

The completion of this paper was supported by the Chilean Council for Science and Technology, Fondecyt Iniciación [grant number 11121346].