ABSTRACT
Somewhat surprisingly, the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler has been relatively neglected. 1 The purpose of this chapter is to start to remedy this by bringing both together through the mediation of the notion of the political. While they do not so much offer a systematized, formal theory about the political as engage in critical interrogations of its conditions of possibility and impossibility, my argument is that Butler’s most recent reflections on the political are shaped by her reading of Arendt, and it is this reading that permits Butler to illustrate how―contrary to those who claim that they are incompatible 2 ―her renowned concepts of performativity and precarity complement one another.
