Arendt and Algeria

This article identifies Algeria as a significant, if obscure, topos in Arendt's writing. It traces various moments of this encounter across Arendt's oeuvre, in well-known texts, such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and “On Violence” (1969), as well as in lesser-known writings, such as “Why the Crémieux Decree Was Abrogated” (1943). In pursuing this trajectory, the article argues that Arendt's sustained engagement with Algeria reflects an ongoing and ambivalent negotiation with French imperialism. While Arendt continually falls back on an apologetic discourse concerning the French imperial nation-state, her text nonetheless hints at an important geometric lesson about the space–time of its legal structure: the differential temporalities governing its regime of assimilation and its regime of decree. Through a parallel recasting of Arendt's famous distinction between power and violence, this article delimits colonial rule in Algeria as a question of speed.

The question brings me to the margins of a figure whose writing on violence and power has remained otherwise marginal to this thinking and naming of violence: Hannah Arendt. 13 Algeria is indeed a topos in Arendt's thought: one of those spaces of orientation that map her engagement with colonial violence and colonial power. 14 I begin by plotting the various sites of this encounter as confirmation of Arendt's ongoing and ambivalent negotiation with the history of imperialism, race thinking, and racism: an archive of historical analyses that frequently reaffirms the racializing terms it purports to diagnose. 15 The specific case of Algeria will suggest that Arendt's apparent critique of French colonial ideology rests on a more fundamental commitment to the horizon of its "civilizing mission." In charting this trajectory, however, I also argue that Arendt's Algerian topoi still offer an unintended lesson in the formations of colonial rule by supplementing the topography of colonial space with a chronography of colonial time. 16 Arendt herself was famously interested in such geometric questions, having promoted a form of thought 13 Ned Curthoys comes close to identifying this proximity in "The Refractory Legacy of Algerian Decolonization: Revisiting Arendt on Violence," in Richard H. King and Dan Stone, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York, 2007), 109-29. For a mobilization of Arendt in the North African context see Alma Rachel Heckman, "Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography," Jewish Social Studies 23/3 (2018), 67-100. 14 A series of exemplary spaces guides Arendt's discussions of topics like totalitarianism (the concentration camp), revolution (America, France), and action (Athens, Rome). Here I contribute to an ongoing debate about Arendt's writing on colonialism and imperialism (often centered on such English topoi as "Britain," "South Africa," and "Conrad"). that would shape time into a "parallelogram of forces." 17 For my part, I seek to demonstrate that the name "Algeria" inscribes within Arendt's texts a mark of colonialism's temporalization of space and spatialization of time. 18 In short: I attempt to prove that Arendt's account of the mission civilisatrice can act as a measure for the violence and power of colonial speed. 19 Fanon, 1969 Arendt's best-known remarks on Algeria appear in her 1969 essay "On Violence." The first mention occurs in passing as a seemingly accidental effect of her argument with Fanon on decolonization and as a derivative expression of her more general concerns about his influence on the "student generation." 20 She writes, "The adherents of nonviolence are on the defensive, and it would be futile to say that only the 'extremists' are yielding to a glorification of violence and have discovered-like Fanon's Algerian peasants-that 'only violence pays.'" 21 A great deal has been said about Arendt's reading and misreading of Fanon. 22 In this context, the peculiarity of her interpretation comes through an equivocal citational gesture. On the one hand, Arendt attempts to shield Fanon from direct criticism by suggesting that he was "much more doubtful about violence than his admirers" and keenly aware of the self-destructive danger that the use of "unmixed and total brutality" poses to anticolonial movements. 23 On the other hand, her manifest reference to the violence of "Algerian peasants" has the strange effect of eliding his broader reflections on the dynamics of colonial violence. Fanon ends the passage quoted by Arendt with the candid affirmation that "colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a Bell's "spatial turn" in his scalar study of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia hinges on readings of both Arendt and Algeria. Dorian Bell, Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture (Evanston, 2018). 19 On the link between "name" and "speed" see Jacques Derrida 23 Arendt, "On Violence," 116. body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state [la violence à l'état de nature], and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence." 24 So even as Arendt insists on naming and condemning the "glorification of violence" among students, "extremists," and Algerians, she also silently elides the institution of violence that Fanon himself condemns and names: the French colonial state.
One could pursue the problem further by comparing Arendt's reticence on colonial violence in Algeria with her proximate claims about the "criminal violence" of Nazism: its "concentration and extermination camps," its "genocide and torture," and its "wholesale slaughter of civilians." 25 But any assessment of this historical relation will depend on how Arendt defines "violence" throughout her essay. According to one prominent tradition, she says, "violence [Gewalt] is nothing more than the most flagrant manifestation of power [Macht]." 26 It is a conceptual grammar that she follows in circuitous ways from the Hebrew Bible (divine law) and Greek antiquity (monarchy) to sixteenth-century absolutism (sovereignty) and modern bureaucracy (the rule of nobody). In this lineage, power always rests upon the asymmetric structure of command and obedience: a tyrannical formation that reduces government to the threat or exertion of superior force and sees "no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun." 27 This is the thought that Arendt seeks to reverse through a series of theoretical transpositions meant to fracture the equation between power and violence. The result is a fundamental distinction. While violence represents the human capacity to expand personal strength by means of instruments-i.e. through the development and deployment of weapons-power represents the human capacity to affiliate as a group (zusammenzuschließen) and act in concert with others (im Einvernehmen mit ihnen zu handeln). 28 The difference allows Arendt to turn the tables on a certain thinking and naming of violence by relocating the source of power from sword to consent, arms to alliance, and instrument to institution. Power no longer emerges organically from an individual's prior monopolization of violence; it instead precedes violence as the collective sanction for any organization of political rule. In arguing for this shift, Arendt makes clear that the "ascendency of power over violence" hardly constitutes an advance in governance. 29 Since power fortifies the foundations of all political systems, it lies at the base of even the most violent and "most despotic" forms of domination: the rule of masters over the enslaved. 30 And just as democratic regimes often suppress the "rights of minorities" and suffocate "dissent without any use of violence," totalitarian regimes inevitably look beyond instrumental violence ("torture") to secure their "power basis" in bodies like the "secret police and its 24 I follow Arendt, who cites from Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1963), 61. For the French see Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris, 2002), 61. 25 Arendt, "On Violence," 116. 26 For the nearly contemporaneous German version of the essay on violence see Hannah Arendt, Macht und Gewalt, trans. Gisela Uellenberg (Munich, 1971), 36. 27 Arendt, "On Violence," 136. 28 Ibid., 143-45; Arendt, Macht und Gewalt, 45-7. 29 Arendt, "On Violence," 149. 30 Ibid.
net of informers." 31 The point, Arendt thinks, is that governments in power never need violence to command obedience. When violence does appear on the scene, it means that governmental power has already begun to decline: "Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost." 32 Instrumental repression is power's "last resort" against those who refuse to obey the order of things. 33 In outlining the theoretical claim, Arendt delineates several historical examples: spatializing the conflict between violence and power across a political geography that once again includes "Hitler's Germany" and "Algeria." 34 She returns to the former as a case of "totalitarian domination" or, in a later definition, government by terror. 35 It is a mode of rule that deploys violence not only to bring about the "massacre and submission" of its enemies but also to eliminate its "friends and supporters" in a reflexive activity of self-destruction. 36 The name "Algeria," by contrast, licenses Arendt's efforts to distinguish such suicidal excess from the relative moderation displayed by "European imperialism." 37 At a certain point in time, she thinks, the French Empire became aware of its "shrinking power" and had to confront the "alternative between decolonization and massacre." 38 That "France in Algeria" chose to follow the path of "restraint" demonstrates that it was not ready to "substitute violence for power" and, in so doing, endanger the stability of its "constitutional government" at home. 39 Unlike the Nazis, in other words, the French seem to have intuited Arendt's own concluding formulation: "Where violence is no longer backed and restrained by power, the well-known reversal in reckoning with means and ends has taken place … with the consequence that the end will be the destruction of all power." 40 This too is Arendt's silent response to Fanon. What he identified as "violence in its natural state" she calls restraining power.
Classical statements by Fanon, Césaire, and Du Bois are enough to contest Arendt's all-too-easy division between Nazism and imperialism, colonial power and totalitarian violence. 41 But the comparative problem can also obscure a simpler 31 Ibid., 141, 149. 32 Ibid., 152. 33 Ibid., 150. 34 Ibid., 152. 35 Ibid., 153. 36 Ibid., 152-3. 37 Ibid., 152. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 152-3. 40 Ibid., 153. issue: what does Arendt mean by "restraint"? Where does she draw the line between moderation and excess? How does she define the limits and containment of violent power? Even a brief glance across the historical archive of French Algeria will surely disturb (and make quite disturbing) the mild portrait that Arendt sketches in her analysis. 42 During the first forty-five years of colonial rule, the French settler state's "multiple logic of violence"-mass killings, economically induced famine, the spreading of epidemic disease-resulted in the estimated death of close to two million Algerians. 43 Central to the exterminatory campaign of this period was the practice of so-called razzias: violent incursions undertaken by the French military to destroy the livelihood and social networks of rural communities. 44 In addition to crop burnings, kidnappings, summary executions, sexual assaults, and torture, these operations involved the perpetration of collective enfumades. 45 Perhaps the most infamous of these "smoke-outs" occurred in June 1845, when a unit led by Colonel Aimable Jean Jacques Pélissier asphyxiated approximately one thousand members of the Ouled Riah tribe in a cave of the Dahra mountains. 46 A century later, just as Europe was declaring its liberation from Nazi violence, the French again displayed "restraint" in Algeria by responding to political unrest with the massacre of between six thousand and seventeen thousand civilians. 47 The ensuing eight-year war (1954-62) to suppress the Algerian Revolution-"the longest and most violent anticolonial uprising of the twentieth century"-would end only after the death of 250,000-300,000 Algerians. 48 It was a war that also saw numerous atrocities, including maiming, mass detention, and the creation of millions of displaced persons. The violence even extended to the streets of Paris. On 17 October 1961, the municipal police, headed by the Vichy collaborator Maurice Papon, acted in concert to arrest, injure, and murder Algerian demonstrators (many by drowning in the Seine). 49 Historical Materialism 12/2 (2004), 25-55. Dan Stone summarizes recent scholarly debates in "Genocide, the Holocaust, and the History of Colonialism," in Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford, 2010), 203-44. 42 Benjamin Stora, Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, 2001), 1-28. This was also something that Arendt obviously knew, considering her own passing reference to Charles Lacheroy as the "torturer in Algeria." Arendt, "On Violence," 194. There are other ways to nuance, correct, and/or rebuke Arendt's evaluation of colonial power and violence in Algeria. A more detailed genealogy, for instance, would elaborate the French state's "everyday and insidious" modes of imperial rule: the legal, bureaucratic, military, and racial codes that "constituted an apparatus of permanent, routinised low-intensity warfare" against the Algerian population. 50 An investigation of this kind would also likely compel a reversal of Arendt's reversal of the power-violence relation-one lesson of French Algeria being that violence does precede power whenever the formation of a single "body politic" depends on the naming of certain bodies as superfluous, disposable organs. 51 The even more troubling irony here, however, is that Arendt's description of all this as "restraint" stems less from a position of ignorance than from a long-standing negotiation with the contradictions traversing the French imperial nation-state. 52 That is why no critique of Arendt's encounter with Algeria can afford to ignore the studied path that conditions her apologetic and negationary discourse on colonialism. My wager is that Arendt's writing on Algeria betrays (against its own intentions) something more than an extortionary choice between restraining power and explosive violence. Arendt's text instead testifies to the violent power of colonial rule as the trembling antinomy of two conflicting temporal orders: the "inherent immediacy and swiftness" of violence and the "deliberate speed" of power. 53 Crémieux, 1943 In October 1940, the Vichy government of France passed the Statut des juifs: legislation that instituted a vast and complex set of anti-Semitic laws across the empire. This included the abrogation of the Crémieux decree, which in 1870 had granted full French citizenship to almost all Algerian Jews. 54 When Allied forces eventually regained control of Algeria in late 1942, the French high commissioner, General Henri Giraud, faced sustained pressure to repeal the Vichy regime's racial codes. He relented on 14 March 1943, in a decision that ended legal discrimination against Jews in Algeria; and yet, in a curious supplemental move, Giraud also immediately chose to reabrogate the Crémieux decree and rescind French citizenship from Algerian Jews for a second time in four years. 55 He justified the pronouncement by appealing to "the principles of equality and justice." 56 Since the passage of the Crémieux decree in 1870 had "created a difference between native Moslems and Jews," its continued existence perpetuated an intolerable hierarchy of racial divisions and threatened to incite Muslim Algerians to violence. 57 An international effort to publicize the affair, overturn Giraud's act, and reestablish Jewish citizenship quickly found its way to Arendt, who responded the following month with a short article on the history of French colonial law in Algeria. 58 The story that Arendt tells begins with an overview of French ideology in the colonies. She knew from a variety of sources that the empire had long pursued a distinctive program of assimilation: "The colonial policy of France since the days of Jean Baptiste Colbert-and contrary to the colonial policy of other European nations-had favored complete assimilation of the natives in its possession." 59 Her article supports the claim with a quote from Colbert, who had once instructed the French governor of New France to call the natives "to a community of life with the French … so that they may ultimately make with those of us who migrate unto Canada, one and the same nation." 60 Other statements collected by Arendt confirm the view. One from 1839 stated the goal of colonization as "the fusion of races and of interests"; another made a century later described France's "duty to see to the amelioration of the lot of the natives and to lead them gradually [ progressivement] into the great French family." 61 For the historian and diplomat Gabriel Hanotaux, colonialism's "final aim" maintained an "old and ever constant ideal" running from Louis XIV and Richelieu to the French Revolution: the reinvigoration of French civilization "through the ever closer [de plus en plus étroite] collaboration of natives and French." 62 Assimilation in its most capacious sense indicated "that the colony was to become an integral, if non-contiguous, part of the mother country, with its society and population made over" in France's image. 63 This might entail "incorporating colonial territories into the national domain by governing them with uniform political institutions, legal codes, and commercial tariffs." 64 Or it might consist in the administration of "colonies as 'overseas departments,' subject to the conventions, customs, and norms of the metropole, and without special dispensation" for 57 Cited in ibid., 405. local traditions. 65 Arendt more or less endorses this basic, spatial understanding of France's imperial mission and even lends her support to the idea that its principles stand in accord with the Declaration of the Rights of Man. 66 In the case of Algeria, she observes that its special status lay in the fact that "it was the first French colony which was close enough to be directly incorporated into the body politic of France, to become an integral part of the mother country." 67 At least since 1870, and perhaps as far back as 1848, France had indeed governed the provinces of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine as internal départements of the state. 68 But the assimilatory paradigm also relied on a complex and frequently changing system of legal structures. As Arendt rightly points out, one of the most significant was the sénatus-consulte of 1865, which codified a set of administrative distinctions that would underwrite and regulate the process of assimilation. 69 The first and second articles of the decree announced: The native Muslim is a Frenchman; nevertheless, he will continue to be ruled by Muslim law. He can be admitted to the army and the navy. He can be appointed to civil posts in Algeria. He can, upon request, be admitted to French citizenship; but in this event he must be governed by the civil and political laws of France.
The native Israelite is a Frenchman; nevertheless, he continues to be ruled by his personal status. He can be admitted to the army and the navy. He can be appointed to civil posts in Algeria. He can, upon request, be admitted to French citizenship; but in this event he must be governed by French law. 70 In a certain respect, Arendt's interpretation of the law echoes more recent scholarship by emphasizing its essential division between "nationality" and "citizenship." 71 She explains that after 1865 Muslim and Jewish Algerians officially belonged to two different legal spheres: one governed by French civil courts and the other by personal status. As French nationals, native Muslims and Jews enjoyed "the same civil rights as French citizens" and could participate in various sectors of government; as non-citizen subjects of France, they remained bound by the customary laws of their local communities-with few rights and "little representation in the decisive political bodies of the country." 72 This meant that one could be a Jewish French or a Muslim French without being a French citizen. And because the law predicated individual naturalization on the renunciation of personal status, one 65 Ibid. 66 Arendt, "WCA," 116. 67 Ibid. Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities, xi, confirms that "the French overseas territory of Algeria was sui generis in that it was considered to be a departmental extension of the mainland rather than a colony."  70 Arendt, "WCA," 116, cites the text of the first article and refers to the second as its repetition for "native Jews." I reproduce her translation choices. 71 Emmanuelle Saada, Empire's Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 2012), 100-1. 72 Arendt, "WCA," 122. could become a French citizen only by transforming the meaning of the terms "Muslim" and "Jew" from legal designations to private marks of "religious 'confession'." 73 Arendt understood the consequences. The sénatus-consulte formed the cornerstone of a legal architecture designed to ensure the "dictatorship" of the French colons: a "selfish and arbitrary" system based on the "inferior political status of the natives" and the denial of their "share in the rule of the country." 74 She was also attentive to a line of thinking that commonly compared the regime in Algeria "to a feudal state, with the French enjoying rights and privileges similar to those of former feudal lords." 75 In 1881-a decade after both the Crémieux decree and the departmental incorporation of Algeria-the Third Republic reaffirmed the subjection of Muslim Algerians by organizing an array of older legal directives into the so-called Code de l'indigénat. 76 This "exorbitant regime" gave systematic coherence to a set of infractions applicable only to natives and approved exceptional powers of enforcement for state administrators ruling over them. 77 Some of these special crimes included unauthorized gatherings, unsanctioned travel, disrespectful actions, and offensive remarks to figures of authority. 78 Punishments for the violations ranged from house arrest and administrative detention (at the dépôt des internés arabes in Corsica) to the levying of collective fines and the confiscation of property. 79 As one of Arendt's sources put it, "While Europeans, French, and other foreigners are judged by ordinary courts [des tribunaux de droit commun] and benefit from all the guarantees provided by French law, the natives are subject to an exceptional penal regime [soumis à un régime pénal exceptionnel] and are deprived of essential guarantees. This state of things sanctions a flagrant inequality of justice." 80 For these reasons and others, Arendt could have easily diagnosed assimilation as a "political myth": one specifically devised to suture the gap between colonial domination and republican ideals. 81 She could have also turned her analytic gaze to another 73 Arendt, "Crémieux Decree," 46. Like others, Arendt also mentions that "neither native Jews nor native Muslims … showed themselves very eager to ask for French citizenship. ambivalent fact of French colonial ideology, namely its near-constant attempt to contain assimilation within the structure of association. One handbook consulted by Arendt defines the difference as a choice between policy and pragmatism: "The aim is to assimilate colonial peoples to the French people, or, where this is not possible in more primitive communities, to 'associate' them, so that more and more the difference between la France métropôle [metropolitan France] and la France d'outremer [overseas France] shall be a geographical difference and not a fundamental one." 82 But in the end, Arendt does not advance a ruthless critique of French colonization or even adjudicate the incongruities of its ideological program. When faced with the evident "failure of the traditional policy of assimilation," she falls back on two exculpatory explanations: an account that reiterates the progressive, civilizational discourse of the mission civilisatrice and its "fundamental assumptions about the superiority of French culture and the perfectibility of humankind." 83 The first adopts the terms of association by attributing the problems of assimilation to the "natives" and their "customs." 84 According to Arendt, Algerian Muslims "did not want to renounce their personal status (which permitted polygamy and the denial of all rights to women)"; and "France could hardly grant them citizenship under this circumstance." 85 She notes that "French civil law and the French Penal code have their bases in the equality of the sexes, and the Islamic concept of paternal authority is in fundamental conflict with this principle of individual liberty." 86 If France "hesitated" to grant citizenship to indigenous Algerians, that is because their "assimilation had to be watched more carefully" than the "backward tribes" living in other parts of the empire. 87 In this sense, Arendt does not see the slow, halting pace of assimilation in Algeria as an effect of French colonial policy; she sees it as a legitimate strategy of temporal accommodation for the supposed persistence of Muslim cultural difference. 88 That polygamy has "almost disappeared" in Algerian cities gives her hope that Muslims are making steady progress toward a future of full inclusion. 89 But the continued inequality of Muslim women remains in Arendt's eyes an acceptable reason for the colonial state's continued refusal of Muslim equality. 90 She deems them not yet ready for civilization. 91 82 The French Colonial Empire, Information Department Papers, no. 25 (London, 1941), 9-10. 83 Arendt, "WCA," 118-19. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997), 1. 84 Arendt, "WCA," 119. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Arendt, "Crémieux Decree,"46. Note here too the existence of other civilizational hierarchies in the French Empire. 88 I use the term "culture" here in reference to Étienne Balibar's essay "Is There a 'Neo-Racism'?", in Balibar, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London, 1991), 17-28. 89 Arendt, "WCA," 119. Arendt quickly admits that this tells only a secondary part of the story. Even "more important than these customs and even more important than the influence of the native aristocracy was the attitude of the French colonials." 92 The shift in focus, however, does not lead her to a revised presentation of French colonial ideology or to a repudiation of her previous justifications for colonialism's injustices. In making the turn from "natives" to "settlers," Arendt instead seeks to divert the responsibility for such obvious abuses from the metropole to the colony. She writes, "While the national government sought the naturalization of the Arabs and regarded the Crémieux decree as a beginning and a way to attract the Arabs by the privileges it gave to its citizens, its intentions have been frustrated during the last seventy years by the colonials, who use their legal power to prevent naturalization of the natives." 93 Here, as elsewhere, Arendt suggests that the whole "sad story" of colonialism in Algeria was a "perpetual conflict" between the guiding principles of French imperialism and their corruption at the hands of local administrators. 94 French settlers, she argues, came to think of themselves as "a kind of master race" and, in the process, "acquired a feeling of racial superiority that never had been known in France itself." 95 From then on, the settlers jealously guarded their power by opposing all national legislation for the "progressive naturalization of Algerian Muslims": successfully defeating the "numerous bills" introduced by the French parliament in the period after 1870. 96 The entirety of Arendt's essay, then, appears to obey a strict logic. The categories of "settler" and "native" frame a geographic argument that from beginning to end strives to absolve "France itself" (la France hexagonale) for the colonization of Algeria (la France d'outremer). This same reasoning also elucidates Arendt's final conclusions about French colonial law and the fate of Algerian Jews. In her summary judgment, "General Giraud's abrogation of the Crémieux decree introduces into Algeria a new criterion for French citizenship and creates a distinction between natives and citizens that is in flagrant contradiction to all French laws, all French institutions and to the whole of French colonial policy." 97 As Arendt clarifies, the real problem with the abrogation of the Crémieux decree lies not in its continuity with the history of colonial "dictatorship," in its inheritance of a distinction between "citizen" and "subject," or in its exposure of the exceptional paradoxes of the mission civilisatrice. The offense comes rather from its apparently novel disavowal of the progressive movement and liberal futurity of assimilation: the "normal process" that had always sought the ultimate transformation of "subjects into citizens." 98 Arendt contends that Giraud's decision produced the opposite, regressive "absurdity that for the first time in a non-fascist country citizens were turned into subjects." 99 She speculates, on this score, that one can find only a single precedent for Giraud's revocation of Algerian Jewish citizenship: the Nazi 92 Arendt, "WCA," 119. 93 Ibid., 120, emphases mine. 94 Arendt, "Crémieux Decree," 46-7. 95 Arendt, "WCA," 118; Arendt, "Crémieux Decree," 46. 96 Arendt, "WCA," 118, 121. 97 Ibid., 123. 98 Arendt, "Crémieux Decree," 3. 99 Ibid.
Reichsbürgergesetz of 1935. 100 Despite its ongoing complications, inequities, and prejudices, "French colonial policy" never abandoned the liberal horizon by reversing or terminating the developmental trajectory established in the promise of assimilation.
Arendt commits herself in these short pages to defending colonial power as an emancipatory, restraining force. Standing in the gap between past and future, she plots the normal, evolutionary course of events as a rectilinear advance from custom to law, Islam to Europe, barbarism to civilization, and subjection to citizenship: an imperial time of improvement menaced only by the abnormal deviations, distortions, and reversions of fascist temporality. 101 This point of view, however, leaves Arendt unable to resolve a familiar dilemma: "Why set up a special law for a country where it is precisely a question of applying the general law"? 102 Her stalwart faith in the civilizing mission prevents her from reading this tension between norm and exception as anything other than a breakdown of colonial ideology. 103 It impedes her from considering the possibility that the simultaneous assertion and denial of citizenship represents a distinctive mode of colonial governance: one in which denaturalization is not a perversion but the rule. 104 Arendt does not entertain the idea that the gap between past ("subject") and future ("citizen") has no existence outside the "dynamic of difference" first instituted by the colonial order. 105 Nor does she recognize the deliberate speed of assimilation and the interim delays of association as twin ideological techniques for regulating the velocity of passage across an imperial chasm founded on the separation of races. 106 What Arendt's analysis of colonial law in Algeria nonetheless illustrates-if fails to adequately theorize-is that the central axis of French colonial ideology "is time, and its cognate, patience" (to borrow Uday Mehta's phrase). 107 For those caught in its "macropolitics of deferral," the orthogonal clash between past and future produces something like a "treadmill effect": the slow, graduated, and vertiginous movement of a system that lives off (and not in spite of) its own incessant provisionality. 108 Such pace-making is perhaps the essential characteristic of a colonial power that composes itself-forms its political body-in a territorial space of 100 Ibid. Schroeter, "Between Metropole and French North Africa," 21, correctly notes that Arendt has curiously little to say about the Vichy laws of 1940. 101 Arendt participates here in what Fitzpatrick calls the "progression of law." Peter Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law (London, 1992), 101-11. 102 Arendt, "Crémieux Decree," 41. On the problem of legal pluralism, and the conflict between "hegemony" and "dominance," see Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900(Cambridge, 2002. 103 In other words, Arendt overlooks the possibility that assimilation was always the rhetorical condition for a practice of discrimination between "citizens" and "subjects."

Larcher, 1951
Nearly a decade after her first encounter with the name "Algeria," Arendt published her most significant contribution to the question of imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). 110 The critique returns to a number of earlier themes, including progress, citizenship, and the civilizing mission. 111 But across these extended discussions, Arendt largely focuses her theoretical attention on the space of the British Empire and its programmatic articulation in texts like Lord Cromer's "The Government of Subject Races." 112 When she does name France, she frequently passes over its role as a colonial power to emphasize its status as the nation par excellence, and the handful of references to Algeria similarly replicate the ambivalent discourse that appears both in her article on Crémieux and in her debate with Fanon. 113 While she acknowledges the "inner contradiction" between France's national "body politic" and its pursuit of "conquest," the "nonsensical hybrid" it created between "nationals" and "subjects," and the "brutal exploitation" it visited upon its colonies, she also mitigates France's comparatively "feeble imperialist attempts" and again displaces responsibility for these abuses from the government of Paris to the settler administration. 114 By 1967-two years before her reflections on violence and only five years after the liberation of Algeria-Arendt could still applaud France's decision "to give up Algeria" as an act of restraint: proof of its adherence to the "moral scruples and political apprehensions of the fully developed nation-states that advised against extreme measures." 115 Notable herself knew that colonial authorities often contrived "at rejecting or indefinitely postponing the requests of natives to be naturalized." Arendt, "Crémieux Decree," 27. 109 Sidi Mohammed Barkat observes that "la caractéristique essentielle de cette appartenance réside dans le fait qu'elle est placée en situation de devoir pleinement s'accomplir sans jamais pouvoir le faire. Ni vraiment une inclusion ni tout à fait une exclusion, mais le report indéfini d'une pleine inclusion annoncée." Barkat, Le corps d'exception, 22. One possible irony here is the incisive attack that Arendt levels against "progress" throughout her writings. In this context see, unless otherwise noted, Arendt's citation of Benjamin's "angel of history" in her analysis of imperialism as a "never-ending accumulation of power." Arendt, "Origins," 143. For a discussion of similar issues see Hannah Arendt, "The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern," in Arendt, Between Past and Future, 41-90; as well as the relevant comments in Arendt, "On Violence," e.g. 131. Dirk Moses underscores Arendt's distinction between "civilizational progress" and "unlimited progress" in The Problems of Genocide (New York, 2021), 410.
here too is Arendt's silence on Algeria in her concluding account of imperialism with its famed analyses of denaturalization, statelessness, and human rights. 116 In making no mention of Algeria, Arendt trades the difference between "citizen" and "subject" for the difference between "citizen" and "refugee." 117 So it is that Algeria withdraws as a major topos in Arendt's writing and recedes as a key coordinating frame for her interventions into the perplexities of nation, state, and empire. But like all disappearances, this one leaves a spectral remainder that continues to haunt Arendt's text, until, in a nearly vanishing moment, it reemerges as a name for one of the "main political devices of imperialist rule": bureaucracy. 118 In a first definition, Arendt classifies bureaucracy as the form of "administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt to be hopelessly their inferiors and at the same time in need of their special protection." 119 She knew from her research on Crémieux that the French military government in Algeria had from early on embraced and implemented the practice. 120 Between 1844 and 1870, the Ministry of War ruled over its Muslim subjects through an intermediary branch known as the Bureaux arabes. The officers of the Bureaux considered themselves experts in Algerian affairs (e.g. history, language, sociology, law) and used their technical knowledge as a means of enforcing French authority over everything from policing and taxation to economic and social policy. 121 On an ideological level, the Bureaux also played a concrete role in imagining and managing the "coexistence of asynchronic civilizations": toggling between the universalizing ambitions of assimilation and the parochializing restrictions of association. 122 In its disciplinary and repressive aspects, the Bureaux inaugurated an administrative system that would long support a "remarkable derogation of the rules of modern penal law and the principle of the separation of powers." 123 One of the foremost expositors of this "political and juridical monster" was the early twentieth-century jurist Émile Larcher (1869Larcher ( -1918, distinguished professor of law at the University of Algiers, an avocat before the Court of Appeals of Algiers, and author of the definitive study of French Algerian law, Traité élémentaire de législation algérienne (1903). 124 Like others in this tradition, 116 Larcher proclaims his steadfast belief in assimilation. He agrees that "in principle, the laws in force in the metropole must be applied to the colony and to the people who inhabit it." 125 But he also confesses that it would be "impossible in a country so vast, with so much variety in its configuration and in the races that inhabit it, so different from the metropole in its customs and its aspirations, to apply metropolitan laws entirely without modification." 126 From this perspective, France cannot surrender its dominion over the "natives" or relinquish the authority that "keeps the calm" and "imposes respect" upon them. 127 A "politics of subjection," Larcher concedes, remains an unavoidable necessity for a place and a population "so distant from our civilization." 128 Larcher adds elsewhere that assimilation is not a process capable of hastily overcoming the profound differences separating French society from "the poor, ignorant, and fanatical tribes" of Algeria. 129 Should assimilation ever succeed, it will come only at the culmination of "a long evolution, of slow and progressive changes in the economic situation and in the customs of the natives." 130 In this light, Larcher calls for a compromise between three political exigencies: the deliberate pace of the "assimilationist tendency," the "obvious need" for racial separation in the sphere of law, and the government's "right to take swift action and modify legislation according to the progress or the dangers of a constantly evolving country." 131 He explains, in this regard, that juridical thought normally distinguishes between the concept of loi and the concept of règlement. Laws are legislative powers: general, permanent, and an expression of a fundamental right. Regulations are executive powers: particular, secondary, and a vehicle for bringing laws to application. 132 Larcher qualifies, however, that the distinction becomes less clear in the colonies, where "the legislative power and the regulatory power are often exercised by the same agents": effectively installing in the colony's administrative bureaucracy an exceptional authority to make law (loi) in the form of regulations (règlements). 133 The politics of subjection, Larcher argues, demands a system "flexible and mobile enough to respond to the rapid changes of a society in formation." 134 It is that "need for speed" that submits Algeria-like all French colonies-to a veritable régime des décrets. 135 Arendt explicitly cites Larcher's formula as part of her political-theoretical inquiry into the operations of bureaucratic governance. 136 She writes, "Legally, government by bureaucracy is government by decree [Regime der Verordnungen]." 137 This means that "power [Macht], which in constitutional government only enforces the law [nur der Ausführung und Innehaltung der Gesetze dient], becomes the direct source of all legislation [wird hier, wie in einem Befehl, zur direkten Quelle der Anordnung]." 138 Like Larcher, Arendt sees the characteristic feature of government by bureaucracy as its inversion of the normal relation between law and power. Whereas constitutional regimes uphold the rule of law by restricting the use of power to the regulative enforcement of legislative decisions, bureaucracy manages to confound this difference by giving every act of regulative enforcement the authority of law. The reversal, says Arendt, creates a troubling legal situation, where parliamentary bodies and legislative assemblies dissolve as identifiable sources of legal right (loi): their place now occupied by an "anonymous" decree (règlement) that has no justification and needs no prior statutory grounding. 139 In its legal structure, bureaucracy represents nothing more than an administrative apparatus for a government of "lawlessness" and "despotism." 140 By the time Arendt invokes Larcher and his phrase régimes des décrets, her analysis of bureaucracy has already moved from colonial imperialism to continental imperialism and from British India to the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. The geographical transition strikes a familiar chord in its comparative minimization and disavowal of the effects wrought by colonial rule: "Colonial imperialism, which also ruled by decree and was sometimes even defined as the 'régime des décrets,' was dangerous enough; yet the very fact that the administrators 136 Arendt, Origins, 243; Arendt, Elemente, 406. To my knowledge only Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison has noticed this citation. Grandmaison, De l'indigénat, 10. I also note the partial absence of Larcher's name in the 1951 edition of Origins. While Arendt includes the phrase régime des décrets in the text and references Larcher's book in the bibliography, she does not explicitly footnote her source. The 1955 German edition cites the French formulation both in the body of the text and in a footnote, which includes a full reference to Larcher; however, these mentions now appear in a much earlier section, "Rasse und Bürokratie"; meanwhile, the later discussion of bureaucratic governance removes the French and uses only its German translation, Regime der Verordnungen. Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1955), 305, 395. This arrangement remains consistent in later German editions. 137 Arendt, Origins, 243; Arendt, Elemente, 516. Here, and in the discussion that follows, I juxtapose Arendt's English and German texts: sometimes including the German parenthetically and other times quoting from it directly. As others have shown, Elemente is both a translation of Origins and a significant revision and reworking of its language. The relationship between the two volumes is further complicated by the fact that portions of the first English edition were based on articles previously written in German. Later, Arendt would also incorporate changes introduced in the German into subsequent English editions. My strategy is to read this textual record as a single, extended, and fluctuating project of bilingual interpretation. In this context, I use the German as a commentary on the English and as an elucidation of its terminology (even as the English can also shed light on the German). For more on the publication history see Ursula Ludz, "Hannah Arendt und ihr Totalitarismusbuch: Ein kurzer Bericht über eine schwierige Autor-Werk-Geschichte," in Stefan Ahrens and Bettina Koch, eds., Totalitäre Herrschaft und republikanische Demokratie: Fünfzig Jahre The Origins of Totalitarianism von Hannah Arendt" (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), 81-92. 138 Arendt, Origins, 243; Arendt, Elemente, 516. 139 Ibid. 140 Arendt, Origins, 243; Arendt, Elemente, 515.
limitations, continuing to exercise legislative power even in situations without a clearly "exceptional character," so that decrees once made "provisionally, for emergency purposes [vu l'urgence], are today still in force." 151 Arendt takes up Larcher's concern by insisting on a more precise distinction between "regimes of decree" and "states of emergency." 152 She recalls that "the emergency decree [Notverordnung], which turns out to be necessary in every state of exception [Ausnahmezustand]," cannot derive its legitimacy from the normal legal order and, for this reason, must "call upon the state of emergency itself for its justification." 153 The difference, Arendt adds, is that an emergency always remains "limited in time" and "clearly recognized as an exception to the rule." 154 Regimes of decree, on the other hand, do not respect clear temporal borders. They swap transience for permanence by generalizing an evanescent deformation of law into an enduring form of government: "The state of emergency justifies in the exception what in despotism is the rule; namely, the concentration and boundlessness of power [Macht] over the subject [Untertan]." 155 Once stripped of all constraints, the decree appears as the "immediate outpouring [unmittelbarer Ausfluß] of an overwhelming omnipotence": a power that needs no justification precisely because a justification would already interrupt its absolute power (Machtvollkommenheit). 156 Arendt's commentary here resonates with a series of long-standing debates about the concept of law and the jurisprudence of emergency. 157 But her reading of Larcher probably finds its most direct conceptual influence in Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt's tacit exchange on the "state of exception." 158 The general contours of the dispute concern the "force of law" and, more specifically, the "field of juridical tensions" that separate legal norms from their application. 159 Schmitt argues across his writing that "every concrete juristic decision 151 Ibid., 1: 142. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison again summarizes much of this legal history (with reference to Larcher) in "The Exception and the Rule: On French Colonial Law," Diogenes 212 (2006), 34-53. 152 In this section, I rely almost entirely on the German version to underscore the terminology introduced (below) by Benjamin and Schmitt. 153 Arendt's nameless referent is all too evident. 176 The question is simply whether one can also hear in this reading of Kafka-in a text that Arendt wrote only a year after her research into Crémieux and the "regime of decree"-the silent reverberation of the name "Algeria." Arendt leaves the possibility in abeyance. But her unfinished project has found belated completion in the writing of the French Algerian philosopher and political theorist Seloua Luste Boulbina. Through a series of incisive readings, Luste Boulbina presents Kafka's texts as fictional testimonials to the "subjectivation of the colonial situation." 177 A guiding thread in these analyses is the dialectic of assimilation and decree. On the one hand, and like Arendt, Luste Boulbina sees in Kafka the anonymous operation "of an infernal machine, an organization with no subject, an empire of administration." 178 She recognizes as well that the terror of Kafka adequately represents the "preeminent dimension of any colony": government by decree. 179 That is, "not a law but an order, not a rule but a command, an injunction, an imperative." 180 On the other hand, Luste Boulbina also insists that Kafka depicts another aspect of colonial governance in its demands for transformation: "The African, the colonized person, is compelled to change. It is imperative that he or she no longer be what he or she is." 181 As Luste Boulbina explains, "Everywhere, assimilation is pregnant with a promise: it is supposed to bring personal benefits and social gains to the one who assimilates and who makes the effort to assimilate … It is always presented as beneficial, oriented in the direction of history (Enlightenment), inscribed in social progress just as in the progress of humanity." 182 What Kafka understood is that this emancipatory "door to humanity" often leads to a "terrible conclusion." 183 Arendt had too much trust in the civilizing mission to perceive its promise as a prison. A similar belief in imperial futures also likely kept her from understanding that in Algeria the distinctions between assimilation and association, citizenship and subjection, law and decree, norm and exception always depended upon a more originary "inscription of racial difference." 184 But Arendt's protracted if tangential engagement with the name "Algeria" can still yield an important geometric lesson about the space-time of colonialism. Whether Arendt knew it or not, her writing on Algeria gauges the vertiginous temporal effects of colonial rule as an interminable "speed race" between the point (violence) and the line ( power): the long, slow, suspensive trajectory of assimilation and the sudden, immediate, polemical eruption of the decree. 185 For Arendt to have thought otherwise and outside this 176