Language and appropriation: on naming in Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between language and appropriation in Hannah Arendt’s and Carl Schmitt’s reflections on the question of naming. Considering that both emphasized the appropriative element underlying the link between language and the world, we start from Arendt’s definition according to which naming is the way through which human beings appropriate the events of reality and thus endow them with communicability, a mechanism that ensures the connection between the human mental activities that seek their meaning and the world of appearances in which they manifest themselves. In the first part of the text, we interpret Arendt’s analysis of these relationships in order to highlight the understanding of language present in her work, especially in The Human Condition (1958) and The Life of the Mind (1978). In the second part, in order to clarify the appropriative meaning of naming, we mobilize Carl Schmitt’s reading developed in the essay “Nomos – Nahme – Name” (1959). According to the German thinker, the
emphasis on nomos as a fundamental term in Western political and legal vocabulary makes it possible to uncover a particular structure of language and thought, the core of which radiates meaning through events originating in the “taking” or “appropriation” (Nahme) encompassed by the very acts of naming. Considering the confluence between these approaches, we conclude that the capturing of events in language through naming has undeniably practical implications, which refer us to decisive processes in the domains of law and politics.