Fugitive Thought

There's a significant change between the literal and figurative meanings of the fugitive, even if both are negative forms of freedom that assume unfreedom as a norm. In the U.S., especially, notions of the fugitive evoke the Fugitive Slave Act. The displaced memory of the fugitive slave inflects the figure of the fleeing criminal (for instance, in Hollywood films about prison escapees) with a potential for political dissent that often migrates, in the process, from black to white. (Thus the figure of the "wrong man," who unwittingly falls into the criminal slot and finds there some kind of insight into the limitations of the legal system.) "Fugitive thought," however, is fleeting rather than fleeing, and includes passing fancy too slight for censorship. Rather than ending when it is either captured or reaches its goal, fugitive thought lacks narrative, and times out because it isn't pursuing an end in the first place.

Slavery doesn't seem to have anything to do with fugitive thought. But Hannah Arendt blurts out an association when, citing and supporting a historian of Rome, she remarks that slaves "remain shadowy types rather than persons" (The Human Condition 54), icons of "the futility of individual life" (56). Seeming to accept the slaves' lesser humanity, Arendt neglects to even mention the self-interested reasons why Romans would not allow them to be thought of as "persons," as though she were distracted and petrified by the possibility of people who could "pass away leaving no trace that they have existed" (55). She goes on to point out that under modern conditions it is "unlikely that anybody should earnestly aspire" to achieve something other than the forgettability once reserved for the slave. Fugitive thought, by this logic, is connected to the slave after all, because the "slave" is the type of the human being who is fleeting even when standing still, existing without the possibility of inscribing the self into history or literature. If Arendt seems so frightened of slave status that she forgets to be sympathetic, it's because she herself would have published little had she not walked out of a French detention camp; she is one of the "new kind of human beings" created to be destroyed by "contemporary history," as she writes in "We Refugees" (in The Jew as Pariah [1978]). Arendt's only approach to the performance of fugitive thought, "We Refugees" is composed from a vanishing point in the aftermath of personality. She writes that she "can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous" than to cultivate pariah status, as it seems to her an invitation to annihilation, but she also notes that adherents to social claims were eliminated along with those who preferred not to make any claims. In "We Refugees" we can see her trying to make a new person out of the pariah who affirms, not lack of identity, but lack of relation to a fixed place. Figurative fugitive thought is only fleeting, not written by fugitives; but it tries to meet the fugitive halfway by turning away from the personhood on which Arendt stakes her hopes (even as she seems also to be giving them up).