Abstract
Arendt claimed that violence is not part of the political because it is instrumental. Her position has generated a vast corpus of scholarship, most of which falls into the context of the realist-liberal divide. Taking these discussions as a starting point, this essay engages with violence in Arendt’s work from a different perspective. Its interest lies not in Arendt’s theory of violence in the world, but in the function that violence performed in her work, namely, in the constitutive role of violence in her thought. It argues that the concept of violence allowed Arendt to make important distinctions serving to catalyze the categories that constitute her political philosophy and, in particular, the categories of public and private. More specifically, it claims that the concept of violence in Arendt’s work is the a priori background against which both the public and private realms should be defined.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Arendt's views on violence were first expressed in a panel debate titled "The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?," hosted by the Theatre for Ideas in New York City in December 1967 and featuring Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Robert Lowell and Conor Cruise O'Brien, with Robert Silvers (of the New York Review of Books) as chair. The written version of the debate was edited by Alexander Klein.
And by philosophers since Plato. See Arendt (1998), 222.
A "thick" deconstructive approach would focus on the theoretical violence exerted by Arendt's thought, for instance through her practice of drawing distinctions between the private and public domains. On deconstruction as the practice of following one thread or one word to understand the composition of a text, see Derrida (1981) and (2001) (inter alia).
In Plato's words, "There is also a third kind… which is difficult of explanation and dimly seen… it is the receptacle, and in a manner the nurse, of all generation" (Timaeus 49a).
Action is the manifestation of human life, but not biological life. On the difference between "human life" and "biological life" in Arendt, its similitude to Aristotle's distinction between bios (the good life in the City) and zoê (the simple phenomenon of life), and its relationship to Foucault's and Agamben's understanding of life and of biopolitics, see Braun 2007, Dolan 2005, Duarte 2006, and Watter 2006. On the separation between the realms of human and biological life, see Benhabib 1996. Note that, for Arendt, the uttermost antipolitical experience is death: "Death, whether faced in actual dying or in the inner awareness of one's own mortality, is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is. It signifies that we shall disappear from the world of appearances and shall leave the company of our fellow-men, which are the condition of all politics" (Arendt 1970, pp. 67–68). In other words, life has two dimensions, but a single end.
Lederman (2014) argues that action contains both communicative and competitive features, and responds to both sides of the ongoing debate between the "discursive" and the "agonistic" interpretations of Arendt. Passerin d'Entrèves earlier compellingly explained that "insofar as Arendt's theory of action rests upon an unstable combination of both expressive and communicative models (or action types), it is clear that her account of politics will vary in accordance with the emphasis given to one or the other. When the emphasis falls on the expressive model of action, politics is viewed as the performance of noble deeds by outstanding individuals; conversely, when her stress is on the communicative model of action, politics is seen as the collective process of deliberation and decision-making that rests on equality and solidarity" (Passerin d'Entrèves 1994, pp. 84–85).
Note that Arendt claims that "In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized" at the beginning of her chapter on labor, not at the beginning of "Work."
At this point, Heidegger makes a distinction between the peasant's work and mechanized agriculture which is strikingly reminiscent of that between labor and work in The Human Condition: "The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order which sets upon [stellt] nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry" (Heidegger 1977, 15).
Arendt's description of the use of tools in labor (see Arendt 1998, 125–126, 144–145) makes her distinction between labor and work less clear-cut and more problematic than it might seem at first sight. Moreover, she does not seem to envisage a possible difference between the violence used in work and that used in labor.
See Hayden's critique of neoliberal violence, which, "turning the world and its inhabitants into a means to an end… makes superfluous the particularities of actual human beings, their plurality, and their active agency" (Hayden 2009, 118).
In the same sentence she adds that even the question of God can become a public question.
She writes that Hegel and Marx had "great trust" in the dialectical "power of negation."
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1959. Reflections on Little Rock. Dissent 6(1): 45–56.
Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Arendt, Hannah. 1972. Crises of the republic. Lying in politics, civil disobedience, on violence. Thoughts on politics and revolution. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Company.
Arendt, Hannah. 1976. The Origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Arendt, Hannah. 1977a. What is authority? Between past and future, 91–141. New York: Penguin.
Arendt, Hannah. 1977b. The crisis in education. Between past and future, 173–196. New York: Penguin.
Arendt, Hannah. 1977c. Tradition and the modern age. Between past and future, 17–40. New York: Penguin.
Arendt, Hannah. 1979. On Hannah Arendt. In Hannah Arendt: The recovery of the public world, ed. Melvyn A. Hill, pp. 301–339. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1990. On revolution. New York: Penguin.
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ayyash, Mark Muhannad. 2013. The paradox of political violence. European Journal of Social Theory 16(3): 342–356.
Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. The reluctant modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Bernstein, Richard J. 2011. Hannah Arendt’s reflections on violence and power. Iris III: 3–30.
Braun, Kathrin. 2007. Biopolitics and temporality in Arendt and Foucault. Time and Society 16(1): 5–23.
Breen, Keith. 2007. Violence and power: A critique of Hannah Arendt on the ‘political’. Philosophy and Social Criticism 33(3): 343–372.
Canovan, Margaret. 1992. Hannah Arendt. A reinterpretation of her political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dallmayr, Fred. 2001. On violence (again): Arendtian reflections. Journal of Power and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Review 2(3): 186–212.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination (trans: Barbara Johnson). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Khôra. In On the name (trans: Ian McLeod), pp. 89–127. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. What Is a ‘relevant’ translation (trans: Lawrence Venuti). Critical Inquiry 27: 174–200.
Dietz, Mary D. 2002. Turning operations: Feminism, Arendt, and politics. London: Routledge.
Dolan, Frederick. 2005. The paradoxical liberty of biopower: Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on modern politics. Philosophy and Social Criticism 31(3): 369–380.
Duarte, André. 2006. Biopolitics and the dissemination of violence: The Arendtian critique of the present. In Hannah Arendt. Critical assessments, Vol. III, ed. Garrath Williams, pp. 408–442. London: Routledge.
Emden, Christian J. 2008. Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and the limits of liberalism. Telos 142: 110–134.
Finlay, Christopher J. 2009. Hannah Arendt’s critique of violence. Thesis Eleven 97: 26–45.
Frazer, Elizabeth. 2014. Power. In Hannah Arendt: Key concepts, ed. Patrick Hayden, 155–166. London: Routledge.
Frazer, Elizabeth, and Kimberly Hutchings. 2008. On politics and violence: Arendt Contra Fanon. Contemporary Political Theory 7: 90–108.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1977. Hannah Arendt’s communications concept of power. Social Research 44(1): 3–24.
Hayden, Patrick. 2009. Political evil in a global age: Hannah Arendt and international theory. London: Routledge.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The question concerning technology (trans: William Lovitt). New York and London: Garland Publishing.
Herzog, Annabel. 2004. Political Itineraries and anarchic cosmopolitanism in the thought of Hannah Arendt. Inquiry 47(1): 20–41.
Hill, Melvyn A. (ed.). 1979. Hannah Arendt: The recovery of the public world. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Honig, Bonnie. 1993. Political theory and the displacement of politics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Klein, Alexander (ed.). 1971. Dissent, power and confrontation. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Lederman, Shmuel. 2014. Agonism and deliberation in Arendt. Constellations 21(3): 327–337.
McGowan, John. 1997. Must politics be violent? Arendt’s Utopian vision. In Hannah Arendt and the meaning of politics, ed. Craig Calhoun, and John McGowan, 263–296. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mills, C.Wright. 1956. The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press.
North, Richard. 2010. Political realism: Introduction. European Journal of Political Theory 9(4): 381–384.
Passerin d’Entrèves, Maurizio. 1994. The political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. London: Routledge.
Taminiaux, Jacques. 1992. La fille de Thrace et le penseur professionnel. Paris: Payot.
Villa, Dana R. 1995. Arendt and Heidegger. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Walsh, Philip. 2014. Hannah Arendt on the social. In Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts, ed. Patrick Hayden, 124–137. London: Routledge.
Watter, Miguel. 2006. Natality and biopolitics in Hannah Arendt. Revista de Ciencia Politica 26(2): 137–159.
