The reason why violence is understood as a political question at all is because it is so often fused with power, even though by its very nature it is fundamentally antithetical to power. Under threat of violence, the capacity to realise the human possibility of acting in concert is diminished and potentially destroyed. ‚Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to
its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.‛18 Violence can destroy power and politics, but it can never produce them.19
To sum up this section, Arendt’s key concern was to redeem the intrinsic value of the political. Politics should not be reduced to an instrumental means to the apolitical ends of natural life: survival, pleasure and happiness. It has to remain an end in itself and therefore to retain its specificity as public action and speech. The distinction between the social and what is truly political is thus fundamental for her philosophical response to the crisis and decline of
the public realm of politics in modern societies. It is a resurrection of the ancient answer to the question of why men are not ants. The restoration of the ancient distinction between polis and oikos could restore not only the specificity but also the dignity of politics, and by the same token separate it from the realm of biological life and inescapable violence. Arendt’s under-
standing of the political thus provides an agonistic account of political action that is nevertheless irreducible to violence. This fortification of the political does not imply the strengthening of the state, but rather heralds the revitalisation of public life, political debate and participation.
The price we pay is the radical narrowing of the realm of the political, however. All issues belonging to the social—such as poverty, sexuality and gender—are economic, biological or technological questions rather than appropriately political questions. Political and social equality must remain distinct issues. As her critics have pointed out, in protecting the sui generis character of her politics and the purity of the public realm, Arendt effectively prohibits the politicisation of issues of social justice.20 While alerting us to the dangerous merging of life and politics in Modernity she would nevertheless insist that biopolitics must remain an oxy-moron, the merging of two ontologically incompatible concepts.
18
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 56.
19
James Dodd argues that Arendt’s instrumental account of violence appears more complex if her separation
of labour and work in The Human Condition is understood as leading to the idea that the order of instru-
mentality characterising work is a kind of violence. She describes the emergence of the sphere of human
works as a form of constitutive violence: the world of instruments, of produced and built things, represents a
violent breaking free from the monotony and impermanence of the incessant metabolism with nature that is
embodied in labour. The world, understood as more than nature, can thus be understood to be born of ori-
ginary violence against the giveness of nature. James Dodd, Violence and Phenomenology (New York and Lon-
don: Routledge, 2009), 58-60.
20
Bonnie Honig, ‚Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity,‛ in Bonnie
Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, 135.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
Elena:
It’s quite shocking for me to watch the conclusions that Arendt reaches, separating politics from life thinking that would strengthen public life instead of continuing the schizophrenic separation into elites.
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