Hannah Arendt, violence and vitality

Abstract

This article places Hannah Arendt’s fundamental view of the instrumentality of violence in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in order to demonstrate the importance for each of a notion of ‘mere life’ or ‘life itself’ to an understanding of the agency of violence in modernity. Arendt’s critique of vitalism is most fully developed in The Human Condition, where she describes an entanglement of the instrumental activity of homo faber with life and labour in the work of Bergson, Nietzsche and Marx. I suggest that Bergson’s treatment of life as creative evolution unexpectedly yields an accurate description of politics as spontaneous, unpredictable motion that Arendt takes as typical of modernity. Since Arendt also credits Bergson with a decisive influence on what she takes to be a growing commitment to the life-enhancing, creative potential of violence in the oppositional movements of the 1960s, which she explores in her late essay, On Violence, I trace out the continuity between Arendt’s earlier account of homo faber and her later critique of postmodern oppositional violence.

‘Ghastly marionettes’ and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and the origins of totalitarianism

“…Rather, it was a question of what sort of science and what sort of vision of nature would prevail. While Arendt and her post-Weimar contemporaries were motivated to defend ‘the political’ as a space discrete from mechanistic nature, within mid-century philosophies of science a resurgent vitalism provided a natural ally for the political fixation on spontaneity, as both shared a deep suspicion about the mechanization of the capacities of life itself (Swift, 2013). To the same extent that political theory was defined by the struggle to demarcate itself from the technocratic social sciences, 20th-century vitalist philosophies of life resisted the epistemic arrogation through which physics and chemistry annexed life into their purview.…”

Invisible streams

“…The pursuit of endless growth demanded stable, limited forms of landed property to be transformed into social wealth, which effectively means the ‘never-ending process of getting wealthier’ (Arendt, 1973: 145). The natural fertility of life, understood in modern biology as a process without a telos or péras (Arendt, 1998: 105, 116, 232; 2006a: 57; Heidegger, 1995: 265; Swift, 2013: 361), was adopted as a model for the endless growth of the economy. The processes of wealth and consumption became liberated from the finitude of household existence, leading to an unforeseen growth in fertility and production.…”