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October 31, 2004
This is interesting terms of the interpretation of Foucault's governmentality as a rupture with traditional (juridical ) conceptions of the political. Dana Villa's new book, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, provides an account of the political thought of Heidegger and Arendt from the perspective of a politics marked by the philosophical critique of modernity.
According to Charles Bambach, Villa focuses on the way that Arendt's whole style of reading and appropriating the Western philosophical tradition:
"... is determined by her adherence to two basic modes of interpretation from Being and Time (1927): retrieval (Wiederholung) and de-construction (Abbau). Simply put, like Heidegger, Arendt's fundamental strategy is to read the tradition not in a spirit of reverence or with the aim of repetition; instead, she attempts to dismantle philosophical concepts, to loosen them from their sedimented and hypostatized strata in order to free them up for a radical kind of retrieval that rethinks their essence from an ontological perspective. Or rather, she wishes to dispense with the whole notion of any subject-centered "perspective" and recover not concepts, but a certain way of being-in-the-world."
Arendt argues against Aristotle. Her theory of political action attempts a radical reconceptualization of action, one that proceeds, in part, through a critique and transformation of Aristotelian praxis. Bambich says that whereas Aristotle understands political activity on the model of poiesis as a kind of "crafting" of political life:
"...Arendt breaks with him in order to recover the freedom of political action which she finds in the pre-Socratic tradition. For her, both Plato and Aristotle come to see lawmaking and city-building [politcs] as.... as a means and not an end. As Arendt understands it, while Aristotle asserts on the one hand that praxis is valuable in and of itself, on the other, like Plato he makes it subservient to a goal: the "highest good." And yet by virtue of her deconstructive reading of Aristotle.....Arendt comes to define political action as the last realm of activity in which the human being can experience freedom."
For Arendt in modernity which she equates with the European project of technical-instrumentalist activity since the seventeenth century), there are three types of the vita activa: "labor" (which she describes as a cyclical and repetitious "animal" activity tied to the sheer biological necessity of survival), "work" (which she defines as a "human" activity that involves one in the making, producing, and instrumental fabrication of poiesis), and "action" (which she equates with Aristotle's notion of an activity that has no end outside of itself and is a genuine form of praxis).
She argues that the modern individual gets borne by the ceaseless project of Cartesian mastery and the possession of nature. As a result, s/he is transformed into homo faber, that active being whose finished products become means for the inevitable end of "the limitless instrumentalization of everything that exists." All contemporary life winds up being caught within this instrumentalist mode of being that leads humanity to desire ever more power and control over the world of nature.
This is a very familar critique, one that was developed by the Frankfurt School--Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas. So what was different about Arendt's political critique of modernity?
Part Two of Villa's book suggests that the difference lies in the ontological dimension of Arendt's critique of modernity. This was influenced by Heidegger's critique of Cartesian subjectivity and its corresponding instrumentalism. Bambich says that Arendt follows Heidegger in deconstructing:
"...the Cartesian will to mastery (reconfigured as Nietzsche's will to power), Heidegger pointed to a new ontological sense of freedom--not of the self-grounding subject, but of human Dasein as a form of "being-in-the-world"... For Arendt, this implied that human freedom was marked by finitude, contingency, and worldliness-properties that reinforced the public character of existence rather than the privatized, interior, and abstract world of the Cartesian subject."
Arendt then puts Heidegger into question by challenging his emphasis on "authenticity" and private life. Villa argues that Arendt "politicizes" Heidegger's existential lexicon by inverting the Heideggerian identification of authenticity with interiority and inauthenticity with the public world of the "they-self." Arendt's argument is Heidegger's brilliant critique of modern subjectivity is limited by the privileging of the authentically interior vita contemplativa against the inauthentically public vita activa.
On Villa's account Arendt appropriates Heidegger by twisting, displacing, and reinterpreting his thought in ways designed to illuminate a range of exceedingly un-Heideggerian issues; the nature of political action, the positive ontological role of the public realm, the nature of political judgement, and the conditions for an antiauthoritarian, antifoundational, democratic politics.
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Gary
A Few years ago I read parts of Villa's book. It is very good at capturing many of the subtle connections between Arendt and Heidegger's thought. But it does point to what I believe is a severe limitation of Arendt's rethinking of "the political." That is her indebtedness to Heidegger's notion of self-disclosure. Freedom is manifested in the words and deeds that are revealed in the public space, what Arendt calls the "space of appearance." This aesthetic notion of freedom seems to severely limit what is considered legitimate political action. Her famous exclusion of socio-economic issues from the realm of politics would be a case in point.