Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action

Political Theory

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 1992, Pages 274-308

  Villa, Dana R ^a  

^a AMHERST COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 84970655228     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591792020002004     Document Type: Article

References (122)

1. Jrgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power” in Philosophical- Political Profiles, translated by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). Richard Bernstein and Seyla Benhabib give similarly dialogical readings.
2. Jrgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology” in Towards a Rational Society, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 96.
3. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, translated by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Cf. also Habermas's contrary position in Legitimation Crisis, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975), 110.
4. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), esp. xxv, 66.
5. Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Rejouer le Politique (Paris: Galil ‘e, 1981) and Le Retrait du Politique (Paris: Galil ‘e, 1983). For a discussion of the Arendtian inspiration, see Nancy Fraser, “The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?” in New German Critique 33 (1984): 127-54.
6. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), 151ff. I deal with this issue here and in my book, Rethinking the Political: Arendt, Heidegger and Political Action, forthcoming. See also B. Honig, “Arendt, Identity and Difference,” Political Theory 16 (1988): 77-98.
7. See Habermas, “Hannah Arendt.” For a full discussion of Arendt's deconstruction of the concept of praxis, see D. Villa, Arendt, Heidegger and Political Action, chap. 1-2.
8. Honig, I think, errs a bit in this direction.
9. Habermas, “Hannah Arendt”; Seyla Benhabib, “The Redemptive Power of Narrative,” Social Research 57 (1990): 167-68. Arendt as neo-Aristotelian is an interpretation that I take great exception to (see note 7). Benhabib's characterization, on the other hand, underplays the strong Heideggerian current in Arendt's thought, her antimodernism. See D. Villa, Arendt, Heidegger and Political Action; also George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), chap. 5.
10. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 17-40.
11. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 16.
12. Arendt, Human Condition, 220ff.
13. Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57 (1990): 73ff. Here, Arendt notes the tendency of the agon to get out of control, cf. p. 82.
14. On the topic of aestheticizing politics, see Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, translated by Chris Turner (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990); Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). The question of Arendt ‘s critique of Heidegger is treated at length in chapter 6 of my book.
15. Arendt, Human Condition, 7.
16. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 163ff.
17. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2, 200.
18. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 146.
19. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 201.
20. Arendt, Human Condition, 111.
21. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 163; Human Condition, 235.
22. Arendt, Human Condition, 195.
23. 222: “Escape from the frailty of human affairs into the solidity of quiet and order has so much to recommend it that the greater part of political philosophy since Plato could easily be interpreted as attempts to escape action and politics.”
24. 222,234; also Between Past and Future, 157: “Our philosophical tradition is almost unanimous in holding that freedom begins where men have left the realm of political life inhabited by the many.”
25. Arendt, Human Condition, 235.
26. See Villa, Arendt, Heidegger and Political Action, chap. 1.
27. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1097a, 1176b; also Arendt, Human Condition, 206-207.
28. See Villa, Arendt, Heidegger and Political Action, chap 1.
29. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future-, also Human Condition, chap. 4.
30. Kateb, to whose excellent presentation of Arendt's theory of action I am much indebted, makes precisely this distinction.
31. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 153.
32. Arendt, Human Condition, 57.
33. Nietzsche, GM, 1,13.
34. This formulation is from Deleuze.
35. See Nehamas, Nietzsche, chap. 6.
36. Arendt, Human Condition, chap. 4.
37. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 120. See also GM, 1,10.
38. Nietzsche, GM, III, 18.
39. Nietzsche, GM, 1,13.
40. Ill, 13. Nehamas calls this inducement of shame “the central purpose of slave morality.” See Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 126.
41. As Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy, “Understanding kills action.”
42. Nietzsche, GM, II, 16.
43. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 199.
44. Arendt, Human Condition, 194.
45. Cf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 225.
46. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 121.
47. As Nietzsche remarks, one distinguishing characteristic of morality is that it “admits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms, and functions solely from the point of view of its interpretation (and has there ever been a system of interpretation more thoroughly thought through?).” GM, III, 23.
48. Lyotard, Just Gaming, 23-25.
49. Deleuze, Nietzsche, 3.
50. Nietzsche, GM, III, 12.
51. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 34.
52. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241.
53. In this regard, see “Philosophy and Politics”; see also ‘Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future and On Revolution, 268-79; “On Humanity in Dark Times,” in Men in Dark Times.
54. Arendt, Human Condition, 57.
55. The specifically political character of Arendt's view is treated shortly.
56. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 3-4.
57. Michel Haar, “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language,” in The New Nietzsche, edited by David B. Allison (New York: Dell, 1980), 14.
58. Alphonso Lingis, “The Will to Power,” in The New Nietzsche, 38. See also Arendt's discussion of Kant's prejudice in favor of the thing in itself in Life of the Mind, vol. 1,24.
59. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974), 125.
60. Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 77.
61. See Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age” and “What Is Authority?”
62. Nietzsche's view that Man takes the structural place of God is elaborated by Heidegger in “The Age of the World-Picture.” Arendt's interpretation of modernity is importantly colored by the resultant conception of “humanism” as a metaphysical position. See D. Villa, Arendt, Heidegger and Political Action, chap. 5.
63. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 29; Arendt, On Revolution, 281.
64. Arendt, Human Condition, 154-57.
65. See Kateb, Hannah Arendt, chap. 1.
66. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 82.
67. For Habermas, Nietzsche's appeal to taste judgment is tantamount to sheer irrationalism. See Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, translated by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 127.
68. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 10; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 93-108,131-33; Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 74-82.
69. As Nietzsche exclaims in GM, II, 3: “Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, the whole somber thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been bought! How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all ‘good things'!”
70. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1988), and “The Concept of Enlightenment”; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977).
71. In foreword to P. Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, translated by Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),.
72. Cf. note 6.
73. This is Dew's formulation. See Logics of Disintegration, 160.
74. Nietzsche G.M., II, 2. Also, Beyond Good and Evil, 188.
75. C.f. Deleuze, Nietzsche, 137: “The product of culture is not the man who obeys the law, but the sovereign and legislative individual who defines himself by power over himself, over destiny, over the law: the free, the light, the irresponsible
76. Nietzsche Twilight, 92, emphases in original. Cf. also Nietzsche's famous description of Goethe, 102-103.
77. Nietzsche, GM, II, 12.
78. emphasis in original.
79. Nehamas emphasizes this aspect in his Nietzsche: Life as Literature.
80. Cf. Richard Rorty's notion of the “strong textualist” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 151-54.
81. Nietzsche Twilight, 40: “We have abolished the true world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps?. But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!” Commenting on this passage in a different context (Introduction, 1-10, The Life of the Mind), Arendt agrees with the judgment that the distinction between sensory and supersensory has indeed disappeared. My point is that Arendt's concept of appearance does not reduce to the “merely sensory.” See also Heidegger's commentary in his Nietzsche, vol. 1, “The Will to Power as Art,” translated by David Ferrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 201-10.
82. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 217.
83. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 104.
84. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 218.
85. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 24.
86. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 219.
87. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by J. H. Barnard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 15.
88. Nietzsche, Twilight, 71, 72.
89. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 210.
90. See Kateb, Hannah Arendt, chap. 1.
91. Where it does not, one risks the politics of terror. See Arendt's Hegel-inspired analysis in On Revolution.
92. Arendt, Human Condition, chap. 1.
93. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241.
94. Kant, Critique, 136.
95. Arendt, Between Past and Future, TAX.
96. Nietzsche, GM, III, 12.
97. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History”; also Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play,” in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-95.
98. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 136.
99. Nietzsche, GM, III, 11; also “On Truth and Lie,” in Philosophy and Truth, edited by Donald Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 79ff.
100. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, edited by Gerth and Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 152-53.
101. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 26; also Just Gaming, 58.
102. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
103. Kant, Critique of Judgment, sec. 20.
104. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 221.
105. Cf. Beiner, Kant Lectures, 119: “In matters of ‘taste’ I never judge only for myself, for the act of judging always implies a commitment to communicate my judgment.”
106. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 221.
107. Lyotard, Just Gaming, 16; cf., however, 14, where Lyotard denies the possibility of a sensus communis in what he calls “modernity,” tying taste judgments to both the premodern and the universal.
108. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 110.
109. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241.
110. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 218. In this regard, see also Beiner's statements regarding the significance of judgment in this context, Kant Lectures, 151 ff.: “Judging is not simply a capacity of political beings. It actually comes to serve an ontological function. That is, judgment has the function of anchoring man in a world that would otherwise be without meaning and existential reality: a world unjudged would have no human import for us.” See also 155: “If the being of politics is indeed appearance. a public space of judgment is needed to render the world of appearances more durable’ to confirm its being, as it were.”
111. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 216-18.
112. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, 66.
113. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 217. The phrase “aesthetics of existence” is one employed by Foucault and refers to a project of self-fashioning exempted from the rule of a telos. See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Random House, 1985), 89-93.
114. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 221.
115. R. Bernstein, Beiner Gadamer, and D. Ingram have all noted this tension.
116. See Villa, Arendt, Heidegger and Political Action, chaps 1. and 2 for a discussion of Arendt's appropriation and critique of Aristotle.
117. David Ingram, “The Postmodern Kantianism of Arendt and Lyotard,” 52.
118. Lyotard, Just Gaming, 26-27.
119. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 26.
120. Lyotard, Just Gaming, 17.
121. Arendt, Human Condition, chap.
122. See Kateb, Hannah Arendt, chap. 1. Cf. Beiner, “Interpretive Essay,” in Kant Lectures, 152.