Hannah Arendt, Violence and Vitality

Article
Hannah Arendt, violence

and vitality
European Journal of Social Theory

16(3) 357376
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431013476578
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Simon Swift
University of Leeds, UK
Abstract
This article places Hannah Arendts fundamental view of the instrumentality of violence
in dialogue with Walter Benjamins 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. Arendts 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 Bergsons 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 Arendts earlier account of homo faber and her
later critique of postmodern oppositional violence.
Keywords
Arendt, Benjamin, Bergson, creativity, instrumentality, life, violence
This article does not propose a systematic account of Hannah Arendts theory of
violence, which is elaborated most clearly in her 1969 essay, On Violence, but that is
foundational to her political thought as a whole. Several detailed studies of Arendts
treatment of violence, and of her relation to precursor and contemporary theorists of violence including Clausewitz, Marx and Engels, Sorel, Benjamin, Fanon and Sartre have
appeared in recent years (Hanssen, 2000; Frazer and Hutchins, 2008; Finlay, 2009).
Arendts difference from other theorists of violence is found in her fundamentally
Corresponding author:
Simon Swift, School of English, Cavendish Road, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, LS2 9JT.
Email: s.swift@leeds.ac.uk
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European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)
phenomenological effort to disentangle violence from power; and the problem of her theory is often seen to lie in the limits of her normative claims for a politics cleansed of
violence. A critique of Arendts theory in these terms was mounted by Habermas shortly
after her death. Habermas argued that Arendt associated strategic action both with force
or violence (Gewalt) and with instrumental action. Her effort to exclude strategy from
her concept of the political, which she modelled on a communicative concept of power
associated with political speech was, Habermas claimed, both unrealistic and hasty in its
effort to reduce all strategy to force (Habermas, 1977: 18). Yet Arendt claims in On
Violence that to speak of non-violent power is actually redundant (Arendt, [1969]
1972: 155). As Habermas has it, [t]he acquisition and maintenance of political power
must be distinguished from both the employment of political power that is, rule and
the generation of political power (Habermas, 1977: 17). He further claims that only in
the last case, the generation of power, should the exclusion of strategic action be maintained, but that the use of strategy in the maintaining of political institutions is inevitable
and necessary. The problem of violence for Arendt, though, has to do with its inevitable
role in the generation of power, where it serves to liberate political actors from natural
necessity. This account is framed largely outside of the terms of the communications
concept of power that Habermas attributes to her, and allows violence a role in the forming of pre-conditions that are necessary for the creation of power. Arendts focus is then
less on the theoretical question of how political institutions are to effectively function
without violence, than on the historical question of why it is that a necessarily violent
act of founding cannot, or can no longer, be held separate from the non-violent operation
of power.
Arendts theory of violence can be productively understood by focussing on its
continuities with, and differences from, Walter Benjamins theory of violence as elaborated in his essay, first published in 1921, Critique of Violence. Like Arendt, Benjamin
held in this essay that there is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the
extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of understanding,
language (Benjamin, 1996: 245). And like Benjamin, Arendt wanted to imagine the
conditions for a politics which is not contaminated by violence, even as they both
stressed the importance of violence as a destructive first step to the building of new
polities and new selves. To this extent, and as Beatrice Hanssen has pointed out, Arendts
silence on Benjamins Critique of Violence which she undoubtedly knew is conspicuous in On Violence (Hanssen, 2000: 16; see also Finlay, 2009: 38). Nevertheless,
I will suggest that Benjamins account in his essay of the relation between mere life
and mythic violence offers an important context for Arendts later effort to link violence to ideas of life and vitality in her critique of postmodern oppositional violence.1
The connection that Arendt herself draws between life and violence, a connection that
she sees as foundational to political modernity, also accounts for her holding to an instrumental view of violence.
I want to suggest first of all that examining this link between violence and vitality in
Arendt through the prism of Benjamins essay uncovers a distinction in Arendts work
between life, understood as a politically conditioned and temporally meaningful existence, and mere biological survival, or what Arendt terms life itself and the life
process. Arendt offers an existential understanding of selves as merely surviving in the
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increasingly administered and bureaucratized totalitarian and liberal capitalist forms of

modern life, rather than as living lives in which they have a stake in political decisions.
Like Benjamins, Arendts critique of violence is founded in a critique of vitalism, and
fundamentally preoccupied with the startling realization that a politics which is organized around the management of biological life is generative of violence. Arendts effort
to understand the invasion of the political realm by biological processes is extraordinary,
and not readily subsumable to the conventional categories of political theory. Yet it is
key to understanding her account of violence in political modernity.
While framing this account in relation to Benjamins essay, in what follows I also
trace Arendts account of the fate of instrumental action in modernity, and the violence
that she associates with it, through her marginal comments on the life philosophy of
Henri Bergson, which appear both in The Human Condition and On Violence. Arendt
argues in On Violence that Bergsons theory of life as creative evolution fed, via
Georges Sorel, into an understanding of violence as creative action in the anticolonial and anti-state movements of the 1960s (see Arendt, [1969] 1972: 1701). In
The Human Condition, Arendt also understands Bergsons Creative Evolution to give
an account of the ways in which homo faber misunderstands life as a process of making
or fabrication. Arendt contends that one important way of understanding the agency of
violence in politics since the French Revolution concerns the way in which political
action is conceived by theorists of revolution as a process of fabrication, the work
of homo faber. Contrary to this conception of politics as making in political theory,
Arendt argues that political realities show politics to have become overwhelmed by
what she calls the life process, a radically non-teleological and natural energy of flux
and movement. Making sense of Arendts account of violence then means attending to
the mismatch that she perceives between theory and reality, which itself hinges on the
peculiar status of life in modern politics. The influence of Bergson although he is a
marginal figure in Arendts treatment of violence can help to unpack these
complexities.
Arendt, Benjamin and the life process

Both Arendt and Benjamin reject an account of violence that understands it as, in Benjamins terms, law making, even as they both acknowledge the importance of violence
to the revolutionary struggle. Such an effort, as Habermas shows, led to an aporetic
conception of violence in both instances. While Benjamin seeks to resolve this aporia
through recourse to a quasi-theological concept of divine violence, Arendt held fast
to her understanding of the Greek polis as a measure for the political violence of modernity. The problem of violence for Arendt is, after Weber, one of legitimation. As she
makes clear in On Violence, violence as a short-term pursuit of properly political goals
can be justified, but never legitimated (Arendt, [1969] 1972: 151). In On Violence, she
repeatedly associates the violence of the Black Power movement with rationality
(pp. 1734), and writes that [v]iolence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the
extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it (p. 176). She especially
suggested that the powerful emotions that have accompanied violence in revolutionary
situations since the French Revolution especially anger and rage against hypocrisy
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are forms of reason in the way that they provisionally articulate an apparently innate
sense of justice (p. 161; see also Hanssen, 2000: 25).
Arendt had earlier argued in The Human Condition that violence is a justifiable, albeit
prepolitical foundation of politics. She follows Aristotle in arguing that:
[F]orce and violence are justified in [the private] sphere because they are the only means to
master necessity for instance, by ruling over slaves and to become free . . . [V]iolence is
the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of the
world. (Arendt, 1998: 31)
The citizens liberation of himself from the force of natural necessity, and his rule
over the domestic sphere that is governed in Arendts terms by natural necessity both
involve violence. The violence of liberation from natural life is understood here instrumentally, as a means to the end of the citizens active participation in political life. But
this theoretical validation of the role of violence in creating a space for the individual in
the political realm is contradicted by the experience of violence in political modernity.
With the rise of a modern concept of society, argues Arendt, the realms of the polis and
the oikos constantly flow into each other like waves in the never-resting stream of the
life process itself (Arendt, 1998: 33), contaminating public space with the violence that
(necessarily) rules over the private. This can be seen most clearly in Arendts account of
post-1789 revolutions, where, she argues, the violent effort of liberation from which the
revolution starts out overwhelms the end of that instrumental process, which is to be
found in the creation of a new polis governed by freedom. Because such revolutions start
out from a discourse of brotherhood and universal human rights, the violent act of liberation from political tyranny that begins the revolution also unleashes, in Arendts terms,
powerful and uncontrollable natural forces of need and want. The newly enfranchised
masses are more concerned with the social question of their welfare than with the political question of what a just constitution should look like. Thus, in modern revolutionary
experience, the genuinely political goal of founding freedom that orientates the revolution is repeatedly suffocated by a new, socially-oriented politics that seeks to make it the
object of the revolution to solve the socio-biological needs of the masses. Politics
becomes, according to this account, about the management of those needs.
Like Benjamin before her, Arendts theory of politics was motivated by a hostility
towards the ethical-political conception that the sacredness of life is the highest good.
In light of totalitarianism, Arendt further rejected a politics organized around the preservation and furthering of the life of the people. Both Benjamin and Arendt traced the conception of the sanctity of life to a specifically Christian doctrine, and an ethical system
that associates life with victims. But where Benjamin, as we will see, challenged it by
drawing on Jewish theology in order to attempt a distinction between mere life and
existence, with the latter imagined as a form of intentional living, Arendt continued
to rely on the Athenian polis as her model for politics. Here, the fact of mortality the
fact that human life is limited in the individual to a process of birth, growth, decay and
death counter-poses and complements what she describes as the durability of the polis.
Arendts phenomenological distinction between political life and the life process therefore concerns the need to distinguish between different models of life species life, the
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good life of politics, and the life-span of individuals which overlaps with each. Such a
distinction concerns itself with an account of the different relations to the world experienced by the different forms of life. Political life depends both on a world of made
objects that have durability and public significance and a constant, violent effort to
keep the life process at bay. The life process is instead involved in a metabolic cycle
of consumption and production of natural matter, which, in Arendts terms, wears down
the teleologically organized world of durability:
Life is a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear, until
eventually dead matter, the result of small, single, cyclical, life processes, returns into the
over-all gigantic circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all
natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition. (Arendt, 1998: 96)
The notion of process here points towards the lack of a telos in biological life; the kind
of telos that Arendt argues can be captured by the life-stories of public actors.2 So too,
Arendt distinguishes the finitude of an individual human life as potential subject of narrative from the deathlessness of the life of the species, which distinction is also linked
to her further effort to distinguish living from survival (Arendt, 1998: 124). One of the
ways in which survival appears in The Human Condition is in the context of the modern
undoing of the Cartesian opposition between the res cogitans and the res extensae, an
undoing which Arendt also associates with secularization. In this context, survival figures a worldview which has replaced the opposition between thinking and being of classical metaphysics with a philosophical-biological account of life that is continuous with
its objects, which is to say that it is preoccupied with the case of a living organism,
whose very survival depends upon the incorporation, the consumption, of outside matter
(Arendt, 1998: 31213).
A further preliminary distinction between Arendts and Benjamins views of violence
concerns their respective understandings of the creative role of violence in building
new political forms. Benjamin held, at least provisionally, to the Sorelian idea that the
catastrophic consequences of a general strike had the potential to annul the law-preserving, mythic violence of the state, but Arendt, however deep her critique of the
nation-state ran, could not go this far (Benjamin, 1996: 269). While Benjamin conceptualized mere life as the victim that sovereign power marks out for itself, Arendt
thought of the political life of the polis as itself a victim of the outgrowth of the life process. Even so, both Benjamin and Arendt faced the same problem of imagining a form of
violence which could be productive of or protective of politics without contaminating
political life itself.
In a Theatre for Ideas discussion held in New York in the early 1970s, Arendt suggested that state organs of violence such as the police and armed forces are marginal
phenomena, instruments of violence that are legitimate to the extent that they are used
to keep the power structure intact, defend the citizenry against crime, and the country
against an aggressor. To this extent, in Arendts view, they stand outside the walls
of the city, as it were, in order to stand guard over them (Klein, 1971: 98). Yet the example of criminal violence also indicates, for Arendt, the insufficiency of political power to
itself, its ultimate dependence on the violence which she understands as politically
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marginal. The criminal who challenges the authority of the laws challenges at the same
time the power of all those whose agreement supports the laws: the community answer is
violence. In such a case, Arendt goes on, we have a certain breakdown of power, the
inability of the law to be self-enforcing, that provokes a limited violence which itself is
instituted according to law (Klein, 1971: 99).
While state violence creates an aporia in Arendts conception of power, she continues
to think of it as licensed by the non-criminal majority. Thus Arendt holds to what Benjamin calls a law preserving conception of state violence (Benjamin, 1996: 241). For
Benjamin, however, state violence is actually law-making, albeit amorphous. Like
Arendt, Benjamin holds that the law of the police really marks the point at which the
state . . . can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it
desires at any price to attain (Benjamin, 1996: 243). But where Arendt keeps this violence within the realm of law, Benjamin argues that police violence escapes the law. The
fact that law operates through acts of judgement or decision acknowledges a metaphysical category that gives it a claim to critical evaluation. But the police operate, for Benjamin, outside of this realm of legal decision by intervening for security reasons in
countless cases where no clear legal situation exists (Benjamin, 1996: 243). To this
extent police power is formless, like its nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states (p. 243). So too, Benjamin argues that in criminality
itself there is an archaic, law-making element that confronts the law with the threat of
declaring a new law, such that the state fears this violence simply for its lawmaking
character (p. 241).
Arendt held that state violence protects the life of political institutions, while revolutionary violence has a creative role in the forming of them through liberating would-be
political actors from necessity. But the fact that she wants violence to be de-fanged at the
threshold of the polis suggests that she understands the relation between violence and
politics to be a problem to be solved, whereas for Benjamin violence is unavoidably
active inside all existing contemporary parliamentary institutions. Indeed, the decay
of those institutions, Benjamin argues in Sorelian terms, is a result of their failure to face
up to the violence which has founded them (Benjamin, 1996: 244). State violence exists,
for him, in the form of control over mere life which can only be redeemed by a messianic, and strictly unimaginable (from the point of view of mere life) form of violence,
whereas Arendt thinks that it is the erosion of the boundary between political and biological life that itself accounts for the presence of violence in modern politics. In order to
do justice to the critical potential of Arendts argument about violence, it is first necessary to frame more carefully her and Benjamins conceptions of life in relation to one
another.
Benjamin and vitalism

Benjamins Critique of violence is bookended by attacks on vitalism and Darwinism.
Towards the end of the essay, Benjamin takes issue with pacifism and activism, which he
argues are founded in the doctrine of the sanctity of life, which they either apply to all
animal and even vegetable life, or limit to human life. (Benjamin, 1996: 250). An ambiguity over what life is meant to mean in this context, already suggested by the question of
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whether it is all organic life, or only human life that is understood to be sacred, is exemplified in pacifisms encounter with the dilemma posed by the extreme case of the revolutionary killing of an oppressor. Benjamin quotes from Kurt Hillers essay
Anti-Cain, which opposes the argument of the intelligent terrorist that [i]f I do not
kill, I shall never establish the world dominion of justice to the central tenet of pacifism
that all life, even the life of the oppressor, is sacred. We, writes Hiller as Benjamin
quotes him, profess that higher even than the happiness and justice of existence stands
existence itself [Dasein an sich steht]:
As certainly as this last proposition is false, indeed ignoble, it shows the necessity of seeking
the reason for the commandment no longer in what the deed does to the victim, but in what it
does to God and the doer. The proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence
is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life [das blobe
Leben] and it has this meaning in the argument referred to. It contains a mighty truth,
however, if existence, or, better, life (words whose ambiguity is readily dispelled, like
that of freedom, when they are used with reference to two distinct spheres), means the
irreducible, total condition that is man; if the proposition is intended to mean that the nonexistence of man is something more terrible than the (admittedly subordinate) not-yetattained condition of the just man. The proposition quoted above owes its plausibility to this
ambiguity. Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, any more
than it can be said to coincide with any other of his conditions and qualities, including even
the uniqueness of his bodily person. However sacred man is (or however sacred that life in
him which is identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife), there is no sacredness in
his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men. What, then, distinguishes it essentially from the life of animals and plants? And even if these were sacred,
they could not be so by virtue only of being alive, of being in life. It might be well worthwhile to track down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life. Perhaps, indeed probably, it is relatively recent, the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western tradition to
seek the saint it has lost in cosmological obscurity. (Benjamin, 1996: 251)
When activism defends the unconditional sanctity of life, it refers to what is properly no more than one attribute or condition of mans existence, that is, his bodily vulnerability. What Benjamin calls the condition of mere life has become, in the example
of Hillers activism, the site of an absolute justification for non-violence in the name of
existence itself. Hillers proposition that existence itself stands over any justified existence (which latter may carry the necessity of violence with it) is false for Benjamin,
since it entangles concepts of life and existence that should properly be kept separate.3
But it also carries an echo of what looks like a much profounder claim, that the nonexistence of man as irreducible, total condition, man as an intentional being, would be a
far worse thing than the fact that the condition of the just man is yet to be created. The
absurdity of the claim that existence itself stands above any justified existence, and the
need to refute it, arguably push Benjamin towards an inversion of this claim which, while
it yields a mighty truth, expresses that truth in Hillers own declarative, empty form.
Any possible argument about what a justified existence might be, and how that existence
is to be created is deferred from Benjamins argument, as the conditioned, intentional life
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of man displaces Hillers existence itself as a kind of highest good. Where life for
Hiller means the quasi-sacred fact of biological existence, for Benjamin, life means the
fully conditioned existence of man. Thinking of life as a meaningful existence rather
than as mere bodily fragility allows life to be imagined, in a different way, as something
like a highest good.
This possibility resonates through Benjamins argument, but the more urgent task at
hand is to refute activism. What Benjamin thinks he can hear in Hillers defence of existence itself, and more generally in the entanglement of concepts of life and existence in
pacificism, is the model of an existence which is justified as mere life, an existence
which in fact is beyond justification in its being an absolute, sacred good, but that is also
reducible to the condition of just being alive. Bodily life can be taken away; and so by
locating the sanctity of life in the scene of its removal, by associating sanctity with bodily
vulnerability, the sanctity of life is made to inhabit those victims to whom violence is
done, and from whom life is taken away. The sacredness of life as a total condition
means that, for Benjamin, this quality belongs equally to the living and the dead; but the
activists locating of lifes sanctity in the mere fact of being alive (and, perhaps, human)
opens it to the violence of state power.
When, then, might it be permissible to take a life? And what relation might such a
violent act have to the justified existence? The problem of the sanctity of life intrudes
into revolutionary politics, and leaves these questions hanging. But this problem is not
confined to the relatively marginal phenomenon of pacifism; rather, pacifism activates
a sense of mere life on which state law depends and from which it feeds. For Benjamin,
life itself is the marked bearer of guilt (1996: 251). The states law-making in fact
produces mere life in order to rule over it, as Giorgio Agamben has shown in great detail.
The mythic violence of the state is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, a form
of power which demands sacrifice. Mythic violence is a manifestation of the gods that
rules human life through fate, establishing laws as boundaries that ill-fated, natural life
infringes unwittingly, and which it must expiate through the offering of a sacrifice since
blood is the symbol of mere life (p. 250). Such a mythic, law-making violence infects,
according to Benjamin, even the least obviously fatalistic account of the moral law, such
as Kants categorical imperative. Benjamin famously opposes the mythic violence of the
state to the pure catastrophe of divine violence which undoes mythic violence. Divine
violence strikes without warning, without threat, and does not stop short of annihilation. Where mythic violence rules over mere life for its own sake, divine violence is
pure power over all life for the sake of the living (p. 250).
If the critique of the philosophy of right that determines Benjamins treatment of violence takes such a marked philosophic-theological turn, this is done out of what is perceived as a necessity. As Habermas remarks in his essay on Benjamin, [m]yth marks a
debased human species, hopelessly deprived of the good and just life for which it was
determined banished to a cursed cycle of merely reproducing itself and surviving
(1979: 39). For which it was determined: the thought in Benjamin would seem to be that
life can or at least should be thought capable of being thought in teleological terms, as
oriented towards a just end. Thus Benjamins essay still tends towards a possible thinking of the just life, even as life appears irremediably driven towards the biological reproduction and survival that cannot but be thought as not its true vocation, and that is
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infinitely vulnerable to state violence.4 Benjamins essay looks as if it will move towards
an account of what a justified existence might be, at least in its parenthetical announcement of the claim that life and existence really are capable of being understood to
occupy different spheres. But no such account, nor any explanation as to what role violence might have in the creation of the justified existence, is offered. Even so, the empty
space where we might expect a justified argument about freedom or existence to be is not
pure lack in Benjamins essay. Law-making is associated with law-preserving violence,
and to this extent Benjamin is wary of any positive or mythic argument about violence
that would accord it a constructive role in the justification of existence, understood as the
building of new political forms or new forms of humanity. The role of violence, after
Sorel, is rather to bring about catastrophe, something approaching the annihilating
power of divine violence. It would appear to be a much better thing to leave life unjustified than to risk justifying it in the wrong way through a turn to the creative powers of
violence. But the argument continues to signal the possibility of a justification of life.
Arendt and life itself

Any theorization of oppositional violence risks being formalized into a mythic, institutional and founding act, since that violence struggles to think of itself as nothing more
than annihilating. Arendt notes at the beginning of On Revolution that all societies formalize the violence at their founding into myths of sibling rivalry, Romulus slaying
Remus or Cain slaying Abel (Arendt, 1990: 20). To this extent, she argues, the fraternity
of the modern nation-state is founded in fratricide. But fratricide does not pass easily, in
practice, into brotherhood. In On Violence, Arendt encountered a defence of the kind of
mythic violence that Benjamin had already dismantled, in Jean-Paul Sartres assertion, in
his preface to Fanons The Wretched of the Earth that [v]iolene [ . . . ] like Achilles
lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted. If this were true, Arendt rejoins, revenge
would be the cure-all for most of our ills (Arendt, 1972: 122). Like Benjamin in his early
work on Trauerspiel and Tragedy, Arendt implicitly imagines the tragic hero as the
first moral subject, and rejects any sacrificial, mythic model for violence, whether oppositional or sovereign, as expiation of guilt (see Hanssen, 1998: 131). But given that
Arendt does not offer the kind of quasi-theological justification of divine violence
found in Benjamin, and that an idea of political power embodied in public speech
remains normative for her, her equally perceptive account of the entanglement of mere
life with sovereign violence takes her in a different direction.
In The Human Condition, Arendt argues that with the rise of the vita activa in the
modern age, and within the diversity of the human condition with its various human
capacities it was precisely life that overruled all other considerations (Arendt, 1998:
313). Like Benjamin in his critique of Hiller, Arendt suggests that this modern reversal
operated within the fabric of a Christian society whose fundamental belief in the sacredness of life has survived, and has even remained completely unshaken by, secularization
and the general decline of the Christian faith (Arendt, 1998: 314). The sheerness of
unconditioned life, of life itself or mere life is also part of her account of the rise of
labour in the vita activa of the modern world, since [t]he human condition of labor is
life itself (Arendt, 1998: 7). Although Arendt does not pursue the Benjaminian thought,
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more recently developed by Giorgio Agamben, that sovereign power depends on mere
life as its sacrificial victim, in her own way she pursued the terrifying dominance of life
in modern nation-states, and similarly struggled to think political life outside of paradigms of fragility, victimhood and survival.5 In her study of the French Revolution,
Arendt takes the incursion of biological life into politics to explain the turn of the Revolution towards violence. According to Arendt, the moderate goals of political reform
from which the revolution set out were overwhelmed by an elemental force (Arendt,
1990: 113) when the course of revolution was redirected, first from reform towards the
founding of freedom, and subsequently towards the guaranteeing of life and happiness.
When the poor appeared on the scene of the revolution, she suggests, freedom had to be
surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life-process itself (Arendt, 1990: 60) as
the raging force of the people was nourished by the necessity of biological life itself
(p. 112).
Like Benjamins earlier argument, then, Arendts effort to give an account of human
conditions, to determine what might be the justified life, is interrupted by the appearance
of sheer, unconditioned life as the object of politics. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the failure to answer the question of a rationally-conditioned existence,
and the place of violence within it, appears in the context of the difficulty each has in
wrestling with the problem of mere life or life itself. In the context of political revolution,
this problem corresponds to the dilemma of how to give legitimacy to a new political
entity that lacks authority, and that has been born in a violent struggle for liberation. The
experience of France suggests to Arendt that the dilemma is irresolvable when the political issue of legitimacy is mired in terrible social problems. In this context, there is a
tendency for the grasping movement of biological need to be enshrined in law itself.
Thus, in France, it is the very process of the revolution itself which became the source
of all laws (p. 183) as the revolutionary actors ended up hoping beyond hope that violence would conquer poverty (p. 221).
The problem of revolution is also connected, though, to Arendts understanding of the
fate of instrumental action in modernity. In The Human Condition, she approaches
instrumentality through her character homo faber. Homo faber is the active man who sets
ends for his activity and does violence to nature in order to achieve them, and is distinguished from the essentially peaceful labourer, animal laborans, who nourishes and
maintains his body in continuity with nature. Arendts peculiar argument about homo
faber involves two interrelated claims. First, she suggests that homo faber has failed
to assert himself in the modern world, under conditions seemingly so extraordinarily
propitious (Arendt, 1998: 312). She poses many possible causes for this, including
Humes critique of the causality principle which, she argues, displaced the earlier
mechanistic view of causality. Humes scepticism about cause led, according to Arendt,
to a turning point in the intellectual history of the modern age where the evolution of a
lower being, for instance the ape, can cause the appearance of a higher being, for instance
man. Evolutionary and developmental thought thereby displaces, in Arendts account of
it, a model of instrumental action found in the analogy of the watchmaker who must be
superior to all watches whose cause he is (p. 312). Evolution thinks in terms of biological development and growth rather than human instrumental action, and in Arendts
peculiar argument comes to displace the latter. This displacement is found, she thinks,
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in modern life philosophy in its various forms. Arendt also thinks that Marxism is continuous with evolutionary theory, relying on the early humanistic Marx with his notion of
the creator-subject transforming species life into a political category (see Arendt, 1998:
116; Terada, 2011: 956). The general intellectual climate for the failure of homo faber
to assert himself, then, is one in which
it is always life itself which is the supreme standard to which everything else is referred, and
the interests of the individual as well as the interests of mankind are always equated with
individual life or the life of the species as though it were a matter of course that life were
the highest good. (Arendt, 1998: 311-12)
Her second claim about homo faber is that even after his failure to assert himself, and even
after public life has become overwhelmed by the life process, political theorists and politicians continue to describe the course of events as if they were the work of homo faber. Thus
the men of the French Revolution, in Arendts account of them, tried to think of the revolution
as something made, as a product of political ideals, even though they found themselves swept
along by the biological force of life that their ideas had helped to set in motion or to liberate.
This also helps to account, for Arendt, for the violence of the revolution, since thinking of a
political event under the category of fabrication brings the violence of making into politics.
An instrumental view of political action, that she herself would refute, therefore misapprehends the biological processes such as labour that come to dominate the public sphere. When
Marx discusses the biological process of labour as if it were a political subject, according to
Arendt, he seeks to disguise this manoeuvre by collapsing labour and action, distinct parts of
the vita activa for Arendt, into work. So too, she claims that Nietzsche and Bergson describe
action in terms of fabrication homo faber instead of homo sapiens just as Marx thinks of
acting in terms of making and describes labor in terms of work (Arendt, 1998: 313). Homo
faber then remains the dominant theoretical ideal of modern revolutionary politics and life
philosophy, even when they discuss species-life or life; to this extent, these philosophies
fail to grasp the reality that the life process has overtaken the political realm.
Bergson and anti-Semitism

Arendts general contention, then, is that the dominant strains of political and philosophical
thought in modernity, life philosophy and Marxism, cannot keep pace with the life processes
that they purport to explain. In a footnote to The Human Condition, Arendt cites Jean
Leclerqs view that it was Bergson who threw the concept of homo faber into the circulation
of ideas (Arendt, 1998: 136). She also cites Bergsons view in Creative Evolution of the
whole of nature as an immense fabric from which we can cut out whatever we want to resew
it however we like as an example of the dominance of homo faber, his instrumentalization
of the world, his confidence in tools and in the productivity of the maker of artificial objects
in theorizations of modernity (Arendt, 1998: 305). Although she claims that an analysis of
Bergson would lead her too far afield, in fact, Bergson might have offered her an exact
description of the tension that she explores: a world ruled over by life itself in ways that cannot
be grasped according to the meansend model of fabrication, even though modern selves do
not seem to be able to shake their confidence that it should be graspable in just those terms.
368
While Bergson claims in Creative Evolution that we are the artisans of the moments
of our life to the extent that we are creating ourselves continually (Bergson, [1911]
1998: 7), he insists that our efforts to understand life and the way that it continually
unfolds in a process of unforeseeable evolution testify to our incapacity to capture this
dynamic process. We always take a frozen view of evolution, cutting out images of
what is in reality a never-ending, dynamic process in which ends cannot be identified.
Indeed, the dominant modes of explaining evolution, the concept of finality and the idea
of mechanism, are anthropomorphic projections of the causality of a human intellect
onto nature, and we would do better to turn to the sympathetic power of intuition, as
Bergson understands it, in order to grasp the reality of creative evolution as endless
becoming. Our different models of causality mechanism and finality agree, for Bergson, in the principle that all is given, thinking of the process of creative development
according to a metaphysical temporality that sets for itself the problem of explaining how
a primordial nothing gets filled up with being. However hard we try, Bergson writes,
we cannot get rid of the metaphysical idea that the full is an embroidery on the canvas of
the void, that being is superimposed on nothing (Bergson, [1911] 1998: 276). In short,
[t]he intellect is not made to think evolution, in the proper sense of the word that is to
say, the continuity of a change that is pure mobility, and consequently becoming itself
slips through our fingers (Bergson, 1998: 163). To this extent life, understood by Bergson as creative evolution, transcends finality (Bergson, 1998: 224), the setting of ends
with which we seek to understand it, and would be better understood as an edge cutting
into the future, a vital, creative impulse. While we are bound, as homo faber, to think of
reality as an assemblage made up of elements, the continual, dynamic process of the
elan vital never freezes itself in reality into a picture of what is given to us (Bergson,
1998: 91). This is rather how we are bound to think of our experience.
While Bergson views life as a continually unfolding, spontaneous and unforeseeable
process that our model of instrumental rationality is bound to misapprehend as a process
of making, the filling up of a void, this view gives an accurate account of how Arendt
understands a politics which has been given over to life. The life process itself, for
Arendt, as human condition is mundane and cyclical, but it comes to mean something
else when it is transplanted into the political sphere. In fact, Arendt had already given
a strikingly Bergsonian account of this unforeseeable unfolding in her account of the rise
of totalitarian movements in The Origins of Totalitarianism.6 Totalitarianism is understood by Arendt pre-eminently as a natural process; it is one particularly extreme example of the general tendency of the social realm to let loose an unnatural growth, so to
speak, of the natural (Arendt, 1998: 47). Nazism, especially, is understood explicitly
as a movement in Arendts account of it, defined by its being perpetually in motion and
therefore always escaping any effort we might make to categorize or to frame it with a
particular political ideology (Arendt, 1968c: 4). Indeed, Arendts claim is that Nazism
made use of and dispensed with ideologies as and when it needed them, using them
merely as vehicles for its process of endless motion the only final principle of which,
for her, was absolute destruction. But Arendts own account of how totalitarianism crystallized out of its elements can also be seen to confirm the Bergsonian thesis that
[b]etween the effect and the cause [ . . . ] it is difficult to regard the cause as producer
of the effect (Bergson, 1998: 183).
Swift
369
I am suggesting this unexpected synergy between Arendts account of totalitarianism

and Bergsons account of creative evolution partly because Bergsonian ideas of life and
creativity, and especially the pathos of his celebration of life as an unfolding, continuous
creation, feature importantly in her later critique of the New Left, where violence is
understood as the best way of forwarding lifes creativity. Before arriving there, however, it is worthwhile to pause with Origins and to explore the ways in which political
understanding is inclined, Arendt claims, to misapprehend totalitarianisms elements
as causes. This can be seen most clearly through the example of anti-Semitism.
What is the agency of anti-Semitism in the development of Nazi totalitarianism?
Arendt argues that there is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and
mystifying than:
the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been
this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting
the whole infernal machine in motion. Such discrepancies between cause and effect outrage
our common sense. (Arendt, 1968: 3)
To some extent, Arendt follows Marxs account of the exemplarity of the problem of
anti-Semitism in his critique of bourgeois notions of civil society in On the Jewish
Question, and turns this critique towards the unprecedented social form of twentiethcentury totalitarianism. Yet Arendt effectively argues that there is a need to grasp
anti-Semitism, and its agency in the case of totalitarian movements, as an example of the
process of becoming. Grasping this process is difficult because [o]nly the horror of the
final catastrophe, and even more the homelessness and uprootedness of the survivors,
made the Jewish question so prominent in our everyday political life (Arendt,
1968: 3). Arendt uses a natural-scientific metaphor that Bergson and Benjamin both
employ to make sense of this process. Writing in her Preface to Origins of the subterranean stream of European history, on which rode a series of moods, affects and attitudes associated with anti-Semitism and imperialism, Arendt claims that since it was
only the final crystallizing catastrophe that brought these elements of totalitarianism
into the open and to public notice, there has been a tendency to simply equate totalitarianism with its elements and origins as though every outburst of antisemitism or racism
or imperialism could be identified totalitarianism (Arendt, 1968: xi). Her use of a biological metaphor indicates that anti-Semitism was a catalyzing agent in totalitarianism;
that is to say, it helped to make totalitarianism crystallize as a political-biological form in
such a way that the agent was also transformed in the crystallizing process. The difficulty
for historical understanding therefore is in disentangling anti-Semitism as an agent or
element of totalitarianism from what totalitarianism made of it, and thereby thinking
backwards from the paradigm of the concentration camp victim to what anti-Semitism
was and created in the pre-totalitarian world. But this is a difficult thing to do, because
the product of the process the concentration camp victim overpowers all efforts to
think of its origins as something different.
The danger of dwelling on the victim, for Arendt, is that it re-institutes an
anthropological-theological understanding of the victim as pure bearer of the historical
meaning of the genocide. Thus, what Arendt calls the scapegoat theory of history
370
upholds the perfect innocence of the victim, a thesis which seems to hold for the victim
of the holocaust because he is objectively and absolutely innocent because nothing he
did or omitted to do matters or has any connection with his fate (Arendt, 1968: 6). But it
is just for this reason, Arendt thinks, that the scapegoat thesis must be resisted, since it
automatically discharges the victim of responsibility (p. 6). The victim does not cease
to be corresponsible because it became the victim of the worlds injustice or cruelty (p.
6). The problem with the scapegoat thesis and the problem with one dominant interpretation of the Holocaust that Arendt addresses here is that in its fixation on the horror
of the bare life that was produced through the Holocaust, it projects that image of victimhood back into its account of the causes of the Holocaust, and symptomatically forgets
that the cause, anti-Semitism, is transformed through the process itself, as those who
became the victims of each, the Jews, are transformed too.
Creativity, life and violence

A key aspect of Arendts critique of modern political life as it increasingly embodies violence that has emerged throughout this article has been the ways in which political ideologies and philosophical ideas fail to keep pace with the flux of events that they try to
understand and control. This insight, and the important role played by violence within
it, are taken further in Arendts account of the global phenomenon of the student protest
movement in 1968 in her late essay On Violence (Arendt, 1972: 117). Arendt claims that
the students misrecognize the sources for their own turn to violence, which she repeatedly associates with the rise of technology, and which she frames especially in the context of the nuclear standoff or what she calls the weird suicidal development of modern
weapons (Arendt, 1972: 116). The general context that Arendt defines for the growing
commitment to violence on the New Left is uncertainty about the future. In the context of
nuclear armament, the means of violence overwhelm the ends of politics in a particularly
dramatic way, as societys technological development is continually geared towards preparation for a thermonuclear war that never happens. The students aesthetic critique of
society, which takes the form of a growing commitment to violence as a furthering and
enhancement of the life force, misrecognizes its continuity with this wider political abandonment of the instrumentality of violence. Both the Cold War powers and the students,
in other words, pass beyond an instrumental model of violence, to a view of violence as
an end in itself. But Arendt also asks why it is that the students cling with such stubborn
tenacity to concepts and doctrines that have not only been refuted by factual developments but are clearly inconsistent with their own politics (Arendt, 1972: 124). The disconnect with reality and what she thinks of as the outmodedness of their ideas are in fact
part and parcel of the same phenomenon. The students cling tenaciously to an ideology
of creativity in the face of the fact that an increasingly consumerist, technology-driven
society has done away with any notion of work. Behind their critique of consumerism,
she argues, stands the illusion of Marxs society of free producers, the liberation of the
productive forces of society; a revolution which has in fact been accomplished, Arendt
thinks, by science and technology (Arendt, 1972: 117). Like the life philosophy that, in
Arendts account, inspires it, the student protest movements aestheticization of violence
blocks out the technological context that determines it and that it reproduces in its radical
Swift
371
abandonment of an instrumental view of violence. As Benjamin remarked in his essay

On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Bergsons philosophy, in his earlier Matter and
Memory,
manages above all to stay clear of that experience from which his own philosophy evolved
or, rather, in reaction to which it arose. It was the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale
industrialism. In shutting out this experience the eye perceives an experience of a complementary nature in the form of its spontaneous afterimage, as it were. (Benjamin, 1992: 154)
But while the students are guilty of misapprehending, like Marx before them, the real
process-character of modern life and labour because they cling to an outmoded, humanistic idea of man as a creator-producer, a figure who, in the work of Sartre and Fanon, is
seen to produce himself through violence, their expression of this doctrine of creativity is
also, for Arendt, internally inconsistent. Unlike Marx, who proposes that man reproduces
himself through labour, the students turn to the Nietzschean thesis that the joy of
destruction is a creative joy (Arendt, 1972: 117). They at once inhabit and depart from
a Marxist humanism, and in doing so they make contact, in their seemingly so novel
biological justification of violence with the most pernicious elements in our oldest traditions of political thought (Arendt, 1972: 171). These elements enable a thinking of
power in biological terms as violence. Specifically, violence is understood as creative
in its expressing of what Bertrand de Jouvenel calls an inner urge to grow (Arendt,
1972: 171). Just as in the realm of organic life everything either grows or declines or
dies, this theory runs as Arendt rehearses it, so in the realm of human affairs power
supposedly can sustain itself only through expansion; otherwise it shrinks and dies. The
endpoint of this biological theory of power is found in the view that kings are killed not
because of their tyranny but because of their weakness and that the people erect scaffolds as a biological penalty for weakness (p. 171). In fact, Arendt had herself
employed such an organicist theory of power in her effort to understand the agency of
anti-Semitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she had compared the Jews to
aristocrats in pre-Revolutionary France. When the aristocrats lost their privileges,
among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites,
without any function in the rule of the country. Comparably, [a]ntisemitism reached its
climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and
finally were left with nothing but their wealth (Arendt, 1968: 4).
But this biological conception of the life of power as one of growth, weakness and
decay ultimately expresses itself in terms of the ultimate human conditions both biological and political for Arendt of natality and mortality. Where the capacity to begin
something new, the coming-into-life of birth, expresses for her the hope of politics and
while death is, in her terms, the most anti-political because it is the most isolated human
experience, what the espousal of the creativity of violence issues in the 1960s is a politics
organized around the paradoxical experience of death as vitality. Death is made into a
communal, even carnivalesque affective experience that can be undergone in ecstatic
union with others who are also wedded to violence.7 Faced collectively and in action,
writes Arendt, death changes its countenance; now nothing seems more likely to intensify our vitality than its proximity. It is as though, she goes on, life itself, the immortal
372
life of the species, nourished, as it were, by the sempiternal dying of its individual members, is surging upward, is actualized in the practice of violence (Arendt, 1972: 165).
Human coming-together, the sign of politics and power for Arendt, is surrendered here to
the biological process of life itself a life stripped of its human conditions and experienced as sheer vitality in the communal affects that accumulate around the proximity of
death.
Conclusion
Rather than reading Arendts theory of violence as a failed effort to justify an instrumental view of violence, this article has instead understood Arendts theory as an historicalphilosophical account of why it is that violence has lost its political justification. At each
stage of the argument, violence becomes unjustifiable just at those moments when it is
taken as legitimate, as no longer the means to an end but rather as an endless process
disguised as a means. Arendt tracks this same shift in the meaning of violence across her
work, in the French Revolution, in totalitarianism, and again in the oppositional violence
of the 1960s. Yet Arendt always seems to imagine that violence may be justifiable in any
context of political struggle, if it is supported by a genuine public realm. Christopher Finlay is no doubt right to claim that
[f]or Arendt, like Benjamin, violence becomes problematic and threatens to vitiate any
attempt at a true new beginning as soon as it tries to do anything positive, to create, to shape,
to posit new conceptions of justice, to constitute or posit new laws. (Finlay, 2009: 40)
Arendt tries to hold, across her work, to an instrumental view of violence that yet
refuses violence anything other than a role in the preparation of raw materials, or the
opening of spaces for creative action. She also keeps disclosing the reasons as to why
violent means have continually outrun political ends in the modern world. There is something about the structure of capitalism, especially about the way that the exposure of bare
life to state power calls continually for a justification of political existence that cannot be
made, that facilitates this overflow. More recently than Arendt, Boltanski and Chiapello
have sought to describe the ways in which capitalism channelled the aesthetic critique of
the 1960s, its ideas of personal autonomy, creativity and authenticity, into its new culture
of managerialism, which leaves individual lives more anxious about the future and
unfulfilled precisely by presenting them with the illusory hope of autonomy and selffulfillment in a de-regulated workplace. Such an effort involves just the kind of coopting of liberation the site of a proper, instrumental use of violence in Arendts terms
into capitalisms endless processes of accumulation. As the authors show, such an
incorporation takes from the artistic critique of society a view of liberation as emancipation from all forms of necessity in order to make uncertainty a lifestyle and a value
(Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 433, 434). Arendts work similarly charts the ways in
which a violent liberation from necessity has led, in modernity, to the rule of an unpredictable flux of life that, as it becomes a political category, carries violence with it.
Arendts work is best understood as a narrative account of the ways in which the political
tradition in the West has failed to justify its increasingly preeminent category, life, and
Swift
373
with disastrous consequences. The way in which Arendt anticipates the most urgent critical studies of our society suggests the continual timeliness of her critique of life and
violence.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. Benjamin was the author of a lost fragment on Life and Violence (see Rabinbach, 1997: 178).
While Benjamins attack on vitalism is marginal to his overall critique of violence, it runs
across his work (especially in relation to his reading of Dilthey). It has become an important
source for the contemporary revival of interest in Foucauldian biopolitics, especially as that
concern is married to a study of Nazism and the Holocaust in Giorgio Agambens work, especially Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Agamben also acknowledges a major debt
to Arendts work which he claims remains, even today, practically without continuation (see
Agamben, 1998: 4). But he remains curiously dependent on Arendts use of Aristotles distinction between political and natural life. That is to say, Arendts own critique of vitalism, which
runs across her work and which frames her account of violence, does not feature in Agambens
study. Agambens reading of Arendt is then focussed centrally on The Human Condition.
Where Foucault never engaged in any detail with the Holocaust, argues Agamben, conversely
in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a biopolitical perspective is altogether lacking (Agamben,
1997: 4). While the present argument is heavily indebted to the way that Agamben brings life to
the centre of his reading of politics and political violence in light of Arendt, I take an altogether
different direction in my engagement with Arendts critique of vitalism which, I argue, can lead
precisely to a reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism.
2. As Rei Terada points out (2011: 96):
Arendts term life process is ambiguous, encompassing both a biological drive and the organised
social activities that sustain and embody such a drive. The phrase life process begins to appear in
nineteenth-and turn-of-the-century social thought; it occurs, for example, in Thorsten Veblens Theory of the Leisure Class (which Arendt cites [in The Human Condition] as well as in Dostoevsky
and Marx. In the wake of the Second World War, the phrase sounds more ominous, redolent of the
Nazi industrialization of life and death.
3. As I argue, Benjamin affirms the possibility of submitting these terms to a critique and a separation of their meaning, without actually doing so. Yet Hiller is far from being alone in using different terms for life and existence indiscriminately. See, for example, Kant in the Critique of
Judgement, who argues:
Only by what he does without concern for enjoyment, in complete freedom and independently of
whatever he could also receive passively from nature, does [man] give his existence [Dasein] an
374
absolute value, as the existence [Existenz] of a person. Happiness, with all its abundance of agreeableness, is far from being an unconditioned good. (Kant, [1790] 1987: 50)
Both of these differ from the feeling of life or Lebensgefuhl that Kant, who got the term
from the Savoyard vicar of Rousseaus Emile, associates elsewhere in the Critique with the
feeling of pleasure derived from the aesthetic capacity [t]o apprehend a regular, purposive
building with ones cognitive power (Kant, [1790] 1987: 44). So too, as Agamben points
out at the beginning of Homo Sacer, there was an early confusion of these terms in Aristotles Politics:
This [life according to the good] is the greatest end both in common for all men and for each man
separately. But men also come together and maintain the political community in view of simple
living, because there is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living . . . If there is no great
difficulty as to the way of life . . . clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life
[zoe] as if it were a kind of serenity [euemeria, beautiful day] and a natural sweetness. (Agamben,
1997: 2)
4.
5.
6.
7.
The good life, in Aristotle the life that, as Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben are at
pains to point out, operates according to an entirely different principle to the life of the
household, the space where zoe is both cultivated and overrruled by violence is
coloured by our sense of natural life as pointing towards the notion that there is some
good inherent in the mere fact of living, even if life is filled with suffering. Political life
appears as something that should be justifiable or justified in and of itself, but it remains
shaped and contoured by a justification in terms of happiness and survival. Important for
my argument is Benjamins sense that life and existence should be capable of categorical
distinction.
Working with the late Theses on the Philosophy of History, Habermas also notes that Benjamins anti-evolutionary conception of history . . . does not remain completely blind to progress made in the emancipation of humanity, but that Benjamin was gravely pessimistic of the
capacity for selective breakthroughs . . . to unite into a tradition and not fall prey to being forgotten (Habermas, 1979: 40). Compare also Rei Teradas claim that The Human Condition
explores Arendts version of a dilemma discovered by Kant, Nietzsche and Freud in different
ways the dilemma of the misdirected organism, burdened with a drive that makes its own existence difficult (Terada, 2011: 96).
It is notable that Judith Butlers work on violence, which is heavily indebted to Arendt, works
extensively with the notion of bodily vulnerability as a shared condition which poses the possibility of overcoming violence. Yet, as I go on to explain, Arendt is closely aligned with the
Benjaminian idea that any recourse to mere life is politically disabling in its complicity with a
sovereign power which is heavily invested in thinking life as fragile. See Butler, Precarious
Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004).
For a quasi-Bergsonian reading of Origins in these terms, see, especially, Jane Bennetts
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things , (2010: 334). While Bennett challenges
Arendts traditional, subject centred notion of agency from the point of view of a distributive
agency model, her analysis nonetheless suggests the possibility of the Bergsonian reading of
Arendt mounted here.
Although there is not space to develop this thought here, Arendts description of an ecstatic politics of death in the students aesthetic critique is worthy of consideration in relation to accounts
Swift
375
of the carnivalesque, community-enhancing feelings that many theorists of the Holocaust have
attached to the possibility of genocide. See especially Dan Stone, Genocide as Transgression
(2004). Stones comments on Roger Callois are especially pertinent.
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Author biography
Simon Swift is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory at the School of English, University
of Leeds. He is the author of Hannah Arendt (Routledge, 2008) and Romanticism, Literature and
Philosophy (Continuum, 2006). He is currently working on a study of stoicism in philosophical
anthropology and literature in the nineteenth century.

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European Journal of Social Theory

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

increasingly administered and bureaucratized totalitarian and liberal capitalist forms of

Arendt, Benjamin and the life process

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

Benjamin and vitalism

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

Arendt and life itself

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

Bergson and anti-Semitism

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

I am suggesting this unexpected synergy between Arendts account of totalitarianism

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

Creativity, life and violence

abandonment of an instrumental view of violence. As Benjamin remarked in his essay

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

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