Natality and the Rise of the Social in Hannah Arendt‘s Political Thought by Jeanette Parker BFA, University of Calgary, 2005 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English With a Concentration in Cultural, Social and Political Thought  Jeanette Parker, 2011 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Supervisory Committee Natality and The Rise of the Social in Hannah Arendt‘s Political Thought by Jeanette Parker BFA, University of Calgary, 2005 Supervisory Committee Dr. Evelyn Cobley, (Department of English) Supervisor Dr. Nicole Shukin, (Department of English) Departmental Member Dr. Arthur Kroker, (Department of Political Science) Outside Member iii Abstract Supervisory Committee Dr. Evelyn Cobley, (Department of English) Supervisor Dr. Nicole Shukin, (Department of English) Departmental Member Dr. Arthur Kroker, (Department of Political Science) Outside Member This thesis focuses on Hannah Arendt‘s theory of natality, which is identified with the event of birth into a pre-existing human world. Arendt names natality the ―ontological root‖ of political action and of human freedom, and yet, as critics of Arendt‘s political writings have pointed out, this notion of identifying freedom with birth is somewhat perplexing. I return to Arendt‘s phenomenological analysis of active human life in The Human Condition, focusing on the significance of natality as the disclosure of a unique ―who‖ within a specific relational web. From there, I trace the distinct threats to natality, speech-action, and worldly relations posed by the political philosophical tradition, on the one hand, and by the modern biopolitical ―rise of the social‖ on the other. Drawing connections between Arendt‘s theory of the social and Michel Foucault‘s work on the biopolitical management of populations, my thesis defends Arendt‘s contentious distinction between social and political life; the Arendtian social, I argue, can fruitfully be read as biopolitical. iv Table of Contents Supervisory Committee ...................................................................................................... ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Dedication .......................................................................................................................... vi List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................ vii Introduction: A Biopolitical Reading of Arendt‘s Theory of the Social ............................ 1 Arendt and Foucault on Modernity: Logics of Process and the ―Entrance of Life into History‖ ........................................................................................................................... 9 Overview of the Thesis Chapters .................................................................................. 11 Chapter 1: Hannah Arendt‘s Phenomenological Analysis of The Vita Activa: Labor, Work, Action and the Condition of Natality ..................................................................... 17 Arendt‘s Phenomenological Method and the Significance of Distinctions .................. 28 The Tradition of Political Philosophy and the Securitization of the Public Realm: the Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa .............................................................................. 32 The Public/Private Divide: The Traditional Conception of Freedom versus Necessity 40 Labor and the Eternal/Cyclical Condition of ―Life Itself‖: animal laborans‘ ―Metabolism with Nature‖ ............................................................................................ 44 Work and the Means-Ends Logic of Homo Faber ........................................................ 53 The Significance of Action: Unpredictable Appearances ............................................. 62 Action and the ―Space of Appearance‖: Reality and the Public Sphere ....................... 70 Speech and the Disclosure of the Agent: Natality, Plurality, and World-Creation ...... 80 Conclusion: Situation Action in the Vita Activa ........................................................... 94 Chapter 2: The Rise of the Social and the Biopolitics of Population: Arendt and Foucault on the Modern Securitization of ‗Life Itself‘ .................................................................. 105 Modernity as ―Crisis‖ and the Breach with Tradition ................................................ 121 The Rise of the Social in The Human Condition: distinguishing Behavior from Action ..................................................................................................................................... 128 The Discovery of the Archimedean Point and ―Acting into Nature‖ ......................... 138 Population versus Populousness in Foucault‘s Lectures ............................................ 160 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 162 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 166 v Acknowledgments The experience of planning and writing this thesis has confirmed for me Hannah Arendt‘s insight that no one, and certainly not the fabricating author, is a self-sufficient being. I would like to thank the members of my supervisory committee for their encouragement and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of the thesis. I am especially grateful to Dr. Evelyn Cobley and Dr. Nicole Shukin. Without their patient guidance and unfaltering support, I would surely not have been able to see this project through to completion. And to my best friend and favourite conversation partner, Timothy Fryatt, any ―thank you‖ proves insufficient, but I extend my thanks for your help with every stage of this project. Thank you, too, for making me laugh. vi Dedication To Frances Irwin, my mother and the first philosopher to inspire my thinking: your support, love, and immense courage throughout the last few difficult years have taught me the true meaning of gratitude. vii List of Abbreviations Works by Hannah Arendt: BPF Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought CCMS ―The Crisis Character of Modern Society‖ EJ Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil EU Essay in Understanding: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, 1930- 1954 HC The Human Condition JP The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age LWA ―Labor, Work, Action‖ LKPP Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy LM The Life of the Mind LSA Love and Saint Augustine OR On Revolution OT The Origins of Totalitarianism OV On Violence PP The Promise of Politics RJ Responsibility and Judgement Works by Michel Foucault: HS The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction SMBD Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 STP Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977- 1978 BB The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Works by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl: FLW Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (biography) WAM Why Arendt Matters Works by Dana R. Villa AH Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political. TMT ―Totalitarianism, Modernity, and Tradition‖ . Introduction: A Biopolitical Reading of Arendt‟s Theory of the Social In the concluding chapter of The History of Sexuality‘s first volume, Michel Foucault famously introduces the concept of bio-power and asserts that this relatively new form of power over human life at the level of the of the species has had a profound impact on virtually all phenomena shaping the ―social bodies‖ of populations from the eighteenth century onward. Bio-power aims at calculating and governing the vitality of whole populations. Foucault describes here, and in greater detail in his Collège de France lectures,1 how bio-power functions in conjunction with other modes of power-knowledge (disciplinary and sovereign) to administer, optimize, or deny ―life itself‖ on a grand scale. Hannah Arendt‘s earlier assessment of the elevation of sheer biological life to the level of the highest good in the modern era and her critique of the economic administration of the ―productive forces‖ of laboring societies bears a number of significant points of intersection with Foucault‘s analysis of the biopolitical relations informing (neo)liberal governmentality.2 In passages that seem to echo Arendt, Foucault writes that bio-power was key to the development of capitalism, which ―would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of 1 See especially, Society Must Be Defended; Security, Territory, Population; Birth of Biopolitics. 2 The emergence of the population as a statistical ‗entity‘ endowed with a socio-economic life, as Foucault demonstrates, emerges in the 18th and 19th centuries in relation to a changing understanding of the role of the state as a governmental power; the ―governmentalization of the state‖ names a shift in the understanding of politics, whereby the state becomes responsible not only for the defense of its sovereign territory, but also for the directing and taking care of the (re)productive, bodily life of those living within its boundaries. See ―Governmentality‖ in Power: the Essential Works of Michel Foucault (201-222). This governmental taking charge of life by the state, and eventually by the economy ‗itself,‘ which Foucault traces in Security, Territory, Population, was enabled through the co-emergence of ―practices, institutions, and new bodies of knowledge , designed to take care of the physical aspects of human life such as fertility, health, disease, longevity, or morbidity, in order to enhance the productivity of the population as well as its loyalty to the state‖ (Braun 8). Parker 2 the phenomena of population to economic processes‖ (HS 141). Much like Arendt, he characterizes the vast transformation in the conceptualization of life arising from the development of biopolitical techniques as ―nothing less than the entry of life into history‖ (HS 141). Biopolitics extends control over populations through demography and statistics, which function at once as forms of knowledge and as techniques of normalization. Arendt‘s theory of the social brings together two separate conceptual strands: the social as pervasive conformism, through which individuals and groups behave predictably in accordance with rules and norms, and the social as economic-biological mass of isolated laboring beings, in danger of being stripped of all meaningful difference (Pitkin 177). The connections between these two strands, the social as conformist behavior and the social as economically administered biological life, are not always clearly articulated in Arendt‘s writing, and yet the outcome of both is the destruction of the conditions for free political action as she understood it. The potential for free political action, in her view, is not linked to the sovereign will of individuals (or states), but can only manifest itself temporarily and without absolute stability in the context of an active and public ―web of relationships.‖ In order to gain a better understanding of Arendt‘s theory of the social, I propose to introduce Foucault‘s biopolitical theories as an interpretive lens for reevaluating the significance and the limitations of this important aspect of Arendt‘s political thought. This will provide a clearer picture of the place of the social within Arendt‘s overall diagnosis of the loss of the public-political in the modern age, and will also point to its overlooked relevance for contemporary political thinkers continuing to grapple with the complex problems of population as Foucault articulates it; Arendt‘s Parker 3 theory of the social, I argue, can be fruitfully read as biopolitical. Arendt offers a nuanced account of dramatic shifts in relationships between (and internal to) the conditions of political humanness, philosophical and scientific evaluations of ‗Man‘ as a species, and the dominant approaches, traditional and modern, to controlling the unpredictable elements of human living-together. Normalizing processes aimed at the socio-economic administration of laboring life, in Arendt‘s view, are definitive of modern liberal mass- societies and these processes of shaping (de)humanized life also reveal a menacing, ―proto-Totalitarian‖ potential. By focusing on how the concept of the social serves as a link between Arendt`s two most important works, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and The Human Condition, I hope to point out the depth and prescience of Arendt‘s understanding of biopolitical power/violence and to identify a few of the many connections between her critical reflections on the pre-eminence of ―life itself‖ in modern (social) politics and Foucault‘s insights into the rise of biopolitics. Arendt articulates the subtle differences and interconnections between various ―crystallizations‖ of biopolitics in the twentieth century, including the unprecedented techniques of totalitarian terror. Some contemporary political theorists, most notable Giorgio Agamben, have begun to acknowledge commonalities between Arendt‘s work and the later writings of Foucault, yet these tentative suggestions have not been substantiated by any sustained comparison of their thought. Despite being one of the first and surely the most influential thinkers to make this connection, Agamben does not follow up on it in any detail. The present discussion of the biopolitical aspects of Arendt‘s theory of the social is a step in that direction. Agamben‘s widely read Homo Sacer trilogy of books presents itself as a