ABSTRACT
Until relatively recently, little serious attention was paid to Hannah Arendt’s work in contemporary debates on biopolitics. 1 From one perspective, this is not surprising, since she does not use the term herself. From another, though, this is a true oversight, since as Julia Kristeva argues, life is the ‘essential domain’ of Arendt’s thought, and this thematic is the central guide to her discussions of political history and metaphysics (Kristeva 2001a, 3–4). For instance, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt proposes a critique of Nazism and Stalinism that sees in them a shared contempt for human life, culminating in the destruction of all that is truly human in a life. In contrast, and deeply connected to this analysis, The Human Condition develops a critical defence of the human over and against the historical reduction of it to nothing more than biological necessity, whether of the individual or of the species. 2 Further, her work is explicitly influential for some contemporary theorists, and ignored at a cost when interpreting others. For instance, Agamben acknowledges the profound influence of Arendt’s work on his own, but claims in Homo Sacer that Arendt was unable to see the true political implications of her own analyses. Foucault, on the contrary, disavows any Arendtian influence in his work, but a fruitful comparison can be made of their thinking about life and politics, especially in terms of racism. Given this, this chapter makes a case for greater consideration of her work within debates on biopolitics.
