ABSTRACT
The human senses usually play a minor role in Western political philosophy. With a few notable exceptions such as Foucault’s notion of biopolitics or Agamben’s distinction between life and bios, the importance of the human body in politics has been widely ignored. This paper attempts a critique of Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the public and private sphere in regard to the human senses. I intend to argue that while Arendt correctly engages with the significance of the public sphere, she ignores the political dimension of the private sphere, which she conceptualizes purely as a realm of necessity. I will argue that the reason for this is, first, a devaluation of the body of the subject and, second, a false primacy of vision over other senses. I intend to show that, as a consequence of this, Arendt establishes (a) a problematic distinction between the private and public sphere on the basis of light and darkness, where the political element of the private sphere is masked, and (b) a one-dimensional distinction between labor and work that ignores the creative dimension of both.
