ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt primary contribution to political theory, it is claimed, is her rescue of the intersubjective essence of political action – action as “acting together, acting in concert” – from the oblivion threatened by the technocratic usurpation of the practical. While poststructuralist readings of Arendt help place her theory of political action in a new and different light, it would be a great mistake to begin reading her as a poststructuralist avant la lettre. Friedrich Nietzsche and Arendt combat the reductionist character of the teleological model of action, exposing the nihilistic consequences of denying meaning or value to the realm of action and appearances. Nietzsche’s aestheticization of action culminates, then, in an overstatement of the world- and self-creative potential of great, agonistic and/or artistic action. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche questions the slavish tendency to take the actor out of the world by positing the “grammatical fiction” of a subject behind every deed.
