Care of the World or Care of the Self?

The Ontological Divide between Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault

The aim of this paper is to discuss two of the most distinguished political

theorists of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault.

Arendt and Foucault are both critiques of modern society and establish links

between Nazism and Stalinism and the characteristics of the post-totalitarian

era. Their famous concepts of biopolitics and the social converge at very

central points of their analysis; hence one might say that Foucault and

Arendt observed, problematized and theoretically conceptualized similar

things in very similar ways. The main question that this paper attempts to

answer is why Foucault and Arendt, despite their agreements on modern

society, nevertheless reach different conclusions on the question of how

individuals can be free. My argument is that Arendt and Foucault do not

diverge on minor matters in their respective theories, but that their disparity

is more substantial and results from the fact that they have different

ontological assumption that lead to different conclusions on how individuals

can or cannot be free.

Keywords: Arendt; Foucault; ontology; biopolitics; the social; freedom

Name: Defne Kadıoğlu Polat

Affiliation: PhD Candidate, Boğaziçi University, Department of Political

Science and International Relations, Istanbul, Turkey

Email: defnekadioglu@gmail.com

Address: Boğaziçi University, North Campus, North Park Building Floor: 1

Rom 118 / 34342, Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

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I

Arendt and Foucault start their analysis of modern society from different

empirical observations. While the formers’ shocking experience with Nazism

leads her to start from the question how the Holocaust could have happened,

to then proceed to discuss the implications for the after-war period and to

finally thoroughly theorize and conceptualize what she observes to be

problematic, the latter looks at institutions in which he detects certain forms

of power relations, such as the hospital, the psychiatric clinic, the prison and

the military. Though their empirical starting points differ Arendt and

Foucault converge at central points of their analysis. I will in this first part

discuss the two political theorists’ perspective on the emergence of

totalitarianism at the beginning of the last century.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958) (Origins) Arendt tries to understand

the historical context that has led to the Holocaust. In a somewhat

observational manner she compares Nazism and Stalinism, traces their

origins, trying to grasp how something could have happened that in every

sense ‘surpasses our powers of understanding’ (Origins, 441).

Significant about her thought was that though she paid thorough

attention to the specific context of the Jewish community, she detached the

problem of totalitarianism from specific groups and restated it as a certain

logic, an ideology, that applies to everything and everyone and thus is the

unfolding of what was by the Nazis was perceived as natural law. Though

‘Jews were the lowest category’ (Origins, 450) in this law-guided order,

Arendt was eager to emphasize that non-Jewish Germans and the executors

themselves were subject to the idea of constant enhancement of the race and

that the

process may decide that those who today eliminate races and

individuals or the members of dying classes and decadent

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peoples are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed. (Origins,

468)

Arendt obviously engaged with totalitarian government in a much more

extensive manner, but Foucault on his part in Society Must Be Defended (2004)

(Society) nevertheless establishes a very similar link between the modern

form of power and racism. Like Arendt he underlines the all-encompassing

logic that lies behind totalitarian government, stating that the

objective of the Nazi regime was therefore not really the

destruction of other races. The destruction of other races was

one aspect of the project, the other being to expose its own race

to the absolute and universal threat of death. (259)

Both scholars recognize that the Holocaust was a deduced outcome of a

certain idea that guided and simultaneously exceeded everyone who was

involved and more importantly exceeded reality itself, with the Jews being

‘the symbol and the manifestation’ (Society, 260) of this universal, beyond-

everything idea. They both refer to Darwinism and the bio-logic that was

inherent in the ideology that guided Nazi and Stalinist society. The ‘survival

of the fittest’ (Origins, 463) idea, the belief in progress, the constant

movement following the motif ‘as more and more of our number die, the

race to which we belong will become all the purer’ (Society, 257) was

certainly a phenomenon which Arendt and Foucault observed and which

must have fascinated and shocked them.

Arendt links this analysis with the concept of superfluity (which

permeates the whole corpus of her work) – as men served only as the

material upon which the natural law of Nazi ideology could realize itself

upon, it did not matter who in particular lived or died but just that some

were eligible to keep on living (for now) while those who endangered the

enhancement of the race were not. For her the concentration camps were the

ultimate site and materialization of this human superfluousness and

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replaceability. In her discussion of concentration camps she also establishes

links with her view of modern society by stating that ‘the totalitarian attempt

to make men superfluous reflects the experience of modern masses of their

superfluity on an overcrowded earth’ (Origins, 457). Her analysis of

totalitarianism is simultaneously a warning that the presumed break with the

past after World War II may be illusionary:

The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of

annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the

problem of overpopulation, of economically superfluous and

socially rootless human masses, are as much of an attraction as

a warning. Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of

totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which

will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate

political, social or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.

(Origins, 459)

Agamben (1995: 119) points out that Foucault curiously never engaged with

concentration camps, though he is famous for his extensive analysis of

prisons and military camps as disciplining institutions. He does, however,

come very close to Arendt’s notion of superfluity. He remarks that if the

eternal law of the enhancement of the race had been realized not even the

Germans as superior race would have survived: the elimination of the Jews

was ‘the attempt to eliminate […] all the other races’ (Society, 260). When the

Germans proved unfit to win the war, they became as dispensable as the

Jews, to quote Hitler himself: ‘If the war is lost, it does not make any

difference if the folk perishes as well. Even so, I could not shed a tear over it,

because it would not have deserved it differently.’i This quote probably

stems from late March 1945 and was followed by a telegram in April 1945

where Hitler gives the order to destroy German infrastructure and to which

Foucault refers to in Society (260). The significance is that Hitler -for Foucault

and Arendt- is very coherent in his deductive logic; it would really not ‘make

any difference’, everyone is equal in his or her dispensability.

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Both thinkers establish continuity with the time before and after the

Holocaust and both point out the all-embracing, all-encompassing idea that

guides totalitarian government. Below I will continue to discuss Foucault’s

and Arendt’s views on modern society.

II

In the following I will discuss and compare Foucaultian biopolitics with the

Arendtian rise of the social and the triumph of animal laborans. Essentially

this is a discussion of modern society and of the dangers that the two

thinkers observe and theorize. The two scholars here converge on very

central points of their analysis, though there also some differences that I will

only tentatively raise in this part and further develop in the last part of this

paper that more thoroughly engages with their disparities.

To start with, Arendt and Foucault agree that the contemporary era is

one in which some things regarding politics and society have been reversed.

Foucault has famously distinguished between sovereign power, as the

Machiavellian-type centralized right to kill, and biopower, a new form of

power that emerged somewhere between the sixteenth and the eighteenth

century and that is ‘plural, decentralized, ubiquitous, immanent strategic,

mobile and unstable’ (Levin Russo 2003: 3). Foucault describes how

Machiavelli’s understanding of rule was slowly replaced by ‘the art of

government’ (Governmentality, 1991: 90). This new art of government

abolishes the highly-centralized and singular form of power embodied by the

Prince, the Emperor or who else might have been the sovereign of a given

territory and introduces a dispersed force that affects and manages not only

the state, but the economy and everyday life and behavior as well

(Governmentality 1991: 91). Though sovereign power does not disappear,

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Foucault identifies biopower or biopolitics as the novel and dominant form

of power.

Arendt on her part famously writes about the ‘rise of the social’ by

which she means that the order between action, work and labor has been

reversedii, that the social has marginalized the political as well as

transformed the private (The Human Condition 1958 (HC), 38-39) and that

the lines necessary to preserve those realms for fulfilling their proper

functions have been blurred. The rise of the social corresponds with the

triumph of animal laborans, Arendt’s existential category with which she

describes human kind in the mode of laboring. For Arendt labor is a circular

activity that is determined by necessity. Laboring is like the biological

functioning of the body: the heart pumps blood into the veins and in turn is

supplied with oxygen and nutrition. The process thus does not create any

result that lies out of the process itself. The aim is to ‘keep it going’: ‘It is

indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing behind, that the result

of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent’ (HC, 87)

Arendt argues that labor has gained a supremacy that led it to step out of the

realm where it properly would belong (i.e. the realm where bodily necessities

are covered for) to the public (where political action should appear), with

horrendous consequences. In due course I will argue that Arendt’s labor

mentality comes very close to Foucault’s notion of govern-mentality.

The elements or characteristics that Arendt and Foucault identified in

Nazism and Stalinism are present in modern society. The difference between

totalitarianism and the modern age for both authors is that totalitarianism

carries these principles to the extreme. Foucault in this respect claims that the

interplay between ‘the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of

biopower’ is ‘inscribed in the workings of all States’, though the Nazi regime

has pushed it to a ‘paroxysmal point’ (Society, 260). Accordingly both

thinkers in their discussion underline that it is not the particular life of

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unique individuals that is in the centre of modern society but the ‘man-as-

living-being; ultimately, if you like, … man-as-species’ (Society, 242), ‘the

life of the species as though it were a matter of course that life is the highest

good’ (HC, 312). Thus the life-span of actual individuals that has a clear

beginning and a clear end is only a transitory moment in the overall process.

The same understanding of temporality and superfluity that the scholars

observed in totalitarianism applies here, the births and deaths of individuals

feed into the process and thus the life of particular individuals is not of

concern but is just an episode in a larger logic that operates in modern age:

And that the new technology that is being established is

addressed to a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are

nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that

they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by

overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production,

illness, and so on. (Society, 242-243)

Or in Pitkin’s reading of Arendt: ‘[…] the life process is the life of the

collectivity, not of individuals.’ (1998: 187):

The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders,

demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as

though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-

all life process of the species […]. (HC, 322)

This ‘automatic functioning’ for Arendt as for Foucault is linked with the rise

of an economic household mentality. Population in the modern age is

managed as a household and in that sense it can be stated that the rise of

biopolitics and the social is the rise of an economical approach to society:

Governing a household, a family, does not essentially mean

safeguarding the family property; what concerns it is the

individuals that compose the family, their wealth and

prosperity. It means to reckon with all the possible events

that may intervene such as births and deaths, and with all

the things that can be done, such as possible alliances with

other families; it is this general from of management that is

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characteristic of government […]. (Governmentality, 1991:

94)

The striking coincidence of the rise of society with the

decline of family indicates clearly that what actually took

place was the absorption of the family into corresponding

social groups. The equality of the members of these groups,

far from being an equality among peers, resembles nothing

so much as the equality of household members […]. (HC,

40)

When government or administration is imagined as the head of a household

who watches over the ‘family’, the population, then knowledge about the

population becomes a decisive factor. To manage a population one needs to

know as much as possible about it. Foucault made this point more explicitly

but Arendt, though it does not occupy as much space in her argument, hints

at the same facts through the role she ascribes to statistics: Arendt writes

that one of the main traits of modern society is ‘the mathematical treatment

of reality’ (HC, 43). A given population is managed, tamed and stabilized or

as she already put in her evaluation of totalitarianism: ‘the essence of

government itself has become moderation’ (HC, 466). Foucault in his analysis

on the disciplining and regulatory character of society tells us that biopolitics

makes it possible ‘to form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms’

(Discipline and Punish 1984 (DP): 201). To ‘determine averages’ for both

scholars means the ‘leveling out of fluctuation’ (HC, 43), ‘it clears up

confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about

the country in unpredictable ways, it established calculated distributions’

(DP, 209). Population is ‘frozen’ (DP, 200) and managed and any

interruption, spontaneity or contingency that might be left is nothing more

than ‘an annoying interference’ (HC, 466) that upsets the efficient working of

the apparatus. Everything that is somehow ‘out of line’ becomes either

‘immaterial’ or is pathologized as ‘asocial or abnormal’ (HC, 42-43). And as

we know well Foucault was highly interested in these pathologizing

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processes and famously engaged with it e.g. in his evaluations on hospitals

and the prison.

The ‘head of the household’ metaphor, however, should not confuse

us: Modern society is characterized by an impersonality of rule. There is no

clearly identifiable source that dictates a certain way of life or a certain way

of behavior but only an abstract ‘they’ (Pitkin 1998: 183). Accordingly for

Arendt society is ‘the rule by nobody’ (HC, 40):

It is true that one-man, monarchical rule, which the ancients

stated to be the organizational device of the household, is

transformed in society -as we know it today, when the peak

of the social order is no longer formed by the royal

household of an absolute ruler- into a kind of no-man rule.

(HC, 40)

Her argument here is almost identical to Foucault’s distinction between

sovereign rule, where the source of power is clearly identifiable as in the

‘transcend singularity of Machiavelli’s prince’ and biopolitics where a

‘plurality of forms of government and their immanence to the state’

(Governmentality 1991: 91) emerges and

the state, no more probably today than at any other time in

its history, does not have this unity, this individuality, this

rigorous functionality, nor, to speak frankly, this importance;

maybe, after all the state is no more than a composite reality

and a mythicized abstraction, whose importance is a lot

more limited than many of us think. Maybe what is really

important for our modernity -that is, for our present- is not

so much the etatisation of society, as the

‘governmentalization’ of the state. (Governmentality 1991:

103)

Put differently: there is in fact no one in particular who dictates what to do or

from what to refrain; instead there is a process of normalization in which each

and every individual knows how to ‘behave’ (HC, 40 and Governmentality

1991: 92). In some sense the ‘you have to’ is here replaced by ‘you know what

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you should do’. It is thus not prohibition that is at play (as in sovereign

power), but a certain kind of expectation directed to everyone by no one and

that concerns what is correct behavior and what not. In her reading of Arendt

Pitkin states that

in the social, the element of pretense and deception has

become so pervasive that, in a sense, it disappears. There no

longer is any independent reality that anyone can perceive or

use as check on social conventions. Each looks to others, or

rather, beyond the real others to some hypothetical ‘they’, to

define reality […]. (Pitkin 1998: 186)

Foucault similarly argues that there is no king whose will it is that we behave

and no prohibition. Hence he appeals to political theory to ‘cut off the king’s

head’ (Power/Knowledge 1980: 121), that means to acknowledge and realize

that the ‘they’ is imagined and that it is ourselves who reinforce behavior and

normalization.

Foucault and Arendt, however, draw somewhat different conclusions

out of this observation, also because they differ in their understanding of

state, government and administration. While the former insists that ‘state and

government gives place here to pure administration’ (HC, 45), the latter rather

implies that the role of the state has been transformed and quite on the

contrary expanded to reach out to all possible realms of life: ‘the

governmentalization of the state is at the same time what has permitted the

state to survive’ (Governmentality, 1991: 103). In this context Dolan (2005) has

argued that Arendt envisions a de-politicization while Foucault envisions a

politicization of modern society. Agamben (1995) on his part claims that ‘what

escapes Arendt is that the process is in a certain sense the inverse of what she

takes it to be, and that precisely the radical transformation of politics into the

realm of bare life […] legitimated and necessitated total domination’ (120). He

argues that Arendt and Foucault essentially mean the same and thus in his

discussion of these thinkers refers to a general ‘politicization of life’. Other

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scholars have, contrary to Agamben and Dolan, held that Foucault (like

Arendt) describes a process of de-politicization (and not politicization)

(Myers, 2008). In my understanding the politicization versus de-politicization

debate already points at the more substantive ontological differences between

Arendt and Foucault which will be discussed in the last part. What appears as

another disagreement concerns the way Foucault discovers a contradictory

force in the workings of modern society:

In a sense, the power of normalization imposes

homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to

measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialties, and to

render the differences useful by fitting them one to another.

(DP, 196-197).

Foucault traces these individualizing and totalizing effects of power back to

the medieval Christian ‘pastoral power’ that is a ‘power technique’ that

addresses the individual and his salvation and is connected with the

‘production of truth – the truth of the individual himself’ (Subject and Power

1977: 333). Foucault argues that biopolitics combines elements of this-wordly

salvation through knowledge and the optimization of well-being of each and

everyone (for the continuation of the species) in a given population with the

Platonic notion of rulership as ‘unifying the whole’ (Dolan 2005: 373) and

thus permits the appearance of individualizing and totalizing effects

simultaneously.

Arendt likewise puts forward that the elevation of biological life as the

highest good and the idea of self-mastery has roots in Christianity and its

sacralization of life as well as Platonic rulership, which is a notion of

rulership that is again based on the metaphor of the household (HC, 222-

227). However, she does not seem to conceive of any individualizing effects

but quite on the contrary holds a vision of society that is completely opposed

to individualization. She sketches the equalizing tendencies of modern

society where everything and everyone is ‘centered around the one activity

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necessary to sustain life’ (HC, 46): ‘This one-ness is the exact opposite of co-

operation, it indicates the unity of the species with regard to which every

single member is the same and exchangeable’ (HC, 123). Again superfluity is

the keyword: Individuals in this society are the same in the sense that they

are all subject to its working, they are all equally dispensable and momentary

in the ‘over-all life process’ (HC, 322):

with the emergence of mass society, the realm of the social

has finally, after several centuries of development, reached

the point where it embraces and controls all members of a

given community equally and with equal strength. (HC, 41)

In Origins Arendt argues that one of the main characteristics of

totalitarianism is to press ‘men against each other, total terror destroys the

space between them’ and thus paralyzes each and every one and impedes

their ‘capacity of motion’ which she sees as a precondition for the exercise of

freedom, as I will further discuss below (466). In modern society there might

still be space left, however, Arendt is certainly concerned about the

marginalization of that necessary space. It is evident that Arendt does not

give place to individuation in her theory of the social in which ‘distinction

and difference have become private matters’ (HC, 41), however, she

maintains that the normalizing forces -though they work effectively on

everyone- draw a given population apart. Not in a manner that it would

enable them to move, but in a manner that it inhibits their being-together. To

understand why that is so in we have to get a deeper understanding of what

she means by the social realm. In Reflections on Little Rock (2000) Arendt tells

us that the social is essentially a realm of discrimination where individuals

may associate with their likes: ‘What matters here is not personal distinction

but the differences by which people belong to certain groups whose very

identifiability demands that they discriminate against other groups in the

same domain’ (205). For her this constitutes no problem as long as the social

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is not confused or interferes with the public. What is fatal is that the social is

predominant in modern society since the logic of discrimination between

groups of people has gained supremacy. Pitkin cites Arendt saying that ‘no

society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement

of things and men in classes and prescribed types’ and this is the condition

and ground for ‘social discrimination’ (Pitkin 1998: 183). Individuals are

equal in that they all become ‘whats’ instead of ‘whos’ (HC, 179), but they are

not ‘together’: Population is ranked and divided (HC, 47). And this is indeed

one of the most crucial matters since we will here also find a clear connection

of how and why racism is heavily intertwined with the rise of the social and

the rise and biopolitics. Or as Foucault asks: ‘What in fact is racism? … the

break between what must live and what must die. … It is a way of

separating out the groups that exist within a population.’ (Society, 254-255).

The ‘separating out of groups’ in turn results in a constant visibility of

individuals, however not qua individuals and in their uniqueness, but qua

members of groups, categories etc. The ‘identifiability’ that formerly was

characteristic of the social for Arendt is carried to the public and exposes

everyone’s categorical belonging, as black, as Jewish, as woman, as ill, as old.

The individual is transformed into a ‘case’, a case that is classified with many

other cases and thus loses its intrinsic quality and particularity. The

difference that is maintained between individuals is one that does not refer to

‘real lives’ but to the measurable ‘gaps between’ them (DP, 202-203): ‘The

scarcely sustainable visibility of the monarch is turned into the unavoidable

visibility of the subjects’ (DP, 200). Thus in my reading, Foucault’s idea of

individualizing effects and Arendt’s ideas about not-being-together, are not

that far apart. Both scholars point out that the imagined ‘one-ness’ of a

society does simultaneously, to use Arendt’s terms, foster the isolationiii (and

if pushed further in the totalitarian direction, loneliness) of each and

everyone.

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A further difference seems to be how the two thinkers perceive about the

direction in which biopower and the rise of the social move: Arendt, as

already stated above, insists that ‘laboring always moves in the same cycle’

(HC, 98) and thus underlines that the ‘ever-recurring cycle of biological life’

(HC, 99) is reflected in the logic of modern society that is dominated -though

not entirely captured- by the laboring mentality, a society ‘dazzled by the

abundance of its growing fertility and caught in the smooth functioning of a

never-ending process.’ (HC, 135). Foucault quite on the contrary holds that

while sovereignty is indeed circular since ‘the end of sovereignty is the

exercise of sovereignty’, government has an end: ‘the finality of government

resides in the things it manages and in the pursuit of the perfection and

intensification of the processes which it directs’ (Governmentality, 1991: 95).

Hence Arendt and Foucault seem to differ on that point, though they seem to

correspond in the way in which they see biopower and the rise of the social as

progressing movement:

The admission of labor to public stature, far from eliminating its

character as a process … has, on the contrary, liberated this

process from its circular, monotonous recurrence and

transformed it into a swiftly progressing development …. (HC,

46-47)

Government is defined as a right manner of disposing things so as to

lead not to the form of common good , as the jurists’ texts would

have said, but to an end which is ‘convenient’ for each of the things

that are to be governed. (Governmentality, 1991: 95)

The disparity is thus that while Foucault imagines the progressing

movement of biopower as the branches of a tree, infiltrating the tiniest units

of society and in constant relation and interdependence with other branches,

Arendt’s vision of progress within society might rather be described with the

metaphor of the hamster wheel, the hamster is surely running off miles, but

it does not proceed.

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To sum up, Arendt’s and Foucault’s conceptualizations of modern society to a

great extent overlap. They agree on the normalizing forces, the rise of

economic household mentality and the impersonality of rule in the modern

age. There are disparities, but nevertheless I would argue that they share

similar assumptions. Arendt and Foucault have different starting points meet

on their way to agree on many substantial points only to separate again. Why?

In the last part I would like to take a deeper look into what separates the

thought of these two distinguished scholars, I will therefore pick up some of

the dividing aspects that I have already tentatively raised above and from

there try to proceed to the question why at the end Foucault and Arendt

diverge so significantly.

III

To grasp where Arendt’s and Foucault’s ways divorce it is crucial to

understand their respective notions of freedom, the political and power, as

well as their conceptions of care of the world and care of the self – two

concepts that drive Arendt’s and Foucault’s thoughts apart.

Though in The Human Condition the relevant chapter’s title solely

refers to the private and public, Arendt actually implies a threefold

distinction. In Little Rock she argues that ‘Society is that curious, somewhat

hybrid realm between the political and the private in which, since the

beginning of the modern age most man have spent the greater parts of their

lives’. Accordingly she refers as private to the realm between our ‘four walls’

(205), to the social as the realm of human association, of social groups

possibly divided along the lines of ethnicity, religion and the like (as a realm

of discrimination) and the public (political) sphere where everyone meets

each other as individual, equal on the ground of non-sameness and

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singularity and only united (temporarily) on the basis of wordly interest. At

least this is what she would think of as the ideal tripartite.

And there is a certain correspondence between these three realms and

another tripartite that Arendt introduces; the existential modes of action,

work and labor. Action is clearly intertwined with the public realm where

political excellence can shine and labor is connected with the social. Whether

and how work and the private are interrelated will be picked up further

below. All three modes are necessary parts of the vita activa for Arendt.

Hence she does not want any of these activities to disappear but clearly

constitutes a hierarchy between them. The rise of the social and the connected

triumph of animal laborans is so fatal because of the consequences it entails

(that have been discussed in the second part) and because of the primacy she

gives to the political and action. For her the political is that what properly

belongs in the public, the realm where individual uniqueness comes to be

seen. Uniqueness for Arendt is part of the human condition: ‘Men are

conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns into a

condition of their existence’, but on the same token ‘men constantly create

their own, self-made conditions’ (HC, 9). In Arendt’s theory then human

nature, which is different than the human condition, must be imagined as a

sort of non-nature – what is universally valid is that men are conditioned

whatever their conditions might be:

If men were not equal, they could neither understand each

other and those who came before them nor plan for the future

and foresee the need of those who will be coming after them. If

men were not distinct, each human being distinguished from

any other who is, was, or will ever be, they would need neither

speech nor action to make themselves understood. (HC, 175)

The Arendtian notion of action in turn is sui generis indeed, action is the one

activity through which we reconcile ourselves with the world that conditions

us and it is the one mode through which human plurality is revealed and

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human beings appear to each other as men. Arendt’s concept of action is

closely related to her notion of natality. Action for her is inherently ‘beginning

something new’ (HC, 177), to ‘insert’ (HC, 176) something into this world that

is unprecedented. The capacity to start, to begin, to give birth to for Arendt is

intertwined with freedom. In respect to totalitarianism she argues:

But it can be slowed down and is slowed down almost inevitably

by the freedom of man, which even totalitarian rulers cannot

deny, for this freedom -irrelevant and arbitrary as they may

deem it- is identical with the fact that men are being born and

that therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins, in a sense,

the world anew. (Origins, 466)

Neither a tripartite nor the concept of natality exists in Foucault, consequently

his understanding of what freedom is, is quite different from Arendt’s. It has

sometimes been suggested that there is a ‘leap’ (Interview with Michel

Foucault: The Ethic of Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom 1988

(Interview): 2) between Foucault’s earlier work where he seems to engage

with the totality of power and knowledge production of the subject, and his

later work where he seems more occupied with truth and care of the self. But

as he underlines himself this understanding results in a misconception of

what Foucault means by power. What he actually refers to are ‘relationships

of power’ (Interview, 11). This is an important difference since he does not

mean to suggest that power is equal to domination. For him power relations

and ‘states of domination’ (Interview, 12) are different. Power has no negative

connotations but is a fact of human relations, or put more accurately: power

relations are human relations. These relations are, however, ‘plural,

decentralized, ubiquitous, immanent strategic, mobile and unstable’ (Levin

Russo 2003: 3). This also means that they are contingent and fluctuating. A

state of domination on the other hand is a state where relations of power are

to some extent effectively fixed and constantly work to the disadvantage of

one side. And this is where the real problem occurs. That means that Foucault

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does not quarrel with the fact that power relations exist but rather that we

must be aware of them and watch which directions and forms they take. And

this is also where his understanding of freedom is located: ‘If there are

relations of power throughout every social field it is because there is freedom

everywhere.’ (Interview: 12) Or has he puts in The Subject and Power:

Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as

they are ‘free’. By this we mean individual or collective subjects

who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds

of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are

available. (342)

Biopower, as a particular form of modern-style power then is the ‘triumph of

a particular relationship of the body to power’ (Dumm, 1996: 21). With

changing forms of power, the types of resistance, the set of possible conduct

are changing as well. The normalizing effects of biopower reach out to forms

of resistance and even normalize them, as Foucault exemplifies in Discipline

and Punish (1984) and his evaluation on the production of delinquency. The

picture is thus not as colorful as Dolan (2005) paints it by saying that

biopower creates a ‘paradoxical liberty’, instead biopower might exactly ‘put

at risk more than just a mode of freedom, but the very possibility of free

existence itself’ (Dumm, 1996: 117). Nevertheless it is true that Foucault

believed that freedom is the precondition for the exercise of every sort of

power and that thus the key to resist normalizing effects goes through a

thorough study of the self, or as he emphasized in the last years of his lifetime:

the care of the self, to which I will come back later.

The question is first of all whether there is any chance that we might

compare Arendt’s notion of action and Foucault’s notion of resistance: To be

sure, what Foucault means by resistance encompasses a broad spectrum of

‘non-behavior’ (HC, 43). Though Foucault writes of biopower as the general

modern-type power, his method is to look into certain subsystems and in each

of these subsystems different forms of resistance are more or less possible.

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This in turn means that one may not be able to resist in one realm but in

another. The multiplication of power relations also signifies the multiplication

of forms of resistance (and of appearances of freedom). Resistance in Foucault

thus can mean quite a range of things. Resistance and freedom are not the

same in Foucault, but freedom signifies the choice of resisting (or not

resisting) to a certain kind of subjectivation.

Arendt differs by concluding that ‘in reality, deed will have less and

less chance to stem the tide of behavior, and events will more and more lose

their significance’ (HC, 43). While for Arendt freedom lies behind the horizon

and acting becomes less and less possible, for Foucault freedom will remain as

long as there are relations of power that are by nature contingent and

unstable. Arendt does not search for a realization of freedom within modern

society. Freedom for her is unconditionally linked to the political and to

action. Whether one goes to his grandmother or not has neither implications

for freedom nor for the political and (in the Arendtian sense) political

struggles are only possible if somewhere a political space, a public is

constructed spontaneously, which is not impossible but becomes rather

unlikely. If the political realm (as she defines it) diminishes, this entails that

the realm of freedom diminishes as well. The rise of the social does not enable

to action, is not a result or effect of it but on the contrary is ontologically

completely divorced from it. For Foucault they are interlinked. Power enables,

it creates subjectivities. In other words, the crucial difference is that in

Foucault resistance and thus freedom itself flows from the contingency of

power relations, in Arendt freedom is clearly located outside of the social.

The divide between the two scholars deepens if we further look into

Arendt’s concept of wordliness and her rejection of any notion of ‘inner

freedom’ or contemplation as a valid form of freedom: For Arendt action and

freedom are not abstract categories that somehow slumber in our souls but

have to be –following the very Nietzschean notion of ‘doer is the deed’-

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enacted, performed: ‘Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each

deed, can lie only in the performance itself neither in its motivation nor its

achievement’ (HC, 206), ‘only where the I-will and the I-can coincide does

freedom come to pass’ (Between Past and Future 1993: 160). Action in that

sense is aesthetic for Arendt, it is not measured against the result it produces,

not a ‘means to an end’ (HC, 179), it is performative and needs the presence of

others to be realized, since acting without anybody seeing, hearing or

knowing of it would not be action but sheer contemplation. The

performativity that is linked to Arendtian action and freedom in turn is

connected with its agent-revelatory character. Through beginning anew the

beginner inevitably reveals who he or she is, significantly he or she does not

only reveal it to others but also to him- or herself, for that ‘although history

owes its existence to men, it is obviously not ‘made’ by them’ (HC, 185). And

here we come to a crucial point: freedom for Arendt is connected with non-

sovereignty. In What is Freedom Arendt unequivocally argues against every

conception of freedom as mastery, integrity or autonomy:

freedom and sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot

even exist simultaneously. Where men wish to be sovereign, as

individuals or as organized groups, they must submit to the

oppression of the will […] If men wish to be free, it is precisely

sovereignty they must renounce. (Between Past and Future 1993:

164)

In that sense action is sharply opposed to labor, which concerns biological life.

We do not need action to survive but we need action to reconcile ourselves

with the world by making sense of it and to distinguish ourselves through our

deeds and words. What action is thus concerned with are not the processes of

life or the products of work, but ‘the matters of the world of things in which

men move, which physically lies between them and out of which arise their

specific, objective, wordly interests.’ (HC, 182) The physical world of things in

turn is a product of work, Arendt’s third mode, besides action and labor.

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Work somewhat balances the fleeting contingency of action by creating the

‘durability of the world’ (HC, 136). It creates the objective ‘inter-est’ (HC, 182),

puts something between individuals that they in different ways can relate to.

Put differently, it creates the objective world that can serve as a ground for

action but that is seen from a distinct perspective by everyone who relates to

it. There is a constant interplay in Arendt between the contingency and frailty

of action and speech and the need ‘to pass through’ (HC, 189) an action. The

person who begins has no mastery over the further course of his deeds

because his beginning is now out in the world, comes into contact with

structure and other actors and thus is literally ‘boundless’ (HC, 191). Work is

reification and thus closely intertwined with creating the conditions for

passing throughiv. Actions and words are ever-fleeting and without some sort

of ‘completion’ they would vanish almost in the same moment as they appear:

Action ‘creates the condition for remembrance’ (HC, 9) but reification through

work creates a ‘home for mortal man’ (HC, 173). Works of art e.g. in this

context make possible the ‘recollection of humanity’:

written down and transformed into a tangible thing among other

things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from

which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things

to remind them, lest they perish themselves. (HC, 170)

Arendt unequivocally rejects any notion of freedom that is disconnected from

the world and mourns that modernity has adapted the Christian idea of

‘interior dwelling’ (Between Past and Future 1993: 163), of a sort of inner

freedom that can be lived out in a ‘dialogue between me and myself’ (Origins,

476). Arendt classifies this notion as the vita contemplativa and links it with her

understanding of isolation. For Arendt isolation is not necessarily a bad thing

since it enables one to step out to the public realm, to reach judgments

through imagination and understanding. In the Life of the Mind (1981) Arendt

ascribes three main faculties to the vita contemplativa: thinking, willing and

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judging. Thinking, willing and judging are not activities but different modes

of contemplation, which Arendt again does not want to abolish or subordinate

to the vita activa (HC, 17). Thinking, willing and judging is what takes place

between ‘our four walls’, in private and no one should and can always be in

public. Isolation is not only needed for judgment and understanding but

likewise for the production of wordly objects. Isolation and work are not

corresponding in the way action and the political do but they are closely

connected: ‘This isolation from others is the necessary condition for every

mastership which consists in being alone with the ‘idea’, the mental image of

the thing to be’ (HC, 161). What Arendt here signifies as the idea is parallel to

the Platonic understanding of it, a general form after which the tangible thing

is then built (HC, 173). The actual reification of that thought is work. The

problem is that the vita contemplativa has been elevated to a higher stage than

action in the teachings of Plato, the Stoics and Christianity and thus the

performativity of freedom as it is inherent in action has been abandoned for a

presumed inner freedom that is lived out in isolation.

As Dolan (2005) rightly argues Foucault’s freedom and his idea of

resistance and care of the self is exactly in this space of isolation. However I

also think that Dolan’s view that these notions would at least ‘promise to

preserve openness to the political, even in Arendt’s elevated sense of the

word’ (2005: 377) needs to be qualified or even rejected. I will explain why.

Foucault similarly to Arendt traces biopower back to its roots in Christianity.

He argues that its origins are to find in pastoral power. Pastoral power is a

mode of power from which the maxim of individual after-life salvation stems

and that with biopower is transformed to this-wordly salvation. Power is now

concerned with the well-being of the population in general and the individual

in particular on earth: ‘It is a form of power that looks after not just the whole

community but each individual in particular, during his entire life’ (Subject

and Power 1977: 333). As already stated, for Foucault freedom flows from

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relations of power, it is not ontologically divorced from it, which means that

the freedom and resistance that Foucault envisions, or rather that he thinks is

possible, are equally not divorceable from the notion of care that is inherent in

pastoral power. To ensure salvation a detailed knowledge about each and

every individual must be obtained which in modernity translates into

statistical knowledge about the population, the visibility of every subject and

the written ‘description and biographical account …‘ of everybody. To be

sure, these biographical accounts are in no sense comparable to Arendt’s life

stories of the actor. As Foucault himself says, this ‘is no longer a procedure of

heroization’ but on the contrary ‘objectification’ (DP, 203). By care of the self,

as a practice of freedom, Foucault then means to offer an ethical principle that

ensures some sort of mastery over the ways we are subjectified in the modern

age, a sort of ‘struggle for a new subjectivity’, ‘not a discovery of what we are

but to refuse what we are’ (Subject and Power: 332, 336). It is a practice of

being free that includes taking care of one’s self and as consequence

knowledge of one’s self. By care of the self Foucault proposes an inherently

privatized and self-reflexive freedom that entails the struggle for the creation

of new subjectivities by a sort of ‘cultivation of the self’ (History of Sexuality

V.3, 1990: 45) or ‘critical ontology of the self’ (Dolan, 2005: 377). This ethical

practice contains a reconciliatory aspect: ‘To care for self is to fit one’s self out

with … truths.’ These truths in turn are not only the truths about one’s self

but also to know how to ‘improve one’s self, to surpass one’s self, to master

the appetites that risk engulfing you’ (Interview, 5).

We remember that reconciliation also plays a major role in Hannah

Arendt’s thought. Arendt does not oppose a thinking process that would also

include self-understanding: ‘the process of understanding is clearly, and

perhaps primarily, also a process of self-understanding.’ (Essays in

Understanding 1994: 310), indeed she says that understanding is ‘the other

side of action, namely that form of cognition, distinct from many others, by

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which acting men […] eventually can come to terms with what irrevocably

happened and be reconciled with what unavoidably exists’ (Essays in

Understanding 1994: 321-322). As we can catch from this statement the

difference is of course that Foucault thinks we must reconcile ourselves with

truths about our self and about the power relations we are embedded in,

while Arendt foresees reconciliation with worldly, objective facts. Here lies

the crux of the matter: while the subjective is in the center of Foucault’s

freedom, it is the objective that Arendt is concerned with: ‘Courage is

indispensable because in political not life, but the world is at stake’ (Between

Past and Future 1993: 156). Thus what is completely absent from Foucault is

the notion of ‘inter-est’ of a wordly in-between that serves as the ground for

collective action in Arendt. This does not mean that Arendt is opposed to

knowledge, quite on the contrary she thinks that we must and can attain

knowledge and make it meaningful through understanding, but if we remain

on that level this for Arendt results in a state where we are maybe ‘still able to

understand and to judge, could no longer give an account of its categories of

understanding and standards of judgment when they were seriously

challenged.’ (Essays in Understanding 1994: 316).

For Foucault in turn there is no other level, no other freedom, than the

one that flows from the contingency of the power relations at hand. Thus he

looks at the same direction for freedom as he looks for power: to pastoral

power and Platonic self-mastery. Arendt also looks to the Greeks, however,

neither to Christianity nor to Plato, but to the polis, which she perceives as

ideal political space. As we have already discussed, Arendt’s freedom can in

no way be connected to any sort of mastery or government of the self. Mastery

for her belongs to the mode of working: ‘Homo faber’v is indeed a lord and

master, not only of because he is the master or has set himself up as the master

of all nature but because he his master of himself and his doings’ (HC, 144).

And in fact I would propose that Foucault’s notion of care of the self is a

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certain kind of making or remaking of the self and relations of power, a work

upon oneself. Given that his notion of freedom contains a strong Platonic

element, Foucault ‘substitutes making for acting’ (HC, 225). This substitution

is albeit not a result of his frustration with the disturbing boundlessness of

action (as it is according to Arendt for Plato; HC, 222), but because there is no

other way or level of freedom he can conceive of. Arendt can reject the

Platonic point of view which has, similarly to Christianity, elevated the vita

contemplativa to a higher level than the vita activa, because she can perceive of

another ontological level than Foucault namely that of the political and action.

The problem from Arendt’s point of view would be that one cannot

work upon one self, as one can upon nature, the result is not a product that

helps to create an objective in-between, but as Foucault puts it himself is a ‘a

retreat within oneself’ (History of Sexuality V.3 1990: 51) – for Arendt this

means a retreat from the world and thus an abandonment of freedom and

action which can only take place with others (and not as a social practice of

teaching one another, as Foucault would envision). A thought that is not

made reality (HC, 169), that means that is neither reified as an object nor

realized in action, is neither connected to the world nor to freedom: ‘This

inner feeling remains without outer manifestation and hence is by definition

politically irrelevant.’ (Between Past and Future 1993: 146).

Since the objective is absent from Foucault’s thought there is no way to

‘anchor’, so to say, thought, willing or judging and to ensure its

communicability. The care of the self, finding oneself, knowing oneself for

Foucault will ideally result in a ‘conversion of power’ since for him to not be

slave to one’s impulses, appetites and desires is to have ‘power over self’

which will in turn effectively limit and ‘regulate power of others’ (Interview,

8). For Arendt, however this idea is inherently ill-guided: ‘The supreme

criterion of fitness for ruling others is, in Plato and in the aristocratic tradition

of the West, the capacity to rule one’ self’ (HC, p. 224) but to be free

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individuals must reconcile themselves with the idea that they are and will

remain unknown to others and themselves as long as they do not step out in

the public and act with others (HC, 186-197).

References

Agamben, G. (1995). Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford:

Stanford University Press.

Arendt, H. (1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism III: Totalitarianism. New York:

Meridian Books.

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Arendt, H. (1981). The Life of the Mind. San Diego/New York/London:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Arendt, H. (1993). Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books.

Arendt, H. (1994). ‘Understanding and Politics. The Difficulties of

Understanding’ in Kohn, J. (ed.) Hannah Arendt. Essays in Understanding. New

York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 307-327.

Dolan, F. M. (2005). ‘The Paradoxical Liberty of Bio-Power. Hannah Arendt

and Michel Foucault on Modern Politics’. Philosophy and Social Criticism 31:3,

369-380.

Dumm, T.L. (1996). Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom. Thousand

Oaks/London/New Delhi: Sage.

Pitkin, H. F. (1998). The Attack of the Blob. Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social.

Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Foucault, M. (1977). ‘The Subject and Power’ in Faubian, J. D. (ed.) Power:

Essential Works of Foucault, V.3. New York: The New Press.

Foucault, M. (1980). ‘Power/Knowledge’ in Gordon, C. (ed.) Power/Knowledge:

Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77. New York: Harvester Press.

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Foucault, M. (1984). ‘Discipline and Punish’ in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault

Reader. London: Penguin Books.

Foucault, M. (1988). ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom.

An Interview translated by J.D. Gauthier’ in Bernauer, J. and Rasmussen, D.

(eds.) The Final Foucault, 1-20.

Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality V.3. The Care of the Self. London:

Penguin Books.

Foucault, M. (1991). ‘Governmentality’ in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. & Miller,

P. (eds.) The Foucault Effect, Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: Chicago

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Foucault, M. (2004). Society Must Be Defended. London: Penguin Books.

Levin Russo, J. (2003). ‘Resistance according to Foucault’, available at:

http://j-l-r.org/docs/jlr_Foucault.pdf (21.01.2011).

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Limits of the Care of the Self’. Contemporary Political Theory 7, 125-146.

i In the original: ‘Wenn der Krieg verloren geht, ist es vollkommen egal, wenn das Volk mit

untergeht. Ich könnte darüber noch keine Träne weinen, denn es hätte nichts anderes

verdient.’ – what is interesting is that today this quote and the following telegram are largely

interpreted as a proof that Hitler was ‘out of his mind’ and at the end did not even

consciously give orders. The truth is albeit that he was very much ‘in his mind’ and that his

last orders were consistent with the overall totalitarian ideology. Germans did not occupy a

space above this idea but where subject to it. A fact that is somehow obscured in post-

Holocaust public discourse.

ii Work and action will not be further explained here but discussed in the last part of this

paper.

iii Isolation is again a term that will be more thoroughly discussed in the last part.

iv What should be noted, however, is that work is not the only way to create some sort of

objectiveness, though it is certainly necessary. Arendt refers to two layers of ‘in-between’, the first

one concerning the world of tangible things, the second one being the ‘web of human relations’ that is

as real and objective as the material world though it does not leave any product behind. This web is

constructed when men speak to each other directly or act together (HC, 183).

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vv Homo faber is man in the mode of working (it is the same principle that applies to animal laborans).