From Totalitarian Violence to the Administration of Vital Processes: Arendt and Biopolitics Reconsidered

The aim of this paper is to re-evaluate the reception of Hannah Arendt in current biopolitical literature. At least since Agamben’s claim, in Homo Sacer, that Arendt initiated biopolitical analysis “twenty years before The History of Sexuality”, her ideas have been brought into dialogue with Foucault, Agamben, Esposito and others. I argue that these readings usually employ one or both of the following interpretative strategies: thanatopolitical analyses that use biopolitics as an explanatory notion for totalitarian violence (Agamben, Braun, Duarté, Vatter), or ‘natality’-oriented readings seeking from Arendt a notion of political subjectivity that is capable of transcending the logic of biopolitics (Braun, Esposito, Vatter). These two strategies, I contend, fall short of giving us the full picture of how Arendtian insights might contribute to contemporary biopolitical research and theoretical debates. By placing too much emphasis on the thanatopolitical, annihilative aspects of what Arendt called the "channelling of the life process into the public realm", these interpretations produce three unwanted outcomes that the paper describes and explicates. First, they fail to give enough attention to the so called productive aspects of biopolitics, to the administration of vital processes in society. Arendt's analysis of this kind of administration, I argue, constitutes her most original contribution to contemporary biopolitical literature, and should not be ignored. Second, they also risk misreading Arendt's analysis of totalitarian violence, downplaying its character as an unique event instead of mere culmination in a long historical trajectory. Finally, by presenting natality as a straightforward opposite to biopolitical rule, these readings provide a one-sided interpretation of non-violent political action. Specifically, they ignore Arendt's revolution-inspired notion of democratic institution-building and her late reflections on the phenomenology of (biological) life. Placing particular emphasis on the productive notion of biopolitics in Arendt, the paper argues that she presents an original argument about the history of biopolitics, linking it to a broader analysis of process-based framing of political temporality. The key example for an 'Arendtian notion of biopolitics' is not totalitarianism, as many authors claim, but the modern capitalist-consumerist society. In Arendt's view, the emergence of modern capitalism coincides with the emergence of a form of rule that focuses on the management and administration of societal life processes, thereby narrowing the field of free political action. The paper discusses the history of such society, emphasizing the role of the French Revolution, imperialism, and the rise of modern sciences. It also provides pointers of how this kind of analysis of biopolitics can lead to new openings in the empirical analysis of biopolitical rule in contemporary society. The empirical examples are drawn from the domestic applications of 'resilient' security politics.