Miguel Vatter

NATALITY AND BIOPOLITICS IN HANNAH ARENDT

ResumenEste ensayo discute la genesis del concepto de la natalidad en Arendt, y las razones que la llevaron a proclamar la natalidad como un concepto fundamental del pensamiento politico. El trabajo argumenta en contra de la tesis comunmente aceptada segun la cual Arendt habria sacado el concepto de natalidad de la analitica existencial de Heidegger. Por lo contrario, el escrito propone que el discurso arendtiano sobre la natalidad debe ser visto como parte de un discurso sobre la bio-politica, y que esta basado sobre un concepto de vida anti-Heideggeriano. El pensamiento politico de Arendt es una especie de bio-politica que contrasta al totalitarismo en su propio terreno, es decir, identificando los aspectos de la vida que oponen resistencia al proyecto totalitario de dominio absoluto sobre la vida. AbstractThis essay discusses the genesis of Arendt’s concept of natality, and the reasons that led her to claim natality as a fundamental concept of political thought. The essay argues against the widespread thesis that Arendt took her idea of natality from Heidegger’s existential analysis of human life. It argues, instead, that Arendt’s account of natality should be situated within the discourse of bio-politics, and that it is based on a conception of life that is anti-Heideggerian. Arendt’s political thought is a species of bio-politics that counters totalitarianism on its own terrain, namely, by identifying what in life poses a resistance to the totalitarian project of attaining total domination over life.

The republic of the living : biopolitics and the critique of civil society

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Biopolitics of the Economy 1. The Tragedy of Civil Society and Republican Politics in Hegel 2. Living Labor and Self-Generative Value in Marx Part II. Biopolitics of the Family 3. Reification and the Redemption of Bare Life in Adorno and Agamben 4. Natality, Fertility, Mimesis in Arendts Theory of Freedom 5. The Heroism of Sexuality in Benjamin and Foucault Part III. Biopolitics of Rights 6. Free Markets and Republican Constitutions in Hayek and Foucault 7. Biopolitical Cosmopolitanism: The Right to Have Rights in Arendt and Agamben Part IV. Biopolitics of Eternal Life 8. The Unity of Biological Life and a Philosophical Life in Aristotle, Spinoza, and Heidegger 9. Eternal Recurrence and the Now of Revolution: Nietzsche and Messianic Marxism Notes Bibliography Index

In Odradek's World: Bare Life and Historical Materialism in Agamben and Benjamin

This essay reconstructs Agamben’s theory of bare life as an example of an affirmative biopolitics, a politics of life that lies beyond sovereignty. The essay shows that his account of bare life constitutes a reworking of four central motifs found in Marx’s historical materialism: the facticity of alienated existence, the fetishism of commodities, the profanity of bourgeois society, and the nihilism of revolution. Agamben’s renewal of historical materialism explicitly turns on an innovative and controversial synthesis of Benjamin and Heidegger. This essay argues that such a synthesis relies, implicitly, on the negative dialectics developed by Adorno. If correct, this interpretation suggests a way of understanding Agamben’s political thought as a particularly radical and consequent continuation of the project of critical theory.

Machiavelli and the Republican Conception of Providence

Machiavelli often seems to advocate a conception of religion as an instrument of political rule. But in the concluding chapter of The Prince Machiavelli adopts a messianic rhetoric in which politics becomes an instrument of divine providence. Since the political project at stake in The Prince , especially in this last chapter runs against both the interests and the ideology of the Catholic Church in Italy, some commentators have argued that Machiavelli appeals to providence merely in order to fool the Church and the Medici. This article argues that it is not necessary to appeal to such exoteric readings of the 26 th chapter of The Prince if one envisages the possibility that Machiavelli may have drawn upon an alternative, non-Christian conception of divine providence coming from medieval Arabic and Jewish sources that is more compatible with his desire to return to Roman republican principles than is the Christian conception of divine providence.

Political ontology, constituent power, and representation

In this piece, I discuss some aspects of the tension between democracy and constitutionalism in light of Pettit’s attempt to think popular control of government by way of a mixed constitution and the introduction of an alternative concept of representation.

The People Shall Be Judge Reflective Judgment and Constituent Power in Kant’s Philosophy of Law

This essay offers an interpretation of Kant’s republicanism in light of the problem of political judgment. Kant is sometimes thought to base his conception of law on an idea of sovereignty drawn from Hobbes and Rousseau, which would leave little room for popular contestation of the state. In this essay, I reconstruct Kant’s account of the rule of law by bringing out the importance of his theory of judgment. I argue that for Kant the civil condition is ultimately characterized by a contest between the judgment of the sovereign and the judgment of the people, which corresponds to the determinative and reflective employments of political judgment, respectively. On this view, popular sovereignty is ultimately located in the people’s power to judge politically and contest publicly the state.

Nationality, State and Global Constitutionalism in Hermann Cohen’s Wartime Writings

This essay proposes a new reading of Cohen’s polemical text, Germanism and Judaism. It argues that the development of Cohen’s late philosophy reveals him not as a helpless philosopher overwhelmed by the maelstrom of a world war, but as an “engaged” thinker who carries forward what he takes to be philosophy’s duty to struggle against war by going to “war” in the space of theory and culture. Cohen’s text needs to be placed in the context of his other wartime writings which, on the one hand, assigned a new and more radical function to messianic Judaism within his ethics, and simultaneously transplanted his neo-Kantianism into the more “realistic” political philosophies of Plato and of Spinoza, respectively. This essay argues that the thought of the later Cohen does not break with his previous commitments to cosmopolitanism and social democracy, as much as it tries to confront the harsh realities of European nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by articulating the roles of philosophy and of Judaism in modernity no longer through a strictly idealistic and cosmopolitan optic.

Comments on Gerald Postema, Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: The Common Law World

Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth Century is an engaging presentation of the Common Law tradition in the twentieth century from which non-specialist readers like myself stand to learn much about the challenges faced by the project of ‘general jurisprudence’ as a ‘sociable science’ (Coke), defended by Postema in the conclusion of his book. Postema arranges the complex material of twentieth-century Common Law jurisprudence into two currents, those of ‘legal realism’ and ‘critical positivism’, and he presents Holmes and Hart, respectively, as their fountainheads. As I read the book, Postema is not neutral towards these two currents: he believes the second one is more conducive towards the goals of general jurisprudence than the first because he understands American legal realism to have inherited an ‘anti-philosophical’ bent that leads its proponents to downplay the systematic, rational nature of law. However, in my opinion Postema downplays or ignores the relation between law, power and community which plays a crucial role not only in the current of legal realism, but also in a third current which Postema does not address in this book, namely, that of legal pluralism. My point is that a consideration of the relation between law and power is just as important as the relation between law and

Esoteric Writing between Mysticism and Science

Abstract This essay addresses the claim that behind the use of esoteric writing lies an opposition between philosophy and politics. I suggest that esoteric writing, on the reading of it proposed by Melzer, would reveal philosophy to be engaged in its own form of politics, making esoteric writing analogous to the doctrine of “secrets of state.” Similarly, my comments question the claim that behind esoteric writing there needs to be an opposition between philosophy and religion; I here highlight the idea of esotericism found in Goethe, an idea that might support an “Oriental” understanding of “ancient theology” in which religion does not oppose philosophy. Finally, I propose that we should distinguish between truthful and sophistical uses of esoteric writing, where the latter corresponds to philosophy as a political project based on distinguishing between the few wise and the many unwise, while the former corresponds to philosophys posture as an endless pursuit of truth open to everyone.