On the Limits of Violence

Abstract

In February 1970, a twenty-eight-year-old Giorgio Agamben sends a letter to Hannah Ar endt. After introducing himself as a friend of Dominique Fourcade, with whom Agamben attended Martin Heidegger's 1966 and 1968 seminars in Provence, Agamben proceeds to express his gratitude to Arendt: her books, he writes, provided him with a decisive experience. He then indicates his intention to join with others in gap between past and future, and to work within the horizon that Arendt herself had opened up. He signs the letter, Cordially Yours, Giorgio Agamben. But these are not his final words to her. In a postscript Agamben adds: You will excuse if I take the liberty of enclosing an essay on violence which I should have been unable to wright [sic] without the guide of your books.1 A 1985 interview, Un'idea di Giorgio Agamben, in the Roman newspaper Reporter sheds some light on the essay that Agamben sent to Arendt in 1970.2 Respond ing to a question about his involvement with 1968 social movements—posed by Adriano Sofri, one of the cofounders of the extra-parliamentary leftist movement Lotta Con tinua—Agamben answers that he never really felt at ease with 1968. He was reading Arendt at the time, an author whom his friends in the movement considered a reactionary, someone absolutely not to be discussed. In fact, the essay on the limits of violence in which Agamben was coming to terms with Arendt's thought was rejected by a political review and was ultimately published in a literary journal. While an oeuvre sometimes functions as a historical detonator [detonatore storico] accelerating revolutionary mo ments, that was not the case with Arendt. Agamben concludes that such a missed appoint ment with history is one of the most humiliating experiences that time itself affords us. Here then for the first time in English is the essay in which Agamben first attempted to come to terms with Arendt's philosophy of history, the essay that he sent to Arendt and that she referred to in the German edition of On Violence? The original essay, Sui limiti della violenza, appeared in Nuovi argomenti in the winter of 1970.4