Situating Hannah Arendt on Action and Politics

Abstract

DANA VILLA'S Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and Aestheticization of Political Action (Political Theory 20 [1992]: 274-308) makes an important contribution to current academic debates about Hannah Arendt. Responding to a communitarian orthodoxy, according to which Arendt is primarily a theorist of consensual dialogue, and a growing Nietzschean counterorthodoxy, according to which Arendt is a theorist of unbridled Villa stakes a sensible middle ground. Focusing on Arendt's appropriation of Kant's third Critique, he argues that Arendt, unlike Nietzsche, sought to temper perfomativity of politics through common sense and judgment. Arendt's enlarged opinion tames sheer theatricality of political action by opening it up to judgment of an audience. It is this audience-centeredness that renders Arendt's theory political, whereas Nietzsche's sole concern with artist/performer is subjectivist and antipolitical. Yet while Villa neatly underscores both Nietzschean and non-Nietzschean dimensions of Arendt's work, dimensions that she took great pains to emphasize, his essay does not escape simplifications of communitarian/Nietzschean debate, a controversy of wholly academic contrivance. Over twenty years ago, Quentin Skinner criticized widespread practice among political theorists of treating historical figures like Aristotle and Machiavelli as if they were engaged in a transhistorical conversation about big issues that surpassed all context. ' Skinner pointed out that this assumption was a misleading academic fiction, most likely to produce anachronism and misinterpretation. Unfortunately Villa, like most commentators on Arendt, ignores this insight.2 His protagonists-Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Arendt, and Lyotard-discourse across centuries about such recent academic constructions as the teleological model of action, the agon, and the sovereign self. According to Villa, Arendt's single most important problem is the