Foucault, Arendt and Violence

Violence is a word that is often used but much less theoretically discussed, even among Foucauldian scholars, with Johanna Oksala being a notable exception. However, she limits her definition of violence to physical forms. In this article, I seek to overcome the quandaries she poses for wide-ranging definitions of violence by incorporating Arendt’s critique of violence into a Foucauldian paradigm. While some work has been done on comparing Arendt and Foucault, I highlight some points of commonality that makes Arendtian violence accessible to Foucauldian scholars, which mostly rest on freedom. If power is productive to the extent that it provides the potential to act otherwise, Arendt, in many ways, situates violence as the prevention of this, similar to Foucault’s account of domination. Violence and power are therefore cast in a symbiotic relationship, not limited to physicality, whereby power is productive of meaning, violence is preventive and the push for freedom is a second-order normative claim. This opens the door to reading political violence through categories, such as biopolitical violence, disciplinary violence or nationalist violence, rather than through types of acts like assault, terrorism or murder. It also allows us to rethink how we look at normative claims about violence, especially in cases where violent acts open up more possibilities for action than they foreclose.