[Article written for the feminist digital press project, Revista Akelarre]
Hannah Arendt was a German author born into a Jewish family in 1906. She devoted herself to political theory as a profession and wrote significant works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).
In 1933, after the Nazis came to power, she was arrested in Berlin for working on gathering information about “the propaganda of horror” (anti-Semitic comments) in specialized magazines and professional associations. After escaping and illegally crossing the border, she settled in Paris, where she worked for Jugend-Aliyah, an organization that relocated Jewish teenagers and children from Germany to Kibbutzim settlements in Palestine. In 1940, she moved to the United States of America, first to New York and then to Chicago, where she served as a professor of Political Theory.
In an interview conducted by Günter Gauss in 1964, she was asked if she was interested in the impact and effect her books might generate once analyzed. Arendt explained that she was never interested in the recognition she might obtain through her texts, but that her writings served her to reach verstehen—understanding. She told the interviewer that his question was “masculine” since men intensely desire recognition and influence. “I see it from the outside. Influence, me? No. I want to understand. And if other people understand in the same sense that I have understood, that gives me satisfaction, like a feeling of home” [1].
Hannah Arendt conceptually defines categories of political theory that allow us to rethink power and violence as differentiated and even opposed elements: where one absolutely dominates, the other is absent.
What does it mean for power to exist with an intrinsic essence of its own, differentiated from violence and domination? The author debates with theories that define power as the imposition of oneself over others, turning them into instruments to achieve one’s will, as the ability to command and be obeyed, to make others act as one desires. Does power truly stem from command and domination?
Violence, the author tells us, is directed by its instrumental nature. It generates instruments and artifacts that increase and multiply human potency to dominate others. Violence can destroy power but can never generate or replace it. “The greater the violence, the less power; the greater the power, the less violence” [2]. Popular uprisings that unfold peacefully are among the most effective because they cannot be confronted with a fight that results in victory or defeat; instead, the only solution is mass slaughter, where the winner also loses because no one can govern over the dead. For the author, the case of Vietnam is an example of how enormous superiority in means of violence can fail against a united and well-organized opponent—that is, a more powerful one.
Power is linked to numbers, and its only indispensable element is the people living united. It corresponds to the human capacity to act, which has no purpose, is not a means to something else, but is an end in itself.
Action is characterized by creation, by beginning, by setting something in motion. This implies that through action, it is possible to create the unexpected, the improbable, the miraculous, that which opposes to statistical laws and probability, to certainties in everyday life. It can generate something that has never happened before and would not have occurred
without the intervention of humanity. It can only be judged by the greatness involved in breaking through what is commonly accepted and achieving the extraordinary, regardless of its victory or defeat, its best or worst consequences.
Action cannot exist in isolation and can only be realized in human contiguity—it is what arises between people when they are together. For this reason, power is never the property of an individual; it exists in the encounter and in acting concertedly, and it disappears with dispersion. Anyone who isolates themselves and does not participate in being united loses power and becomes impotent, no matter how valid their reasons.
If power were more than this potentiality in being together, if it could be possessed like strength or applied like force instead of being dependent upon the unreliable and only temporary agreement of many wills and intentions, omnipotence would be a concrete human possibility [3].
Following this line of thought, the author argues that action can only be realized in plurality and in the network of relationships. It never develops in a closed circle, which is why it is limitless; it becomes a chain of reactions. This is a process from which three frustrations necessarily arise: first, the process that begins is irrevocable; second, it is impossible to know what its final outcome will be since it never has an end; and third, its character is anonymous because it unfolds in the interrelation of an infinity of people, so there is no single author.
The author enables us to think about the power of encounters between people, as they can, through trust, give rise to creative processes where the miraculous is likely since the unexpected can emerge as a human creation.
Thinking of being together as the source of power, revealing that no specific person or instrument of violence can enable processes as acting concertedly can—doesn’t this allow us to think of new paradigms, to create new opportunities for humanity?
The fragility of human affairs, linked to the frustrations that result from action, can only be resolved if they remain in this sphere: through forgiveness that undoes past acts and frees us from the chain of reactions that perpetuate them. This means that we, as creators, have a responsibility: to use our potential within the framework of human relationships. When this potential is turned toward other areas, such as technology and the intervention in nature, this fragility cannot be resolved. The irreversibility and inability to predict the consequences of intervention in these aspects have led us to the disaster of destruction—not only of humanity but also of the nature that surrounds us, against which forgiveness is not enough. The isolation that arises from work and consumption has generated an indifference to what happens to the world—an unfortunate loss of the world.
Will we begin to repair our world by participating and relearning the communal? Perhaps we will recover the vision of our surroundings and our power if we bet on joint action rather than domination, violence, and instrumentality.
Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities [4].
[1] Arendt H. (1964). Interview with Gunter Gauss. Zur Person. Germany.
[2] Arendt H. (2005). On Violence. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
[3] Arendt H. (2003) The Human Condition. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
[4] Ibid.
