Vasti Roodt

Nietzsche's legacy for political thought is a highly contested area of research today. With papers representing a broad range of positions, this collection takes stock of the central controversies (Nietzsche as political / anti-political thinker? Nietzsche and / contra democracy? Arendt and / contra Nietzsche?), as well as new research on key concepts (power, the agon, aristocracy, friendship i.a.), on historical, contemporary and futural aspects of Nietzsche's political thought. International contributors include well-known names (Conway, Ansell-Pearson, Hatab, Taureck, Patton, Connolly, Villa, van Tongeren) and young emerging scholars from various disciplines.

Describing an action or a state of affairs as a form of violence is usually shorthand for condemning whatever falls under that description. However, precisely because the concept of violence is taken to have a special kind of moral force, it is prone to conceptual inflation. In this chapter, I argue that we should resist such inflation for epistemic and moral reasons. Specifically, the indiscriminate application of the concept deprives us of the means for saying what violence is not, which leaves us unable to specify the moral end for the sake of which violence is to be condemned. Having made the case for delimiting the concept of violence, I go on to show that violence is not a normative concept, and that expanded notions of “systemic” or “structural” violence add nothing to our understanding of the specific wrong at stake. I conclude that decoupling violence from normative assumptions enables us to distinguish between violence as a feature of specific human actions and injustice as a feature of policies and institutions that cannot be reduced to individual agency. My aim, ultimately, is not to reject violence as framework for explanation and evaluation, but to show that it is self-defeating to expand this framework beyond reasonable limits.

In this chapter, I argue that Nietzsche is not a political thinker in a specific, normative sense of the term: the kind of thinking that starts from the point of view of human beings who must share a common world, rather than from the point of view of the human being in the singular or the human type in general. Consequently, Nietzsche is not the philosopher to turn to for new forms of human solidarity, new political norms or new kinds of polity. I argue further that the value of Nietzsche’s philosophy does not depend on what he has to say about politics. On the contrary, the value of his philosophy lies precisely in what is not political in it; in the extent to which it confronts us with the limits of political thinking.

The purpose of this paper is to engage in critical reflection on identity politics as a mode of resistance to the experience of oppression, marginalisation or social exclusion. I argue that the notion of an identity-driven politics springs from a fundamentaldisaffection with the world as it is given to us, and that this disaffection is reinforced in the very attempt to overcome it. In support of my criticism I then try to sketchan alternative conception of identity and politics that does not run aground on the same difficulties. My argument consists of three parts. First, I delineate the theoreticalbackground to contemporary identity politics and point out a number of problematic assumptions that underlie such a conception of identity and politics. Second, I try to substantiate this initial critical assessment of identity politics by appealing to Hannah Arendt's analysis of the interplay between identity and worldliness. The purpose here isto show that identity is bound up with the world that lies between us as opposed to being tied to an exclusive place anyone occupies within the world. In the third and last part of the article I relate this notion of worldliness to Arendt's notion of amor mundi. I argue in this regard that amor mundi involves a reconciliation with the world as ithas been given to us, which nevertheless finds expression in judgements about what ought to appear in this world rather than a passive acceptance of the world as we find it. On the basis of this insight, I eventually try to demonstrate that Arendt offers us thepossibility of resisting marginalisation and oppression for the sake of the world we share with one another rather than for the sake of the affirmation of any pre-determined identity