Frederick M. Dolan

In this volume, Simona Goi and Frederick M. Dolan gather stimulating arguments for the indispensability of fiction—including poetry, drama, and film—as irreplaceable sites for wrestling with nature, meaning, shortcomings, and the future of modern politics. _Between Terror and Freedom_ brings to the surface an understanding of modernity as a multifaceted and dynamic narrative as it relates to politics, philosophy, and fiction. Collecting essays across fields, Goi and Dolan challenge strict disciplinary boundaries. This is not meant to be read as another contribution to the debate of whether literature is, can, or should be political. _Between Terror and Freedom_ instead reveals how literature illuminates and expands our understanding of philosophical and political questions. Political theorists, philosophers, cultural scholars, and rhetoricians offer a fresh perspective on the questions of our age and the paradoxes of modernity when they read literature.

Objections to the project of a "deconstruction" of political texts center around claims that deconstructive readings are abstract, unhistorical, unpolitical, and above all anti -political because nihilistic. ;The dissertation addresses the advantages, limits, and risks of the deconstruction of political texts by testing the approach against the imagery and textual strategies characteristic of some modern attempts to found a science of politics, placing deconstructive readings in the context of Friedrich Nietzsche's skepticism of scientific method and his attempt to fashion a post-metaphysical theoretical vocabulary. ;While it is possible to meet many of the objections commonly raised against deconstruction, its political content remains ambiguous. The issues that must be faced in a political assessment of deconstructive readings are clarified, however, by Nietzsche's discussion of the equivocal status of "nihilism" in modernity and by his critique of the ideologies of modernity.

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, composed during the seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma.

For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, ‘initiatory’ human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once ‘life’ - that is, sheer life - becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time, and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her account of the withdrawal of the political in modernity. In this article, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • bio-power • Michel Foucault • Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe • modernity • Jean-Luc Nancy • pastoral power • the social • rulership.