Abstract

Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault: Toward a Politics of Transformation analyzes the status of politics in the absence of a common good, shared set of values, or shared identity. I argue that the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault can make a valuable contribution toward such a project, given these two thinkers' commitments to thinking politically within contexts of contingency and plurality. I support my argument by drawing out the political implications of Kant's Enlightenment legacy within Foucault's and Arendt's work, and then bringing their work into conversation with that of contemporary continental philosophers, as well as American feminist and political theorists. My analysis thus elucidates, more particularly, the potential for a Foucauldian/Arendtian-inspired feminist politics. Focusing upon historical and current understandings of what it means to act responsibly and to engage in collective political activity, I argue, via analyses of Foucault's conceptualization of practices of the self and Arendt's notion of judgment, that traditional understandings of political responsibility, unity, and freedom must be rethought but not abandoned. A key question raised is whether it is only through such rethinking that something like freedom, if not freedom itself, "perhaps...eventually will appear"