Intimate Violence and Political Death in Hannah Arendt’s "On Violence"

• In Event: Legibility and Violence in Feminist Political Theory

Abstract

In "On Violence," Hannah Arendt cautions against treating violence as a natural, and inescapable, prerequisite for political life. Arendt deems violence anti-political because it erases men from the shared world of appearances. Yet Arendt acknowledges that violence seems foundational to politics, both in the form of collective public acts and private acts within the home. Through a reading of Arendt, this paper argues that the construction of the private realm as a hidden, pre-political sphere exerts another form of violence: the erasure of those contained in private from public, political life. The relegation of women to the private realm of the home therefore constitutes a form of violence. Labeling gender-based violence “domestic,” “private,” or “intimate,” this paper concludes, obscures the fact that such violence often works to create the very distinction between public and private in the first place, in order to perpetuate exclusion as a form of political death.

Author

• Rose Owen