Abstract

Hannah Arendt is well known to articulate distinctions based on the separation between the public-political and the private-pre-political spheres that impact her understanding of violence and power. Starting with the hypothesis that the classic approach to Arendt’s theorisation of “prepolitical violence” from the opposition to “political power” conceals the much more complex character of violence in her work, this paper aims to demonstrate that the shift in the focus of analysis to the web of relationships between identity and violence allows us, first, to explore the ontological implications of her conceptualisation of personal identity through its link to Arendtian conception of politics as a “space of appearance”. Secondly, it allows a critical analysis of her own understanding of violence from a wider point of view, one that goes beyond the restriction to a physical and instrumental dimension and invites us to consider it in connection to the (de)configuration of personal identity or as a producer of “spaces of disappearance”. Finally, this rereading also expands the Arendtian concept of “space of appearance”, by revealing porous areas of her thought that nuance her distinctions between the public-political and the private-prepolitical spheres, power and violence, and between the spaces of appearance and disappearance.