CONTENTS

PREFACE	xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	xiii
A NOTE TO THE READER	xiv
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS	xv
INTRODUCTION The Problem of Action in Arendt	3 3
PART I: ARENDT’S THEORY OF POLITICAL ACTION	15
CHAPTER 1 Arendt, Aristotle, and Action	17
I. Aristotle and Arendt on the Self-Containedness of Action	17
II. Applying the Criterion: Arendt’s Descriptions of Labor, Work, and Action	25
III. The Idea of a “Self-Contained” Politics	36
CHAPTER 2 Thinking Action against the Tradition	42
I. Teleology versus Self-Containedness	42
II. The Antipolitical Quality of Aristotelian Praxis	49
III. Autonomous Action: Politics as Performing Art	52
IV. Arendt’s Critique of the Modern Turn to Will and History	59
V. Conclusion: Beyond Aristotle and Kant	77
CHAPTER 3 Arendt, Nietzsche, and the “Aestheticization” of Political Action	80
I. Introduction	80
II. Nonsovereignty and the Performance Model: Arendt’s Anti-Platonism	82
III. The Disclosive Nature of “Aestheticized” Action	89
IV. Limiting the Agon: Difference and Plurality, Perspectivism and Judgment	99
PART II: ARENDT AND HEIDEGGER	111
CHAPTER 4 The Heideggerian Roots of Arendt’s Political Theory	113
I. Introduction: The Ontological-Political Stakes of Arendt’s Theory of Action	113
II. The Abyss of Freedom and Dasein’s Disclosedness: Thinking Freedom in Its Worldliness and Contingency	117
III. Heidegger’s Distinction between Authentic and Inauthentic Disclosedness and Arendt’s Appropriation	130
CHAPTER 5 Groundless Action, Groundless Judgment: Politics after Metaphysics	144
I. The Second Level of Appropriation: The Dialectic of Transcendence/Everydayness and Arendt’s Ontology of the Public World	144
II. Being as Appearing: Post-Nietzschean Ontology and the Evanescence of the Political	150
III. The Problem of Groundless Action and Judgment	155
IV. The Tradition as Reification: Productionist Metaphysics and the Withdrawal of the Political	166
CHAPTER 6 The Critique of Modernity	171
I. Introduction: Arendt and Heidegger as Critics of Modernity	171
II. Heidegger: The Metaphysics of the Moderns and the Subjectification of the Real	175
Self-Assertion as Self-Grounding: The “Inauthenticity” of Modernity	175
The Will to Will and the Conquest of the World as Picture	178
Technology as a Mode of Revealing: The “Brink of a Precipitous Fall”	182
III. Arendt on Modernity: World Alienation and the Withdrawal of the Political	188
Modern World Alienation and the Subjectification of the Real	188
From Homo Faber to the Animal Laborans: Instrumentality, Technology, and the “Destruction of the Common World”	193
IV. A “Rejectionist Critique”? Thinking the Present from an Arendtian Perspective	202
PART III: THE CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHICAL POLITICS	209
CHAPTER 7 Arendt, Heidegger, and the Oblivion of Praxis	211
I. Introduction	211
II. Heidegger’s Concept of the Political	212
The Devaluation of Communicative Action and the Public Sphere in Being and Time	212
The Poetic Model of Disclosure in the Work of the Thirties	219
The “Oblivion of Praxis” in Heidegger’s Later Work	224
III. Arendt’s Heidegger Critique: The Unworldliness of the Philosopher	230
CHAPTER 8 Heidegger, Poiēsis, and Politics	241
I. The Ambiguity of Heidegger’s Contribution to the Oblivion of Praxis	241
II. Politics as Plastic Art: The Productionist Paradigm and the Problem of Heidegger’s Aestheticism	246
III. Art, Technology, and Totalitarianism	253
IV. Questions Concerning Technology—and the Rethinking of Action	260
V. Heidegger, Arendt, and the Question of “Faith” in Human Action	267
NOTES	271
BIBLIOGRAPHY	313
INDEX	323