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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Andrea Khalil
Hannah Arendt's On Violence
Oct 1, 2008
Arendt's conceptual distinction between power and violence, the position that "power and violence are opposites" as she writes, finds filiation in Rousseau's optimism in the moral rectitude of the 'common good'. Rousseau's 'common good', also called the 'general will' resembles Arendt's definition of political power. Power, writes Arendt, is constituted by human support and consent. In Rousseau's thought the common good, according to the rules of democracy, is defined as good by necessity because freely consented to by the majority, which is incapable of consenting to something which is harmful to itself, and thus only the perversion of the common good would lead to violence against humanity or the minority. Indeed Arendt writes that violence breaks out when there is a crisis or breakdown of power.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Michael Busch
The Power of Institutions
Sept 29, 2008
As much as I would like to ride with John Brenkman on the Arendtian express, I fear the train may be headed over a bridge too far. John is correct to point out in his response to Corey Robin that the difficulty of wrapping "one's mind around her concept of power" comes "from some deeply engrained assumptions we inherit from modern political and social criticism."
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 John Brenkman
Action in Concert
Sept 26, 2008
Just where Jill Lepore gets off the Arendtian train I say, “All aboard!”
What’s at issue goes to the heart of Arendt’s concept of power. Power looks like a feature or variant of might, force, and violence to those who see power as essentially “the means by which man rules over man.” Marx considered the state an instrument of one class’s rule over others; psycho-political essentialists like Schmitt consider politics the manifestation of an intrinsic human impulse to dominate others; Weber asserted that “politics operates with very special means, namely power backed by violence.” Arendt resists all these conceptions. Her thought goes against the grain of those theoretical traditions that “reduce public affairs to the business of dominion.”
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Ilgin Yorukoglu
Violent Laws, Althusser, and Burning One’s Own Car
Oct 6, 2008
It seems we agree that violence involves not only the most visible forms (what Zizek calls the subjective violence) but also those manifestations of “symbolic” violence embodied in language, in discourse, in the reformations of meaning and categories and so on, and “systemic” violence, to use Zizek again, which often are the consequences of the very normal and smooth functioning of the political-economic systems. In this sense violence engages with the concepts that are very much linked to the idea of the ‘modern state’. This broad understanding of violence is extremely important, I think, not only because one type of violence secures the conditions for that of another, but this broad definition is crucial especially when we try to make sense of those “irrational” acts performed by the state, the groups, or individuals.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Agnieszka Kajrukszto
Hannah Arendt's On Vioence
Sept 30, 2008
"Hey, you big bully, what's the idea of hitting that little bully!"
--Groucho Marx
Arendt's piece raises more questions than it answers. I find her argument provocative and, on some level, intuitively true. But I also think that violence and power are often intertwined in more nuanced ways and are not antithetical.
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