Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his
devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt,
whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of
political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated
by admirers (including critical theorists, communitarians, and
participatory democrats) who had hoped to enlist her in their less
radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing
"Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's
modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian
and Nietzschean theme of a break with tradition at the closure of
metaphysics.
Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of
misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a
persuasive case for Arendt as "the" postmodern or postmetaphysical
political theorist, the first political theorist to think through
the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the
death of God (i.e., the collapse of objective correlates to our
ideals, ends, and purposes). After giving an account of Arendt's
theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how
Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of
the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions
they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging
discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle,
Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics
after metaphysics.
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