Braun

"In many passages of the New Testament, she tells us, ‘miracles are clearly not supernatural events but only what all miracles, those performed by men no less than those performed by a divine agent, always must be, namely, interruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected’ (Arendt, 1968/1993: 168). This miraculous power of human action has a messianic quality to it as it ends one time and opens up another; it disrupts the time of the process and opens up the time of the interval. It brings the current time to a close insofar as it stops time’s race towards the future and breaks open a time span in the present, a time between limits.8 The element of messianism and the thought of redemption are alien to Foucault and it is with regard to this messianic perspective that Arendt’s and Foucault’s conceptions of temporality fundamentally diverge. Foucault’s considerations about time (see Michon, 2002) do not refer to the messianic idea of an end of time, whereas Arendt’s conception of human action as a messianic power that manifests itself in the public sphere bears strong affinities to what Gershom Scholem (1971) identifies as the messianic idea in Judaism: ‘Judaism, in all of its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community. It is an occurence which takes place in the visible world and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearance’ (p. 1). Arendt, as well as Foucault, strictly rejects the ‘strong’ messianic idea that the world could be saved once and for all, which she, as well as Foucault, considers extremely dangerous. Nevertheless, she does convey a messianic message, only that the messianic powers, the human faculties of action and forgiving, are themselves temporal; they operate within time, their results are unstable and all they can do is open up time for a new beginning in this world. Hence, messianic time in Arendt has the structure of the interval, redemption means freedom, the exercise of which in Arendt is synonymous with power, and such power takes place, quite as Scholem (1971) put it, publicly, in the community. To Foucault, in contrast, freedom means the capacity to think differently and to conceive of ourselves differently, different from the requirements of subjectification, of becoming an ‘autonomous’ subject through confessing and truth telling and thereby producing knowledge required for the biopolitical management of the living. The liberty Foucault (1997) finally leaves us with consists of thought practices and self-practices; liberty to Foucault is ‘an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life’ (p. 319), ‘a permanent critique of our historical era’ (p. 312), a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’, it is ‘work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves’ (p. 316). It is a liberty that remains preoccupied with the self, if not confined within the limits of the vita contemplativa. Foucault’s way of interrogating history and exposing allegedly universal, necessary, rational or emancipatory features of modernity as being not only historical but also inherently ambiguous provides us with a tremendously helpful prerequisite to analyse the logic of modern biopolitics. It is hard to see, however, how this self-centred, philosophical conception of liberty could point at an alternative conception of politics, one that enables us not only to analyse but also to overcome biopolitics. The concept of natality, I have argued, takes us a step further, offering an alternative understanding of politics, life, and temporality. Human life here is understood not as a moment in an endlessly racing process whose laws are to be executed on the individual, nor as a manageable entity but as the time span between birth and death. Time is not the medium for the execution of suprahuman processes but the interval that provides the chance to perform activities for their own sake. Politics, finally, would be understood not as the management of populations or the acceleration of economic or scientific progress but as acting in concert together with others, and the purpose of politics would not be to enhance the quality of some collective entity, to create a better species or to maintain the dynamics of the economy, but to make the world a home''.

BRAUN: BIOPOLITICS AND TEMPORALITY IN ARENDT AND FOUCAULT 19