Reclaiming “Political Spirituality”:Foucault and Arendt on Revolution
Author: Yu-he Hsiao
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
This essay focuses on issues of revolution in the writings of two contemporary political thinkers, Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, whose core concerns are the redefinition of revolution. They both attempted to separate something which may be called the “experience of revolution” from the revolution itself; Foucault named it “political spirituality” and Arendt named it “revolutionary spirit”. For them, there will always be tension between the experience of revolution and the resulting institutions, since resistance is the experience of revolution, and cannot merely be a conceived phenomenon of a transition phase or reduced to any resulting institutions. The most heuristic point lies in their interpretation of revolution: the resistance is always accompanied by the conception of collectivity. This essay also argues that, for Foucault and Arendt, the potentiality of another politics and of collectivity envisaged in a revolution would breed from their existing relations.
Keywords：Hannah Arendt、Michael Foucault、Political Spirituality、Resistance、Revolution、Revolutionary Spirit