Krisis des Machtbegriffs und Kritik der Gewalt

Abstract

This article focuses on the epistemological and normative crisis of the critique of power, which was initiated by the ontological generalization of the concept following Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s theories of power. The challenge for a contemporary critique of power lies in conceptualizing power both as a relation of inequality (power over) and as collective agency (power to), and in articulating this combination in a normative perspective. The article argues that this task can be fulfilled if, in a first step, power is differentiated from violence; and if, in a second step, their historical intersections in the forms of «power to violence» and of «power of violence» can be worked out. These forms of power are accompanied by the effects of social rupture and reification, which offer criteria for a normative critique of power.