1 ARENDT AND FOUCAULT ON MARKET LOGIC: Security, Violence and Superfluousness Zeynep Gambetti Bogazici University Abstract Foucault’s last lectures probe into the nature of a new type of power that he ends up naming biopower. Although several aspects of the phenomenon Foucault was trying to grasp are now being explored, one peculiar dimension of biopolitics did not yet receive the scholarly attention that it deserves. In 1976, Foucault noticed that the power to “make live” hinges upon its sinister opposite, the practice of “letting die”. Like fascism, this new “regulatory power” cannot have “life” as its main object without designating a portion of the population as a threat to that life. In 1978, he categorized this under the generic name “security”. Like market economy, security works by deducing the “norm” from life processes via normality curves, sacrificing those lives that fall outside. Fascism, biopower and neoliberalism seem thus to converge. Much earlier, Arendt confronted a similar problem. The distinguishing characteristic of totalitarianism is the transformation of human beings into “superfluous” bodies. But totalitarianism became possible partly through capitalism’s imperialist motives. This insight was later developed by Arendt, with a focus on what she called the “victory of animal laborans”. In the cyclical logic of modern consumption, all ends turn into means for the sake of “life”. This paper claims that focusing on sovereignty as Agamben does tends to obscure the relation between violence and the market fundamentalism of neoliberalism, and proposes instead to follow the path that Arendt and Foucault have opened.