This article tries to situate Arendt's discussion of imagination both in her thought on “understanding” and her thought on “judgment.” The concept of imagination in Arendt has often been discussed in relation to “judgment,” but not in relation to “understanding.” In this article, we try to find the uniqueness of Arendt!; imagination in the ways in which she connects imagination to “understanding.” Especially, we focus on her conception of imagination as an “understanding heart” or “the only inner compass we have” presented in “Understanding and Politics.” For Arendt, imagination is the faculty that makes possible “understanding,” “an unending activity by which... we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality.” Imagination is indispensable for our sense of direction by which we take our bearings in the world.

  Arendt's understanding of imagination is also characterized by her view that it essentially belongs to the spectator's mind. The connection between imagination and the spectator is already found in Kant. But we could say that Arendt took it from Kant and developed it in her own political thinking. Arendt observes that the spectator is situated in an intermediate position between the actor and the philosopher. While the spectator withdraws from the direct involvement with actions in “the world of appearances,” he or she does not leave “the world of appearances.” “The spectator's standpoint” is a peculiar standpoint which paradoxically withdraws from “the world of appearances” while staying in it.

  Both in her thought on “understanding” and in her thought on “judgment,” imagination grounds itself on “the spectator's standpoint.” In the context of “understanding,” imagination enables us to take “the spectator's standpoint” from which we can see the “meaning” of the events in our world and establish contact with the reality of our world by coming to terms with it. In the context of “judgment,” imagination enables us to obtain “the spectator's standpoint” which is based on “impartiality” and “generality,” that is to say, a viewpoint from which we form judgments. In other words, imagination provides us with what Kant calls “eine erweiterte Denkungsart,” a mentality accomplished by “comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man.”

  Imagination is inseparable from this spectator's position which exists between thinking and politics. This leads us to think that the significance of imagination in Arendt's thought is found in the possibility that it connects the realm of thinking and that of political reality and thus overcomes what Arendt calls “the predicament” in which “thought and reality have parted.”

  The article aims to throw a new light on the question of power and resistance in the later Foucault, focusing on the problematic of “government”, which is now considered a guiding thread of his thought from the 1970s to the 1980s. It is often said that there exists rupture between his theory of power in the mid 1970s and that of subjectivation in the 1980s. However, the author argues that there is continuity around the concept of government whose perspective finally subsumes the two theories. With this hypothesis, the author analyzes a pair of notions:“scientia sexualis” (sexual science) and “ars erotica” (erotic technique), which appear in The Will to Knowledge, and then discusses the conceptual elaboration of government in the later Foucault.

  Firstly, the author shows that Foucault articulated sexual science and erotic technique as two different ways of truth-telling practices with its own subject-constructing process respectively : subjection through secularized confessional practices and subjectivation through embodiment of liberating truth initiated by a master. It will then be argued that this articulation anticipated Foucault's full discussion of subjectivation in the 1980s whereas the way he contrasts sexual science in modern times with erotic technique in pre-Christian period in the western world might tend to fall into the well-known dichotomy between power and resistance.

  Secondly, the author suggests that in the late 1970s, Foucault made a paradigmatic turn on the conception of government. While its definition as government of human conducts did not fundamentally alter since its introduction in the early 1970s, the place it occupied in Foucault's thought drastically changed in the later period. Initially, government in this sense was equivalent to sexual science or pastoral power. In the late 1970s, however, it came to have three dimensions. That it to say, the question of government came to be addressed in terms of governing (guiding) practices of others and oneself as well as of being governed. With this move, Foucault maintains that “counter-guiding” of the governed or even their autonomous self-guidance is immanent in the very practices of government.

  Thirdly and finally, the author contends that this new conception of government in the later Foucault provides new insights into the apparent opposition between sexual science and erotic technique. It is true that Foucault suggested, in passage, that the two are not exclusive but intertwined, and in so doing, tried to avoid, it may seem, addressing the thorny dichotomy. However, as discussed above, Foucault's later conception of government doesn't substitute power but subsumes both power and subject ; his argumentation that subjection and subjectivation result from two different truth-telling practices indeed opened up a path to the theoretical refinement of government in the 1980s, which made it possible to treat these processes under a single category of government. Consequently, the pair of sexual science and erotic technique ought to be seen as a necessary precursor of Foucault's full conceptualization of government.