Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy A 'Retro‐version' of Power: Agamben via Foucault on Sovereignty (original) (raw)
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This paper is an attempt to explore how Giorgio Agamben adapts the traditional historiographic school’s concept of sovereignty and Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics in his theory of European state sovereignty. Due to formal restrictions, the aim is not to compare their theories of power (although such comparisons, at certain points, will surely be inevitable), but instead will focus on the theory of history that their theoretical works on European state sovereignty imply. It will be argued that Foucault’s novel approach to power and to history, although it initially shook the very foundations of many human disciplines, has been successfully reconciled with historiographic theories I term traditional, in the works of Agamben. The argument set out below, therefore, is two-fold. On one hand, it will attempt to show that for European state sovereignty, as conceptualized by Agamben, the population and the body is just as important as the territory and the juridical order is. On the other hand, it is contested that the theory of history that this conceptualization implies is founded on an intertwined notion of time, which introduces the total narrative of European state sovereignty while simultaneously allowing for rupture and human inventiveness.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY vol. 11 no. 1 23-61 (2011).
This essay is an examination of the implications of the largely uncritical taking up of the ascendant Agambenian paradigm in recent scholarship. Following Arendt, it is argued that the most important reason for the success of the polemical redefinition of political community as subjecthood by those who elaborated the project of political modernity (esp. Bodin and Hobbes) has been its success at getting its opponents (e.g. Locke, Bentham, Austin, Rousseau, Weber, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, and Agamben) to accept this definition of sovereignty as both an empirical reality and as the critical object against and through which future politics must be defined. As a result, the project of naming the sovereign – however rhetorically satisfying – has never failed to be deeply disabling for both scholarship and politics, as scholars accept its radical modern naturalization, rationalization, and unification of power as the basic concept of political organization and as the possibilities of political life come to be defined by the impossible task of deriving freedom from the concept of sovereignty. The most important recent example of this is Agamben’s work which, because it is based on Benjamin’s early writings in which this modern imbrication of sovereignty and political life is viewed as complete and irreversible, requires – if we are to get out of sovereignty – nothing less than that we reject every possibility of future political community and make a complete ontological break from political forms. This, it is argued here, is much too much to ask of either scholarship or of our political present.
Foucault and Agamben on Sovereignty: Taking Life, Letting Live, or Making Survive
Reading Texts on Sovereignty: Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought, edited by Stella Achilleos and Antonis Balasopoulos, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 171-178, 2021
Two of the most outstanding figures of late twentieth-century political philosophy, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, are linked by a sort of ‘filiation bond’, whereby Agamben claimed to take up and develop Foucault’s ‘biopolitical’ project, transforming it, two decades after its subdued inception, into a central and inescapable issue for contemporary philosophical-political debate. From early on, however, critics have emphasised how the two projects differ in scope and intention, and one of the fundamental differences is precisely their understanding of biopower in relation to sovereignty: whereas Foucault saw the two modes of power as historically distinct and (at times, though not consistently) as mutually exclusive, Agamben came to conflate them into one single meta-structure which spells out the very essential trait of Western metaphysics. Both construe their political project in fundamental opposition to sovereignty, but, just like the ways of understanding it, also the modes of this opposition differ to the point of taking opposite routes.
Power over life from Agamben to Foucault : an examination of the question of sovereignty
2015
This thesis starts by studying the specificity of Michel Foucault’s account of the emergence of bio-power in contrast to that developed by Giorgio Agamben. It focuses on the mutation of jurisdiction Foucault describes in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, which corresponds to the shift from the law of the sovereign to that of the norm. Challenging the idea that the concept of biological life can be spontaneously used to understand the type of relationship which links modern political power and life, this thesis questions the epistemological implications of this concept by inscribing it within Foucault’s wider description of the emergence of anthropological knowledge. Instead of understanding biopolitical modernity as the expression of the power of the sovereign, this thesis demonstrates that it is not the persistence of sovereign power but its transformation which allows to think the meaning of the concept of life targeted by human sciences. This thesis inscribes the hist...
Power's Two Bodies: A Critique of Agamben's Theory of Sovereignty
Philosophy Today, 2024
This article seeks to problematize Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty in light of the “archaeological method” he uses in his Homo Sacer project. In contrast to Agamben’s exposition, which treats biopolitics as the original and ontological paradigm of Western politics, the essay discusses how, historically, sovereign power has been conceived as a “double body”—transcendent and immanent, sacred and sacrificial, absolute and perpetual—from whose tension conceptual and political metamorphoses of sovereignty arise. The first attribute of sovereignty—absoluteness, on which Agamben has often focused—should be seen as an ordering and essentially modern function of its second “body”: the perpetuity of power. The article illustrates, then, how the retrospective projections through which the Italian philosopher constructs his ontological reading of sovereignty depend on some logical and epistemological lacunae that characterise his “archaeological method,” which is based, essentially, on an arbitrary use of historical analogies.
A Completely New Politics, or, Excluding the Political? Agamben's Critique of Sovereignty
Soziale Systeme
The paradox of the excluded middle - namely, that the proposition »All propositions are either true or false« can itself be proven neither true nor false - is presented as the logical figure for the exception or self-exemption at the heart of the political principle of sovereignty. Whereas Carl Schmitt maintains the necessity of the sovereign exception to the rule, Giorgio Agamben wishes us to push beyond the logic of exclusion that defines the political within the Western metaphysical tradition. Contrasting Schmitt with Walter Benjamin and thus the Messiah with the katychon, Agamben seeks a »completely new politics« that would release us from guilt and return us to a »natural innocence.« Conversely, this paper argues that the katychon, with its consequent infinite deferral of the parousia, is indeed the appropriate model for the political in the terrestrial City that can never aspire to the status of the City of God.
Theories of Foucault and Agamben: the Issues of Borders and Sovereignty”
2020
have developed theoretical lenses for depicting how we should understand individuals in sovereign states, and the way in which these states interact with said individuals. Through an approach that assesses the framework of biology, race and ethnicity contribute to the notions of biopolitics and of 'bare life,' and exemplifies the constructs of how discrimination against the 'other' is embedded in western thought. These systematic processes are utilized through notions of biopower and the 'state of exception' as a means of maintaining hierarchical power structures. This paper will be assessing the role of the international in these processes of analysing borders, and humanitarian intervention in the promotion of western values. At the individual level, those who are classified under these 'biopolitical' or 'bare life' find themselves as victims of sovereign power; their existence is dependent on majoritarian and cultural feasibilities. Individuals are unpredictable, which makes them the target of norms and ideologies of the sovereign state, framing them as a threat and security risk to the western order.
Against Totalitarianism: Agamben, Foucault, and the Politics of Critique
Foucault Studies, 2015
Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but ra-ther a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fun-damental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes to proliferate. By contrast, Agamben’s resurrection of sovereignty turns on a moraliz-ing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions “against” totali-tarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject.