Agamben's Foucault: an overview

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...

Foucault Studies, 2010

Following the trajectory of Giorgio Agamben's work since the mid-1990s not only offers a fascinating exposure to this productive period, and an important political turn, in his work, it also makes evident that it is proceeding by an ongoing interpretation of the thought of Michel Foucault. This review offers a chance to evaluate several of his texts, including the most recent ones, together in a manner that allows at least a partial exposition of Agamben's engagement with Foucault. These texts, some long translated in English, some newly translated (with attendant considerations that are noted here), and some not yet translated from Italian, show an intellectual itinerary followed in the developing work of Giorgio Agamben: one which, by his own insistence, is heavily indebted to Foucault.

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.

Foucault Studies

Antonella Cutro, Technique et vie: biopolitique et philosophie du bios dans la pensée de Michel Foucault (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010), ISBN: 978-2-296-54085-9.

International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2016

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben criticizes Michel Foucaultʹs distinction between "productive" bio-power and "deductive" sovereign power, emphasizing that it is not possible to distinguish between these two. In his view, the production of what he calls "bare life" is the original, although concealed, activity of sovereign power. In this article, Agambenʹs conclusions are called into question. (1) The notion of "bare life", distinguished from the "form of life", belongs exclusively to the order of sovereignty, being incompatible with the modern bio-political notion of life, that is univocal and immanent to itself. In the era of biopolitics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe ("form-of-life").

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.

Foucault Studies 2, 2005

This term paper discusses Michel Foucault major works as follows; Power/knowledge, the Birth of Clinic, Discipline and Punish and the Order of Things. In the mentioned writings Michel Foucault believed in the freedom of people. He also realized that as individuals, we react to situations in different ways. He used his books as a vehicle to show the various factors that interact and collide in his analysis of change and its effects. As a philosophical historian and an observer of human relations, his work focused on the dominant genealogical and archaeological knowledge systems and practices, tracking them through different historical eras, including the social contexts that were in place that permitted change - the nature of power in society. He wrote that power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" (Foucault 1980,30).