Foucault's Analytics of Sovereignty

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.

Foucault Studies

This book presents a novel conception of political freedom developed on the basis of the work of Foucault. Against the prevailing interpretations which disqualify a Foucauldian approach from the discourse of freedom, this study posits freedom as the primary axiological motif of Foucault's writing. Prozorov reconstructs an ontology of freedom in Foucault's textual corpus AND outlines the modalities of its practice in the contemporary terrain of global governance on the basis of a new interpretation of the relation of Foucault's approach to the problematic of sovereignty. Critically engaging with acclaimed post-Foucauldian theories of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, this book restores the controversial notion of the sovereign subject to the critical discourse on global politics. As a study in political thought, this book will be suitable for students and scholars interested in the problematic of political freedom, philosophy and global governmentality.

In his own writings and lectures, Foucault sought to free the study of power from institutions. The originality of Foucault’s work lies in part in how he reverses the question of power, asking not how power is held and imposed but how it is produced. In both his discussion of sovereignty and governmentality, though, Foucault focuses almost exclusively on Rome under the principate. Although there are certainly continuities between the Republic and the principate, the social and political frameworks that Foucault sees as dissolving under the principate are still intact in the Republic. My interest is to reconstruct this framework, not from its institutional forms but from the logic by which relations of power are organized. After briefly setting up how Rome figures into Foucault’s thought I extend his discussion to identify a ratio of government by which the res publica was made intelligible, its relations understood, and its logic organized. I end by suggesting some implications for neo-Roman interpretations of liberty as non-domination.

Journal of Law and Society, 2006

After raising doubts about Foucault's approach to law-power, in the light of various acts of religion-inspired violence on and after 11 September 2001, a case is made against this approach, based on the charge that Foucault ties law far too tightly to what he calls negative power. He makes law part of juridico-sovereignty power, a form of power he regards as outmoded, with an outmoded commitment to sovereignty and the state. It is argued that in attempting to separate law from what he sees as the positive power of modern governmentality, Foucault never understands law's role as a part of a crucial balance ± between political power, military power, the social, the cultural, the legal, and the economic ± a balance that tries to achieve both individual freedom and the security to enjoy that freedom. An alternative way of understanding law, and of understanding sovereignty and the state ± the state under the rule of law ± is presented as a much better route to an appreciation of law's part in the balance.

Critical Horizons, 15 (1), 14-27., 2014

Amy Allen criticizes Foucault for having a “narrow and impoverished conception of social interaction, according to which all such interaction is strategic.” I challenge this claim, partly on the basis of comments by Foucault which explicitly acknowledge and in some cases endorse forms of non-strategic interaction, but more importantly on the basis of the significant changes in Foucault’s concept of power that he elaborated in lectures from 1978 onwards and in “The Subject and Power.” His 1975–1976 lectures embarked upon a critical re-examination of the “strategic” concept of power that he had relied upon up to this point. However, it was not until 1978 and after that he outlined an alternative concept of power as government, or more broadly as “action upon the actions of others.” After retracing this shift in Foucault’s understanding of power, I argue that the concept of power as action upon the actions of others does not commit him to a narrow conception of social interaction as always strategic. At the same time, Foucault’s concept does not answer normative questions about acceptable versus unacceptable ways of governing the actions of others.

At the beginning and end of Foucault’s decade-long excursus on power, he refers to the Greek image of the "sumbolon" in which two halves must be joined to become “a unique object whose overall configuration is the manifest form of power”. In his investigations into power, he divides and joins the halves of: sovereignty & biopolitics, the religious& the political, the theological and the secular, the juridical-political & war and battle, reign & government, games of freedom & states of domination, violence & consent, totalization & individualization, political technologies & techniques of the self. We can add here: the domestic and the international. While ‘domestic’ social sciences, such as sociology, are liable to find Foucault deficient in privileging the economic-governmental axis over the more ‘structural’ one of sovereignty and the state, the critical study of international relations welcomes his governmental-constructivist search for an analysis of power beyond the state and sovereignty. This paper argues for a putting together of different pieces of Foucault's thought to suggest an approach to contemporary power relations as a field of oscillation and vibration between the juridical-institutional form of sovereignty and the economic-managerial one of governmentality. Another name for the 'sumbolon* is what I elsewhere call 'the signature of power'.

2022

The present study aims to analyze the insufficiency of a juridical-sovereign model as a way of analyzing con- temporary power relations. Oriented by the archaeo- logical method, the research presents as a hypothesis the insufficiency of the models of legal-sovereign analysis to understand the dynamics of power, con- sidering that these have their best functioning from a microphysics of power. To this end, a bibliographic re- view of Michel Foucault's vast work constitutes the base material for research. In the itinerary proposed by this study, the theme will be addressed at first with the characterization of the microphysics of power, followed by a reading of the transition from the an- cien regimen to the so-called disciplinary society - as- sociated with the biopolitical device - and ending in the techniques of consciousness direction, in pastoral power, that is, in the dimension of subjectivity that becomes the focus of relations between government and governed, explaining the difference that consti- tutes the modern government / population paradigm in face of the legal analyzes organized by the idea of sovereign / people.