Impossible dialogue on biopower: Agamben and Foucault

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...

The "Dark Side" of Biopolitics. Notes to Agamben's Homo sacer, 2023

This paper discusses Giorgio Agamben's reading of Michel Foucault's biopolitics and biopower. Agamben intertwines Foucault's biopolitics, Hannah Arendt's insights on the distinction between the political realm and the sphere of biological life, Carl Schmitt's notions of "sovereignty" and "exception", and Walter Benjamin's syntagma "bare life" 2. While examining Agamben's use of the notion of biopolitics and the distinction between the two Greek words for life, zoé and bios, this paper will not study Agamben's employ of Carl Schmitt's, Hannah Arendt's 3 , and Walter Benjamin's theorizations on politics, sovereignty, and bare life. On the contrary, it will focus on Agamben's broad use of the concept of biopolitics, which he employs to address the outbreaks of violence against foreigners and citizens, and what he describes as the steady normalization of the state of exception that started at the dawn of the modern age.

Foucault Studies 2, 2005

2005

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.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2015

Ideas y Valores, 2013

This article presents a critical account of Agamben's understanding of the logic of sovereignty and of the notion bare life, particularly Agamben's approach to the paradox of sovereignty and its relation to Aristotle's metaphysical category of potentiality. With regards to bare life, it brings together an analysis of the figure of the homo sacer with an account of Agamben's use of paradigms as methodological tools. The first part of the paper argues that Agamben ontologises sovereignty by dramatising the paradox of its structure as im-potentiality. The second part claims that even though an account of Agamben's methodology serves to respond to the different critiques that his notion of bare life has raised, Agamben's notions of sovereignty and of bare life ultimately rely on Schmitt's decisionism.

In the introduction to Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben proposes that the “the protagonist” of his book is “bare life,” particularly “the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert” (12). Agamben’s interpretation of “the life of homo sacer” is derived from Roman law, but it is particularly appropriated with respect to how human life, generally, is included in or excluded from the overarching political structure. For Agamben, “bare life”—a simple form of human existence—becomes zoē constituted by (or separated from) the political order of bios, by sovereignty’s “state of exception.” Essentially, not only does sovereignty exist in a politicalized construct to, chiefly, stabilize it and make determinations about who should be included in (or excluded from) the bios, but the Sovereign has a Heideggerian “ek-sistence,” due to being existentially exceptional.

2013