Michel Foucault articulated the hypothesis of biopower and biopolitics in the 1970s, and Giorgio Agamben developed this hypothesis in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English in 1998. Since these interventions, biopower and biopolitics have become indispensable as a theoretical point of reference in the humanities and social sciences. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that in the last thirty years the process of biopower and biopolitical regulation has increased, so much so that today every (...) aspect of social relation is subjected to the operations of this power. This chapter considers the position of biopower in the thought of Foucault and Agamben, and how the two conceive of power and resistance to power. It examines how biopower relates to sovereign power in both philosophers’ work, and specifically how Agamben’s development of Foucault’s thought is radical and offers a markedly different direction to scholarship on biopower and its relationship to sovereign power. Despite the relative age of Foucault’s writings, they continue to offer conceptual and theoretical tools for scholars in ways that Agamben’s theories and work do not. I use the example of the coronavirus pandemic to illustrate the shortcomings in Agamben’s thought. Finally, this chapter draws on recent work by Alexander Weheliye and Achille Mbembé to explore the close relationship between sexuality and race, and to show how both gender and race open up new avenues for exploring biopower and its relationship to sovereignty in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This essay examines and challenges some of the theoretical arguments of the neoliberal attack on the concept of popular sovereignty. I argue that in order to resist both the neoliberal reaction against popular power and the subsequent resurgence of populist rhetoric, we need to rework the concept of popular sovereignty. I focus on three groups of texts written in the early years of the neoliberal shift—namely, from the mid-1970s to early 1980s—which deal with the question of sovereignty: (...) Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty; Foucault’s works of the late 1970s; and Lefort’s reflections on the symbolic dimension of power. While Hayek and Foucault defend similar views on sovereignty and argue that it is or should be replaced by technics of management, Lefort proposes a de-essentialized conception of democracy based on redefining sovereignty as the possibility of continually refiguring the space of power. (shrink)

(2006). A ‘Retro‐version’ of Power: Agamben via Foucault on Sovereignty. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 445-459.

Deleuze has suggested that Spinoza and Foucault share common concerns, particularly the notion of immanence and their mutual hostility to theories of subjective intentionality and contract-based theories of state power. This article explores these shared concerns. On the one hand Foucault's view of governmentality and its re-theorization of power, sovereignty and resistance provide insights into how humans are constituted as individualized subjects and how populations are formed as subject to specific regimes or mentalities of government. On the (...) other, Spinoza was concerned with how humans organized themselves into communities capable of self-government. In particular, his idea of immanent causality was crucial because central to his ideas of freedom and power. We argue that Spinoza's approach to power and causality prefigures ideas developed by Foucault in his theory of governmentality, especially with respect to his biopolitical rethinking of power and resistance. (shrink)

The course given by Michel Foucault from February to March 1984, under the title 'The Courage of Truth', was his last at the Collège de France. His death shortly after, on June 25th, tempts us to detect a philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the theme of death, notably through a reinterpretation of Socrates' last words--'Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius'--which, with Georges Dumézil, Foucault understands as the expression of (...) a profound gratitude towards philosophy for its cure of the only serious illness: that of false opinions and prejudices. These lectures continue and radicalize the analyses of those of the previous year. Foucault's 1983 lectures investigated the function of 'truth telling' in politics in order to establish courage and conviction as ethical conditions for democracy irreducible to the formal rules of consensus. With the Cynics, this manifestation of the truth no longer appears simply as a risky speaking out, but in the very substance of existence. In fact, Foucault offers an incisive study of ancient Cynicism as practical philsophy, athleticism of the truth, public provocation, and ascetic sovereignty. The scandal of the true life is constructed in oppositon to Platonism and its world of transcendent intelligible forms"--Publisher's description, p. [2] of dust jacket. (shrink)

The notion of biopolitical sovereignty and the theory of the state of exception are perspectives derived from Carl Schmitt’s thought and Michel Foucault’s writings that have been popularized by critical political theorists like Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri of late. This article argues that these perspectives are not sufficient analytical points of departure for a critique of the contemporary politics of terror, violence and war marked by a growing global exploitation of bodies, tightened management of (...) life, and endless and unpredictable abusive force. To better capture the singularity of our present condition of violence, war and terror, a supplementation of Schmitt’s and Foucault’s approaches by way of Hannah Arendt’s language of political action and agonistic engagement is useful. By bringing Arendt’s language of political agony to bear on contemporary biopolitical debates and discourses, we wish to revisit common practices of war and terror as matters of ‘agonal sovereignty’. ‘Agonal sovereignty’ allows us to peer into the ‘abyss of total violence’ that manifests itself after sovereign decisionism and biopolitical modalities of power have taken over the everyday conduct of political affairs. (shrink)

Contemporary Foucauldian research assimilates the political with governance. This formulation dates to Foucault's emphasis on the significance of the anti-Machiavellians in introducing the concept of governance into political theory. Returning to Machiavelli, we argue that early modern political theory was instead characterized by the simultaneous problematization of ruler and ruled, and the co-constitution of sovereignty and governance. We then outline the relation of ruler and ruled in the political structure of the democratic sovereign. Concepts of both sovereignty (...) and governance are necessary to theorize the political in modernity, including the dangers that arise from fusing sovereignty and governance, as occurred during the Nazi period in Germany, when the distinction between the sovereign people and the governed population was conflated. (shrink)

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 rather 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 fundamental 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 moralizing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions “against” totalitarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject. (shrink)

The objective of my comments is to draw attention to the complex relationship between the juridico-political model of sovereignty and disciplinary power in Foucault's work. I suggest that Elden's reading of Foucault and Shakespeare opens up new ways to understand contemporary forms of governmentality through a genealogy of political ceremony and theatricality. More specifically, my comments seek to show that an examination of the ceremoniality of coup d'État in connection with what Foucault calls the “democratization of (...) sovereignty” is potentially fruitful for examining modern forms of the government of civil society and counter-conduct. (shrink)

,is article addresses the relationship between sovereignty, biopolitics and governmentality in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault. By unpacking Foucault’s genealogy of modern governmentality, it responds to a criticism leveled against Foucauldian accounts of power for their alleged abandonment of the traditional model of power in juridico-institutional terms in favor of an understanding of power as purely productive. ,is claim has most signi-cantly been developed by Agamben in “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare (...) Life”. I argue that Judith Butler’s analysis of power, in particular in her essay “Inde-nite Detention”, presents a more di.erentiated account of power that registers the signi-cance of practices of sovereignty and resonates with Foucault’s lectures on “Security, Territory, Population”. (shrink)

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 skips over the res publica; a form of political organization that fits neither Foucault’s characterization of sovereignty nor the care of the self. I extend Foucault’s discussion to identify a ratio of government around the discipline (...) of ownership 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. (shrink)

The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was always divided and contested. In this article I argue that Foucault offers a competing account of sovereignty that underlines such features and is thus more historically apt. While commentators typically assume that Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty is borrowed from the classical theory, I demonstrate instead that he (...) offers a sui generis interpretation, which results from the application of his general strategic conception of power to sovereignty itself. In construing sovereignty through a “matrix” of civil war, Foucault thus deprives it of the absoluteness traditionally attributed to it. Instead, he views sovereignty as constituted by conflictual and mobile power relations, a precarious political technology that deploys violence to restore its authority. I also motivate Foucault’s contention that popular sovereignty remains fundamentally continuous with the absolutist sovereignty it succeeds, insofar as it masks and thereby perpetuates unequal power relations in conditions of social conflict. According to Foucault, sovereignty is not a fact of power but a contestory claim, a discourse whose mutability helps to explain its persistence today. (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, activists, farmers and scholars have been arguing that the industrialized global food system erodes democracy, perpetuates injustices, undermines population health and is environmentally unsustainable. In an attempt to resist these effects, activists have proposed alternative food networks that draw on ideas and practices from pre-industrial agrarian smallholder farming, as well as contemporary peasant movements. -/- This book uses current debates over Michel Foucault’s method of genealogy as a practice of critique and historical problematization of (...) the present to reveal the historical constitution of contemporary alternative food discourses. While alternative food activists appeal to food sovereignty and agrarian discourses to counter the influence of neoliberal agricultural policies, these discourses remain entangled with colonial logics. In particular, the influence of Enlightenment ideas of improvement, colonial practices of agriculture as a means to establish ownership, and anthropocentric relations to the land. In combination with the genealogical analysis, this book brings continental political philosophy into conversation with Indigenous theories of sovereignty and alternative food discourse in order to open new spaces for thinking about food and politics in contemporary Australia. (shrink)

In this article, I explore several of Foucault’s claims in relation to race, biopolitics, and power in order to illuminate some concerns in the wake of the post-9.11.01 political regime of population management. First, what is the relationship between sovereignty and power? Foucault’s writings on the relation between sovereignty and power seem to differ across his writings, such that it is not clear whether he had definitively circumscribed the role of sovereignty in relation to “power.” (...) Second, while central sovereign authority, at least in ”Society Must Be Defended” has been displaced by Foucault’s analysis of power, the question still remains as to what drives or instantiates the exercise of power. I lay out an account of what I will call “ontopolitics,” as one that foregrounds the role of sovereign authority in ascribing racial divisions. Moreover, these divisions are driven by cultural, social, and moral criteria that complement—or circumscribe—biopolitics—and are inscribed at the level of the ontological, or onto-ethical. (shrink)

This piece considers especially the concept of potentiality in Agamben, and how it is indebted to and present in Foucault’s thought. It draws on Aristotle to highlight important aspects of potentiality and to consider Agamben’s interpretation of it. The paper thus indicates some of the important ontological and methodological aspects of the relations between Foucault and Agamben.

Foucault’s critique of early modern political theory aimed at displacing sovereignty as the principle of intelligibility of power. In the genealogical literature since Foucault, sovereignty has become a residual category lacking analytic specificity, largely displaced by governance, in turn equated with politics. We argue that Foucault and the Foucauldians have not understood that the flourishing of governance has presupposed a symbolic regime with a division of knowledge-power-law characteristic of the democratic sovereign. The conflation of governance (...) with politics, together with the sliding of sovereignty under governance, has left Foucauldians unable to diagnose the dangers present in varying possible sovereignty-governance configurations. (shrink)

Modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone. Although a metaphysical assumption, anthropocentrism is of immense practical import, enabling modern states to command loyalty and resources from their subjects in pursuit of political projects. It has limits, however, which are brought clearly into view by the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously. UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet (...) in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be "known" only by not asking what it is. (shrink)

This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault in order to analyze the constellation of political strategies and power at the US/Mexico border wall. These strategies, however, are incredibly diverse and often directly antagonistic of one another. Thus, this paper argues that in order to make sense of the seemingly multiple and contradictory political strategies deployed in the operation of the US/Mexico border wall, we have to understand the coexistence and intertwinement of at least three distinct types of (...) power at work there: the sovereign exclusion of illegal life, the disciplinary detention of surveilled life, and the biopolitical circulation of migratory life. By doing so this paper offers an original contribution to two major areas of study: in Foucault studies this paper expands the existing literature on Foucault by analyzing the crossroads of power particular to the US/Mexico border wall, which has not yet been done, and in border studies this Foucauldian approach offers a unique political analysis that goes beyond the critique of sovereignty and toward an analysis of coexisting strategies of power. (shrink)

While the immediate aim of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Critique of Violence,” is to provide a critique of legal violence, commentators typically interpret it as providing a further critique of state violence. However, this interpretation often receives no further argument, and it remains unclear whether Benjamin’s essay may prove analytically relevant for a critique of state violence today. This paper argues that the “Critique” proves thusly relevant, but only on condition that it is developed in two directions. The first direction (...) is conceptual, and consists in an explanation of the necessary relationship between states and violence. This explanation is found by appealing to a concept not cited in Benjamin’s text, but which, I argue, remains its implicit basis: sovereignty. According to this conceptual development, state violence is the necessary result of the state's attempt to maintain its sovereign law at the expense of emancipatory struggles to generate non-sovereign law. The second direction is genealogical, and consists in destabilizing the modern belief that justice is best served through the judicial channels of a sovereign state. Here I employ Michel Foucault’s genealogical research to demonstrate the historical contingency of state justice and, by extension, the possibility of a justice beyond the state. (shrink)

This paper analyzes "ticking time bomb" scenarios in the discursive legitimation of torture and other coercive interrogation techniques. Judith Butler proposes a Foucauldian framework to suggest that Adminstration policies can be read as the irruption of sovereignty within governmentality. Rereading Foucault, I suggest that the policies could equally be understood as an exercise of governmentality, i.e., the subordination of juridical law to economy. I then propose as a reconciliation of these readings that time bomb scenarios serve rhetorically to (...) make the exercise of arbitrary power Butler identifies appear as an exercise of governmentality; sanitized of complications, coercive interrogation appears efficient. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power has generated a large body of work in many different disciplines. Much of it has considered the paradox of the power of “each and all” or has seen pastoral power as an extension of the disciplinary gaze into welfare state policy. The political economy of the pastorate and the mutual dependence of sovereign and pastoral power, by contrast, are both relatively neglected. This article focuses on the exercise of pastoral power in a moral (...) and political economy and examines the “arts of government” through which the Catholic Church attempted to claim that pastors lived from the flock only to live for it. While there is heuristic value in Foucault’s diagram of pastoral power, in practice that power cannot be separated from class relations and political sovereignty. Empirical material is drawn from the novel attempt of Britain to govern its Quebec colony through the Catholic Church. (shrink)

How can sovereignty provide the premises to think outside of sovereignty? In other words, how is it possible to perceive of resistance to sovereignty which itself is deemed to have been caught up in the double bind of sovereignty? With a critical appraisal of theories on the ‘state of exception’ in conversation with Robert Jungk’s consideration of the ‘nuclear state’, I account for the nuclear state of exception which has acquired sovereignty in several nations in (...) the post-Second World War scenario, before going on to consider ‘spaces of exception’ to it. I then provide a critical appraisal of studies of resistance. Using the case of a public hearing on the Koodankulam nuclear power plant in south India, I account for how ways of conceptualizing contestation and challenges in the shadows of sovereignty can be pursued in what I describe as a case of ‘sovereignty without hegemony’. (shrink)

The paper explores the incentive structures and the structurally rigid social hierarchies inherent in the polarizing logic of modern credit money and the mutual constitution of money’s sovereign and biopolitical dimensions. It is argued that the monetary system constitutes a major transitory channel for the logic of financial capital to transcend the limitations of sovereign spaces and to transform itself into a biopolitical force. The relationship between the material and the subjective – or the sovereign and the biopolitical – dimensions (...) of money is seen as di-polaric rather than di-chotomic – as a mutually constitutive whole between relational dynamics and the normalizing opportunity structures which govern such interaction. If the sovereign and the biopolitical dimensions of money indeed constitute distinct but inseparable moments of the same totality, there would appear to be more room for strategic combination of heterogeneous analytical practices in emancipatory scholarship than what some of the traditional notions of the epistemological politics of power and sovereignty might suggest. (shrink)

The events of 9/11 have underlined the relevance of the thought of Georgio Agamben in so far as he attempts to explain the genesis of an authoritarianism that increasingly implements extraordinary measures and enhanced surveillance. This can be understood in terms of the expansion of a biopolitical regime. Biometric analysis: finger printing, iris and retina scans etc., are to be understood in their relation to the individual as bare life, the individual stripped of his/her political legal identity and thus identified (...) without reference to the latter. The camp, according to Agamben, is said to be the ultimate space, a lawless zone, where questions of legality and illegality become irrelevant. However, this paper argues that Agamben fails to underline the importance of the Cartesian legacy that initiated a form of conceptualization in which the ordering of reality replaced qualitative distinctions with mathematical quantification. Biometric analysis, which relies heavily on mathematized quantification of biological features, is integral to the biopolitical regime, as described by Michel Foucault and Agamben. This paper argues that a rejection of this Cartesian inheritance is necessary if we are to overcome insidious forms of control based on surveillance, biometric identification or even managerial oversight through supposedly quantifiable metrics of performance. (shrink)

The essay identifies and analyses the main similarities between Weber’s and Foucault’s work. They concern the three main areas of their reflection: knowledge, power and the subject. These thematic axes are always firmly intertwined in their work. With regard to knowledge, both authors practice a form of historical knowledge in which both the “subject” of knowledge and the “object” known are radically called into question. Regarding power, they abandon the model of the state and sovereignty in order to (...) analyse the relations of power and domination that run through the entire social body and that “govern” the conduct of individuals. As for the subject, both elaborate ethical forms of subjectivity and “care of the self” that take on an ascetic significance. For Weber, however, it is a question of making objectivity itself a “vocation” for the subject, while Foucault proposes a resistance and a struggle for a new subjectivity. (shrink)

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and the “Society Must Be Defended” lectures (1975–1976), Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault present unexpected engagements with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. This article contextualizes and elucidates their interpretations of Hobbes by foregrounding the genealogical aspect of their projects. Their readings of Leviathan reflect common methodological commitments and figure the distinct but related problematics which Foucault and Arendt articulate, encapsulating the differences between their influential conceptions of power. The article concludes with a reading of (...) Hobbes’ theory of the liberty of subjects, which, while not explicitly addressed by Arendt or Foucault, lends support to their treatments of his text. Comparing their readings of Hobbes opens a potentially generative dialogue between their critiques of sovereignty and racialized state violence. (shrink)

A crucial element of sovereignty politics concerns the role that juridical techniques play in recursively creating images of the sovereign. This paper aims to render that dimension explicit by focusing on examples of crime-focused law and colonial rule at the Cape of Good Hope circa 1795. It attempts to show how this law helped to define a colonial sovereign via such idioms as proclamations, inquisitorial criminal procedures, and case narratives framing the atrocity and appropriate punishment for crimes. Referring to (...) primary texts of the time, the paper explores how procedures and narratives of Cape law were also deeply involved in fashioning specific images of the sovereign in whose name it claimed to operate. (shrink)

Liberal government, as analysed by Foucault, is a project of measured, utilitarian political activity, that takes ‘population’ as its object, dating back to the late 17th century. The rise of nationalism, authoritarianism and populism directly challenges this project, by seeking to re-introduce excessive, gratuitous and performative modes of power back into liberal societies. This article examines the relationship and tensions between government and sovereignty, so as to make sense of this apparent ‘revenge of sovereignty on government’. It (...) argues that neoliberalism has been a crucial factor in the return of sovereignty as a ‘problem’ of contemporary societies. Neoliberalism tacitly generates new centres of sovereign power, which have become publicly visible since 2008, leading to a dramatic resurgence of discourses and claims to ‘sovereignty’. (shrink)

For Foucault, Hobbes is important for the transition from sovereignty to governmentality, but he does not always go into great detail how. In “Society Must Be Defended”, Hobbes’s reactions against the political historicism of his time lead him to an ahistorical foundation to the state. In Security, Territory, Population, his contract is emblematic of the art of government still caught in the logic of sovereignty. Management techniques, one of which being inheritance laws like primogeniture, inducing changes in (...) a population’s milieu so that its interest is properly directed allow the art of government to escape this logic. Hobbes supports primogeniture, but its historical position in the common law makes this support unexpected. This article examines the historical context of primogeniture and the reasoning for Hobbes’s support of it in light of Foucault’s claims about him in order to give more precision to those claims. The result is that primogeniture as a law of nature produces the family as an interested unit of the population. Yet this interest is itself historicized, so Hobbes’s attempt to de-historicize politics did not fully succeed. (shrink)

This article explores the Foucauldian analysis of the linkage between temporality and politics, addressing mainly two loci of Foucault’s production: the assessment of the post-WWII ordoliberal experience in The Birth of Biopoliticsand the Iran reportage for “Corriere Della Sera”. The article emphasizes the relevance of Foucault’s assessment of ordoliberal Germany for contemporary studies on neoliberalism and inscribes Foucault in a wider tradition of thought on the relevance of history and temporality for the comprehension of political dynamics. In (...) TBoB, Foucault offered a prescient analysis of neoliberal temporality and its de-politicizing effects. In his view, ordoliberal theorists and politicians sought to ground political legitimacy in the economy itself, giving birth to a political-economic “double circuit” which did away with history and made political consensus “permanent” and automatic. The connection between neoliberalism, the re-structuring of state sovereignty, and temporality will be highlighted. Furthermore, by analyzingthe almost-coeval Iranian reportages and the eulogy for Clavel, the article further investigates Fou-cault’s reflection on the link between temporality, politics,and subjectivation processes. If the anal-ysis of ordoliberal temporality in TBoB describes a linkage between de-temporalization and de-politicization, the reportages will be highlighted as a possible “pars construens” –as a way to reinstate the possibility of political action through the appeal to different ways to experience tem-porality. The article concludes that Foucault’s sparse comments on temporality can be read as an attempt, albeit not fully developed, not only to envision the de-politicizing effects of marketization but also to envisage new, re-politicizing modes of experiencing temporality and history. (shrink)

Michel Foucault in this Post-Colonial Time In our time of globalisation and post-colonial existence what do the writings of Michel Foucault represent for us ? The article discusses the reception of Foucault in India. It shows how new research in the areas of law and extra-legal powers, into the nature of sovereignty and exceptions, combines Foucault’s ideas in a creative way, with a non-conformity and radicalism that post-colonial society is generating now. We cannot help remembering (...) that this is not the first time that existing social inquiries about the body and about the physical aspects of our political life have taken on an interesting new turn. This is nothing new. The entire tradition can be described by way of Lenin’s phrase, “militant materialism”. (shrink)

In Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer project, he gives an archaeology of Western political power from ancient Rome up through Carl Schmitt's model of "exceptional sovereignty," where the sovereign is "he who decides on the exception."1 Agamben takes Schmitt's thesis further, arguing that, in modern biopolitics, the "sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such," and therefore, on life and death in the state.2 Although this model also appears in Foucault's work, Penelope (...) Deutscher argues that Agamben's use of it includes "the particularly lethal variant seen in the capacity to cancel the status of what is put to death."3 "Homo sacer" is the name that Agamben gives to the form of political... (shrink)

Bataille and Blanchot figure among the authors who influenced Foucault the most. In this article we show how close Foucault was to these authors and to what extent his proximity to them permitted him to deviate from the prevailing university culture, i.e from those great philosophical machines called Hegelianism and phenomenology. The questions we pose are the following: How important were these experiences for Foucault? How did he receive them? How did he transform their theoretical stakes? In (...) the first part of this article we argue that the encounter with Bataille’s work and Blanchot’s was for Foucault a kind of experience of the self. In Bataille and Blanchot, experience has the function of wrenching the subject from itself: it is a project of desubjectivation and of destruction of the notion of the foundational subject and system in philosophy. The second part focuses on the contemporary experience of the death of God. According to Foucault, such an experience discloses the limitless reign of the Limit. We show how the work of Bataille, his discovery of the categories of irreversible expenditure, death, sacrifice, excess, limit, negativity pushes the system beyond its limit. In the third part we take into account the literary experience of Blanchot. According to Foucault, Blanchot’s work focuses on the disappearance of the subject: the being of language emerges in the exclusion of the subject. How is it possible to have a language stripped of dialectics? (shrink)

No topic has caused more discussion in recent philosophy and political theory than sovereignty. From late Foucault to Agamben, and from Guantanamo Bay to the 'war on terror,' the issue of the extent and the nature of the sovereign has given theoretical debates their currency and urgency. New thinking on sovereignty has always imagined the styles of human selfhood that each regime involves. Each denomination of sovereignty requires a specific mode of subjectivity to explain its meaning (...) and facilitate its operation. The aim of this book is to help outline Jacques Derrida's thinking on sovereignty - a theme which increasingly attracted Derrida towards the end of his career - in its relationship to subjectivity. It investigates the late work Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, as not only Derrida's fullest statement of his thinking on sovereignty, but also as the destination of his career-long interest in questions of politics and self-identity. The book argues that in Derrida's thinking of the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity - and the related themes of unconditionality and ipseity - we can detect the outline of Bataille's adaptation of Freud. Freud completed his 'metapsychology,' by defining the 'economic' nature of subjectivity. In Bataille's hands, this economic theory became a key to the nature of inter-relationship in general, specifically the complex and shifting relationship between subjectivity and power. In playing with Bataille's legacy, Derrida connects not only with the irrepressibly outrageous thinking of philosophy's most self-consciously transgressive thinker, but with the early twentieth century scientific revolution through which 'energy' became ontology. As with so many of the forebears who influenced him, Derrida echoes and adapts Bataille's thinking while radically de-literalising it. The results are crucial for understanding Derrida's views on power, subjectivity and representation, as well as all of the other key themes in late Derrida: hospitality, justice, otherness and the gift. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of a new form of right that is both antidisciplinarian and liberated from ‘sovereignty’, the term Michel Foucault uses for what he claims to be the traditional theme of modern political philosophy. Some attempts to derive a theory of right from Foucault’s critique have been made. However, by their own admission they do not yield a coherent and adequate theory, and other work has demonstrated the major problems (...) inherent in Foucault’s critique that render such a project problematic. This paper takes a different approach by revising the philosophical foundations of modern democracy with the goal of developing a new theory of right that addresses the problems that Foucault identified. To provide a theoretical context for this exploration, Foucault’s key concepts of disciplinary technologies, power, the construction and maintenance of human subjects, and the role of the human body in human subjection are briefly reviewed. The main analysis will focus on the ideas of three political theorists whose respective works represent the core of ‘sovereignty’, and who are indisputably basic to any student of Western political theory, namely Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The aim of this analysis is not to provide another critique of their virtues and shortcomings. Instead, the work of these thinkers is used in a pragmatic way, to elicit a new form of right that could serve as a counter to disciplinary power. Key Words: civil right • Enlightenment • Foucault • natural right • political philosophy • political theory • postmodern critique • social justice. (shrink)

Using the Western tradition of metaphysical and political thought as a backdrop, Critique of Sovereignty (a work in 4 volumes) re-examines the concept of sovereignty in order to better understand why our ethical values and technical capacities often seem so divorced from our lived realities. On the one hand, ostensibly self-enclosed entities like the nation-state and the person are rhetorically bolstered as sites of technical agency and/or moral responsibility. On the other hand, these same entities appear fragile -- (...) if not purely fictional -- in relation to ever ongoing tidal processes such as the migration, diffusion, and conglomeration of bodies, capital, ideas, etc. While some of our institutions might work some of the time, they always seem to work differently than we like to think they do. Accordingly, the forging of more humane institutions might very well entail if not require ways of thinking that strive to undo the self-imagined binds, exceptions, and sureties of thought for the sake of embracing a continuity with all that withers, decays, and falls away. Book I, "Contemporary Theories of Sovereignty," compares the varied interpretations of sovereignty given by a range of 20th-century political theorists (Maritain, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Agamben, Hardt, and Negri) with Jean Bodin's initial outline of the concept, rendered at the outset of modern political thought in the 16th century. The analytic framework of sovereignty encountered in these comparative readings provides an initial point of departure for unfolding a method of critique appropriate to the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is an ideal starting point for a critique of the deadlocks between thought and reality for a simple reason: it doesn't actually exist. When it serves as a guide to action, sovereignty may be regarded as a particularly captivating fantasy. The closer it appears, the further it recedes, and, too often, the more vigorously it is pursued. (shrink)

The forms of liberal government that emerged after World War II are in the midst of a profound crisis. In I Am the People, Partha Chatterjee reconsiders the concept of popular sovereignty in order to explain today’s dramatic outburst of movements claiming to speak for “the people.” To uncover the roots of populism, Chatterjee traces the twentieth-century trajectory of the welfare state and neoliberal reforms. Mobilizing ideals of popular sovereignty and the emotional appeal of nationalism, anticolonial movements ushered (...) in a world of nation-states while liberal democracies in Europe guaranteed social rights to their citizens. But as neoliberal techniques shrank the scope of government, politics gave way to technical administration by experts. Once the state could no longer claim an emotional bond with the people, the ruling bloc lost the consent of the governed. To fill the void, a proliferation of populist leaders have mobilized disaffected groups into a battle that they define as the authentic people against entrenched oligarchy. Once politics enters a spiral of competitive populism, Chatterjee cautions, there is no easy return to pristine liberalism. Only a counter-hegemonic social force that challenges global capital and facilitates the equal participation of all peoples in democratic governance can achieve significant transformation. Drawing on thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Ernesto Laclau and with a particular focus on the history of populism in India, I Am the People is a sweeping, theoretically rich account of the origins of today’s tempests. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgression and Masculinity in Bataille and FoucaultJudith Surkis (bio)In August 1963 Critique published an “Hommage à Georges Bataille,” a special issue commemorating the death of its founder. How did the volume’s contributors go about the seemingly tricky business of pledging fealty to the philosopher of sovereignty? How did they profess loyalty to, in effect recognize, the sovereign subject known (...) to insistently refuse masterful identity?Apparently undisturbed by this difficulty, the articles written by Bataille’s acquaintances—Alfred Metraux, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, and Jean Piel amongst them—establish an explicitly fraternal relation to their contemporary. Piel begins his homage with an account of their initial encounter chez Queneau in 1927, noting his “impression of extraordinary fraternity, an impression which, through our last meeting days before his death, never diminished” [721]. Intermingling intellectual and personal history, these occasional pieces remember Bataille in a variety of contexts: the awakening of his interest in ethnology and work on Documents in the 1920s, his early “confrontations” with Hegel and work on Critique sociale and Contre-attaque in the 1930s, his sensitivity to events and developments in post-World-War-II Europe. While significantly diverse in focus, these articles manifest a similar approach, at once biographical and autobiographical, detailing the unfolding of shared intellectual amitié in favorite cafés, apartments, and studios. Bataille emerges here as a historical subject whose interests and investments, while multiple and, to use Leiris’s metonym, even “impossible,” are repeatedly linked to a variety of intellectual and political milieux.Michel Foucault’s “Preface to Transgression” assumes a more reverential tone than the pieces written by members of Bataille’s own generation. While framed as an explicit “homage” in its recognition of a certain debt to Bataille, Foucault’s essay also plays upon the contradiction of pledging loyalty to a “sovereign” who repeatedly renounces his own claim to mastery. Bataille’s death becomes an occasion on which to herald the “breakdown” and “shattering” of the masterful philosophical subject conventionally assumed to be in control of the “natural” language of dialectics [42–43]. For Foucault, a new possibility for philosophy is seen to arise in “the non-dialectical language of the limit which arises only in transgressing the one who speaks” [44], a transgression repeatedly performed, according to Foucault, in Bataille’s own writing and metaphorically enacted in and by his death. Bataille had, after all, proclaimed in the conclusion to Erotism: “To give transgression to philosophy as a foundation (it is the approach of my thought)...” Bataille’s theory of transgression aims to evoke a “world of play” in which “philosophy disintegrates” [275]. Yet, if the disintegration of philosophy in and through transgression is already Bataille’s “project,” we might inquire into why Foucault frames his article as a preface. [End Page 18]In introducing this presumably already achieved transgression, the “Preface” affects a curious, alternating temporality, a certain confusion of anteriority and posteriority. 1 At once following and preceding Bataille, Foucault remains out of sync and hence unable to coincide with Bataille in the shared amitié inscribed by the author’s contemporaries; it would appear that this generational gap introduces a certain shift in the recollection of Bataille’s legacy. Following in his footsteps, Foucault appropriates one of Bataille’s own disorienting gestures—the tactical use of prefaces, itself mentioned in the “Preface” [43]—in order to dislodge Bataille from his anterior position; instead, Bataille comes to epitomize the transgression predicted by Foucault’s “philosophical” preface. Bataille’s (and, by implication, Foucault’s own) “location” becomes confused and obscured; as I hope to show, Foucault is invested in achieving this state of indeterminacy for both himself and Bataille.To honor Bataille in death assumes a double significance for Foucault: it represents a “transgression of the philosopher’s being” which “has sent us to the pure transgression of his texts” [40] and simultaneously allows Foucault to sacralize Bataille. “Pure transgression” becomes liberated from the historically located being of the philosopher. And further, since the language of transgression is linked by Foucault to the “death of God,” Bataille becomes, in a sense, “deified” in the announcement and celebration of... (shrink)

While Agamben acknowledges the Arendtian and Foucaultian thesis of the modernity of biopower, he will claim that sovereignty and biopolitics are equally ancient and essentially intertwined in the originary gesture of all politics; sovereignty is the power to decide the state of exception whereby bare life or zoe is exposed "underneath" political life or bios. Agamben then finds in the concentration camp the modern biopolitical paradigm, in which the state of exception has become the rule and we have (...) all become [potentially] bearers of exposed bare life in that we are all subject to what I will call a "de-politicizing predication": to use the current American jargon, being named an "enemy combatant.". (shrink)

Boldly focusing on sexuality as a crucial definer of social order, Being and Symptom argues that there is an "M theory" -- a master theory of theories -- not only in Quantum Physics, but also in Continental Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology, disclosing how the ontological structure of the "fantastic four" ingredients of metaphysics (potentiality, impotentiality, actuality, completion) has recurred through time. Öğüt also seeks to turn Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy into a social theory within the fields of sexuality and (...) class='Hi'>sovereignty and to locate parallels among Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Agamben, Nash, Derrida, Girard, Kristeva, and Žižek, with a special emphasis on how Žižek has adapted Lacanian psychoanalysis into social theory. Öğüt conveys a highly original analysis of the unconscious of our social (sexual) relations, subjectivities, and politics. (shrink)