Agamben and the Originary Violence of Sovereignty
In their respective analyses of biopower, both Foucault and Agamben follow Arendt in maintaining that the political realm in Modernity has become more and more preoccupied with the management of biological life.
Elena: The way in which this is happening seems to follow the same structure within the family producing a “paternalistic” state that still rules over the people pretending to “order” all the realms of life______ .
They both deny that we should or could restore the classical political categories, as proposed by Arendt, however. This denial brings violence back to the heart of politics, but in fundamentally different ways. Whereas Foucault considers the birth of biopower a contingent historical fact, which he dates to the second half of the eighteenth century, Agamben sees it is as an originary phenomenon contemporaneous with the entire history of Western metaphysics.
Elena note: Biopower was a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations. From wikipedia
Agamben’s analysis of the relationship between political power and biological life in his influential book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, builds on some of the key ideas of Arendt and Foucault, but the way he appropriates them for his own theory is highly original and challenging. He begins by confirming Arendt’s claim that ‚Today politics knows no value< other than life.‛21 The politicisation of life as such constitutes a decisive event of
modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of Ancient thought. He breaks sharply with Arendt, however, in denying that the distinction between biological and political life has, ever since its very inception, held fast. Life has always been a definitive object of politics. The explicit preoccupation with life in modern politics only brings to light the way in which politics has always been founded on power over natural life. In taking biological life as its primary target, the modern state only exposes the hidden but originary bond between sovereign power and bare life.
Agamben acknowledges that politics was, since the time of Aristotle, explicitly
separated from natural life. The Ancient distinction between zoe and bios, natural life and political life, grounded the idea that politics was concerned with something more than just the perpetuation of biological life. It was fundamentally defined by such specifically human characteristics as justice, morality, language and self-reflexivity. According to Agamben, the dis-
tinction between bare life and political life was always an unstable distinction, however: a distinction that could never be fully maintained nor eliminated.
Elena: It’s interesting that they would even with to separate them when they are just two aspects of the whole.______
The exclusion of bare life outside of the political has to be understood to be at the same time an inclusion in being a founding act: it is the very act that establishes the community as political. He calls this inclu-
sive exclusion a relation of exception: it is the extreme form of relation by which something is
included solely through its exclusion.22
There is politics because man is the living being who, in language separates and opposes
himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare
life in an inclusive exclusion.23
Bare life, through its exclusion, is the hidden foundation of politics. It is what political, pro-
perly human life is not, and politics must therefore repeatedly enact its exclusion.
21
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 10.
22
Ibid., 18.
23
Ibid., 8.
Oksala: Violence
30
Elena: Wow! They are really going at it!: The separation of the realms instead of the connectedness. This sounds so similar to the relationship that men were supposed to have with women according to St. Augustine only spread out in the social realm with politics separated from bare life but at the same time ruling over it! It’s also interesting because from a completely different perspective if we think about non-identification, the individual is “present” to the world but at the same time not identified with it which has nothing to do with being separate from it or at least we must define what kind of separation is possible because it is very easy to think that the separation takes away the value of the “life” that it is separating from. I feel these problems present in Arendt’s text. But let’s go on.
This means that Agamben’s concept of bare life does not simply denote biological,
animal life. While he sometimes uses the term as a synonym for biological life as opposed to
political life, bare life is strictly neither natural nor political life, neither the public life of a
citizen nor the natural life of an animal. Agamben’s examples of it include: detainees of refu-
gee camps, brain dead patients in hospital wards and inmates in death row. In these exem-
plary sites, human life is in different ways reduced to bare life, to the simple fact of living
common to all living beings. Bare life is thus something that cannot be clearly demarcated and
then simply negated.24 It is biological life that has been politicised in being included in the
political community, but only through its exclusion.
Elena: All these inclusions seem to still be aspects of biological life. I wonder why they don’t just separate the realm of the body and its needs and clearly define it? This is so much better done by the Fourth Way System in its concept and understanding of the Instinctive center. It would be good to separate all the aspects of social life that have to do purely with the instinctive center because this would help us clarify the different realms in their own context and THEN establish their connectedness.________
The idea of exception is also central for Agamben’s conception of sovereignty, which is
decisively Schmittian: the sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception.25 Schmitt
argued that any legal system had to rest upon a decision that could not itself take the form of
law. This holds true to both its limits as well as its origin: the judicial system requires a
political decision to give it limits as well as a set of fundamental principles and values. The
sovereign must have the power to set these limits and thereby provide the ungrounded
ground of the law. He must have the power to decide when the normally valid legal system
operates and when its validity is suspended in a state of exception. In establishing the thres-
hold between the legal and the non-legal he defines them both. Similar to the way that the
exclusion of bare life founds the realm of the political, the exclusion of sovereignty from the
realm of the law founds the legal order. The state of exception is not anarchy or chaos because
an order still exists, even if it is not the order dictated by laws. The exception is outside the
law, but it thereby defines its limits and creates the normal situation in which the law can be in
force.26
Elena: I cannot agree with this because here the sovereign is still able to dictate the law and that implies the rule of someone over others and that is not democracy. In democracy the individual, each individual is the ruler. Should I say in Democracy as I conceive it? Each individual human being has enough authority to be the ruler of his and her personal as much as social life and comes to an agreement with the rest of the population on the laws that he and she is willing to live by. When there is a disagreement between them, they look for a court to help them solve it. The court is not a ruler over the people but a protector of the law.
Catherine Mills argues similarly in her seminal book on Agamben that the notion of bare or naked life
(nuda vida) has given rise to a great deal of misunderstanding in literature on Homo Sacer. While Agamben
often appears to use the term simply as a synonym for natural or biological life (zoe), she shows that his aim
is in fact to question the distinction between bios and zoe. Bare life is neither natural nor political life because
it is the politicised form of natural life. See, Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen,
2008), 64, 69. Other commentators also note that the concept is never precisely defined. See e.g., Andrew
Norris, ‚The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer,‛
in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death. Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2005), 270. Peter Fitzpatrick, ‚Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insis-
tence of Law,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 65.
25
Carl Schmitt presents his influential theory of sovereignty in Constitutional Theory and the first volume of
Political Theology. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006). Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory (Durham and London: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2008).
26
See Giorgio Agamben ‚The State of Exception,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death,
289. Peter Fitzpatrick argues that Agamben moves markedly beyond the conception of sovereignty extrac-
ted from Schmitt because for Schmitt the sovereign was still a juridical entity.
____________For Schmitt the sovereign
decision cannot be simply beyond the normal order and preformed law, but is also imbued with law. If
sovereign claims are to be any more than evanescent and assume operative continuance, they must be
integrally tied to law. Law constitutes the decision maker himself and constitutes the matters decided upon.
Exception must be distinguishable from juristic chaos and therefore it is the legal system itself, which can
anticipate the exception and suspend itself. Although the sovereign stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, and sovereignty remains a juristic concept. In other words, sove-
reignty could not be sovereign without the law. The law and sovereignty depend on each other in a way
that means that the law cannot simply be subordinated to sovereignty instrumentally. See Peter Fitzpatrick,
_______________
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
Elena: This last paragraph by Schmitt equally fits whether it is applied to the king, government or individual. In my claim that we are moving towards democracy: the rule of the people, it would apply equally to each individual. It is interesting because the individual human would remain “not identified” with “life” and therefore would stand outside of the “life dimension” only to render it with “meaning” and ”perspective”.______
31
Sovereignty, understood in this way, thus corresponds crucially to bare life. Bare life is
the exception within the political order because it forms the zone outside of the law and of po-
litical rights. The exclusion of bare life from the realm of politics establishes sovereign power
as the power that decides on that exception: bare life is the essential referent of the sovereign
decision. In other words, the exclusion of bare life as the exception forms the condition of
possibility of politics, and also of sovereignty. The state of exception excludes bare life from
the political community, but by the same token also captures it within it as the exception. It is
the permanent state of exception that constitutes the hidden foundation on which the entire
political system rests.27 For Agamben, the defining feature of political power in the West is
precisely its ability to suspend the law, and by the same act, to produce a sphere of bare life:
beings without political rights or properly human qualities.
Because the exclusion of bare life forms the foundation of sovereignty, and sovereignty
in turn produces bare life, the necessary counterpart of the sovereign in Agamben’s thought is
homo sacer—an ancient figure in Roman law who was without any political rights and who
could be killed by anybody without fear of any legal punishment. Similar to homo sacer, the
sovereign must be outside the law, he must necessarily stand outside the legal system in order
to be able to decide on its suspension. He is excluded from the political realm in the same
sense that homo sacer is excluded from it, and this constitutes their hidden and originary bond.
The sovereign is one who can kill without legal punishment—he is the point of indistinction
between violence and the law—and homo sacer is one who can be killed without legal
punishment. They both are within and without the legal order:
At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two sym-
metrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one
with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with
respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.
Elena: This understanding of the sovereign and the homo sacer seems precisely the status quo of the people in power yesterday when they could kill without being accountable but the Egyptian uprising together with all other movements that are calling for the accountability of people in government is shifting that understanding of the status quo. Neither the sovereign nor the human could be excluded from the law in a Democracy in which all humans are equal.___________
Bare life and political power, homo sacer and the sovereign are ‚the two poles of the sovereign
exception‛ irrevocably tied together.29 Homo sacer represents the bare life that must be ex-
cluded and negated in order for the political community to become more than an ant society.
Andrew Norris explicates the importance of the figure of homo sacer in Agamben’s account by
comparing it to René Girard’s superficially similar account of sacrifice. Whereas for Girard the
victim is a scapegoat for the murderous desires of the community, for Agamben the stakes are
considerably higher. Instead of an act of self-protection on the part of the community, the
killing of sacred life is the performance of the metaphysical assertion of the human: homo sacer
‚Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and
Death, 58-60.
27
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15-29.
28
Ibid., 84.
29
Ibid., 110.
Oksala: Violence
32
must die so that the rest of the political community may affirm the transcendence of their
bodily, animal life.30
Agamben’s account also significantly relies on Foucault’s concept of biopower, but the
way he appropriates this idea is different. Foucault’s analysis of biopower in the final section
of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 is short and fragmentary, but the key distinction that he
makes is between sovereign power, or juridico-institutional power and biopower. Whereas
classical sovereign power was essentially repressive and deductive, biopower has a funda-
mentally different rationality. Its purpose is to exert a positive and productive influence on
life, to optimise and to multiply it. It is an important tool in Foucault’s attempt to rethink
power: to find ways in which to theorize it that are not caught up in the narrow juridico-
institutional framework of sovereignty that has dominated Western political thought.
Although Agamben shares with Foucault the view that modern Western societies are
biopolitical, he challenges the idea that this is a historically recent development: ‚Biopolitics is
at least as old as the sovereign exception.‛31 More fundamentally, he also denies that the two
forms of power can be theoretically distinguished. Foucault’s key distinction between bio-
power and sovereign power is, in fact, a false one because these two forms of power essen-
tially intersect and depend on each other. They are intrinsically and originally tied together:
The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juri-
dico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power. What this work has had to record
among its likely conclusions is precisely that the two analyses cannot be separated, and that
the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed –
nucleus of sovereign power.32
Agamben argues that Foucault’s thesis about biopolitics has to be corrected: what charac-
terises modern politics in not the inclusion of life—the fact that life as such has become the
principle object of the projections and calculations of State power. The decisive fact is rather
that the realm of bare life—which was originally situated at the margins of the political
order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and inclusion and exclusion, out-
side and inside, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. Bare life used to be exceptional
and excluded from public life, but in Modernity it has become coextensive with the political
realm as a whole. The boundary between bios and zoe that was always indeterminate and
blurry has now been completely eliminated and they are no longer distinguishable from each
other at all.
Agamben’s provocative claim is that the rise of this zone of indistinction in modern
societies means that the state of exception has gradually become more and more the norm: the
exception has become the rule. He argues that the obfuscation of the distinction among
legislative, executive and judicial powers became a working paradigm of government in
Western democracies in the course of the twentieth century. Although the state of exception
30
Andrew Norris, ‚Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead,‛ in Andrew Norris
(ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 10.
31
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6.
32
Ibid.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
33
was initially meant to be a provisional measure, it has in fact become a lasting characteristic of
government. This transformation of an exceptional measure into a permanent technique of
government has resulted in the gradual erosion of the legislative power of parliament: it is
often limited to ratifying measures that the executive issues through administrative decrees
that have the force of law.33 ‚The state of exception< ceases to be referred to as an external
and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself.‛34
As a result, ‚exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter a
zone of irreducible indistinction.‛35
Sovereignty thus produces bare life by establishing a state of exception with no tem-
poral limits. We are all living in this state of exception, in a zone in which our life is subjected
to the unmediated power of various police sovereigns and managers of life. We are all
effectively reduced to the status of homo sacer. As citizens of modern democracies we are
obviously not excluded from the political realm or the legal system as such, but when the state
of exception becomes the norm or the rule the legal order operates only by suspending itself.
In the state of exception the suspension of the law has become the rule and the law is ‚in force
without significance.‛36 The law is not absent—we do not live in a lawless state—but it is
emptied of concrete meaning and suspended in its effective application. In this situation sove-
reign power becomes unmediated power over those whose existence is reduced to bare life.
Politics has been ‚totally transformed into biopolitics‛37 when it is impossible to distinguish
our biological life from our political existence anymore and when the resulting bare life can be
destroyed by sovereign power at any moment.
Elena: Now I am understanding this better and can agree with this last paragraph totally._______
Hence, although the biopolitical logic of modernity places the highest value on life, it
also, paradoxically, contains the exceptional power to take it away in an arbitrary fashion. It
produces human beings that are reduced to bare life without any political protection. Agam-
ben sees the concentration camp as the paradigm of this political predicament of modernity: it
is the exemplary biopolitical space in which politics has been completely transformed into
biopolitics and bare life has been subjected absolutely to sovereign power.
Elena: Cults can also be included here_______
The camps were
opened when the state of exception had become the rule in Nazi Germany. He notes that ‚the
Jews were exterminated exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice’, which is to say, as bare
life.‛38 The dimension in which the extermination took place was neither religious nor legal,
but biopolitical. Because the people sent to the camps were lacking almost all the rights that
are normally attributed to humane existence, and yet they were biologically alive, they came
to be situated in a limit-zone in which they no longer had anything but bare life. They moved
in ‚a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in
which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any
sense.‛39 The concentration camp was the most absolute biopolitical space that had ever been
33
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
34
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 168.
35
Ibid., 9.
36
Ibid., 51.
37
Ibid., 120.
38
Ibid., 114.
39
Ibid., 170.
Oksala: Violence
34
realised: it was a space in which life was reduced to the bare minimum and sovereign power
reached its maximum. It is therefore the exemplary place of modern biopolitics, ‚the hidden
paradigm of the political space of modernity.‛40
Agamben regrets that both Arendt and Foucault overlooked this crucial site. Arendt’s
mistake in her pertinent analysis of the totalitarian states of the postwar period was to omit
any biopolitical perspective. What escaped her was the way in which the radical transfor-
mation of politics into biopolitics had legitimated and necessitated total domination. Foucault,
on the other hand, missed the most glaring manifestation of biopower that confronted him.
His error was to overlook the most exemplary place of modern biopolitics, the politics of the
great totalitarian states. In other words, contemporary political thought has failed to situate
the totalitarian phenomenon in the horizon of biopolitics and therefore ultimately to make
sense of it.41 Agamben’s provocative claim is that until this is done Nazism and fascism will
remain with us. The camp is not just a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past; it
is the hidden matrix of the political space in which we are still living.
Elena: BRAVO! YES! He sees it clearly. All my blogging on cults and our societies has been about this and it is a true pleasure to find someone express it so clearly. Thank you.
For many readers, this emblem of the camp has come to stand in for Agamben’s
complex account of biopolitics. It has fuelled a lot criticism against him: he has been accused
of constructing politically debilitating metaphysical fictions and morbid intellectual pontifi-
cations. Michel Dillon argues that he ontologises political modernity and then ‚iconicises‛
this ontologisation in the compelling, but politically debilitating figure of the camp.43 Andreas
Kalyvas observes that he ‚gives us no explanation for the sovereign’s repeated victories and
unstoppable march toward the camp.‛44 His commentators have also pointed out that his
understanding of bare life is theoretically ambiguous and his notion of sovereignty distur-
bingly ahistorical: the originary bond between bare life and sovereign power not only survives
Antiquity, but extends unchanged over a period of twenty-five centuries right through to the
Modern age.
Elena: recognized only in the authoritarian patriarchal society.________
Sovereign biopolitics has uninterruptedly accompanied the ancients and mo-
derns alike, remaining unaffected by significant political events, such as the birth of the An-
cient Greek democratic city or the emergence of commercial capitalism. Agamben thus
operates with a conception of history that does not bring forth anything new, but is uniform
and unidirectional.45
It is important to note that Agamben’s claims about politics are precisely ontological
and not ontic, or that they are concerned with the history of metaphysics, not political history.
For him, metaphysics is the pivotal political question of our time. The radicality of his project
lies in the attempt to fundamentally disturb the metaphysical categories that he claims are
upholding our conception of the political: bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/
40
Ibid., 123.
41
Ibid., 119-120, 148.
42
Ibid., 166.
43
Michael Dillon, ‚Cared to Death. The Biopoliticised Time of Your Life,‛ Foucault Studies, 2 (2005): 38.
44
Andreas Kalyvas, ‚The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Meta-
physics, and Death, 112-113.
45
Ibid., 110-113. See also Peter Fitzpatrick, ‚Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law,‛ in
Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 54-56.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
35
inclusion. He shows how the construction, blurring and finally eradication of the distinction
between biological life and political life has determined the political destiny of the West.
Instead of defining the political through a focus on life that is recognised as just and good—the
form of life proper to human community—he focuses on the other side of this fundamental
dichotomy: on bare life, the forms of life that in one way or another fail to achieve what is
understood as truly human life. He wants to show that our conception of the political is not
constituted solely by the idea of a community inclusive of beings capable of morality, self-
reflexivity and speech, but by the exclusion of life that is unworthy of politics.
Elena: BRAVO Mr. Agamben Bravo! At last I am finding others that understand what I’ve been fighting about for the past five years. _________
Sovereign de-
cision is the moment of this fundamental and constitutive separation and exclusion. Sove-
reignty can therefore not be thought of as a historically specific political formation contem-
poraneous with modern nation states. It has to belong essentially and originally to our under-
standing of the political.
In sum, Agamben’s answer to the question of the relationship between violence and the
political is to acknowledge the irreducibility of sovereign violence over bare life. In relation to
the sovereign we are all ants. The political has inevitably been founded on violence since its
inception because of the fundamental bond between sovereignty and bare life. This is an
originary political bond or structure, which implies that political power, at least in the forms
we know in the West, is inseparable from violence because it cannot be separated from the
sovereign’s originary power to kill. Arendt’s attempt to resurrect the Ancient meaning of the
political as defined by speech and not violence is a doomed attempt because it was never in
fact achieved. The way of life in the Greek polis was not based on the eradication of violence, it
was founded on the exclusion and killing of bare life. This inclusive exclusion founded the
political community and sovereign power. The first foundation of politics is thus life that may
be taken away, a body that can be killed. Life is politicised irrevocably through its capacity to
be destroyed by the sovereign.
This means that, for Agamben, we cannot sever the originary bond between violence
and the political by any nostalgic restoration of Ancient metaphysics. The loss of politics is
not a modern problem, but happens already in the Ancient polis where zoe and bios were
originally separated. The only genuine possibility for breaking this essential bond would re-
quire a move beyond the metaphysical categories of bare life and political life to a sovereign-
less political community. This coming community would not be based on national or religious
identity, stable juridical or parliamentary institutions or political rights. It is a utopian, mes-
sianic idea of a community.46
46
A detailed discussion of Agamben’s idea of the coming politics must remain outside of this paper. In Ho-
mo Sacer Agamben suggests that we could move beyond the categories of bare life and political life: ‚
life must itself< be transformed into the site for the constitution and constellation of a form of life that is
wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.‛ (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188). The
idea of a sovereignless political community is developed in The Coming Community (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). His critics have argued that he is the least convincing and the
most obscure when he attempts to offer us political alternatives to biopower. Andreas Kalyvas, for example,
argues that his elusive notion of the sovereignless coming community, beyond rights and legal norms, comes
dangerously close to one of an extralegal, permanent, though sovereignless exception. It ultimately dissolves
into an eschatological utopian vision of social life: society without institutions or any modern structure of
Oksala: Violence
Elena: BRAVO!!! Bravo again and again! We think very much alike and have received similar criticism when there’s been any in my case but the foundation is clear and solid and as practically founded as every study of cults and present day society reveals. Now we can go on from here.
Foucault on Sovereignty and Biopower
If Agamben has been criticised for operating with an ahistorical notion of sovereignty, Fou-
cault has been accused of eradicating the notion completely and replacing it with distinctively
modern forms of power, such as discipline and biopower. While it is true that he never deve-
loped any kind of explicit theory of sovereignty, the notion is nevertheless indirectly theorised
as the consistent contrast to his alternative conceptualisations of power.
Note for Elena: Take into account that Foucault never developed a explicit theory of sovereignty for this important. ______
In Discipline and Pu-
nish, sovereign power forms the contrast to discipline and in The History of Sexuality, the
central distinction organising the argument is between biopower and sovereignty. In his lec-
tures on governmentality, mechanisms of security are introduced as an alternative to both dis-
cipline and sovereignty. Rather than replacing sovereignty with these alternative forms of
power, it is my contention that Foucault was working towards a more historically and poli-
tically grounded conception of it. He thus contests traditional approaches to theorising
political power based solely on juridical and institutional models, and advocates a radical
rethinking in order to understand its historical changes and specific forms in modernity. His
idea was that sovereignty had to be analysed as a power formation that had undergone
fundamental transformations in Western political history. It has been challenged, modified
and undermined by competing counter-discourses and new techniques of power.
In his lectures on governmentality, he argues that the form of power that had
sovereignty as its modality or organising schema was not up to governing the economic and
political body of a society that was undergoing both a demographic explosion and industri-
alisation at the turn of the nineteenth century. Too much escaped the old mechanisms of
sovereign power, on both the detailed and the mass level. There was an acute need for new
power technologies focusing on individual bodies as well as on the species body. Sovereign
power was not comprehensive or flexible enough to respond effectively to new capital for-
mations and demographic changes.
Foucault explicitly notes, however, that charting the genealogy of modern forms of
power such as biopower is not a simple case of substitution. Mechanisms of biopolitical
governmentality did not simply replace juridico-institutional mechanisms. The old sovereign
right to take life or let live was not replaced, but was rather complemented with a new right to
make live and let die.47 He attempted to identify a turning point in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries when the management of population took pre-eminence without repla-
cing sovereignty and law. These two forms of power thus permeate each other and exist to-
gether forming a ‚scientifico-legal complex.‛48 This co-existence is not necessary or originary,
however, as Agamben claims; for Foucault, it is historically contingent.
rights and institutionalised liberties. Andreas Kalyvas, ‚The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp,‛ in An-
drew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 116. For an interesting account of ‚affirmative biopolitics,‛
see Roberto Esposito, Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008).
47
See e.g., Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, ed. by
Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 219.
48
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1991).
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
37
Foucault’s short but influential discussion of biopower at the end of The History of
Sexuality, Vol. 1, begins with a summary definition of sovereign power: it is a form of power
that was historically founded on violence—the right to kill. Its characteristic privilege, since
Roman law, was the right to decide life and death. In its limited modern form, as in its ancient
and absolute form, it is dissymmetrical: the sovereign exercises his right of life only by exer-
cising his right to kill or by refraining from killing. In other words, he demonstrates his power
over life through the death he is capable of requiring. Sovereign power was exercised mainly
by means of deduction: it consisted of the right to appropriate a portion of the nation’s wealth,
a tax on products, goods and services, time, bodies and ultimately, life itself. It culminated in
the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.49 The obligation to wage war on be-
half of the sovereign and the imposition of the death penalty for going against his will were
the clearest forms of such power.
Foucault’s claim is that the West has undergone a very profound transformation of the
mechanisms of power since the seventeenth century. Deductive and violent sovereign power
has been gradually complemented and partly replaced by biopower, a form of power that
exerts a positive influence on life, ‚that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it,
subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.‛50 Deduction or violence is no
longer the predominant form of power, but is merely one element among others, working
towards a new objective under a new rationality. Biopower is bent on generating and or-
dering forces: the aim is to increase them rather than to impede or destroy them. In short, its
logic or rationality is not violent deduction, but positive production.
The era of biopolitics is marked by the explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the subjugation of bodies and control of populations: techniques that coordinate
medical care, normalise behaviour, rationalise mechanisms of insurance and rethink urban
planning, for example. The aim is the effective administration of bodies and the calculated
management of life through means that are scientific and continuous. It is power whose
highest function is no longer to kill but to ‚invest life through and through.‛51 What essen-
tially characterises biopower in Foucault’s account is thus not the fact that it is unmediated
power over bare life, but the fact that the mechanisms of power and knowledge have assumed
responsibility for the life process in order to optimise, control and modify it. In other words,
the exercise of power over living beings no longer carries the threat of death, but implies the
taking charge of their life. Life and its mechanisms are brought into the realm of explicit cal-
culation in the regimes of knowledge-power.
The rationality of biopower is markedly different from that of sovereign power in
terms not just of its objectives but also of its instruments. A major consequence of its develop-
ment is the growing importance of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law.
The law is always armed and is based on violence, whereas biopower takes charge of life with
the help of continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms based on knowledge. Foucault
argues that the rise of biopower means that we have entered a phase of juridical regression:
49
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, 23.
50
Ibid., 137.
51
Ibid., 139.
Oksala: Violence
38
I do not mean to say that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice
tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the
judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into the a continuum of apparatuses (medical
and administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A norma-
lizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life.52
According to Foucault, biopower uses administrative policies, strategies and tactics instead of
laws as its instrument, or it uses laws as a tactic. Biopolitical rationality treats the law as one
administrative technique among others that can be utilised to regulate and improve the life of
the population. Biopolitical techniques do not typically result from sovereign parliamentary
decisions, but are part of the administrative and managerial procedures legitimised by expert
knowledge.
Both Agamben and Foucault thus claim that we live in a society in which the power of
the law has subsided. Whereas Agamben sees this as a result of the sovereign state of excep-
tion that has become the norm, Foucault claims that it is the power of sovereignty itself that
has been undermined. Biopower is not political power in the traditional sense because it is not
reducible to the power of a democratically elected sovereign body, whether individual or
collective. It penetrates such political power, but it is essentially the power of life’s experts, in-
terpreters and administrators. The key problem with biopower is thus not the foundational
violence of the sovereign, but the depoliticised violence of expert knowledge.
Because Agamben connects sovereignty and biopower with an originary bond, his
framework makes it difficult to diagnose the profound tensions that exist in modern societies
between these two fundamentally different rationalities and types of power. Whereas the
essential feature of sovereign power is its license to kill, for biopower killing presents a
problem: it does not celebrate death and violence, but seeks to exclude or at least to hide them.
Foucault notes that death has ceased to be a collective and spectacular ceremony in modern
biopolitical society, but has become something to be hidden away: it is ‚not so much sex as
death that is the object of a taboo.‛53
This obviously does not mean that modern biopolitical societies are non-violent. On
the contrary, violence is harder to detect because it has to be hidden. Foucault readily ac-
knowledges the unprecedented violence of modernity: the biological conception of politics has
made killing possible on an unprecedented scale.54 Biopower is thus clearly capable of utili-
sing violence, but only under very specific conditions and restricted by defined limits. The
violence it uses has to be hidden away or called something else because it presents a problem
in the rationality of biopolitics, the explicit aim of which is the optimisation and enhancement
of life. The connection with violence has to be mediated: biopolitical violence must pass
52
Ibid., 144.
53
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76, ed. by Mauro Bertani
and Alessandro Fontana, English series ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. by David Macey (Harmondsworth:
Allen Lane, Penguin), 247.
54
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 136-37.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
39
through the regime of knowledge/power and it must be given a scientific legitimacy that is
compatible with the aims of biopolitics.
In arguing that Foucault does not analyse the politics of the great totalitarian states,
Agamben overlooks his last lecture in the series Society Must be Defended, in which he referred
to the phenomenon of State racism in Nazi Germany as an example of the paradoxes in the
exercise of modern biopower. He anticipated Agamben’s argument by acknowledging that
Nazi Germany could be seen in many ways as the extreme development of biopower: there
was no other state in which ‚the biological was so tightly, so insistently, regulated.‛55 How-
ever, he posed the question of how a political system so completely centred upon biopower
could unleash such murderous power and in fact utilise the old sovereign right to kill. ‚How
can power such as this kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its
duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings?‛56
His answer was biological racism, which provided a way of separating the different
groups that exist within a population and then establishing a biological relationship between
them. This was not an adversarial relationship between enemies—the inferior group was not
the enemy threatening the nation’s existence in the Schmittian sense. It was rather a biological
relationship of abnormality: the inferior group had to be eliminated as a biological threat to
the population and its improvement. The death of the inferior race would make life in general
healthier. The objective to improve life for its own sake could thus legitimise killing within
the rationality of biopower. The logic of biological racism was the condition that made killing
acceptable in biopolitical societies.
In the biopolitical system< killing, or the imperative to kill, is acceptable only if it results
not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to
and the improvement of the species or race< Once the State functions in the biopower
mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.57
It is thus highly significant that the racism of Nazi Germany was essentially different from
‚ordinary‛ racism, which takes the form of mutual contempt or hatred between races. The
specificity of modern biopolitical racism is bound up with a technique of power that allows
biopower to work. When racism becomes the racism of a biopolitical state, ‚it is obliged to use
race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise sovereign power.‛58
In biopolitical societies, a sovereign power cannot simply assume unmediated power over
bare life if it wants to kill its own citizens, but must pass through the regime of power/
knowledge and gain bioscientific legitimacy. Biological racism provided a pseudo-scientific
discourse that was compatible with biopower, and through which biopower could be trans-
formed into sovereign power.
55
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 259.
56
Ibid., 254.
57
Ibid., 256.
58
Ibid., 258.
Oksala: Violence
40
The Third Reich thus became a monstrous combination of biopower and sovereign
power, exercising sovereign means for biopolitical ends. Genocide was carried out in the
name of care and the improvement of life:
We have, then, in Nazi society something that is quite extraordinary: this is a society which
has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign
right to kill. The two mechanisms – the classic, archaic mechanism that gave the State the
right the life and death over its citizens< and the new mechanism of biopower – coincide
exactly.59
Foucault thus agrees with Agamben that the tension between biopower and sovereign power
was dissolved in the Third Reich and the two coincided exactly. This coincidence was not ori-
ginary and necessary, however; it was historically contingent. It was made possible because of
two crucial factors. Firstly, biological racism worked as the mechanism that harmonised the
opposing rationalities of biopower and sovereign power, and masked the fact that a bio-
political society was killing its own people. Secondly, the Third Reich was also a society in
which the sovereign power to kill ran through its entire social body. It was granted not only
to the State, but also to a whole series of individuals, such as members of the SA and the SS:
Ultimately everyone in the Nazi Sate had the power of life and death over his or her
neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing, which effectively meant doing away
with the people next door, or having them done away with.60
It was sovereign power—not just biopower—that was taken to its extreme limit.
For Foucault, the seamless coincidence of sovereign power and biopower in Nazi Ger-
many was thus a historically contingent conglomeration of factors, ‚the paroxysmal point‛ in
the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower geared towards
the protection and enhancement of life.61 The concentration camp was not the exemplary un-
masking of an originary connection between violence and political power in modernity, but ‚a
demonic combination‛ of two fundamentally different rationalities of power: biopower and
sovereign power.62 As Mika Ojakangas observes, Foucault considered these two forms of
power to have become intermingled, modern states being the resulting combination. This is
not the case, however, because there are hidden de jure ties between sovereign power and bio-
power, as Agamben claims. It is rather that sovereign states have de facto used bio-political
methods, just as modern biopolitical societies have de facto hinged on principles of sove-
reignty.63
59
Ibid., 260.
60
Ibid., 259.
61
Ibid., 260.
62
Michel Foucault, ‚Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,‛ in Power: Essential Works of
Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 3, ed. by James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. by Robert Hurley and
others (New York: New Press, 2000), 311.
63
Mika Ojakangas, ‚Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault,‛ Foucault Studies, No 2,
(2005), 15.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 23-43.
Elena: This is a wonderful and powerful text for the research I'm working on. It is of course obvious that my input at the beginning of the text is due to the fact that I have not read the whole text and understood the full spectrum of their views but my observations are nevertheless useful because they still help me in the long run to understand where I find the inconsistencies that are later dealt with or not dealt with in the text.
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