Elena:
I realize how I use these texts at my will and convenience to expand where I feel I can do so. I would be filled with shame were I to distort them or dishonor them in any way, I could not be more indebted to them for providing a framework on which I can put my own grain of sand.
It is beautiful how Agamben and Foucault reconstruct our history and reinterpret it for us. It is so good to remember...
I've only worked on a quarter of this text today.
Anke Snoek 2010
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67, November 2010
ARTICLE
Agamben’s Foucault: An overview
Anke Snoek, Macquarie University / IVO Addiction Research Institute
ABSTRACT: This article gives an overview of the influence of the work of Michel Foucault
on the philosophy of Agamben. Discussed are Foucault’s influence on the Homo Sacer cycle,
on (the development) of Agamben’s notion of power (and on his closely related notion of free-
dom and art of life), as well as on Agamben’s philosophy of language and methodology.
While most commentaries focus on Agamben’s interpretation of Foucault’s concept of bio-
power, his work also contains many interesting references to Foucault on freedom and possi-
bilities—and I think that it is here that Foucault’s influence on Agamben is most deeply felt.
This article focuses on the shifts Agamben takes while looking for the Entwicklungsfähigkeit in
the work of Foucault.
Keywords: Foucault, Agamben, art of life, freedom, Entwicklungsfähigkeit
‚I see my work as closer to no one than to Foucault‛
- Giorgio Agamben
Introduction
The way Agamben uses the work of Foucault is controversial. Some speak of an ‘agambeni-
sation’ of Foucault, others see a revaluation of Foucault’s works through Agamben’s analyses.
Agamben himself often emphasizes the importance of Foucault for his work. But where in
Homo Sacer1 he speaks of correcting or at least completing one of Foucault’s theses—a phrase
that irritated many of Foucault’s fans—more than ten years later his tone has become more
modest, stating in Signatura Rerum2 how much he has learned from Foucault. A study of
Agamben’s references to Foucault offers a glimpse of the depth and broadness of this influ-
ence, which can hardly be overestimated.
In Agamben’s early works from the seventies to the early nineties, Foucault is
remarkably absent. In his first six books, only one short reference to Foucault is found (in
Infanzia e storia, 1979). This changes with the publication of Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la
nuda vita (1995), which was the first of a cycle of books, and was Agamben’s philosophical
1
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995/
1998), 12.
2
Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things. On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2008/2009), 7.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
45
breakthrough. In Homo Sacer Agamben gives an alarming analysis of the contemporary poli-
tical situation, and in this analysis Foucault’s notion of biopolitics plays an important role.
Since 1995 Foucault has been a well-known guest in the work of Agamben, especially through-
out the Homo Sacer cycle. Deladurantaye calls Foucault the single most decisive influence on
Agamben’s later works.3
Agamben once stated that he prefers to work with the Entwicklungsfähigkeit in the work
of the authors he likes. With Entwicklungsfähigkeit he means that which the author had to leave
unsaid, undeveloped, or as a potential.4 So in Foucault’s work, Agamben seeks to elaborate
the undeveloped aspects. Agamben’s contribution is not meant as criticism, although it some-
times radically changes Foucault’s concepts.
1. Foucault’s influence on the Homo Sacer cycle
The influence of Foucault on the Homo Sacer cycle as a whole is hardly ever commented upon.
Most commentaries focus solely on the first book, in part because the last parts have not yet
been translated into English. As of now, the Homo Sacer cycle contains the following books
(the chronological publication of the different volumes differs from the numbering of the
books):
I. Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (1995)
II.1. Stato di eccezione (2003)
II.2. Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo (2007)
II.3. Il sacramento del linguaggio. Archeologia del giuramento (2008)
III. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. l'archivio e il testimone (1998)
A closer look at the titles of the Homo Sacer cycle shows the apparent influence of Foucault. In
the first place on method: Agamben refers to a ‘genealogia teologica dell'economia’ and an
‘archeologia del giuramento.’ In Homo sacer II.2, the term regno seems to relate to Foucault’s use
of règne and governo to gouvernement.5 In Homo Sacer III, the notion archivio refers to Foucault
archive. While in Homo sacer II.3 only one short explicit reference to Foucault is found (with
regard to man as political animal), the sustained concern with veridiction indicates a close
association with Foucault. The notion of the oath (giuramento) is also mentioned in another
prominent citation of Foucault (on his distinction between two forms of veridiction or truth-
telling: the confession and the oath),6 which probably put Agamben on the trail of the impor-
tance of the oath.
In Homo sacer I (1995) Agamben mainly focuses on Foucault’s concept of biopower in
relation to sovereign power and the concentration camps. In an interview almost ten years
later, Agamben remarked:
3
Leland Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben. A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2009), 208.
4
Giorgio Agamben, ‚What is a Paradigm,‛ Lecture at European Graduate School (2002).
5
Jeffrey Bussolini, ‚Michel Foucault's Influence on the Work of Giorgio Agamben,‛ in Sam Binkley and
Jorge Capetillo (ed.), Foucault in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 117.
6
Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 133.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
46
I sought to apply the same genealogical and paradigmatic method practiced by Foucault.
On the other hand, Foucault worked in many areas, but the two that he left out were
precisely the law and theology. It seemed natural for me to address my two latest studies in
this direction.7
In Homo sacer II.1–Stato di eccezione (2003), Agamben shifts his analysis to the field of law, and
in Homo sacer II.2–Il Regno e la Gloria (2007) to theology. Although in Stato di eccezione only one
reference to Foucault is found, Il Regno e la Gloria shows great explicit indebtedness to Fou-
cault.
In Homo sacer I (1995) Agamben had wondered why Foucault never brought his in-
sights on biopolitics to the concentration camp.8 Contrary to what may be expected, Homo
sacer III–Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998)—published only three years after Homo sacer I—cites
Foucault not only in relation to biopower, but also with regard to notions of resistance and
freedom (this is repeated in Stato di eccezione, 2003).
In the homo-sacer-cycle the main themes that Agamben makes use of from the work of
Foucault emerge: biopower, sovereignty, art of life and freedom, methodology, and language.
All these influences by Foucault will be further explored in this article.
2. Foucault’s influence on (the development) of Agamben’s notion of power
Early in the nineties Agamben’s philosophy made a shift from metaphysics, language and
esthetics to politics. This is also the first time Foucault made a serious entrance in the work of
Agamben. The influence of Foucault is most explicit in two books (Homo sacer I, 1995; Il Regno
e la Gloria, 2007) and an essay (‚Che cos'è un dispositivo?,‛ 2006). But references to Foucault’s
theory of power also appear in other books published in this period, such as in a beautiful
essay called ‚In this exile,‛ which can be found in Mezzi senza fine (1996), in Quel che resta di
Auschwitz (1998), and L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale (2002). It is interesting that between the
publication of Homo sacer I (the first Homo sacer book) and Il Regno et la Gloria (chronologically
one of the latest Homo sacer books), Agamben’s notion of power makes a decisive turn; a turn
which is highly influenced by the work of Foucault.
Biopolitics and sovereignty
The starting point of Homo Sacer (1995) was Foucault’s analysis that ‚modern man is an animal
whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.‛ This is a revision of Aris-
totle’s claim that ‚man is a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence.‛9
Agamben transforms Foucault’s claim in stating that we are also—inversely—citizens whose
very politics is at issue in our natural body. In Homo Sacer Agamben develops a notion of bio-
power inspired by Foucault. Much is written about this topic, for example in Foucault Studies
2005 (2), and the apparent irreconcilability in Foucault’s and Agamben’s accounts of biopower
7
Gianluca Sacco, ‚Intervista a Giorgio Agamben: dalla teologia politica alla teologia economica,‛ Rivista
(2004): http://rivista.ssef.it/site.php?page=20040308184630627&edition=2005-05-01.
8
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 76.
9
Ibid., 105.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
47
has not gone unnoticed within the critical literature. It has even been suggested that a dia-
logue between Foucault and Agamben is impossible.10 Agamben himself, for his part, always
states his indebtedness to Foucault: ‚I first began to understand the figure of the Homo sacer
after I read Foucault’s texts on biopolitics.‛11 For this overview on biopolitics, I will only focus
on the three points at which Agamben revisited Foucault’s notion of biopower.
The first point at which Agamben revisited Foucault's notion of biopower is the time
span. In the final chapter of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that the regime of power
that emerged from the seventeenth century onwards involved a fundamental reversal of the
principle of power’s operation: ‚for the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence
was reflected in political existence.‛12 Against Foucault, Agamben claims that bare life has
long been included as the ‚original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power,‛ such that
biopolitics and sovereignty are originally and fundamentally intertwined.13 Agamben thus
extends the field of Foucault’s biopolitical inquiry to the origins of Western political expe-
rience in Greece and Rome. In a 2005 interview Agamben explains his shift of time-span with
the metaphor of a shadow:
Foucault once said something quite beautiful about this. He said that historical research was
like a shadow cast by the present onto the past. For Foucault, this shadow stretched back to
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For me, the shadow is longer< There is no great
theoretical difference between my work and Foucault’s; it is merely a question of the length
of the historical shadow.14
As Patton remarked, in the end the difference between Agamben’s approach and that of
Foucault is not so much a matter of correction and completion as a choice between epochal
concepts of biopolitics and bare life.15
The second point pertains to the role of sovereignty in relation to biopower. Agamben's
analysis of biopolitics is closely related to the concept of sovereignty. In Discipline and Punish
Foucault shows on the contrary how a sovereign model was replaced by a disciplinary model
of power. Resistance against the disciplinary model of political power is not to be found in re-
turning to a sovereign model as opposed to the disciplinary one. Foucault even suggested that
historians abandon their focus on sovereignty, and in the first volume of his History of
10
Mika Ojakangas, ‚Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power. Agamben and Foucault,‛ Foucault studies 2 (2005), 5-
28. Catherine Mills, ‚Biopolitics, Liberal Eugenics, and Nihilism,‛ in Matthew Calarco & Steven DeCaroli
(ed.), Giorgio Agamben. Sovereignty & Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
11
Hanna Leitgeb & Cornelia Vismann, ‚Das unheilige Leben: Ein Gespräch mit dem italienischen
Philosophen Giorigo Agamben,‛ Literaturen 2 (2001), 16-21.
12
Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2008).
13
Ibid., 64-65.
14
Abu Bakr Rieger, ‚Der Papst ist ein weltlicher Priester. Interview with Giorgio Agamben,‛ Literaturen
(2005), 21-25.
15
Paul Patton, ‚Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Biopolitics,‛ in Matthew Calarco & Steven
DeCaroli (ed.), Giorgio Agamben. Sovereignty & Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 218.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
48
Sexuality he called for a ‚liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty.‛16 According
to Deladurantay,
Agamben listens carefully to this advice—and does precisely the opposite. Instead of
liberating his reflections from a theoretical privilege accorded to sovereignty, he radically
intensifies them.17
In contrast to the historical succession of sovereignty and biopower that Michel Foucault
posits at times,18 Agamben sees a tight integration between sovereign power and biopower.
For Agamben the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.
In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception.19
This conception also implies that modern politics does not represent a definitive break
from classical sovereignty. The biopolitical regime of power operative in modernity is not so
much distinguished by incorporating life into politics as Foucault claimed—this is as old as
politics itself. What is decisive for our modern politics is that
together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of
bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins
to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and
zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.20
The third point concerns the relation with the concentration camps. In Homo Sacer I, Agamben
wonders why Foucault never brought his insights on biopolitics to the most exemplary place
of modern biopolitics: the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century and the concen-
tration camp.21 Agamben’s inquiry in Homo Sacer concerns the hidden point of intersection
between Foucault’s juridico-institutional and biopolitical models of power: the relation be-
tween the production of a biopolitical body and the sovereign exception.22
While Agamben speaks of correcting and completing Foucault, he is careful to
characterize Foucault’s choice as a conscious, methodological one that makes perfect sense in
light of Foucault’s aims, but that for his own study a treatment of legal structures could
‚complement‛ and ‚integrate themselves‛ into the line of speculation opened by Foucault,
and that he tried to bring ‚Foucault’s perspective together with that of the traditional juridical
16
Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 209.
17
Ibid., 209.
18
Foucault modifies his position on biopower and sovereignity in the lecture courses Sécurité, territoire,
population and Naissance de la biopolitique, where he no longer maintains that biopower and sovereignty are
distinct, nor that biopower displaces sovereignty, but that there is a more complicated interrelation and
interpenetration between them. This is presumably closer to Agamben's stance.
19
Catherine Mills, ‚Agamben’s Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life,‛ Contretemps 5
(2004), 46.
20
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9.
21
Ibid., 76.
22
Ibid., 11.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
49
and political ones,‛ adding that ‚there is no reason to keep them apart.‛23 As Bussolini re-
marked, Agamben seems to overlook the significance of Foucault’s brief analysis of the
military camp in Discipline and Punish, which shows close parallels with the analysis of Arendt
that Agamben cites,24 as well as Foucault's explicit treatment of the camps and the Nazi state
in Il faut défendre la société. Agamben partly corrects this in Quel che resta di Auschwitz by
drawing heavily from the Foucault lecture, but he does not fully indicate that he had unfairly
accused Foucault of overlooking this topic in Homo Sacer— so much for Homo Sacer I.
Auschwitz and caesuras in life
In Homo sacer III–Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998), which was published before the volumes of
Homo sacer II, Agamben further develops Foucault's analysis of biopower with regard to Hit-
ler’s Germany, stating that Foucault offers an explanation of the degradation of death in our
time.
Power in its traditional form (as territorial sovereignty), defines itself as the right over
life and death. This right is asymmetrical: the right to kill is more important than the right to
let people live. This is why Foucault characterizes sovereignty through the formula to make die
and to let live. When sovereign power progressively transformed into biopower, the care for
the life and health of subjects became increasingly important in the mechanisms and calcu-
lations of states. The ancient right to kill and to let live gives way to an inverse model which
defines modern biopolitics: to make live and to let die. This degraded death:
While in the right of sovereignty death was the point in which the sovereign’s absolute
power shone most clearly, now death instead becomes the moment in which the individual
eludes all power, falling back on himself and somehow bending back on what is most
private in him.25
But in Hitler’s Germany biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics: an unpre-
cedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute
generalization of the sovereign power to make die. How is it possible that a power whose aim
is essentially to make live instead exerts an unconditional power to death, Agamben wonders.
Foucault gives the answer to this paradox in his 1976 Collège de France lecture, where
he poses the same question: In so far as biopolitics is the management of life, how does it
make die, how does it kill? In order to re-claim death, to be able to inflict death on its subjects,
its living beings, biopower must make use of racism. Racism is the thanatopolitics of bio-
politics. Foucault states that racism is precisely what allows biopower to fragment the
biological domain whose care power had undertaken.26 Agamben sees this fragmentation, this
caesura in life, not only between Germans and Jews, but also more generally between animal
life and organic life, human and inhuman, and conscious life and vegetative life. But as there
is no given humanity of the human, this caesura is a moving border.
_______________________________
Elena:
It is the same with any separation: racism, nationalism, classism.
23
Deladurantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 209; Leitgeb & Vismann, ‚Das unheilige Leben.‛
24
Bussolini, ‚Michel Foucault’s Influence on the Work of Giorgio Agamben,‛ 107.
25
Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société (Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 1997), 221.
26
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 82-84.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
50
According to Agamben, the formula that defines the most specific trait of twentieth-
century biopolitics is no longer either to make die or to make live, but to make survive. This
survival is a mutable and virtually infinite survival, the absolute separation of animal life from
organic life until an essential mobile threshold is reached.27 What survives is the human in the
animal and the animal in the human. To ‚make survive‛ means to produce naked life, which
is subjected to death, but also, as we will see later, it means a change for resistance. This
survival is a dehumanization of the human in order to find his or her humanity—which can
never be found in any event as there is no human essence according to Agamben.
Elena: This is a strange affirmation but I need to read him to know how he means it.
Govermentality and economic theology
After a silence of four years, Agamben published a new volume of the Homo Sacer cycle (2007):
Homo sacer II.2–Il Regno e la Gloria, which marks a decisive turn in Agamben’s notion of power
in relation to Homo Sacer I. This turn can be marked as a shift from political theology to econo-
mic theology. Agamben explained this shift in focus in an interview:
It became clear to me that from Christian theology there derive two political paradigms (in
the wide sense): political theology, which locates in the one God the transcendence of
sovereign power, and economic theology, which substitutes the idea of oikonomia, conceived
as an immanent order—domestic and not political in the strict sense, as much a part of
human as of divine life. From political theology derives the political philosophy and
modern theory of sovereignty; from economic theology derives modern biopolitics, up until
the current triumph of the economy over every aspect of social life.28
Negri characterised this shift as moving away from the analysis of the nature of sovereignty
toward the practice of government.29 For Agamben,
The true problem, the main Arcanum of policy is not sovereignty but government, not the
king but the minister, not the law but the police force, that is, the state machine that they
form and keep in motion.30
Elena:
When government replaces sovereignty, instinctive life has taken over society and people are meant to work, work, work and survive, rather than live. Cults are masters at achieving that from people in short periods of time. “The state machine” is the projection of the lack of identity of the people and the people’s slavery for survival, a projection of the lack of sovereignty of themselves as much as the government.
It is very well possible that We needed to go through this step but the possibility of not being able to overcome it is terrifying.
It is also possible that what detonated this process in the political sphere and then in the individual sphere, was the Church’s separation of God and the divine from the human, with them as intermediaries. From their “intermediariness” to the intermediariness of the government between the people and sovereignty, is one small and simple step and then THAT reflected on individual’s lives is just another small gap. People “model” their inner world from how they perceive the outer world to be and there being no sovereignty in the outer world it is easy for us to neglect our own. It is neglected in our unconsciousness and that is precisely why the process might be necessary: because it is not enough to be sovereign without the consciousness of that sovereignity. The political process being as necessary as the individual one.
Suicide is also a phenomenon that should be related to this, for in suicide, the individual has interiorized the homo sacer and kills it even though he or she is completely innocent of crime. The people who commit suicide in our times are incapable of tolerating the dehumanization. They themselves become dehumanized and death is the only way out of it but it must be noted that it is rare for a person to kill him or herself, for the person rarely performs the act, the act performs itself on the person through the inertia of events and the individual is as much a victim of the forces in question as an actor. Were she or he present, where he or she the sovereign of his or her life, were he or she still there enough, he and she would be able to avoid the event. This is the same phenomenon as a government that has turned against the people and starts killing them as we are seeing in Kadafy’s Libia.
_____________
This shift seems to be closely related to Foucault’s work in its turning away from—or
fundamentally modifying—the analysis of sovereignty.
In a broad sense Il Regno e la Gloria is not as much a turning away from sovereignty, as
an attempt to formulate the complex relation between sovereignty and biopolitics (govern-
mentality) and to understand the complicated, if fractured, fusion between sovereignty and
biopolitics. Zartaloudis writes that in Il Regno e la Gloria Agamben reconsiders Foucault’s ana-
lysis of biopolitics by suggesting that instead of first having an ‚era‛ of supreme power and
then a transformation to nation-State and geopolitical sovereignty or ‚post-sovereignty,‛ what
27
Ibid., 155-156.
28
Sacco, ‚Intervista a Giorgio Agamben.‛
29
Antonio Negri, ‚Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Affairs of Earthly Life,‛ Journal for Cultural and
Religious Theory 9 (2008), 96-100.
30
Giorgio Agamben cited in Antonio Negri, ‚Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Affairs of Earthly
Life,‛ Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 9 (2008), 99.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
51
there has always been since at least the second century is a bipolar system where sovereignty
and government have always worked in tandem.31
Il Regno e la Gloria ‚proposes to investigate the ways and the reasons for which power
came to assume, in the West, the form of an oikonomia, that of a government of humans. It is
situated therefore in the track of Michel Foucault’s research on governmentality.‛32 But just as
in Homo sacer I, it is also a search for the Entwicklungsfähigkeit in the work of Foucault, or in the
words of Agamben: he ‚seeks to understand the internal reasons for which it *Foucault’s
study+ did not come to completion.‛ This Entwicklungsfähigkeit concerns the following points
especially.
First, Agamben approvingly references Foucault’s Sécurité, territoire, population with re-
gard to the problem between reigning and governing:
I was led to designate or see something relatively new(<): the privilege which government
starts to exercise with respect to the rules, to the point that one day we could say, to limit the
powers of the king, ‚the king reigns but does not govern,‛ this inversion of government in
relation to rule and the fact that government would be, at base, much more than the
sovereignty, much more than rule, much more than the imperium, is the modern political
problem.33
Agamben explores the same topic as Foucault, but just as in Homo Sacer I, the time span
Agamben uses is longer than Foucault’s: ‚The shadow of the theoretical interrogation of the
present projected on the past here reaches, well beyond the chronological limits which
Foucault assigned to his genealogy, the first centuries of christian theology.‛34 Agamben seeks
to use Foucault's method in important respects, but push back the historical time frame, or
shadow, of the inquiry. He notes that Foucault’s ‚lesson of March 8, 1978 is dedicated, among
other things, to an analysis of Aquinas’ De regno, showing that, in medieval thought and espe-
cially in the Scholastics, there is still a substantial continuity between sovereign and govern-
ment.‛35 Agamben tries to show, on the contrary, ‚that the first seed of the division between
Reign and Government is in the trinitarian oikonomia, which introduces into the divinity itself
a fracture between being and praxis.‛36 Foucault’s "methodological choice of leaving aside the
analysis of juridical universals does not permit him to fully articulate" what Agamben calls the
bipolar character of the governmental machine.37
Second, Agamben stresses the important insight gained from Foucault, according to
which the notion ‘economy’ is closely related to governmentality:
31
Thanos Zartaloudis, Giorgio Agamben. Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2010), 164.
32
Giorgio Agamben, Il Regno e La Gloria: per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo (Roma: Neri
Pozza, 2007), 9. This selection roughly translated by Jeffrey Bussolini (parts of the book pertaining to
Foucault), available at (http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/biogeo/2009/10/19/agamben-on-foucault/),
accessed September 25, 2010.
33
Ibid., 126.
34
Ibid., 9-10.
35
Ibid., 127.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., 300.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 44-67.
52
Foucault situates the origin of governmental technologies in the Christian pastorate<
Another essential trait which the pastorate and the government of humans share is,
according to Foucault, the idea of an ‚economy,‛ that is of a management organized on the
familial model of individuals, things, and riches. If the pastorate presents itself as an
oikonomia psychon, an ‚economy of souls,‛ ‚the introduction of economy into political prac-
tice will be< the essential scope of government.‛ Government is nothing other, in fact, than
‚the art of exercising power in the form of an economy‛ and the ecclesiastical pastorate and
political government are both situated within a substantially economic paradigm.38
But, Agamben remarks, ‚Foucault seems to ignore altogether the theological implications of
the term oikonomia,‛ which he sets out to analyze in detail in Il Regno.39
Third, Agamben criticizes the absence of the term providence—which he considers
extremely important—in the 1977-1978 course of Foucault:
The theories of Kepler, Galileo, Ray, and of the circle of Port-Royal which Foucault cites, do
not, as we have seen, but radicalize this distinction between general providence and special
providence, into which the theologians had transposed in their way the oppositions between
Reign and Government. And the passage from the ecclesiastical pastorate to political
government, which Foucault strives to explain, to tell the truth in a none too convincing
manner, through the emergence of a whole series of counterconducts which resist the pasto-
rate, is all the more comprehensible if it is seen as a secularization of that minute pheno-
menology of first and second, proximate and remote, occasional and efficient causes, general
and particular will, mediated and immediate concurrence, and ordinatio and executio,
through which the theorists of providence tried to render intelligible the government of the
world.40
The influence of the work of Foucault on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben is marked on the
one hand by indebtedness and on the other by Entwicklungsfähigkeit. In the words of Anton
Schütz:
Schmitt’s theologisation of sovereignty has been subjected, 50 years later, to a ‘quarter turn’
by Foucault’s move from issues of domination to issues of government. After a further 30
years, radicalizing Foucault, Agamben’s archaeology of economy adds another ‘quarter
turn’:
authorize them, with a new, unexpected, political content and with a change of epistemic
paradigm.41
Schütz not only notes the well-known interpretive influence of Schmitt on Agamben, he also,
crucially, locates Foucault as a hidden term in this relation. Although Foucault did not
explicitly comment on Schmitt as Agamben has done, he was concerned with many of the
38
Ibid., 126.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 128.
41
Anton Schütz ‚Imperatives without imperator,‛ Law and Critique 20 (2009), 233.
Snoek: Agamben’s Foucault
53
same political currents. In this way Schütz has identified Agamben's as a Foucauldian rea-
ding of Schmitt which strives, nonetheless, to further develop the line of inquiry.
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