As I understand Foucault's historical studies, Foucault focused on the forms of power, such as those of discipline, bio-power, and governmentality, which are other to sovereignty. Te whole thrust of bio-power (or the power over life), for instance, is that it opens up a post-sovereigntist and non-juridical conception of power.
This opening up is what I find to be innovative in Foucault's writings on power, as it brings the power relationships of biomedicne and biotechnology into the foreground. It is but a small step to extend this diverse cconception of forms of power to a politics of death--say detention camps for refugees and illegal immigrants and the destruction of a whole people. Detention camps are making a big return.
In his essay 'Governmentality' (The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, pp.87-104) Foucault juxtaposes the 'self-referring circularity' of sovereignty, as found in Hobbes and Pufendorf, to the productive arts of government from the 'reason of state' thinkers and the German cameralists who succeed in giving content to the achievement of public order and security. Foucault shifts away from the blood and sword sovereignity to statecraft, on the grounds that this understanding of government contributes to modern rationalities of governance.
However, Carl Schmitt reminds us that we cannot write sovereignty out of the picture. The sovereign decides not only what the ends of government are, but how to understand such ends and the practical content when applied to life. We cannot avoid sovereignty when we are thinking about the rationalites of the state.
So we need to think bio-politics, governance and sovereignity.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 5, 2005 11:58 PM | TrackBack