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Foucault, power, sovereignty#2

An interesting paper by Mitchell Dean, which links and connects Foucault, Schmitt and Agamben. Dean makes some good points. He says that:

"For Foucault, politics can only be approached as the articulation or displacement of the poles of a series of oppositions: the right of death and the power of life, sovereignty and bio-politics, the 'city-citizen' and 'shepherd-flock' games, individualizing and totalizing character of modern powers, techniques of government and techniques of self, reason of state and liberalism, etc. But the point at which they link, overlap, interact, of enter a zone of indistinction is difficult to discern. Foucault proposes their relations are demonic, but cannot tell us why or how. "

I've always puzzled how Foucault's toolbox could be used to make sense of the detention camps for refugees and illegal immigrants situated on the edge of the political life of liberal democracies. I've wanted use Foucault's toolbox to move beyond the discourse of natural right deployed by many left liberal critics of the detention camps who appeal to international agreements and seek the universalization of certain rights without exception.

But I haven't made much progress and I'd begin to suspect that I'd reached the limits of Foucault's account of power re the duality of sovereignty and bio-politics. Maybe governmentality----the techniques of of government and the reasons of state would do. But it didn't give that much depth as illegal immigrants are both outside and inside the normative rule of law.

Sovereignty is important here. As Schmitt points out, sovereignty is precisely the power to determine the exception to the rule. Thus it is the act of sovereignty that captures the Guantánamo detainees, such as David Hicks, and then pushes them beyond the reach and protection of the US and Australian sovereign state. The Australian state is also dismantling the rights and laws of the legal system so as to make exceptions of 'asylum seekers' in order to legally intern them in places offshore (the 'Pacific Solution') and exempt them from the laws of the land.

So there things stood with a question mark over Foucault's toolbox.

start

Dean makes a second point. He adds that there is a:

"...possibility that Foucault has underestimated the extent to which sovereign forms of power were constituted in relation to notions of life, and a failure to distinguish different concepts of life."

The detention camp, which suggests that the state of exception is invoked with respect to refugees and illegal immigrants, has pretty much become stablized within the moral and political life of the liberal polity.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 9, 2005 01:42 PM | TrackBack