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March 28, 2005
Due to this I've started reading Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). I'm impressed by what I've come across so far. Consequently, I've ordered The State of Exception. which I mentioned in in this post as well as Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002). I know very little about the latter.
In starting to read the Introduction to Homo Sacer this afternoon I was suprised by the gaps in the way it tackled Foucault. It starts okay. Agamben says that:
"One of the most persistent features of Foucault's work is its decisive abandonment of the traditional approaches to the problem of power, which is based on the juridico-institutional models (the definition of sovereignty, the theory of the State), in favour of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates subject's very bodies and forms of life. As shown by a seminar held in 1982 at the University of Vermont, in his final years Foucault seemed to orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand the study of the political techniques( such as the science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very centre; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which the processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power."
So far so good. That concurs with my reading of the Vermont lectures.
The two above tendencies intersect at many points. What Agaamben says nest suprises me:
"Yet at the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely unclear in Foucault's work, so much so that it has even been claimed that Foucault would have consistently refused to elaaborate a unitary theory of power...But what is the point at which the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into contact with objective power?...is it legitimate or even possible to hold subjective technologies and political techniques apart...it remains. .. somtehing like a vanishing point that the different perspectival lines of Foucault's inquiry converge toward without reaching."
I would argue that Agamben is wrong on this. The different trajectories of power come together around Foucault's category of governmentality. The connection is made here.
Agamben's failure to mention governmentality is what suprises me.
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Interesting post, Gary; thanks.