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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

sovereign power & biopower « Previous | |Next »
January 7, 2006

The point of departure of Gorgio Agamben's little text Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is the concept of bio power in Foucault's The History of Sexuality. Mika Ojakangas says:

For Foucault biopower is an essentially modern form of power and its purposeis to exert a positive influence on life, to optimise and multiply life by subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. In contrast to this power Foucault opposes the classical sovereign power that was exercised mainly as a means of deduction--the seizing of things, time, bodies, and ultimately the seizing of life itself. Although Agamben admits that our societies are biopolitical ones, he nevertheless sees the Foucauldian opposition between biopower and sovereign power as superfluous. According to him, in fact, these models of power essentially intersect, although in a previously concealed manner. Agamben calls "bare life"---the life of homo sacer that is exposed to an unconditional threat of death--the hidden point of intersection between the sovereign and bio-political models of power.

I concur with that argument as I have argued in terms of the national security state, the state of emergency and the war on terror. Not so for Mika Ojakangas.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:51 PM | | Comments (0)
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