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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

biopower and sovereignty « Previous | |Next »
February 27, 2007

Sergei Prozorov in this article in Foucault Studies states:

Despite evident differences, Agamben’s and Hardt and Negri’s approaches are both marked by the conflation of sovereign and biopolitical modalities of power. While Agamben’s Homo Sacer presents an ontological thesis on the originary indistinction between sovereignty and biopolitics that are linked in the figure of ‘bare life’ as their product, Hardt and Negri’s argument posits a quasi‐empirical indistinction of the two forms of power as a result of the ‘epochal transformation’ of late modernity, whereby the sovereignty of the nation‐state gives way to the ‘biopolitical sovereignty’ of the decentred Empire....Ultimately, biopower becomes little more than a new, fancier term for sovereign power or, alternatively, sovereignty becomes generalised to embrace additional objects of rule.

Prozorov argues for the irreducible difference between biopower and sovereignty.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:36 PM |