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.
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