March 15, 2007
This paper on sovereignty entitled “The Sovereign Disappears in the Election Box” Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger on Sovereignty and (Perhaps) Governmentality by Thomas Crombez makes use of Foucault's distinction between between the logic of sovereignty and the logic of governmentality. Crombez says:
Michel Foucault, in his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France entitled “Il faut défendre la société” (”Society must be defended”), defined sovereignty as relating to territory. Its chief objective is how to maintain and expand this territory, in relation to which it occupies a position that may be marked as singular, external and transcendent. It is a power that is not primarily interested in the land itself or the people inhabiting it. This other kind of power, which Foucault terms ‘governmental’, develops only during the early modern period. The logic of governmentality is concerned with the governance of the bodies of those who inhabit the territory. Foucault identified this as the rise of biopolitics.
Crombez argues that both Schmitt and Heidegger are caught up in the logic of sovereignty and only have a limited understanding of governmentality.
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