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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

Agamben + biopolitics « Previous | |Next »
December 7, 2009

Agamben has called attention to the fact that Michel Foucault,despite introducing the concept of biopolitics in the late 1970s (The History of Sexuality, Volume I) "never dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century." Instead Foucault dwelt on disciplinary institutions, in particular, the prison. But, to Agamben, "the camp -- and not the prison -- is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos." Agamben argues that life captured within the sovereign ban is bare life, and as such, is life irreparably exposed to the force of death that characterizes sovereignty. Further, Agamben argues that the originary relation of the law to life is not application, but abandonment

Catherine Mills in Agambenʼs Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life in Contretemps December 2004

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:59 PM |