A Farewell to Homo Sacer? Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Agamben’s Coronavirus Commentary

AbstractThe article addresses Giorgio Agamben’s critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben’s comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respective…

Why is there truth? Foucault in the age of post‐truth politics

Foucault and Agamben on Augustine, Paradise and the Politics of Human Nature

This article focuses on Foucault’s and Agamben’s readings of Augustine’s account of human nature and original sin. Foucault’s analysis of Augustine’s account of sexual acts in paradise, subordinated to will and devoid of lust, highlights the way it constitutes the model for the married couple, whose sexual acts are only acceptable if diverted by the will away from desire and towards the tasks of procreation. While Agamben rejects Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and reclaims paradise as the original homeland of humanity, his reappropriation of paradise remains conditioned by our turn towards our true nature, from which we have been estranged by sin. Agamben’s politics of reclaiming par…

The limits of subtractive politics: Agamben and Rousseau’s inheritance

The article critically engages with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Rousseau in order to explore the affinities between the two authors’ subtractive approach to political subjectivation. In The Kingdom and the Glory. Agamben argues that Rousseau’s Social Contract reproduces, in a secularized manner, the providential paradigm of government, whose origins Agamben finds in early Christianity. This paradigm establishes a fictitious articulation between transcendent sovereignty and immanent government, presenting particular acts of government as emanating from general divine laws. We shall demonstrate that Rousseau was neither unaware of the problematic character of this paradigm nor did he venture…

How to criticize without ever becoming a critic

The chapter elucidates the disposition of the critical IR scholar by exploring the resonances between the political subject and the figure of the critic. While the critical disposition is often contrasted with proper politics as overly negative and devoid of constructive effects, I argue that political praxis and critical activity share a similar modus operandi in overcoming exclusions, overturning hierarchies and abolishing restrictions in a given world. The political subject is not a poet, artist or ‘world-maker’, but a pitiless critic of the worlds s/he finds itself in. Critical IR is therefore a political intervention into the world of the IR discipline that does not seek to consolidate…

Mind your Manners : Agamben and Phish

In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series Giorgio Agamben develops the concept of destituent power, a power that unworks itself in every constitution and renders itself inoperative in its every operation. This concept helps elucidate Agamben’s more enigmatic notion of form-of-life. Whereas the power of sovereign biopolitics is constitutive, i.e. constituting a determinate actual bios out of the indefinite potentialities of zoe, form-of-life exemplifies the power of rendering actual and determinate forms inoperative or destitute. Rather than attempt to devise a ‘proper’ form of life, Agamben seeks to free life from the gravity of all tasks or vocations imposed on it by privileged forms. W…

A parody of action : Politics and pantomime in Agamben's critique of Arendt

Foucault and the birth of psychopolitics : Towards a genealogy of crisis governance

The article contributes to the genealogy of current tendencies in crisis governance by reconstructing Michel Foucault’s analysis of the application of the notion of crisis in 19th-century psychiatry. This analysis complements and corrects Reinhart Koselleck’s history that viewed crisis as originally a medical, judicial or theological concept that was transferred to the political domain in the 18th century. In contrast, Foucault highlights how the psychiatric application of the concept of crisis was itself political, conditioned by the disciplinary power of the psychiatrist. Unlike the ancient medical concept of crisis that emphasized the doctor’s judgement in observing the event of truth i…

Otherwise than quantum

AbstractThe paper focuses on two problems with Alexander Wendt's unification of physical and social ontology on the basis of quantum theory. Firstly, by endowing social phenomena with an ontological foundation in physical reality defined in quantum terms Wendt risks reducing a plurality of worlds as ‘fields of sense’, ordered by their immanent rules, to the physical world ordered by the laws of quantum theory. Secondly, by defining his quantum social science as an ontology Wendt risks excluding from consideration all that which violates ontological laws, yet may still be said to exist or take place: event, potentiality, and alterity. Although the advantages of a scientific ontology are indi…

Why is there truth? Foucault in the age of post-truth politics

Contemporary debates about post‐truth politics have raised the question of the complicity of Michel Foucault’s thought in the apparent decline of the authority of truth in Western democracies. In this article we probe this question in the analysis of Foucault’s theory of true discourses developed in his 1980‐1981 lecture course ‘Subjectivity and Truth’. In this course Foucault argues for non‐necessary and supplementary character of truths in relation to the reality of which they speak. This argument leads him to abandon the familiar approaches to truth as reflecting, concealing or rationalizing reality and look for the effects of truth in the processes of subjectivation. We explore the affi…

Review of ‘Liminal sovereignty practices’

When did biopolitics begin? : Actuality and potentiality in historical events

The article addresses the ongoing debate about the origins of biopolitics. While Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics approached it as a modern rationality of government, Agamben’s Homo Sacer series presented biopolitics as having a longer provenance, dating back to the antiquity. These polar positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist in these and other theories of biopolitics, which approach its object as both modern and ancient, having its chronological origin in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries yet also possessing a prehistory of precursors. The article interprets this dual origin in terms of Paolo Virno’s theory of historical temporality, which distinguishes between the chron…