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And then later, after some discussion I wrote this:
"First off, sorry for abandoning my own thread, I have been extremely busy with moving as of late. Also, the question was a sort of exam question (a question developing out of adiscussion with some friends over Agamben), I am in the middle of working out the difference between Biopower and Biopolitics as related in Foucault and Agamben, as well as the relationship between sovereignty and Biopower. What I am essentially interested in is the ways in which this notion is related to the kind of dissolution of the “state-form” that Hardt/Negri write about; and what’s left. That is what does a Biopolitics (or a biopolitical general intellect) without sovereignty mean? This post is going to be excessively long, and with lots of problems that I am sure anyone can point out.
I want to thank everyone here for writing what they have, and I would love to see this discussion develop in the way it was independent of my silence.
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Agamben begins Homo Sacer with a central challenge to Foucault’s genealogy of power relations. Agamben insists that biopolitics appears in history much earlier than what Foucault presents in his work. Foucault’s biopower is a particular strategy of power, a particular management of power relations wherein the principal focus of power is on the regulation and maintenance of life. Power, for Foucault should be conceived in terms of the “multiplicity of force relations” immanent to the plane in which they operate. This is in contrast with the strategies of sovereign power; power focused (though not encapsulated) by a single individual who had the power of death. The Sovereign occupies the space of power however power is principle relational between the sovereign and his/her subjects. Foucault conceives sovereignty as the unequal investment of power in particular individuals (such as a King) or institutions (such as the law), which have the ability to decide death.
Biopower, however is the power over life, rather than death. Agamben is in agreement with Foucault on this point. However, for Foucault, biopower is a particular strategic deployment of power relations that emerges in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It is an arrangement that is the result of a number of shifts, mutations or redeployments of power. Biopower, for Foucault arises out of particular strategic arrangements and shifts in sovereign power (the move from a particular sovereign to that of juridical sovereignty, the rule of contracts and law). Agamben, however, asserts that biopower, as the particular techniques of disciplining and managing populations, health and well being is evidenced in the ancient world. For Agamben sovereignty and biopower are genealogically emergent together in history.
Biopower, for Foucault, has as its _object_ the body, particularly through medical, educational, scientific and punitive institutions. Furthermore biopolitical institutions begin by asserting entire discourses on health aimed at populations. Agamben, in casting biopower into the Roman world is compelled to present a new genealogy for biopower, other than Foucault’s.
Agamben draws on the distinction in Ancient Greek between bios and zoe. Here bios refers, to put simply, qualitative life, the standard of living, how one lives in the world; the rational of the rational-animal, the political. Zoe, in contrast is bare life, which is the embodied subject of law, punishment, discipline, education, training, employment, etc. Zoe is close to Foucault’s notion of the body (however, I think Foucault would say that bios is immanent to zoe). Bio is the life of the citizen; zoe is the life of the governed. The determination of zoe and bios, are for Agamben, the principle function of sovereignty. This notion of sovereignty, drawn from Schmitt’s articulation of sovereignty as the position that declares the state of exception (where the citizen ends and the subject of law begins) ties zoe to the state of the body (the subject) in the state of exception. It is zoe that is the subject of violence in the state of exception, that is life as bare life (without quality). Agamben’s notion of sovereignty is, in my sparse reading of Schmitt, lifted more or less directly from Schmitt’s “state of emergency.” Agamben’s appropriation of Foucault diverges greatly from the formulations of the original author.
Foucault’s biopower emerges much more recently within certain disciplinary régimes and asserts itself over the masses by the mechanisms of population control (disciplinary institutions). Biopower is contrasted with sovereignty that it coexists with and overtakes. For Foucault sovereignty and biopower are two specific strategies of power’s dispersion. Agamben agrees with Foucault that biopower (as exercised in biopolitics) will (should?) overcome sovereignty, he writes, “this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into the site of contestation and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe?” It seems that Agamben is championing the usurpation of sovereignty (along with it juridical sovereignty of law) in favor of biopolitical deployment. It is my view that such a reading of this text can be nothing less than a call to usher in a full affirmation of biopower, as if Agamben thinks there is no hope unless we are in a global camp.
However it seems to me Agamben is posing something much less profound, I read this as Agamben simply reaffirming that it is the body of those that occupy the state of exception (prisoners, students, employees, migrants, criminals, etc) that the political contestations will take place, or rather when political discourse, or power relations are concerned exhaustively with the utter transformation of the concern of bios completely invested in zoe that a transformation in sovereignty will take place. In either case I think that indeed there is a call for the full realization of a biopolitical deployment of power.
On whatever reading Agamben is essentially calling for a usurpation of all sovereign discourse (including juridical). Perhaps it is an old Marxist shout, a call to listen to the materiality of the law, that the law originates in and is concerned with bare life, and that this materiality must be addressed fully in order for a transformation (class consciousness) to occur. In drawing our attention to illegal immigrants; to those bodies that occupy the state of exception, perhaps Agamben is gesturing towards something like a political body akin to Hardt & Negri’s “flesh of the multitude.” That is the management (or inability to manage) flows of bodies over sovereign borders. That is, that bare life, like the multitude calls attention to the materiality of bodies in space without regard (or at least little) for abstract notions of sovereignty or law. The question of how this “form of life” may be understood is not presented in Homo Sacer, in any way that comes to my mind. However one could imagine, like Hardt & Negri’s multitude, a global body that moves freely over the space of the planet, a permanent global diasporas, with no boarders (the sovereignty of the nation-state is obvious dissolved) simply location in relation to other bodies. This material reading of Agamben’s suggestion; however it makes the suggestion itself no clearer, rather articulates a discourse to which the suggestion may appeal."
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