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The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben

Katia Genel

Online Publication Date: 01 January 2006

To cite this Article Genel, Katia(2006)'The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben',Rethinking Marxism,18:1,43 62
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RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 18

NUMBER 1

(JANUARY 2006)

The Question of Biopower:

Foucault and Agamben

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Katia Genel
Translated by Craig Carson
According to Foucault, a transformation in the exercise of power comes to light
beginning with the eighteenth century, as life itself becomes an object of concern for
power. Biopower is the term he uses to describe the new mechanisms and tactics of
power focused on life (that is to say, individual bodies and populations), distinguishing such mechanisms from those that exert their influence within the legal and
political sphere of sovereign power. In Homo Sacer, Agamben takes up Foucaults
analysis and reestablishes it on the very terrain that the latter had wanted to break
from: the field of sovereignty. Agamben argues that sovereign power is not linked to
the capacity to bear rights, but is covertly linked to a bare life, which is life
included in the political realm by a paradoxical exclusion, exposed to the violence
and the decision of sovereign power. In this text, I bring into relief the extent to
which Agamben shifts the meaning and content of Foucaults notion of biopower,
which he grafts onto another terrain. What is of interest is the examination of this
notion of biopower when applied to sovereign power, in order to assess its relevance
and fruitfulness as well as what it brings to our understanding of modernity.
Key Words: Biopolitics, Biopower, Exception, Sovereignty, Agamben

The hypothesis of biopower, which Foucault formulated at a turning point in his

investigations, brings to light a specific mode of exercising power: beginning with the
eighteenth century, life is the privileged stakes of power. It is the life of individual
bodies, objects of an anatomo-politics that are concerned and, in this respect,
Foucault is engaged in a continuation of his analysis of disciplines. More precisely,
however, beginning with the second half of the eighteenth century, the stakes of
political strategies become the life of the human species, thereby marking a
societys threshold of biological modernity (Foucault 1978, 143). What is then at
issue are the biological processes affecting populations and demanding to be
regulated by an insuring (assurantiel ) or regulatory power that, in the final chapter
of the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), is specifically designated biopolitics. In Agambens work, biopower functions as a thesis rather than a hypothesis,
a thesis concerning the very structure of power, the origin of which is directly related
to life. The logic of sovereignty is a logic of capturing life, a logic of isolating a bare
life as an exception. This life is exposed not only to the sovereigns violence and
ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/06/010043-20
2006 Association for Economic and Social Analysis
DOI: 10.1080/08935690500410635

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GENEL

power over death but also, more generally, to a decision that qualifies it and
determines its value. Sovereign power establishes itself and perpetuates itself by
producing a biopolitical body on which it is exercised. Agambens thesis is
formulated not only in the work Homo Sacer (1995) but also in the succeeding
text, Remnants of Auschwitz (1998), as well as in some contemporary articles
collected under the title Means Without End (2000). The question of biopower, which
is not Agambens central concern, is annexed to another problematic that animates
all his writings: the perpetual definition or redefinition of the human.
Foucaults hypothesis, which was taken up by Agamben as a thesis, is
indeed concerned with a question of biopower: the question of a particular juncture
between two terms, power and life, which requires that both be redefined. This
question of biopower, this juncture of life and power, constitutes a part of
a multidirectional and nonunified history of political techniques or the art of
governing, the stakes of which are life. It is not necessarily, however, a history
that intersects with a history in which politics is given a vitalist foundation. While
Foucault clearly situates himself more immediately within the first of the
two histories, it is evident from the outset that the problematic character of the
notion of biopolitics*/or, even more, biopower*/results from Agambens implicit
attempt to grasp the two together, or rather, to articulate one with respect to the
other.
Approaching the problem of biopower by questioning Foucault and Agamben in this
way opens up a double series of interrogations. First, there is a question of
elucidating the reciprocal determination of the two terms, power and life, in light
of their juncture and the relation they sustain. How do these very general notions
specifically determine one another within biopower? It is necessary, initially, to define
the life that is implicated in power: is it a question of a body (the object of disciplines
and surveillance); a labor-power; a biological life (the life of the ill or the life of
populations); an existence (such as Foucaults lowly and infamous lives, which are,
like Herculine Barbin, bound up with and traversed by power); a bare life (life
destined to die with the utter impunity of Homo sacer ); or, instead, a survival (the life
of an individual in an overcoma [en coma depasse])? Conversely, power is modified
by the introduction of life into its terrain and preoccupations. This transformation of
power must be understood as the transformation both of the way in which power is
exercised or manifested and, at the same time, of the manner in which we must
understand its processes. For Foucault, the hypothesis of a biopower clearly implies a
redefinition of power. More important, however, it also implies a redefinition of the
manner in which one grasps hold of power, a redefinition that will allow one to grasp
power in the interstices where it had remained undetected. Biopower is a uniquely
modern mechanism that, even if it is bound up with the old sovereign power at
various times and in various modalities, remains distinct with respect to it. Insofar as
it functions through technologies of power, biopower must be analyzed in the
concrete operations of its most localized procedures as well as in the manner in which
it integrates itself into the more general processes of sovereignty and the law. Is it
therefore legitimate or even pertinent for Agamben, who locates the concept of
biopower at the very nucleus of the concept of sovereignty, to transpose biopower
into sovereigntys originary architecture? Agamben invokes biopower in order to think

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FOUCAULT, AGAMBEN, AND BIOPOWER

45

political space in its entirety, which thus functions according to the matrix of the
camp*/the paradigm of biopower in the extreme insofar as it is the space of a radical
decision on bare life. In this light, the notion of biopower calls for a transformation of
what one understands by the term politics. If one admits that, as Foucault suggests,
life is the privileged stakes of power and that modern man is an animal whose
politics places his existence as a living being in question (Foucault 1978, 143), is it
possible to complete this formula, as Agamben does, by its inversion, according to
which we are citizens whose very politics is at issue in their natural body (Agamben
1998, 188)?
Beyond these questions concerning the redefinition of life and power implicated by
the hypothesis or thesis of a biopower, a second series of interrogations emerges from
the confrontation of these two positions; it is a series of interrogations that stems
from the question of Agambens rereading of Foucaults hypothesis. One must first
determine the stakes of Foucaults analysis, formulated in the 1976 lectures, Society
Must Be Defended, as well as at the end of the first volume of The History of
Sexuality, in which biopolitics is not the central object. The hypothesis of biopower is
bound up with a redefinition of power which is finally not brought to completion along
these lines, but which is instead compelled to introduce the question of the subject.
In The Subject and Power, Foucault reinterprets his work, writing that his
overriding theme is not power but the subject. This shift of emphasis is legible in
the reflections on pastoral power and governmentality, reformulations of biopower in
which the emphasis is placed on the subject and which ultimately open onto the
question of the technologies of the self. Can Agamben legitimately reinterpret
Foucaults thought starting from what is an admittedly essential but nonetheless
transitory and brief moment of his thought, the hypothesis of biopower? In his
rereading, Agamben poses the question of a unitary theory of power within Foucaults
work, attempting to find the bilateral connection that would unite the notion of
political techniques and the technologies of the self, not on the side of the subject
but on the side of power. But in order to reconstitute the unity of the Foucauldian
analyses of power, Agamben carries out a displacement of his interrogation onto the
terrain of sovereignty and the law, a terrain Foucault had abandoned. Does
Agambens analysis realize the completion of Foucaults project by virtue of this
abandoned question, or even by virtue of objects*/the camps, Nazi biopolitics*/that
Foucault had never treated at any length? Foucaults hypothesis is in effect open,
nonunified; it can be thought of as a work in progress with conceptual tools that are
both rich and malleable, and as a result it is able to authorize numerous
appropriations. Even if Agamben, in appropriating biopower, proposes to complete
or even to correct Foucaults analyses, the synthetic aim of his project does not
appear ultimately to accomplish this task. Is it then a question of a critique of
Foucault? Or a radical infidelity? Or even an entirely incompatible objective? It is
necessary to pose the question of the pertinence, or even the productivity, of the
notion of biopower for deciphering current politics in terms of the enigmas of the
century (such as Nazism) that remain dramatically current and that would call for
an elucidation on the same terrain*/biopolitics*/on which they were formed
(Agamben 1998, 4).

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Foucaults Hypothesis of Biopower

The formulation of the hypothesis that inaugurates the age of biopower, is bound up
with a redefinition of power that ultimately forces one to pose the question of the
subject. One could examine this formulation in the courses given at the Colle
`ge de
France in 1976 as well as in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, by
emphasizing above all two interdependent aspects that fix the stakes of biopower.
From one angle, this hypothesis reports a transformation of the mode in which power
is exercised. From another, it demands a new method for the interrogation of power
in order to grasp its new technologies. Because what prevents us from grasping the
complex play of powers processes is precisely that it presents itself internal to a code
of law and sovereignty, the analysis is conducted along two related planes: grasping
this transformation of the way in which power is exercised relies on a new approach
to reading it.

A New Mode of Exercising Power

If the age of biopower, in which power includes life in its calculations, both succeeds
and is bound to sovereign power, it also transforms this power at the same time.
Foucault revisits the slow and very profound transformation of these mechanisms of
power (1978, 136): the sovereign right over life and death is relativized so that the
asymmetrical right of death, exercised as a right of the sword, is no longer the
principal form of power but simply one element among others. It is organized within a
power of the management of life, not to be understood strictly as labor-power (the
indispensable basis of capitalism), but as an element of a biohistory in which one
acquires the scientific possibility of transforming life, ultimately, for itself, into wellbeing or health. Foucault links this hypothesis to his previous work on the
microphysics of power. In Discipline and Punish (1977), he demonstrates that
disciplinary power tends to increase the utilitarian force of the individual body. In
a chronological overlap, he articulates within the 1976 lectures a nondisciplinary
technology of power that does not exclude the disciplinary technology, but is
superimposed on it, dovetails or integrates into it, uses it by sort of infiltrating
it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques (2003, 242). The two
different technologies function at two distinct levels: discipline is individualizing,
biopolitics is massifying. Biopolitics no longer addresses itself to the body, but to
living man, to a multiplicity of men . . . to the extent that they form . . . a global mass
that is affected by overall processes characteristic of life (242/3). It intervenes in
different processes such as birth, death, and illnesses, which are considered to be
factors in the reduction of force. But it also intervenes in the processes of old age, in
accidents, in everything that requires mechanisms of assistance and insurance, or
even in the relation between the species and the environment (the problem of the
city, for example). In short, the object of biopolitics is the population, conceived as a
scientific and political problem; biopolitics therefore focuses on collective phenomena that have long-term political effects and strives to regulate them. It is a question
of security mechanisms which have to be installed around the random element

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FOUCAULT, AGAMBEN, AND BIOPOWER

47

inherent in a population of living beings (Foucault 2003, 246). What, then, is the
connection, in this transformation, between sovereign power and biopower? It is a
question of a shift in the regime of power: one of the greatest transformations
political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldnt say
exactly that sovereigntys old right*/to take life or let live*/was replaced, but it
came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which
does penetrate it, permeate it. This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite
right. It is the power to make live and let die (241).
Thus, the two dimensions are presented not as a simple succession, but as an
interpenetration. In order to take charge of life, power needs new processes. The
new technologies of power are situated in effect below the power of sovereignty:
power is increasingly less the power to put to death, and increasingly more the right
to intervene in order to make live. Foucault insists therefore on the ineffective
character of power whose organizing schema is sovereignty for governing the political
and economic body of an industrializing and demographically developing society. He
delineates the necessity for powers twofold adjustment with respect to the
processes that escape it.
[F]ar too many things were escaping the old mechanism of the power of
sovereignty, both at the top and at the bottom, both at the level of detail
and at the mass level. A first adjustment was made to take care of the
details. Discipline had meant adjusting power mechanisms to the individual
body by using surveillance and training . . . And then at the end of the
eighteenth century, you have a second adjustment; the mechanisms are
adjusted to phenomena of population, to the biological or biosociological
processes characteristic of human masses. This adjustment was obviously
much more difficult to make because it implied complex systems of
coordination and centralization. (249/50)
The new mechanisms, both disciplinary and normalizing, constitute new forms of
the modes of exercising power that sovereign power cannot fully exploit. They can be
joined together, most notably around the question of the norm (an element that
circulates between the two) as sexuality demonstrates in an exemplary manner. The
normalizing mechanisms are not, however, the enlarged forms of discipline. It is a
question rather, as Foucault writes, of covering a larger surface of the body of the
population by means of the bilateral interplay of normalizing and disciplinary
mechanisms.

A New Approach to Power

Thus, the study of the mechanisms of biopower cannot be carried out according to the
traditional approach of sovereignty, a point that emphasizes the polemical rather
than the simply descriptive character of the hypothesis of biopower. Foucault clarifies
the point: I would in fact like to trace the transformation not at the level of political
theory, but rather at the level of the mechanisms, techniques, and technologies of
power (241). In this sense, Foucault abandons the theory of sovereignty and law in

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GENEL

order to study the technologies of power which are no longer presented exclusively
internal to a code of legality or sovereignty, codes which in fact mask the new modes
of the exercise of power.
For a new understanding of power, an analytics of power is therefore required.
This necessity is formulated in particular in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, in
which the central object is not biopower but the repressive hypothesis*/the idea that
sexuality will be repressed, denied, silenced*/which Foucault intends to challenge or
rather to resituate within a general economy of discourse on sex in order to bring
to light how sex is put into discourse (1978, 11); rather than the processes of
restriction, the latter is ultimately a mechanism to increase incitement. It is,
however, the second doubt that Foucault proposes concerning this hypothesis that
interests us here, a doubt that takes the form of a historico-theoretical question: Do
the workings of power . . . really belong primarily to the category of repression? (10).
It is a question, therefore, of Foucaults departure from a juridical-discursive
interrogation of power, which preserves power in its negative form as repression or
prohibition. Instead, power is in fact a positive mechanism aiming at the multiplicity,
the intensification, and the increase of life.
One remains attached to a certain image of power-law, power-sovereignty, which
was traced out by the theoreticians of right and the monarchic institution. It is this
image that we must break free of*/that is, the theoretical privilege of law and
sovereignty*/if we wish to analyze power within the concrete and historical
framework of its operation. We must construct an analytics of power that no longer
takes law as a model and a code (90).
It is a question of being liberated from the theoretical privilege of the law and
sovereignty, a question of taking leave of the legal code. In short, Foucault
demonstrates the inadequate character of the juridical code for properly grasping
the exercise of power, since this code is the one according to which power presents
itself and prescribes that we conceive of it (88).
And if it is true that the juridical system was useful for representing, albeit
in a nonexhaustive way, a power that was centered primarily around
deduction (prele`vement ) and death, it is utterly incongruous with the
new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by
technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by
control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond
the state and its apparatus. We have been engaged for centuries in a type of
society in which the juridical is increasingly incapable of coding power, of
serving as its system of representation. (89; emphasis added)
Power must be sought outside these mechanisms in which it has always
been presented. The Foucauldian question concerning power*/ how is it exercised?*/is bound to the concern not for a central nucleus of power but for its
technologies. It refers to a strategic model of power rather than a legal model, in
view of understanding the multiplicity of relations of force and the operations of
power.

FOUCAULT, AGAMBEN, AND BIOPOWER

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Analysis of Racism
A final element of the Foucauldian hypothesis of biopower interests us with respect
to the comparison with Agamben. It is a question of the analysis of racism, which
comes after his analysis of race war, and in particular the idea of a paradox of
biopower formulated within this context. Indeed, if power is a biopower the
function of which is essentially the management and increase of life, how is one to
understand the role of killing at the heart of this power? In other words, in what
manner does biopower fasten itself to the exercise of sovereign power? Two examples
are given: the first, atomic power as an excess or abuse of the sovereign power to kill
(to kill all life, more precisely) and the second, the technical possibility of fabricating
viruses, biological weapons, as an excess or abuse of biopower beyond that of
sovereign power. The analysis of racism is the response to the question of knowing
how to exercise the function of killing within biopower. Through the emergence of
biopower, racism is inscribed within mechanisms of the state according to a double
logic. On the one hand, racism introduces caesuras between what must live and what
must die within the life of which power has taken control. It implements a
fragmentation of the biological field by making (inferior and superior) races appear,
which is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population (Foucault
2003, 255). On the other hand, racism establishes a positive relation between the life
of some and the death of others which is no longer bellicose or militaristic, but
biological. Not merely the security of one race, the death of the other is the death of
a pernicious race that will make the life of the race healthier and more pure. Enemies
are not political adversaries but biological threats. Racism is thus understood by
Foucault as the precondition that makes killing acceptable in a normalizing
society (256); it is the point through which biopower must pass in order to exercise
sovereign power, the right over death. With the specific case of Nazism, Foucault
establishes an exact coincidence between the two procedures, the expansion in the
extreme of both the power to kill and biopower: Nazi society, both regulatory and
insuring, at the same time unleashes its power to kill through exposing its citizens
to death. It is this total exposure to death that constitutes the German race as
superior race. The Nazi State makes the field of the life it manages, protects,
guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the
sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own
people (260).
This specific mode of the exercise of power, biopower, therefore implies a
redefinition of the mechanisms of power and a new approach to them. Biopower
binds itself to sovereign power, but the mechanisms remain irreducible to those of
sovereign power. It is necessary to be freed from the privilege of the juridicalinstitutional code in order to grasp these new procedures and new strategies. How
then is one to make sense of Agambens approach, which is presented as an
appropriation of the problem of biopower, not strictly on the abandoned terrain of
sovereignty but by an extensive reworking of the terms involved, transforming the
understanding of power as much as the understanding of life?

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Agamben: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

In order to understand how Agamben intends to correct, or at least, to complete
Foucaults analysis, it is necessary to separate out the content that Agamben adds to
the notion of biopower. The resulting displacement of this concept*/the apparent
corrective*/is essentially a result of the notion of power that is implied: Agamben
extracts a biopolitical structure from sovereign power. He presents his inquiry in this
way: The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection
between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power. What this
work has had to record among its likely conclusions is precisely that the two analyses
cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm
constitutes the original*/if concealed*/nucleus of power (Agamben 1998, 6). His
thesis is constructed starting from the hypothesis of Foucault; it is a question of
reopening the question of sovereignty from a particular perspective because the aim
of the inquiry is to locate a point of intersection between the different mechanisms of
power. It is possible to pinpoint two operations in Agambens rereading of Foucault:
the first can be imagined as the extension or complement of Foucaults analyses,
while the second is rather on the order of critique. Agamben states that there is an
elision in Foucaults analysis, an absence of a unitary theory of power. In actuality,
according to Agamben, the two threads of the research, the one concerning political
techniques and the other concerning the technologies of the self, are intertwined at
several points. But because from Agambens perspective life inhabits this intermediary position, the question of a political subject emerges as a problem.
Referring to pastoral power, Foucault does indeed speak of a tricky combination . . .
of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures (Dreyfus and
Rabinow 1982, 213). We must therefore find out whether or not the unitary center
of this political double bind is accessible to thought, and if Agamben succeeds by
means of his critique to complete Foucaults analyses.

The Redefinition of Sovereignty

Agambens approach to sovereignty is presented as a rupture with the traditional
approach. The problem of sovereignty has been for a long time the identification of
who within the political order was invested with certain powers. Accordingly,
Agamben notes that the very threshold of the political order itself was never called
into question (1998, 12). What is called into question, therefore, is the formulation
of the limits and the originary structure of the state sphere. His thesis is then the
following: sovereignty functions according to the logic of the exception, the
privileged object of which is life, and constructs itself by producing a biopolitical
body, which is to say by including bare life through its exclusion. In reopening the
question of biopower on the terrain of sovereignty, Agamben presupposes a
redefinition of sovereignty. It does not concern a traditional questioning which
would, starting from legal subjects, pose the question of its legitimacy or its
constitution. Sovereignty does not emerge from a contract or a general will nor is it
derived from interests. It not concerned with legal subjects but, in a hidden manner,

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51

with bare life which it detaches from the forms of life to which this life is habitually
attached. Agambens redefinition of the notion of sovereignty takes its substance
from the analyses of Schmitt: on the one hand, Agamben thinks sovereignty as a limit
concept between interiority and exteriority. The sovereign establishes himself in a
paradox: he establishes himself from the outside, while declaring that there is no
outside, in this way establishing the juridical order (as Schmitt writes, the sovereign
proves itself not to need the law to create law). On the other hand, the sovereign
establishes himself through a decision on the exceptional situation. The strength of
the sovereign is affirmed paradoxically in the state of exception, the source of
juridico-political order. Thus these two elements, the exception and the decision, at
the same time reveal and establish the sovereign.
Agamben then investigates the topology inherent to the paradox of sovereignty: it
is the logic of the exception in the etymological sense*/taking of the outside. This
logic focuses precisely on life, which is legible in the sovereigns right over life and
death, the moment in which power has taken control of life either by exploiting or by
suspending its right to kill. It is a question of inscribing exteriority within the body of
the nomos */which is to say, the law as conjunction of right and violence in the
sovereign or even, as with Schmitt, as the imposition of an order on a location*/by
which the former animates the latter. It is a question, in short, of the integration of
those things that had escaped. As a result, the relation between power and life is
called a relation of exception, designating a relation in which something is
included by its exclusion; the sphere of bare life is produced by this very exclusion.
Production of bare life, therefore, is the originary activity of power. The notion of
bare life is thereby distinguished from natural life: it is life inasmuch as it is exposed
to power and its force, inasmuch therefore as it is exposed to death. These two
terms, sovereign power and bare life, emerge in this specific relationship. The life
caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originally sacred*/that is, that may be
killed but not sacrificed*/and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the
originary activity of sovereignty. The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an
absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally
expresses precisely both lifes subjection to a power over death and lifes irreparable
exposure in the relation of abandonment (1998, 83; emphasis added).
Agamben intends to reverse the dogma of the sacredness of life referred to by
Benjamin, by producing its genealogy. Far from being an object of some form of
protection by virtue of its sacred character, mere life is a production of a power on
which the latter exercises its force. Agamben demonstrates this fact through a
redefinition of the sacred, by calling forth the figure of Homo sacer, and by
generalizing this figure (a methodological procedure justified only by the object of
inquiry, the exception, whereby the exception reveals the rule). The life of Homo
sacer, an obscure figure of archaic Roman law which can be killed without committing
homicide but which cannot be sacrificed in any ritual form, is a life destined to die
with complete impunity. It is a life that is therefore negatively implicated in power in
the form of the exception or even of the ban, in the double sense of to banish, both
to expel from the community and put at the mercy of the command and insignia of
power. In short, in searching for the ground of sovereignty, Agamben brings to light
the logic of the exception: If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then

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GENEL

sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical concept . . .

it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by
suspending it (28).
It is the exception that makes the juridical order possible. Agamben demonstrates
that what establishes sovereign power is also that which keeps it operational, that is
to say the violence of the processes by which bare life is excluded and, therefore, the
production of a biopolitical body on which sovereign power can exercise itself. Power
clandestinely exercises itself through the exception and perpetuates its force through
the repetition of the gesture of exception. It has two sides: the hidden side of the
exception, which keeps the visible side, that of the law, operational. A second
dimension of the exception, however, soon appears: the state of exception is
precisely what is going to generate a certain visibility, to make what is hidden
emerge. It is from this perspective that the camp will be analyzed: the hidden face of
power, the locus in which the exception is operative, is revealed in the crisis
situation, either in the exceptional situation or ultimately in the camp.
The reading of Hobbes proposed by Agamben is particularly illuminating with
respect to his conception of sovereignty. Sovereignty is founded on an exception of
life similar to a state of nature; this state of nature or state of exception continues to
function internally to sovereignty. On the one hand, Agamben rereads Hobbess
constitution of sovereignty by emphasizing lifes exposure to death which characterizes the state of nature and which will be encountered again (at the expense of the
notion of the contract) within the state. Because Agamben has never made any
reference whatsoever to the idea of the contract (except in order to show that it
stands in the way of understanding the problem of sovereign power), his reading
pushes Hobbess text in a surprising direction. The state of nature is a situation in
which each man is a sacred man for all others. This state of nature survives in the
person of the sovereign, who alone conserves the ius contra omnes, since he
conserves a right over life and death of the citizens, who are for him sacred men.
Far from being a prejuridical condition that is indifferent to the law of the city, the
Hobbesian state of nature is the exception and the threshold that constitutes and
dwells within it (106). Sovereignty is not derived from the subjects of law, subjects
who give up a right within a contract. On the contrary, the question concerns the
threshold of the juridical order: sovereign power functions according to a logic of
exception or a logic of the exposure of bare life. It is a power which is established
beginning from this violence.
On the other hand, the state of nature is a manner for Hobbes to consider society in
its civil state as if it were dissolved, thereby rendering visible the internal principle
of the state. The following citation, which is taken from De cive, appears as an
epigraph in Homo Sacer: To make a more curious search into the rights of the State,
and the duties of Subjects, it is necessary, (I say not to take them in sunder, but yet
that) they be so considered, as if they were dissolved, (i.e.) that we rightly
understand what the quality of human nature is, in what matters it is, in what not
fit to make up a civill government, and how men must be agreed among themselves,
that intend to grow up into a well-grounded State (ix).
Agamben is not concerned with a consideration of how the constitution of
sovereignty puts an end to the state of war*/in this sense, unlike Foucault, he does

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53

not think that sovereign power signals the end of war, nor evidently that Hobbes is a
thinker of civil peace*/but with a demonstration of how the state of nature, or even
the state of exception, endures within the normal situation. Always active, this state
is continually presupposed as the maintenance and perpetuation of power. The state
of exception is not therefore the chaos that precedes order, but rather the situation
that results from its suspension. It can be considered a principle immanent to
sovereignty which structures the political state without ever appearing within it. In
the same manner, for Schmitt, the sovereign is only ultimately established from the
emergence of the state of exception. The law presupposes the nonjuridical (for
example, mere violence in the form of the state of nature) as that with which it
maintains itself in a potential relation in the state of exception (Agamben 1998,
20/1). Such a reading reveals the reversal of the traditional notion of sovereignty.
Characterized in this way, the structure of sovereignty orients the history of
biopower, which is the history of the deployment and the emerging crisis of this
structure.

History and Crisis of Sovereign Power

Starting from the biopolitical structure of sovereignty, a history of biopower takes
shape the aim of which is to elucidate both contemporary politics and its continuity
with the enigmas of the twentieth century. The crucial moment of this history is not,
as it is for Foucault, the intensification of the diverse processes that make live, but
the moment in which bare life frees itself.
[W]hat characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zoe in
the polis */which is, in itself, absolutely ancient*/nor simply the fact that
life as such becomes a principle object of the projections and calculations of
State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by
which exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life
*/which is originally situated at the margins of the political order*/gradually
begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion,
outside and inside, bios and zoe , right and fact, enter into a zone of
irreducible indistinction. (Agamben 1998, 9)
By virtue of the crisis, the state of exception becomes the rule and the hidden
foundation of sovereignty is revealed, exposing the specificity of political modernity.
This crisis is made possible by means of a double process of the politicization of life
which consists in the increasing inscription of life within the political order, which in
turn makes its exposure to power increasingly radical. The specificity of modern
democracy, differentiated from the democracy of antiquity, is the fact that it
approaches its opposite, totalitarianism.
(a ) Such is the aporia of democracy, analyzed in its rise to power as the inscription
of life in the political order and, more specifically, in the nation. In this respect,
Agamben appears to accomplish a nearly Foucauldian project on the terrain
abandoned by Foucault, since what is at stake is determining and unmasking the
fiction through which power, by borrowing juridical codes, manifests itself. As the

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inquiries into the Declaration des droits de lhomme and the writ of habeas corpus
show, life itself, in the form of nativity and the mere body, is invested with the
principle of sovereignty. The fiction of sovereignty is the fictional bond between
nativity and nation, etymologically related. Life, the actual sovereign subject, is the
ultimate and opaque bearer of sovereignty.
Declarations of rights . . . assure the exceptio of life in the new state order
that will succeed the collapse of the ancien regime . The fact that in this
process the subject is, as has been noted, transformed into a citizen
means that birth*/which is to say, bare natural life as such*/here for the
first time becomes . . . the immediate bearer of sovereignty. The principle of
nativity and the principle of sovereignty, which were separated in the ancien
regime (where birth marked only the emergence of a sujet, a subject), are
now irrevocably united in the body of the sovereign subject so that the
foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted . . . The fiction
implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation such that there can
be no interval of separation between the two terms. Rights are attributed to
man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately
vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such) of the citizen.
(Agamben 1998, 128)
But this is an ambivalent inscription: men inscribe their demands for rights and
liberties in the very place of their subjection to power. Hence, too, modern
democracys specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into
play in the very place*/bare life*/that marked their subjection. Behind the long,
strife-ridden process that leads to the recognition of rights and formal liberties stands
once again the body of the sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot
be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed (10). Each subject repeats this gesture
of the exception of life by inscribing his or her life in the political order and by being
exposed to the submission to power.
The crisis of the nation-state, which is a crisis of the connection between birth and
nation, ushers in a biopolitical modernity in the extreme. The fiction of sovereignty is
in a certain manner uncovered by another fiction, or rather by another history, one
that Benjamin calls the tradition of the oppressed. The figure of the refugee, an
explicit reference to Hannah Arendts analysis within the fifth chapter of Imperialism, emerges as the symptom of this other history. It is, moreover, on the occasion of
this analysis of the falsification of the rights of man*/which are originally the
instruments of protection over against the new state sovereignty, but which reveal
their practical flimsiness the moment they are faced with refugees*/that Arendt
makes reference to something like a bare life: The conception of human rights,
based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very
moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted
with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships*/except
that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness
of being human (Arendt 1951, 295).
The refugee, like the Jew, is mere bare life, and, as such, the bare life of the
refugee should, since it is the man named by the declarations, be made the object of

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55

a protection. But in reality, the refugee reveals the vacuity of the notion of a
humanity and of the declaration, which is not a proclamation of eternal values, but
which has a precise historical function. From the moment of the crisis of the nationstate, life no longer succeeds in appearing within the system. Life becomes the stakes
and the problem of politics. Modern democracy, like totalitarianism, should be
analyzed as a response to this crisis. Power is going to short-circuit this connection,
the inscription of life in the nation, and deal directly with bare life.
(b ) The analysis of totalitarianism is therefore the analysis of a response to this
crisis of political space and to the absence of systemic regulation. Totalitarianism is a
biopolitics investing itself more directly in life, which becomes immediately political.
A continual process pushes past the decline of rights*/a second-class citizenship is
conferred on the Jews*/to the production of a bare life and then to its extermination.
The extermination must be understood within a juridico-political order of the killing
of bare life and not within the religious violence of a holocaust: The truth*/which is
difficult for the victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover
over with sacrificial veils*/is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant
holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, as lice, which is to say, as bare life
(Agamben 1998, 114). It is necessary to understand Nazi politics not simply according
to the paradigm of extermination, but also as the production of bare life.
Two traits characterize totalitarianism: on the one hand, power becomes the
immediate decision on life, which is to say the decision on its value or nonvalue. It is
starting from this point that the practices of euthanasia and human experimentation
are taken into account, since the life in question has been qualified as life devoid of
value. Similar human experimentation had been practiced in democracies, on lives
declared devoid of value such as those of prisoners who have been sentenced to
death. More specifically, Nazism produces a people staring from the discrimination
and the exclusion of a population*/that of a particular life, the life of the Jews. On
the other hand, a second trait characterizes totalitarianism: biological facts become
political objectives, and politics is then understood in terms of the police. The
burgeoning concern for the race, which is revealed by the positive function of the
police, coincides with struggle against a foreign enemy, which is revealed by external
politics. These are the two indissociable elements in which politics and biology are
confounded. Nazism, according to Agamben, is intelligible from this biopolitical
perspective.
As a preliminary to confronting the massive thesis according to which the camp is
the matrix of modernity, it is possible to examine the commentary on the Foucauldian
analysis of racism, which is not formulated in Homo Sacer (it should be noted that the
1976 course at the Colle
`ge de France does not figure in the bibliography of Homo
Sacer ), but in the text which succeeded it, Remnants of Auschwitz . Here, Agamben
comments that the Foucauldian analysis of racism is a mode of resolving the paradox
of biopower, which is the paradoxical exercise of the power over death by a power
aiming at the increase of life. He intends to pursue Foucaults analysis and to
reveal the mobility of the biopolitical caesuras that endlessly separate and exclude
one life*/that of the Jews*/in order to reinforce and to cause another life*/that of
the Germans*/to emerge from it. Agamben does, however, deviate from Foucaults
position on two points. First, according to Agamben, the two functions*/biopower

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and killing*/which come to coincide with one another in the Nazi state (but which
despite their points of intersection remain heterogeneous in the analysis of Foucault)
are indissociable. Second, this initial point is contiguous precisely with the fact that
extermination is not the exclusive paradigm by which to grasp Nazism and the events
that took place within the camps. The production of bare life can, however, explain
this double process. To the extent that the logic of the production of bare life leads to
the production of death, the concentration camp is thereby linked to the
extermination camp. Becoming a Muselmann (the paradigmatic figure for Agamben
of the man of the camps in the process of dying of malnutrition, and therefore in a
mode of survival) is the incremental production of the living as dead.
Thus for Agamben, racism, in a certain manner, goes beyond race. It creates
caesuras between the people and the population, the people emerging through the
exclusion of a population that is a biological danger for it, pursuing this separation in
order to reach a threshold where it is no longer possible for caesuras to function. It is,
in fact, a production of survival. Power is above all a decision on life in the form of a
qualification of life, a decision on its value and therefore also its nonvalue. This is
what characterizes the biopolitics of the twentieth century: a third formula can be
said to insinuate itself between the other two, a formula that defines the most
specific trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: no longer either to make die or to
make live, but to make survive . The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists
in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite
survival (Agamben 1999, 155). What becomes clear as a result of the analysis of
totalitarianism is the political qualification of life and, more generally, the logic that
designates the thresholds distinguishing within biological life itself (which is the
secularized form of bare life) the values of life and the frontiers beyond which life
ceases to be politically relevant. These are both biopolitical and thanatopolitical
processes. According to Agamben, this logic extends to every political space, the
figure for which is therefore the camp.
(c ) The camp is conceivable as the matrix of modern political space, but it is
irreducible to a historical reality. It is aligned with the state of exception, but one
that would have become the rule: it is a permanent state of exception, one that has
been prolonged de facto. Agamben formulates a specific type of interrogation with
respect to the camp.
Rather than deducing the definition of the camp from the events that took
place there, I will ask instead: What is a camp? What is its political-juridical
structure? How could such events have taken place there? This will lead us
to look at the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly that*/though
admittedly still with us*/belongs nonetheless to the past, but rather in some
sense as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still
live. (2000, 37)
The camp entails a direct relation between power and life. It is a new and stable
spatial order inhabited by a bare life which, increasingly, fails to appear within the
system: in this way life is made the object of a radical capture by the sovereign.
It becomes clear that the camp, much more than a historical reality, is an operator
or even a machine, referring to diverse situations that all have in common the

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indistinction between norm and life. They are the situations in which the norm invests
itself in life to the point that the latter becomes confounded with the former, such as
the life of the man of the camp or even the life of the neomort, for example.
Modernity is conceptualized in terms of the matrix of the camp in order to sanction
the impossibility at any point in the future of man distinguishing between his life as a
living being and his existence as a political subject. The figure of the camp, as
invoked by Agamben, is therefore paradoxical: in attempting to erase the undecidability of Auschwitz, he is driven into a position where it is impossible to think the
plurality and specificity of modes of power. By assimilating sovereign power, the
power of the SS, and the power of medical science, by using the camp as a
generalizable figure, and by imprecisely extracting the common structure of
disparate realities and events (such as the concentration camp, the extermination
camp, the internment camp, the airport detention center, the refugee camp),
Agamben can no longer examine these events in a localized manner. The transformation of the analysis of the camp into a figure of political space appears to result in a
rather reductive paradigm. Political space, normalized by the camp, is reduced to a
specific mode of the exercise of power: the decision on the value of life.
The redefinition of sovereignty as biopower implies a modification of Foucaults
hypothesis, which leads to a considerable displacement and, ultimately, to a design
fundamentally incompatible with Foucaults work. Agamben devotes himself to an
extension of biopower to all aspects of political life, but only by reducing the
significance of each aspect: the extension and radicalization of Foucaults hypothesis
is only conceivable as a reduction. Paradoxically, one is therefore confronted with a
conception of power which is too large because too reductive, a conception which no
doubt relies heavily on the ambivalent notion of bare life and the connection
established with power which functions literally like a camp. However, what is of
interest in Agambens analysis is that it brings into view the exercise of a biopower at
the heart of mechanisms of sovereignty, in particular, as the refugee demonstrates, as
it relates to the question of citizenship. Sovereign power functions according to a
logic of thresholds and caesuras, which are concerned not only with biological
processes of populations, but with mere survival. Agambens inquiry is therefore an
inquiry into the originary fiction of sovereignty, one that can be expressed in
Foucauldian terms: his inquiry concerns the manner in which power presents itself
within the legal code and the way in which it prescribes that we conceive of it,
bringing to light the complex procedures*/behind their reductive assimilation*/of
thresholds and divisions.
By doing this, Agamben radically modifies the Foucauldian concept of power. In one
respect, he does not return to certain strengths of Foucauldian concept of power,
compiled for example in Society Must Be Defended . In fact, it is not a question of a
traditional interrogation of sovereignty, as the rereading of Hobbes clearly demonstrates. Agamben does not think sovereignty in terms of a cessation of power, nor in
terms of individuals themselves giving up something in view of their subjection; it is
not a question of the idealized genesis of the state. In another respect, sovereign
power is not a repressive power. Sovereignty is exercised through the sovereign
decision in the paradoxical gesture of the exception. Constructed through a relation
of the ban, it establishes and maintains itself through a gesture which is reproduced

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by each citizen in relation to his or her own life, by which each individual becomes
subject and object . . . of the political order. The logic of power is a logic of exclusion
and inclusion which designates the thresholds which continually redefine life, its
value, and, as a result, the human. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben (2004),
qualifying this mechanism, speaks of an anthropological machine. Agambens
analysis, however, is fundamentally foreign to Foucaults hypothesis, at least insofar
as it is concerned with the dual project of investigating both sovereign power and a
unitary theory of power. Despite everything, Agamben is in fact bound to a power and
its logic rather than to the plurality of its mechanisms. Power, according to the model
of the camp, is understood as a mechanism for creating caesuras; it is in this respect
reduced to paradigmatic logic. In Agambens conception of the term, biopower is
nothing other than the deployment of the structure of sovereignty in the form of the
crisis. Agamben constitutes it as a paradigm rather than locating, as Foucault has
done, the discontinuities and historical transformations of the way in which power is
exercised.

Resistance to Power
Resistance must be rooted in the very same terrain that has been put at stake in
power: life. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault writes that life
as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the
system that was bent on controlling it. Political struggles are grounded in life: a
right to life, to ones body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs is
expressed as a political response to all these new procedures of power which did not
derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty (1978, 145). It is a question
of resisting the processes of subjection at work in the technologies of power. In the
volumes of The History of Sexuality that follow, the subjective dimension of
Foucaults thought comes to be decisively underlined with inquiry into the care of
the self. Foucaults results are therefore not concerned with the political subject,
but rather with the question of the constitution of the subject starting from the
relations of power, as indicated by his analysis of governmentality which is concerned
with the conduct of conduct and action upon action. Biopower remains a
constellation of technologies which, as Rancie
`re describes it in The Disagreement ,
functions on the register of the police: a logic of the designation of positions.
In Agambens writings, the answer of a resistance to biopower is scattered, only
really indicated in the final lines of Homo Sacer. As in the work of Foucault, it is life
that must oppose the operations of power, over against powers divisions and
deductions (prele`vements ). What is at stake is the use of a life of possibility
(puissance ) (possibility understood as starting from conceptual tools that are far from
new: the Aristotelian dynamis without energeia, a possibility which can never pass
into actuality, and the potentia of Spinoza). In this respect, there is a reversal of the
negative understanding of the notion of biopolitics, a shift in the direction of a
possibility of life. In order to resist sovereigntys proliferation of the ban, this
possibility must establish its cohesion in opposition to every division: it is necessary to
make its life into a form of life, which appears to return to Foucaults analyses to the

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extent that the idea of a practice of the self provides a form of life. But Agamben
moves in another direction. Certainly, this form of life is bound up with a liberation
from the state*/that is to say, a withdrawal from all codified forms of belonging, from
all identification with the state*/but it is a liberation accomplished by becoming an
unfigurable singularity, what Agamben refers to in The Coming Community as
whatever singularity (1993). In short, Agamben turns the negative indetermination
of Homo sacer s bare life into a positive indetermination, figured as (among other
things) any singularity whatever. In the state of exception become the rule, the life
of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into an existence
over which power no longer seems to have any hold (1998, 153).
This forces Agamben to introduce a reversal into the diagnosis already under way.
The final page of Homo Sacer declares the necessity of transforming bare life, which
had been an index of the production of power, into a form of life. This biopolitical
body that is bare life must instead be transformed into the site for the constitution
and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is
only in its zoe (188). This absolute withdrawal from power and the aporias of
sovereignty, which is a folding backward toward a possibility, is directly related to
powers no longer having any hold. It is Agambens intention to think possibility
outside any ban, outside any actuality, and even outside any relation with political
organization, thereby entering into an irremediable disjunction with it. The
resolution is metaphysical and is bound up with a specific vision of history. Life, for
Agamben, is in fact what is originally excluded as the exception. But this
abandoned ground of the history of sovereignty is, from an explicitly Heideggerian
perspective, what determines its unfolding*/the very telos of this history, which
moves toward what is original*/or what it is concerned with reassuming or becoming
again. In an age when there are no longer any projects, the historico-political destiny
of the West is the reappropriation of bare life. In The Open, Agamben designates the
taking on of biological life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task
(2004, 76). From this point forward, it is necessary to take up the question of a
peoples simple factual existence. The proposed solution signals a displacement
beyond both politics and, at the same time, the state. It is in terms of metaphysics
that the problem of politics must be resolved, in order that politics in its turn may
accomplish the metaphysical task of human liberation. This presupposes that politics
and metaphysics share an identical structure: life is the name of Being, and to
separate bare life from concrete forms of life is a return to the isolation of pure Being
beginning with its separation from the multiple meanings of the term. The solution
consists in the cohesion between life and its form, in a possibility that is capable
of resisting the operations of power. Agamben proposes another formulation of
this solution in Remnants of Auschwitz which moves in the direction of an ethics of
the subject of testimony. The subject is a remnant, it is what remains (ce qui reste ) in
the messianic sense insofar as it takes shape within the irreducible gap between the
approach of the living being to speech and the speakers sensation of life. It is what
remains of a subjectivization that takes place as a desubjectivization. As The Time
That Remains illustrates, what remains can be conceived as what resists.
The egress from biopolitics is thus signaled by a dislocation of the ban and by a
paradoxical reversal of the diagnostic already under way which brings it into

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conformity with the historical perspective underlying Agambens analysis. In this way
a mode of life*/even a form of life*/appears, the possibility and cohesion of which
will found, according to Agambens messianic perspective, the politics to come.
The problem posed by this positive biopolitics is the reversal of the notion of bare
life, which shifts away from the anchorage point for power toward the nucleus of a
political mode of life. In this way, bare life appears to be a problematic foundation for
a resolution to biopolitics, a resolution that is no longer political but ethical or
metaphysical, which is outlined in order to resist biopower.

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Conclusion
To conclude, it is possible again to take hold of the stakes of the question of biopower
and the difficulties encountered with this notion. Biopower, as a genealogical
analysis of the mechanisms of power, finds two extremely different formulations
here. The definition given by Foucault is intended to be comparatively more
localized, while Agamben carries out an extension of the field of biopower which
calls into question its relevance. Agambens analysis of the mode of exercising power
is coherent to the extent that it successfully updates both the facade behind which
power makes its advances within the juridico-institutional code and on the plane of
sovereignty, as well as the manner in which sovereignty includes bare life in its
calculations. In this minimal way, it is possible to understand the analysis of Agamben
as a complement to Foucaults project: both below and above the processes of
normalization and control which manage the individual and collective bodies, a
separation is operative at the level of bare life, which is the very survival of
individuals. It takes the form of an exclusion, discriminating between the living
subjects and others who are considered destined to die with utter impunity, the life of
which has not been made an object of protection. Bare life itself, rather than
existence or the bodies of men, is a juridico-political construction, not something
given or a natural, extrapolitical fact. Agamben presents this genealogy then as an
update of the fundamental violence of sovereign powers procedures. This violence
must be thought at the heart of the problem of citizenship and sovereignty, on the
terrain of a thought largely inaugurated by Hannah Arendt. Totalitarian phenomena,
in which mans survival (as representative of the species) is threatened, in fact open
up a paradigm for thinking the violence which, reproduced daily, is faced by refugees,
minorities, or the inhabitants of impoverished nations. In analyzing this kind of
violence, however, it is not a question of going so far as an amalgam or assimilation of
diverse situations. In this respect, the camp appears as a problematic paradigm that
cannot stand as a figure for the entirety of politics.
It is this addition, however, that turns up in Agambens appropriation of Foucault.
From Agambens perspective, it is necessary to complete Foucaults formula
according to which our life is at issue in our politics, with the inverse formula
according to which we are citizens whose very politics is at issue in their natural
body. This complement comes to displace the notion biopower, moving instead in
the direction of biopolitics. If Agambens understanding of sovereign power was
already quite removed from the attention given by Foucault to the techniques and to

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the play of power, the project of grounding politics in life is entirely foreign to
Foucaults hypothesis. By entering into the terrain of sovereign power abandoned by
Foucault, it is a question for Agamben of thinking the unifying central point, a
hidden point of intersection between the political techniques and the technologies
of the self, which are the mechanisms through which life enters into political
strategies and the processes of subjectivization through which individuals become
linked to their identity. But it is a unifying central point that Foucault does not
designate. In presenting bare life as the center of this double bind, Agamben proposes
a conception of power that is not only incompatible with Foucaults perspective, but
problematic in its own right. Bare life is unquestionably the point on which power
anchors itself as well as the point that becomes both subject and object of the
political order. But two difficulties appear. On the one hand, bare life informs us of
precise political mechanisms which would not be able to represent the entirety of
political space; there is at least a doubt as to the validity of such a notion for
analyzing diverse phenomena, in particular the new forms of racism.
On the other hand, if bare life is the point from which a politics is able to be
reconstructed, the definition of bare life would have changed, no longer as what
Agamben presents in his analysis of sovereign power where it is a production of power.
In fact, a slippage in the sense of the term becomes apparent to the extent that it
functions both within the mechanisms of the problem and in the positive resolution.
From the historical perspective that underlies Agambens analyses, in order to oppose
cohesion of life to the divisions of power, it is a question of reappropriating the
excluded and forgotten ground of bare life. Is it then still the result of power? Dose it
not become an original fact to which one must return? Bare life is in fact
characterized by Agamben as a vague and indeterminate concept which, in the
same manner as Being, becomes the historico-political destiny of the West. Its
signification therefore oscillates between the polemical status of the production of
power and a positive but ambiguous status of the center of a mode of political life; it
is a fundamentally ambivalent notion.
In the final reckoning, the problem of biopower is contingent on the determination
of life. It is clear which life is targeted by the biopolitical strategies of power, but it is
not clear how to rebuild politics starting from life, and even less clear how life can be
conceived as the truth of politics. Such is the problem posed by the passing from a
genealogical analysis of biopower into an attempt to give a content to biopolitics.

References
Agamben, G. 1993. The coming community. Trans. M. Hardt. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
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Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
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*
*/ /. 2000. Means without end: Notes on politics . Trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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