Against Totalitarianism: Agamben, Foucault, and the Politics of Critique

Authors

C. Heike Schotten, University of Massachusetts BostonFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-2015

Abstract

Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but ra-ther a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fun-damental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes to proliferate. By contrast, Agamben’s resurrection of sovereignty turns on a moraliz-ing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions “against” totali-tarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject.

Recommended Citation

C. Heike Schotten, "Against Totalitarianism: Agamben, Foucault, and the Politics of Critique," Foucault Studies vol. 20 (Dec. 2015), 155-179.

Publisher

Foucault Studies