Agamben and Foucault: Sovereignty and Power

Despite Agamben’s assertion that his project somehow corrects or completes Foucault’s political thoughts, it seems that there are some deep and fundamental differences between them. Foucault rejects any kind of theory of power and believes that the analysis of power in the contemporary world should be freed from juridical-theological presuppositions. In contrast, in Agamben’s thought we come across some obvious elements of the classical understating of power and its theological presupposition so that political theology is a basic constituent of his theory about sovereign power. Though Foucault’s aim is mostly to analyze power’s mechanisms according to a micro-politics, he never thinks about the role of a person or state and his/her or its decision as a foundation for political situation. In contrast, he regards such a point of view as the feature of the classical theories about power. For him power is a Nietzschean concept which is the foundation of everything. Agamben, following Schmitt, regards power as the sovereign power. He believes that there is a logic for our contemporary political situation called “the state of exception”, that is the result of sovereign decision. This article tries to analyze the meaning and mechanism of biopower and biopolitics in both thinkers and explain the way that Agamben’s political theory can be said to be rooted in Foucault’s analysis.