Revisiting Giorgio Agamben’s Reformulation of Michel Foucault’s Biopolitics

Michel Foucault’s twin notions of biopolitics and biopower were pivotal in the development of a theoretical tradition in the social sciences and the humanities, despite riddled with conceptual inconsistencies and culminating in ambivalence. Giorgio Agamben later claimed to have continued and completed Foucault’s unfinished project and appropriated this continuity to analyze the configurations of power today. In this paper, I revisit the Foucault-Agamben relation. I claim that Agamben’s conception of power, subsumed in his biopolitics, is a continuation and completion of Foucault’s biopolitics despite the differences. In a peculiar way, Agamben’s biopolitics is a unifying account of power that brings together what Foucault’s biopolitical investigations, partitioned in different moments in his investigations, are unable to connect. The task of this paper is threefold. First, I articulate a succinct narrative account of Foucault's biopolitics. Second, I locate Agamben’s point of departure from Foucault and discuss his own notion of biopolitics. In doing this, I chart their divergences and convergences. Third, I articulate Agamben’s reformulation of Foucault’s biopolitics as a way of understanding how Agamben’s biopolitics can account for the originary and fundamental structure of both fascism and liberal democracies, which is one power—biopower—in two modes—centralized and dispersed.