Abstract
,is article addresses the relationship between sovereignty, biopolitics
and governmentality in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith
Butler, and Michel Foucault. By unpacking Foucault’s genealogy of modern
governmentality, it responds to a criticism leveled against Foucauldian
accounts of power for their alleged abandonment of the traditional model
of power in juridico-institutional terms in favor of an understanding of
power as purely productive. ,is claim has most signi-cantly been developed
by Agamben in “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”. I
argue that Judith Butler’s analysis of power, in particular in her essay
“Inde-nite Detention”, presents a more di.erentiated account of power
that registers the signi-cance of practices of sovereignty and resonates
with Foucault’s lectures on “Security, Territory, Population”.