This article contributes to governmentality studies and state theory by discussing how to understand the centrality and importance of the state from a governmentality perspective. It uses Giorgio Agamben’s critique of Michel Foucault’s governmentality approach as a point of departure for re-investigating Foucault as a thinker of the state. It focuses on Foucault’s notion of the state as a process of ‘statification’ which emphasizes the state as something constantly produced and reproduced by processes and practices of government, administration and acclamation. (...) As a result of this, the state appears as a given entity which is necessary for the multiplicity of governmental technologies and practices in modern society to function. Only by reference to the state can governmental practices be effective and legitimized. Finally, the article conceptualizes the centrality of the state through Foucault’s notions of the state as a ‘practico-reflexive prism’ and a ‘principle of intelligibility’. (shrink)

The article investigates Giorgio Agamben’s turn to, and radicalization of, Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which Agamben argues constitutes a ’decisive point’ in the Homo sacer-series. The article shows that in the investigation of the Trinitarian oikonomia, Agamben finds the point of intersection between the ‘totalizing procedures’ of the state and ‘individualizing techniques’ of biopolitics thereby disclosing the ‘zone of indistinction’ between sovereignty and government and politics and economy, which constitutes power in the West. Furthermore, the article argues that Agamben shows (...) how the economy is not something distinct from politics, encroaching on its logic, but rather how the governmental paradigm of the West constitutes the continual administration of the given, the continual and perpetual government of the economy and thereby of the existing economic and political power-relations. (shrink)