This book explores the origins of western biopolitics in ancient Greek political thought. Ojakangas's argues that the conception of politics as the regulation of the quantity and quality of population in the name of the security and happiness of the state and its inhabitants is as old as the western political thought itself: the politico-philosophical categories of classical thought, particularly those of Plato and Aristotle, were already biopolitical categories. In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal (...) with all the central topics of biopolitics from the political point of view, but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. Yet although the Western understanding of politics was already biopolitical in classical Greece, the book does not argue that the history of biopolitics would constitute a continuum from antiquity to the twentieth century. Instead Ojakangas argues that the birth of Christianity entailed a crisis of the classical biopolitical rationality, as the majority of classical biopolitical themes concerning the government of men and populations faded away or were outright rejected. It was not until the renaissance of the classical culture and literature - including the translation of Plato's and Aristotles political works into Latin - that biopolitics became topical again in the West. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the field of social and political studies, social and political theory, moral and political philosophy, IR theory, intellectual history, classical studies. (shrink)

In Western thought, it has been persistently assumed that in moral and political matters, people should rely on the inner voice of conscience rather than on external authorities, laws, and regulations. This volume investigates this concept, examining the development of the Western politics of conscience, from Socrates to the present, and the formation of the Western ethico-political subject. The work opens with a discussion of the ambiguous role of conscience in politics, contesting the claim that it is the best defense (...) against totalitarianism. It then look back at canonical authors, from the Church Fathers and Luther to Rousseau and Derrida, to show how the experience of conscience constitutes the foundation of Western ethics and politics. This unique work not only synthesizes philosophical and political insights, but also pays attention to political theology to provide a compelling and innovative argument that the experience of conscience has always been at the core of the political Western tradition. An engaging and accessible text, it will appeal to political theorists and philosophers as well as theologians and those interested in the critique of the Western civilization. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben criticizes Michel Foucault's distinction between 'productive' bio-power and 'deductive' sovereign power, emphasizing that it is not possible to distinguish between these two. In his view, the production of what he calls 'bare life' is the original, although concealed, activity of sovereign power. In this article, Agamben's conclusions are called into question. (1) The notion of 'bare life', distinguished from the 'form of life', belongs exclusively to the order of sovereignty, being incompatible with the modern bio-political (...) notion of life, that is univocal and immanent to itself. In the era of bio-politics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe ('form-of-life'). (2) Violence is not hidden in the foundation of bio-politics; the 'hidden' foundation of bio-politics is love (agape) and care (cura), 'care for individual life'. (3) Bio-politics is not absolutised in the Third Reich; the only thing that the Third Reich absolutises is the sovereignty of power (Aryan race) and the nakedness of life (the Jews). (4) St Paul's 'messianic revolution' does not endow us with the means of breaking away from the closure of bio-political rationality; on the contrary, Paul's 'messianic revolution' is a historical precondition for the deployment of modern bio-politics. (5) Instead of homo sacer, who is permitted to kill without committing homicide, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt is one of the most influential political and legal theorists of the 20th century. His ideas have long been familiar to intellectuals in Europe. Despite growing interest in Schmitt, the analysis of the metaphysical structure and logic of Schmitt's political thought is still missing. This book tries to redress this flaw. It focuses on Schmitt's conception of the concrete, which is seen as the "metaphysical core" of his writings. For Schmitt, the concrete is a condition of possibility of (...) any order. Rather that a concept, it is a name for a borderline or a passage between a concept and life, between a mediating idea and an immediate existence. In addition to the structure and logic of Schmitt's thought, the book is a short presentation of all central themes in Schmitt's writings from Political Theology (1922) to The Nomos of the Earth (1950). (shrink)

Even a superficial look at the classical ideas and practices of government of populations makes it immediately apparent that there is a peculiarity in Foucault’s genealogy of western bio-politics and governmentality. According to Foucault, western governmental rationality can be traced back to the Judeo-Christian tradition in general and to the Christian ideology and practice of the pastorate in particular. In this article, my purpose is to show that Christianity was not the prelude to what Foucault calls governmentality but rather marked (...) a rupture in the development that started in classical Greece and Rome and continued in early modern Europe. With the rise of Christianity, the majority of these classical practices, including negative eugenics and even family policies, either faded into the background or they were rejected outright. (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben argues that every ethical doctrine that claims to be founded on the notions of responsibility and guilt, even if ‘interiorized and moved outside law’ in the form of moral conscience, is necessarily ‘insufficient and opaque’. Indeed, one of the basic intents of the book is to profane and to neutralize the notions of guilt and responsibility as the paradigms of ethical thought, and to remove the idea of conscience from the sphere of ethics. In (...) this article, my aim is to bring out some ‘opacities’ that occur in Agamben’s own analyses. To Agamben, the ‘witness-remnant’ is an ethical notion that shows the way beyond the interiorized juridical categories of conscience, whereas I argue that both the witness and the remnant are notions intimately and even inseparably linked with the western history of conscience. Conscience has been a witness from the very beginning of its appearance in the classical period of Greece. In the Christian era, moreover, conscience became a remnant, even the remnant, remaining of the original moral integrity that had been lost by humankind in the Fall. At the end of the article, I argue that instead of succeeding in profaning the theological/ juridical notion of conscience, Agamben’s ‘witness-remnant’ merely secularizes it in the Schmittian sense. (shrink)

During the formative years of National Socialist Germany, Carl Schmitt abandoned the decisionism he had been developing since the beginning of his career and turned toward institutionalism, known also as “concrete order thinking” and the philosophy of nomos. Schmitt had outlined his decisionist theory as a critical response to the normativist approach in legal positivism represented especially by Hans Kelsen. In Schmitt's understanding, normativism identified law (Recht) with legal rules and norms, dismissing the existential dimension of personal judgment and decision (...) in the theory of law.1 Schmitt's decisionism meant a revival of this existential dimension: “Law is concretized only in…. (shrink)

In Politics of Friendship Jacques Derrida reveals the core of Carl Schmitt's thinking concerning the political: “If thepolitical is to exist, one must know who everyone is, who is a friend and who is an enemy, and this knowing is not in the mode of theoretical knowledge but in one of apractical identification.”Nevertheless, the enemy, who actually isidentified, is not Carl Schmitt's real enemy. On the contrary, the identified enemy is his friend to the extent that it constitutes by exclusion (...) what is most important to Schmitt: the existence of the political, and thereby, the Volk. Schmitt's real enemy is, as I try to demonstrate in this article, anyone who is not identified, the anonymous “natural existence of groups of individuals who just happen to live together” (Schmitt). In Schmitt's Nazi-period this anonymous individual got a concrete—although still non-identified—content: an assimilated Jew. And although Schmitt thought that he was a Christian thinker, in the end of this article I argue that the very first assimilated Jew was indeed St Paul, and that his doctrine of the “life in Christ” can be taken as a point of departure for thinking politics beyond enemies and exclusion. (shrink)

The Greek city-state has traditionally been viewed as an entity that was divided into two distinct spheres and governed by two distinct arts. The a...

In line with his theory of secularization according to which all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, Carl Schmitt argues in Constitutional Theory that people’s (Volk) constitution-making power in modern democracy is analogical to God’s potestas constituens in medieval theology. It is also undoubtedly possible to find a resemblance between Schmitt’s constitution-making power and God’s power as it is described in medieval theology. In the same sense as the constitution-making power is absolutely free (...) from all normative ties, God’s potestas constituens, or rather, God’s potentia absoluta is free from such ties. Yet, unlike the Schmittian constitution-making power, God’s potentia absoluta was not, in medieval theology, originally intended as a description of some form of divine action: the absolute power of God referred to the total possibilities initially open to God. However, when the canonists started to employ the term potentia absoluta in their speculations concerning the papal plenitude of power (plenitude potestatis) by the end of the thirteenth century, they used it in a different sense than the theologians previously. According to certain canonists, the pope, by his potentia absoluta, could grant de facto dispensations from divine and ecclesiastical laws. Later on, this notion became a theological notion as well, but given its origin in juridical discourse, the constitution-making power, rather than being a secularized theological notion, is a theologized juristic notion. (shrink)