Both Foucault and Agamben are contradictory and lack explanatory power.

Indeed, our claim is that in Foucault there does seem to be an unresolved tension between, on the one hand, an idea of biopolitics as representing a radical break with old forms of sovereign power and, on the other, an idea of it as coextensive to it; as constituting part of the articulation of sovereignty. This is clearly made evident by his discussion of Nazism but also, as Esposito rightly notes, by the fact that Foucault uses both the term “replace” and “complement” to explain the workings of biopower in relation to sovereignty, sometimes in the same sentence. Thus, for instance, Foucault says, […] one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn’t [sic] say exactly that sovereignty’s old right – to take life or let live – was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right […]. This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die [or biopower].93 What this shows is that Foucault’s analytics maintains a level of ambiguity with respect to the question of the relation between biopower and sovereign power. While providing vital theoretical tools to analyse contemporary securitisation and racialising practices and creating useful lines of enquiry, Foucault’s notion of state racism appears, if not exactly to contradict, to at least create problems for his understanding of biopower, while bringing attention to the difficulties of moving away from sovereignty’s old right. By bringing the question of sovereignty to the forefront, the example of Nazism implicitly challenges one of Foucault’s methodological starting points: the idea that there is no sovereign; thus, putting into question his (main) understanding of biopolitics as unrelated to sovereign power. This is a point that Agamben makes explicit when he says that even though Foucault’s analysis has shown how these two faces of power work, it has failed to elucidate the points at which sovereign power (political techniques) and modern techniques of power (technologies of self) converge.94 Agamben’s notion of sovereignty as biopolitical, whereby the decision on the exception is a decision about life and more precisely about the threshold between life and death, can be seen as an attempt to readdress the problem of sovereignty in terms of what is for him an implicit thought in Foucault. Through his notion of (bio)sovereignty, Agamben attempts to account for mechanisms of state power that, although arguably more prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, continue, in different forms, to permeate contemporary societies. 95 According to Agamben, the production of a specifically biopolitical body is ultimately dependent on the sovereign’s capacity to exclude through inclusion what he calls “bare life” or politically unqualified “life” from the juridico-political order. From this perspective, biopolitics is not only absolutely coextensive with sovereign power but biopolitics is both historically and conceptually the original activity of sovereignty. In other words, according to Agamben, sovereignty is founded on biopolitics. Thus, from his perspective Foucault is right in arguing that “when life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power, politics turns into biopolitics and that this signals the decisive event of modernity.”96 However, Agamben expresses puzzlement toward Foucault’s suggestion that life only becomes a political object in early modern Europe and, consequently, to conceptualize biopolitics as an exclusively modern phenomenon. Instead, what Agamben intends to show is that from the earliest treaties of political theory, particularly in Aristotle’s notion of man as “a political animal,” a notion of sovereignty as power over life or biopower is implicit. To this extent, bare life is the condition of modern politics (i.e., essential to its constitution). In Agamben’s words, “bare life is the original activity of sovereign power,”97 even as it is a condition that is necessarily negative or negated; one that only appears as such when the topology (or the hidden logic/location) on which it is based (i.e., the topology of exception or “inclusive exclusion”) is fully displaced.98 Consequently, for Agamben, no notion of biopolitics or biopower99 can do away with the question of sovereignty. Specifically, it cannot ignore what he calls ‘the paradox of sovereignty’, whose topology (or hidden logic), in line with Schmitt, he identifies in “the state of exception.”100 By deciding on the exception the State, which is “thus granted autonomous – and hence decisive – status,”101 substantiates sovereignty and real as opposed to ideal law. 102 Agamben’s own conceptualisation has been much discussed103 and is certainly not without its own problems and not just in terms of the question of racism, which, as we have discussed above, remains unspecified. According to Lazzarato, for example, it is Agamben’s notion of biopolitics that oscillates continuously between two alternatives. Lazzarato argues that for both Agamben and Foucault, the introduction of zoê into the sphere of the polis is the decisive event of modernity; it marks a radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of classical thought. Yet, he suggests, Agamben is very ambiguous on whether the “impossibility of distinguishing between zoê and bios, between man as a living being and man as a political subject” is “the product of the action of sovereign power or the result of the action of new forces over which power has ‘no control.’’ 104 This is interesting. The same charge made by Agamben toward Foucault is here repeated by Lazzarato against Agamben. It is as if almost, if not all, attempts to find a resolution to the problem of whether to consider biopower as substitutive for or a complement to sovereign power tend either to reproduce this same ambiguity or to underplay the theoretical difficulties that arise from keeping them separate. Lazzarato himself could be seen as underplaying Foucault’s own ambiguities as analysed here but there are other such examples. In “Impossible dialogue on bio‐power,“ Ojakangas argues against Agamben’s reading and suggests that “neither the modern state nor the Third Reich – in which the monstrosity of the modern state is crystallized – are the syntheses of the sovereign power and bio‐power, but, rather, the institutional loci of their irreconcilable tension.”105 But what does this mean? Does it mean that Foucault was mistaken when he himself referred to their absolute coextensivity? In a reply to his critics, Ojakangas acknowledges that they can be and have been “historically intermingled in many ways […].”106 However, this insight is played down in an attempt to smooth over real points of intersection between biopower and sovereign power and in so doing, render Foucault’s analytics of power more coherent. What this misses, however, is that the tensions in Foucault’s work are not necessarily ascribable to him as a writer. As Negri says, “Foucault’s attention focused are [sic] perfectly continuous and coherent – coherent in the sense that they form a unitary and continuous theoretical production.”107 The tensions in his work in relation to his notion of biopower are not the result of a shift in focus but real – that is to say real in the sense of reflecting real conditions of history. Returning to Agamben, moreover, it is fair to say that, in line with Schmitt, his own understanding tends to reflect a decisionist or essentialist model of the state that seems oblivious to its bureaucratic differentiation, group strategies, class fractions, political parties, etc. and to how these might also rely on disciplinary, bio-political and⁄or securitisation mechanisms. Even his analysis of the movement as the truly political element is still within an essentialist framework where, as we have seen, in line with Schmitt, the state and the movement become one and the same. This is because what interests Agamben is not to provide a sociology or theory of the state as “a ‘transactional reality’ [réalité de transaction], that is to say a dynamic ensemble of relations and syntheses.”108 His intention is rather to expose, and provide a critique of, the hidden logic governing the state (of exception) in its production of spaces of exception or camps.109 By camp, Agamben means a space or anti-space of modernity – Agamben’s primary examples are yesterday’s Nazi camps and today’s refugee camps – in which people can be killed and inhumanely treated. The camp corresponds to the suspension of law where a zone of anomie is created, which Agamben claims not to be unrelated to the juridical order but where normal laws do not apply. However, in focusing on hidden logics, Agamben misses important aspects which from a Foucauldian perspective are not immaterial. For example, Foucault alerts us that the population “escapes the sovereign’s voluntarist and direct action in the form of the law” and is also “driven by its own specific phenomena and processes,” where the movement or movements could come to represent a more dynamic and autonomous force here.110 Furthermore, and contrary to both Schmitt and Agamben, for Foucault the state is not reducible to state sovereignty. Foucault understands the state as “the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centres, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on.”111 In other words, Foucault sees the state not as an essence but as constructed through the interplay of “multiple governmentalities.”112 Thus, a Foucauldian analysis must take this into account when exploring the power of the state. It must consider that there are different levels of decision making and legitimation and a ”diversity of forces and groups,” which in turn have an impact on the specific configuration that a given state takes at a specific time. In this reading the state does not monopolize all decisions on the exception. As argued by Fleur Johns, proceeding from Schmitt’s open characterisation of the exception and in line with Foucault’s emphasis on the diffusion of power, “it is possible to conceive as both political and exceptional a much broader range of decisions, approached by or among a much broader range of agents, aggregations or arrogations, than those which Schmitt entertained as such.”113