Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 489 ^ 507

doi:10.1068/d3508

Biopolitics, biopower, and the return of sovereignty

Mathew Coleman, Kevin Grove

Department of Geography, Ohio State University, 1156 Derby Hall, 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1361, USA; e-mail: coleman.373@osu.edu, grove.80@osu.edu Received 11 March 2008; in revised form 19 December 2008

Abstract. In this paper we want to open up for discussion what counts as `biopolitics' a term frequently used by critics and devotees alike to describe the organization of political power and authority in a world after Bretton Woods, the Cold War, and 9/11. We do so on two fronts. On the one hand, we contrast Foucault on war and the normalizing society, Agamben on thanatopolitics, and Hardt and Negri on biopotenza. Our goal here is to draw attention to multiple competing definitions of biopolitics, and in so doing problematize the term as a catchall category to describe either the `nonsovereign' or the `postsovereign' operation of power. On the other hand, while refusing some baseline definition of what counts as biopolitics, we develop our own specifically geographical criticisms of Agamben and Hardt and Negri on the topic of biopolitics. Following Sparke's recent interrogation of postfoundational thought on account of its oftentimes buried metaphysics of geopresence, we submit that Agamben as well as Hardt and Negri deploy biopolitics in both metaphysical and metageographical ways. We contrast this with Foucault's inductive, genealogical, and time-specific and place-specific use of the concept.

``The concept of biopolitics has recently become fashionable: it is often, and enthusiastically, invoked in every kind of context. We should avoid this automatic and unreflective use of the term. Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it.'' Virno (2004, page 81) Introduction For much of the 20th century, sovereignty circulated among Western political geographers, political sociologists, and international relations scholars as a shared shorthand about the location and nature of power, authority, and legitimacy in the global political economy (Agnew, 1999). And, yet, if it was an essentially uncontested concept (cf Connolly, 1993, pages 9 ^ 44), a number of different presuppositions circulated under sovereignty's sign. As Walker (1993, page 165) argued in his memorable genealogy of the term, a ``presumed convergence'' of concepts related to sovereignty (ie state, democracy, identity, community, etc), treated for the most part as synonyms, made it ``easy to string certain names together'' into a selective epistemological ``cannon of textual reference''. Walker's point was that beneath the too often taken-for-granted categorical presentation of sovereignty was a rich and overdetermined diversity of texts and thinkers. Most importantly, Walker suggested that to neglect these complex undercurrents was simultaneously to displace the disciplinary politics of thinking sovereignty. As Virno signals above, a similar possibility exists today with the neologism ``biopolitics'', coined by French political theorist Foucault as part of his search for a vocabulary about politics and power not ``erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition'' (1980a, page 121). We note, in particular, the term's frequent deployment by critics and devotees alike to describe as if in a wordthe `nonsovereign' and/or `postsovereign' organization of political

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power and authority in a world after Bretton Woods, the Cold War, and 9/11. Not only does this quick usage threaten to reiterate rather than problematize sovereign-centric accounts of Cold War life (Walker, 2002); it also presumes that what counts as biopolitics can be readily agreed upon (Rabinow and Rose, 2006). We take up the last point in this paper. That the biopolitical is not the same for all those who invoke it is frequently elided. Indeed, the matter of how ``modern Western societies [have taken] on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species'', and how as a result ``the basic biological features of the human species [have become] the object of a political strategy'' (Foucault, 2007, page 1), is far from settled. This is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Agamben, and Hardt and Negri. Their reciprocal (if often strained) citation of each other's work, their conjoining in numerous literature reviews and conference presentations as a new breed of theorists of biopower, as well as the ways in which Foucault figures prominently in their scholarship mean that too often the disjunctures between Agamben and Hardt and Negri on exactly how life has become an object of regulation are abbreviated, or worse ignored. Certainly, at one level, Agamben and Hardt and Negri make remarkably similar use of Foucault's notion of biopolitics. If, for example, Foucault meant biopolitics loosely as a means of decentering mainstream sovereign explanations of power (more on this below), biopolitics is for these thinkers alike a key aspect of sovereignty's spatially reconfigured `return' to the center of contemporary theorizing on power. But, at another level, Agamben's and Hardt and Negri's insights on biopower stand in stark contrast to one another on precisely the question of, as Virno phrases it, ``how and why life breaks through the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it'' (2004, page 81). Indeed, our claim in this paper is that, despite their shared deployment of biopolitics to explain war, appropriation, revolution, identity, etc, and despite the ways in which they both signal Foucault as a thinker core to their respective lenses onto the world, what we get from Agamben and Hardt and Negri is a remarkably incongruent deployment of Foucault and of biopolitics. As a result, we also get very different mappings of how power works and to what ends. We wish to address these differences head-on in this paper. We should make clear at the outset that we are not going to try and adjudicate between different uses of biopolitics according to some allegedly original definition provided by Foucault. The chief difficulty here is Foucault's own speculative approach to the concept, which we understand as an incitement to experiment rather than as a definition to be abided by. Moreover, we hope to accomplish something more than a comparison of how Foucault and biopolitics figure differently in Agamben's and Hardt and Negri's accounts of postsovereign power. Building on Sparke's (2005) insights on the limits of postfoundational thought, we argue that if Foucault and biopolitics are used very differently by Agamben and Hardt and Negri they nonetheless appear as constituent elements of a `metaphysics of geopresence' for both. In reviewing a host of contemporary spatial thinkers (including Hardt and Negri), Sparke notes that geography is frequently marshaled in otherwise antiessentialist postfoundational theory in paradoxically essentialist ways. Sparke notes, in particular, the drive to finalization and totalization that accompanies various mappings, visualizations, landscapings, and metaphorizations of space in postfoundational theory. He calls these finalizations and totalizations `anemic geographies' which conceal ``the complex geographical palimpsest over which [is written] a singular and supposedly coherent geo'' (Sparke, 2005, page xvi). Inspired by Sparke, we pursue two basic lines of argument. On the one hand, we contend that Agamben's use of biopolitics works with his concept of the threshold to erase the unevenness of political, economic, and social space. We argue that the result

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is a perverse reconstitution of sovereign (bio)power in a dazzling, all-encompassing, and totalizing spatial formnot unlike the mapping of state power that Foucault found necessary to unpack via his discussion of the biopolitical. On the other hand, we argue that Hardt and Negri's interpretation of biopolitics maps out a global system of domination and resistance that elides the multiple and complex historically and geographically specific forms these struggles take. Furthermore, we argue that Agamben's as well as Hardt and Negri's essentialist, metaphysical redeployment of Foucault and biopolitics is largely a product of their questionable critiques of him as unable to think the role of death in biopolitics (Agamben) and as committed to a functionalist account of postsovereign power (Hardt and Negri). We disagree with both critiques, and signal where in Foucault's work to look for clues to the contrary. Lastly, we want to suggest that Agamben's and Hardt and Negri's shared metaphysical deployment of biopolitics is at quite some remove from Foucault's geographically and historically grounded investigation of state power. Leaving aside the matter of whether or not the reader agrees with Foucault the historian, or, indeed, the counterhistorian, of state power on substantive grounds [on `anti-Roman history', see Foucault (2006, pages 65 ^ 86)], Foucault's inductive approach to power meant that the state, in particular, was something to be explained from the bottom up, in its heterogeneity, rather than assumed as a coherent independent variable of the world of power. As Foucault put it, the state is neither a ``cold monster'' nor a ``puppet show policeman'', but a time-specific and place-specific way of governing ``which exists, but which [in comparison to the way it is written about] does not yet exist enough'' (2008, pages 4, 6). Indeed, it was the discourses and practices of government in place of what was supposed to be sovereignty that led Foucault to his discussion of biopolitics in the first place. In contrast, Agamben as well as Hardt and Negri proceed deductively when it comes to their discussions of biopolitics. Despite their differences, Agamben and Hardt and Negri infer concrete biopolitical phenomena from overriding biopolitical universalsthe sort of top-down sociological and philosophical inquiry which Foucault understood as an ``obligatory grid of intelligibility'', and which he strove against in his work (2008, page 3). We open our essay with a brief discussion of Foucault on war and biopolitics. A second section looks at Agamben's provocative critique of Foucault and his development of sovereign power. A third section looks at Negri's reading of biopolitics, as well as at his recent work with Hardt on empire and the biopolitical constitution of the present. A brief section, on what we call the multiple `returns' of biopower, ends the paper. War and biopolitics in Foucault It is sometimes claimed that Foucault's approach to power is about dissolving the state. Bartleson (2001), for example, argues that for Foucauldians the state is a discursive fictionthe result of a ``series of speech acts or a system of statements''and, as such, is overwhelmingly characterized by the ``potential not to be'' (page 152). Or, as he puts it, the state is, from a Foucauldian standpoint, ``an accidental compartmentalization of political space about to be undone'', a ``momentary blip on the screen of history'' (page 180). This strikes us as misplaced. We see Foucault as, quite differently, offering an account of the staying power of state authority qua government. Key here are two things. First, government is not fleetingly discursive in the sense parodied by Bartleson, but is, instead, about the relative durability of regimes of truth in relation to institutionalized practicesin other words, systems of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980b). As Dean (1994, page 159) reminds us, power/knowledge refers to ``how discourses organized and systematized by the task of stating the truth exist in relation to organized and systematized forms of practice''. Second, government extends beyond sovereign state territoriality as singular, transcendent, and discontinuous with other `lesser' forms of

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power (Foucault, 2007, pages 87 ^ 114). In this sense, rather than a monolith, the concept of government outlines `state' power as an assemblage of institutions, procedures, knowledges, etc, with little overall unity and certainly a minimum of necessity or functionality. In sum, Foucault's concept of government points, for us, to the `abidingness' and yet polyvalent and protean character of ensembles of practices and knowledges referred to nominally as the `state'. As Jessop (2007, page 37) spells out, this means attention to the state as ``the terrain of a non-essentialized set of political relations ... rather than a universal, fixed and unchanging phenomenon.'' Indeed, it is through the lens of the reconfiguration of `state' powerwhich we take as Foucault's central contribution via the concept of government, and which we see as a specifically spatial problematic (Allen, 2003; Elden, 2001)that we find Foucault's notion of biopolitics relevant, and not as a dissolution of the state per se. Foucault's account of biopolitics and its antinomy to theories of state sovereignty is well rehearsed. Rather than repeating his account of biopolitics from The History of Sexuality (1978), we will look at how Foucault comes at the concept in his 1975 ^ 76 ge de France, recently translated into English as and 1977 ^ 78 lectures at the Colle Society Must Be Defended (2006) and Security, Territory, Population (2007), respectively. Dating from an important period for Foucaultencompassing Discipline and Punish (1977a) and The History of Sexuality (1978)the lectures offer new insights into his discussion of power (Elden, 2002; 2007; Philo, 2007). They also provide much needed background for two well-known excerpts from the lectures, already translated into Englishthe ``Governmentality'' essay (Foucault, 1991), and the ``Two lectures'' essay (1980c). At one level, the lectures are an obvious complement to Foucault's well-cited dissatisfaction with sovereign juridical models of power, and, in particular, the contract model of political authority. In Society Must Be Defended (henceforth SMBD), for example, Foucault eschews power as something that can be alienated, transferred, and/or surrendered so as to constitute sovereign authority. His focus, instead, is on ``how multiple bodies, forces, energies, matters, desires, thoughts, and so on are gradually, progressively, actually and materially constituted as subjects'' (2006, page 28). But, at another level, the lectures reveal much more clearly what is at stake in an `exchange of contracts' model of power. In language that echoes Schmitt's (1996) typification of war as all encompassing, Foucault argues that contract theory is the basic move in a systematic devaluation of the problem of ``private'' or ``day-to-day warfare'' (2006, page 48). The devaluation is, for Foucault, twofold. On the one hand, contract theory's equation of law with peace eradicates war ``from the social body, and from relations among men [sic] and relations among groups'' (page 48). On the other hand, and inasmuch as it binds nation to state, contract theory pushes war to ``the outer limits of the great state units, and only as a violent relationship'' (pages 48 ^ 49). In contrast, Foucault describes social order itself as warfare: ``[T]he role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe ... relationships of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language and even the bodies of individuals ... .We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions'' (page 16). In suggesting a possible similarity between Schmitt and Foucault on the pervasiveness of war, we do not intend to conflate the two. Although Foucault's emphasis on the indistinction between peace and war dovetails with Schmitt's critique of liberalism, it is nonetheless not the same as Schmitt's discussion of politics as ``the real possibility of physical killing'' (1996, page 33). For instance, Foucault's interest is in a ``generalization of war with respect to the battle form'', or with how war as ``a general economy'' of alliances, group conflict, and relations of force comes to constitute a whole range

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of apparently peaceable spaces, institutions, practices, and knowledges (Foucault, 2006, page 160). However, for us the more pressing difference between the two is their respective takes on sovereignty. Although about a brutal form of survival in the first person, the ability to make war is, for Schmitt, ultimately an aggregation of power in the person of the sovereign. In contrast, for Foucault the war metaphor is an attempt to disaggregate the behemoth of sovereign power. Another way of putting it is that for Foucault war is about government. Foucault hints at the linkage between war and government in a 1977 interview: ``As soon as one endeavors to detach power with its techniques and procedures from the [sovereign] form of law... isn't power simply a form of warlike domination?'' (1980a, page 123). This comes on the heels of his claim that the state ``is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations'', and, moreover, that the state ``can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations'' (page 122). The reader is left to conclude that if we ``conceive all problems in terms of relations of war'' (page 123) then it cannot be in terms of the sovereign's capacity to administer it. SMBD eliminates much of this guesswork. To the extent that Foucault's primary goal in the 1975 ^ 76 lectures is to pose the `domination ^ repression' couplet as a corrective to the `contract ^ oppression' model of power, this is done by linking `private warfare' through the concept of domination ``not [to] the king in his central position, but [to] subjects in their reciprocal relations; not [to] sovereignty in its one edifice, but [to] the multiple subjugations that take place and function within the social body'' (page 27). Echoing Foucault's `governmentalization of the state' thesis, the result is a governmentalization of war. Foucault's summary of the myriad relations of force constitutive of the ``normalizing society'', in the penultimate lecture of SMBD, shows explicitly how war is no longer the exclusive property of the sovereign's reign, and, in turn, how modern ``dayto-day warfare'' is about a proliferation of intersecting group conflicts in the broadest sense possible. Foucault explains the normalizing society as the product of a series of ``seizures of power'' which entail significant ``adjustments'' to sovereign-juridical authority and to the sovereign's traditional right to kill. The first adjustment is an ``anatomo-politics of the human body'', in which individual bodies are ``kept under surveillance, trained, and, if need be, punished'' in centers of incarceration and correction (2006, page 242). The second adjustment is a ``biopolitics of the human race'' (page 243). Foucault explains this as a remote and aggregate form of management which has as its goal making populations live in productive ways as well as insuring against the ``random element inherent in a population of human beings'' (page 246). These modes of war are not mutually exclusive. For example, if discipline is focused on epidemics (ie containing and correcting temporary outbreaks that threaten life), then biopolitics is focused in a complementary manner on endemics (ie regulating permanent threats against life throughout a population). Together, discipline and biopower are thus described as taking ``control of life in generalwith the body at one pole and the population at the other'' (2006, page 253). There is a third adjustment relevant to this `taking control of life' which makes SMBD an important extension of Foucault's most-cited English language work on biopolitics. What Foucault calls ``state racism'' describes the return of a (decentered) sovereign right to kill at the heart of biopolitics, ``unleashed throughout the entire social body'' in the form of neighbors ``doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with'' (2006, page 259). As Foucault explains in reference to the Naziadministered genocide, ``state racism'' legitimates the ``death of the bad race, of the inferior race ... [to] make life in general healthier: healthier and purer'' (page 255). In this sense, the 1975 ^ 76 lectures present a triplet of wars constitutive of the normalizing

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society: at the core, a biopolitics centered on managing and regulating ``the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on''; and, on the margins, a ``corrective'' war against individual bodies as well as a ``genocidal'' war which ``justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger'' (page 258). The result is a much more complex account of how life is brought within the realm of government than is usually attributed to Foucault. Perhaps most interesting for geographers and we will end our discussion of Foucault on this point is how the account of `private warfare' in SMBD finds a spatial counterpart in Security, Territory, Population (henceforth STP). There, Foucault differentiates between sovereign-juridical, disciplinary and biopolitical spaces (Foucault, 2007, pages 1 ^ 27; cf Foucault, 1980d; 1996a). The difference between the three boils down to space as: a geometric centerpoint facilitating the equal diffusion of law and command; as a camp, with localized and hierarchical relations of surveillance and correction; and as a facilitative medium designed to `let things happen'. Much as in SMBD, where Foucault argues against reading regimes of power periodically, these three spatialities of power are not to be interpreted sequentially. Indeed, if from SMBD we learn that present-day ``private warfare'' concerns a biopolitical core at once shot through with anachronistic disciplinary and racist powers, then from STP we learn that this ``edifice'' of power portends a coincident and contradictory mix of ``centripetal'' enclosures as well as ``ever-wider circuits'' of flows and interconnections. The former organize space on the disciplinary principle that ``the smallest things must not be abandoned to themselves''; the latter, in contrast, organize space biopolitically or ``centrifugally'' as in ``letting things follow their course'' (pages 45, 48). In this light, Foucault's account of private warfare in the normalizing society can be read not only as an expansion of biopolitics in the form of discipline ^ biopolitics ^ racism, but at once geographically as a general space of freedom and circulation ``ballasted'' by contrary spaces of ``considerably restricted freedom'' (page 48). As we will see in the third section below, this account stands at odds with Hardt and Negri's rather straightforward reading of biopolitics as a ``smooth space of uncoded and deterritorialized flows'' (2000, page 333). Biopolitics as thanatopolitics Foucault's examination of biological life and the problem of government has received renewed attention in recent years in large part due to Agamben's scholarship on the biopolitical properties of sovereign power. However, if it is dependent on Foucault's work, we contend, as do others (ie Ojakangas, 2005), that Agamben's discussion of so-called `bare life' results in a quite different rendering of biopolitics. In order to probe these differences, we focus here on two principal objections to Foucault's account of biopolitics found in Agamben's Homo Sacer (1998), Remnants of Auschwitz (2002), and The State of Exception (2005). The first criticism concerns Foucault's periodization of biopolitics and subsequent treatment of death; the second, his failure to more fully theorize the intersection of sovereign and biopolitical arts of government. Agamben's first major criticism of Foucault concerns his historical narrative on the changing properties of state power, and, specifically, what this means about how biopower works. In Remnants of Auschwitz, for example, Agamben (2002, page 83) argues that Foucault proceeds via a series of oppositions and sharp differentiations in time, with the result that sovereign-juridical, disciplinary, and biopolitical arts of government are presented as ``essentially heterogeneous'' and ``conceptually distinct''. For Agamben this problemwhich is, in effect, about the discontinuity of successive regimes

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of poweris in full force in Foucault's discussion of the differences between a sovereign power focused on territory and a biopolitical power centered on the health of populations. The transition from one to the other, Agamben argues, is in Foucault less about the interpenetration of different arts of government and more about the ``giving way'' of sovereign-juridical and disciplinary powers to an ``inverse'' model of power rooted in the fact of ``making live'' (pages 82 ^ 83). Foucault's sometimes exaggerated parsing of sovereign power and biopolitics certainly lends itself to this critique, particularly in The History of Sexuality (1978). However, Foucault's repeated calls that the history of forms of power is not one of well-defined periods and successive techniques should be kept in mind. Indeed, we find Agamben's periodization critique a difficult fit with Foucault's explicit warnings ge de France lectures about approaching power through the problem of in his Colle ``reactivation'' rather than as a ``series of successive elements'' (2007, page 8). Moreover, Agamben's critique seems predicated on a too literal deployment of Foucault's notion of discontinuity. On our reading, although Foucault invoked discontinuity as a corrective to overarching histories of sovereign power, it was never intended as a ``monotonous and unthinkable void between events'' but, rather, as a way to talk about social formation and transformation (Foucault, 1996b, page 38). Indeed, to replace continuity with discontinuity would be to replace the absolute of continuity with an equally absolute notion of rupture (1972, pages 166 ^ 177). In this spirit, for example, Butler (2004, pages 51 ^ 100) argues that, although focused in the main on the ``devitalization of sovereignty'', Foucault's research is properly about a field of resurgent powers rather than a neat chronology of once relevant arts of government (see also Coleman and Agnew, 2007; Elden, 2007). Agamben's periodization argument is important to consider because it is the basis for hiswe think equally misplaced claim that Foucault's work is characterized by a piecemeal displacement of the problematic of death. Echoing previous critiques about Foucault's neglect of the law (eg Hunt and Wickham, 1994), Agamben's whole point in the periodization critique is to circumscribe the problem of death in Foucault's work to his discussion of classical sovereign power, and to argue that for Foucault the post-17th-century mix or edifice of state power is primarily about nonlethal technologies of governance. Indeed, for Agamben, Foucault's reliance on the biopolitical as in to `make live'to explain modern regimes of power, in contrast to ostensibly prior sovereign-juridical and disciplinary arts of government, effects a ``progressive disqualification of death'' (2002, page 83). Agamben continues that Foucault's periodization ``strips [death] of its character as a public rite in which not only individuals and families but the whole people participates; hence the transformation of death into something to be hidden, a kind of private shame'' (page 83, our emphasis). It is worth mentioning that the ``progressive disqualification of death'' is how many Foucauldian scholars themselves approach the question of biopolitics (eg Rose, 2006). However, as is well summed up in his discussion in SMBD of the biopolitics ^ discipline ^ racism triplet (above), Foucault clearly was interested not so much in a prohibition on death as he was in reinscribing it within an edifice of power more complex than the princely `right of the sword' [see also Foucault (2003, pages 316 ^ 318) on psychiatric power, death, and biopolitics; and Fontana and Bertani (2006, page 286) on the ``red in the air'' in Foucault's work]. Moreover, the language Foucault uses to describe this reinvigorated power sounds very much like Agamben's own discussion (below) of what a more `deathly' biopolitics might look like: ``When I say killing, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on'' (Foucault, 2006, page 256).

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Strangely, Agamben's second major criticism of Foucault concedes the point that he was not working toward a neat periodization of power, he was instead interested in exploring power's complex hold over life in the form of a convergence over time of sovereign-juridical, disciplinary, and biopolitical arts of government. In the introduction to Homo Sacer, for instance, Agamben argues that Foucault's promised integration of techniques of subjective individualization and procedures of objective totalization never quite materializes, and for the most part plays out as a prioritization of subjective individualization (1998, pages 5, 119; cf Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982). Based on this ``logically implicit'' but nonetheless ``vanishing'' aspect of Foucault's research, Agamben asks whether or not Foucault's unsuccessful attempt to locate the ``hidden point of intersection'' between these two models of power preempts consideration of a ``unitary center'' at the heart of the modern state (1998, pages 5 ^ 6). Such an approach to Foucault, who apparently ``converge[s] toward without reaching'' the concealed ``nucleus of sovereign power'' (page 6), contradicts his much more frequent deployment as a thinker who problematizes exactly the possibility of sovereign political authority in terms of a unifying logic or essence. We will have more to say on this later. Both Agamben's criticisms Foucault's displacement of death, plus his failure to uncover the functional nucleus of biopolitical governmentare the basis of his revamped theory of the biopolitical. Agamben's first move in this reconfiguration is to suggest that sovereign power is the ability to hold life hostage within what he calls a `sovereign ban'. The ban is a Mo bius-ribbon-type limit between the states of law (nomos) and nature ( physis) such that ``he who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather ... [is] exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable'' (1998, page 28). From this perspective, the application of law to lifethe inclusion of what Agamben calls zoe (the simple fact of living) into the polis or its conjoining with bios (politically qualified life)is not in itself the stuff of sovereign authority. Rather, at the root of sovereign authority is the sovereign's ability to straddle natural and juridical orders. Sovereignty's power of the ban amounts to a paradoxical ability to expose and endanger living beings across a nature/law threshold in which law passes over into violence and violence into law. Agamben's second and related reconfiguration of biopolitics concerns the figure of homo sacer, the human victim which inhabits this peculiar space between the law and nature. Homo sacer is a life doubly excludedfrom both the ius humanum (sphere of the profane) and ius divinum (sphere of the religious)such that it can be killed without the charge of murder, and yet not sacrificed. This grim picture of a human life, politicized by virtue of its abandonment to a no-man's land between nomos and physis, is front and center in Remnants of Auschwitz. There Agamben looks in detail at the Muselma nner literally `the muslim', a physically exposed and severely malnourished detainee serially produced in the Nazi concentration camps. For Agamben, this ``walking corpse'' or ``corpse without death'' is important because it is ``the final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum'' (2002, page 85). By this, Agamben means that if, as with Foucault, ``every people is doubled by a population'' that must be biologically regulated, the Muselma nner is the limit figure of a general series of mobile ``biopolitical caesuras'' which divide the population into increasingly degraded subjects (ie citizens into non-Aryans, Jews, deportees, prisoners, and eventually the Muselma nner). The death camps are thus not sites of extermination apart from a democratic space of rights and law, but, rather, the limit form of a racist biopolitical technology which striates the entirety of a democratic people.

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For Agamben, these two aspectssovereignty as the indistinguishability of law and nature, as well as homo sacer as caught in the space between the polis and the profanecome together to constitute the biopolitical. What do these moves entail for Foucault's notion of biopolitics? On the one hand, it means that, contra Foucault's account of biopolitics as a second fine-tuning to sovereign-juridical authority, starting in the 18th century, ``Western politics is biopolitics from the very beginning'' (Agamben 1998, page 181). For Agamben, sovereign-juridical and biopolitical arts of government are not historically and geographically contingent models of power; biopolitics is, rather, metaconstitutive of sovereign-juridical power. On the other hand, insofar as Agamben presents us with a radical devaluation of life in the camp, what counts as biopolitics is substantially altered. Rather than the collection of statistics and the management of populations through aggregate operations concerned with reproduction, sickness, fertility, sexuality, old age, injury, etc, and the ways these techniques interact with state racism, what we have in Agamben's work is a lethal model of biopolitics which approaches what one critic calls an ``aesthetics of disaster centered around a fascination for the cadaver'' (Mesnard, 2004, page 156). This is most evident in Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben, 2002). There, as a midway point between Foucault's distinction in The History of Sexuality (1978) between sovereignty as the power ``to make die and let live'' and biopolitics as the power `to make live and let die', Agamben argues that biopolitics in the 20th-century concentration camp takes a hybrid form of the power to `make survive'. Key for Agamben is the way the death camps produced ``in the human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios'' (2002, page 156). The result is a sort of suspended, mute lifelikened to the overcomatose personwhose inhumanity is ``separated from every possibility of testimony'' (page 156). But, because Agamben sees the power to `make survive' as a state of minimally human life beyond which there is only death, he prefers the label `thanatopolitics' (politics as death) to `biopolitics' (politics as life). In fact, in Homo Sacer (1998), when speaking of the generalization of the camp as the new biopolitical nomos of 20th-century modernity, Agamben suggests that biopolitics should be read in his work as thanatopolitics, which he says is when biopolitics plays out in an extreme form as a determination on the unworthiness or valuelessness of a particular life. Thanatopolitics, as such, is obviously a far cry from the productive biological regulation of a population sketched out by Foucault. Compare this, for example, with Foucault's discussion of biopolitics as a ``power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them'' (1978, page 136, our emphasis). If anything, Agamben elevates Foucault's conceptualization of `state racism' such that discipline and the management of populations fade into the background. But there is more to Agamben's idiosyncratic approach to the biopolitical than the difference between `making live' and `making survive' per se. It might be tempting, for example, to say that Agamben's approach to the biopolitical, unlike Foucault's approach, centers or reinscribes authority in the body of the sovereign. Hardt and Negri make this argument. They claim that Agamben is obsessed with ``those who institutionally hold the power of exception, the power to suspend laws, and the power of dictatorship'' (2004, page 364). However, we feel that this is not quite what is going on in Agamben's work. In The State of Exception (2005), for example, Agamben refuses an absolute political authority in the person of the sovereign. Agamben speaks of the state of exception not as a ``a fullness of powers'', but as a ``an emptiness and standstill of the law'' where what is at stake is ``the opening of a wholly anomic space for human action'' (page 49). To this we should add that, throughout Agamben's work, sovereign power

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appears consistently as an `illocalized' phenomenon. In Homo Sacer (1998), for instance, the camp is paradigmatic on account of what goes on there (ie the production of homo sacer) and not as a physical space carved out from a still signifying juridical order. Likewise, in The State of Exception, the emergency situation is a ``single catastrophe'' enveloping all spaces (2005, page 57). But, if Agamben's conjoining of biopolitics with sovereignty empties out and delocalizes sovereign power, there is something in the way that he employs the concept of the threshold to explore this sovereign-biopolitical union which warrants critical scrutiny. In line with his above description of sovereign biopower as ``a zone of absolute indeterminacy between anomie and the law, in which the sphere of creatures and the juridical order are caught up'' (2005, page 57), the threshold functions in Agamben's work as a spatial device which draws together multiple aspects and arenas of human existence. For instance, it allows Agamben to challenge the binaries of law/violence, culture/nature, biological life/politically qualified life, anomie/nomos, sacrifice/homicide, etc, and to bring them, instead, into a productive relation with one another. However, in our opinion, the threshold does more than merely allow for a constitutive traffic. The difference between Foucault's work on the biopolitics of sex and Agamben's critique of Foucault in the final paragraphs of Homo Sacer is telling. For example, for Foucault, the family is a privileged moment of articulation between the state and the individual as concerns the regulation of sex. Although the family brings children and other family members into sustained contact with a wide range of medical and pedagogical authorities (Foucault, 1978, pages 108 ^ 114), Foucault never argues that it enables the unconditional colonization of biological life by the state. Rather, the family is relatively autonomous from sovereign biopower, and, moreover, takes on multiple possible configurations and characteristics in distinct contexts (Foucault, 1980b, pages 187 ^ 188; see also Foucault, 2003, pages 93 ^ 121). However, if the ``biopolitical body of the West'' (Agamben, 1998, page 187) appears in Foucault's work as a relationship of compulsion and elision mediated by any number of social sites and institutions, in Agamben's work it appears in a much stronger form, via the threshold, as an ``absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life''. Indeed, whereas Foucault proposes, at the end of The History of Sexuality (1978) an incomplete biopolitical colonization of the body, Agamben, while at once eschewing the centeredness of sovereign power, warns of the inescapableness of sovereign power as well as of the futility of an embodied politics of resistance. As he argues: ``The body is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power'' (1998, page 187). In short, unlike Foucault, Agamben's approach to biopolitics as evidenced by his claim about the body as ``always already a biopolitical body and bare life'' (page 187, emphasis added)renders all places subject to the biopolitics of the sovereign ban, without differentiation; in so doing, it also uniformly treats bodies across space, regardless of race/class/gender/sexuality, as all potentially homines sacri (Mitchell, 2006). In this sense, we think that Agamben, in large measure because of his reading of biopolitics through the threshold, has an abridged understanding of the unevenness of political, economic, and social space. However, most important for us is the way that this totalizing vision of sovereign spaceor inattention to the complexly scaled habitats and embodiments of sovereign powerworks alongside what Connolly (2004, page 30) calls Agamben's proclivity to ``overstate the extent to which the complexity of biopolitical culture is resolvable into a consummate logic'' of the sovereign ban. The result, we contend, is a densely interwoven landscape of power reminiscent of Debord's

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(1995) diffuse and yet blanket rendering of the capitalist spectacle. Indeed, Agamben's threshold rendering of space, in conjunction with his reliance on the always-operative logic of the sovereign ban, allows biopower to embrace everything everywhere, and, moreover, coherently. This stands in contrast to Foucault's account of power; for Foucault, as Elden summarizes, power was ``everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere'' (2001, page 106), and for Foucault, as a result, power was fundamentally about a multiplicity of poorly articulatedeven contradictoryprojects and spaces. Biopolitics as biopotenza Like Agamben, Hardt and Negri criticize Foucault's ambiguous account of biopolitics. As they write in Empire, if ``we were to ask Foucault who or what drives the system, or rather, who is the `bios', his response would be ineffable, or nothing at all'' (2000, page 28). Their claim is that Foucault adheres to a ``structuralist epistemology'' which fetishizes power as a faceless function, and which ignores ``the ontological substance of cultural and social production'' (page 28) (more on this below). But this shared ambivalence toward Foucault on account of, for lack of a better phrase, how power works, is but one point of convergence between otherwise very different interpretations of Foucault and of biopolitics. For example, while Agamben seeks to make biopolitics legible through homo sacer and the negative power of exception, Hardt and Negri seek a more productive grounding for the term. This owes much to Negri's autonomist roots (Thoburn, 2003; Wright, 2002). However, we want to focus specifically on the Spinozist qualities of Negri's work as central grounds for Hardt and Negri's departure from Foucault and Agamben on the question of the biopolitical, even if this is not often considered by critics (eg Coleman and Agnew, 2007; Toscano, 2007). In his solo work Negri explores biopolitics through the concept of productive life. By productive life, following Spinoza, Negri means the immanent ability of humans to constitute a social reality that enhances not only the ability to exist but also the scope of this existence (Spinoza, 2000, EIIIP7, page 171). This theme features centrally in the s, Alma Venus, Multitudo'' (2003), where Negri explores productive life essay ``Kairo s. For Negri, kairo s is a way of describing the relationship through the concept of kairo between ``past'', ``present'', and ``future'', but not as ``a single extension without gaps that is traversable in every direction'' (page 162). Refusing the past as a simple accumulation (and death) of events as well as the future as ``future duration'', or prefigured s as an open-ended, immeasurthrough repetitions and constants, Negri explains kairo s is the restless body poised at the able, and revolutionary temporality. Key to kairo ``edge of time'', which generates knowledge via language in ``the instant, that is to say, the quality of the time of the instant, the moment of rupture and opening of temporality'' (page 152). Indeed, at the heart of Negri's account of productive life is the human ability to lend significance to a constant unfolding of events through a common praxis that ``constructs, or transforms the thing into the name and the name into the thing'' (page 161). In turn, this act of naming constitutes subjectivity, and specifically the common subjectivity of a multitude of communicating bodies. This jointly creative act of naming is, for Negri, a liberationone that appropriates the world in new ways outside and against existing structures of practice and meaning (Wolfe, 2007). Productive life is, therefore, ontological, in the sense that it generates new ways and forms of being. s and productive life comes Negri's definition From this general discussion of kairo of biopolitics as the power to produce the totality of social life, the bios, in each and every moment of the present. This use of biopolitics is clarified in a recent interview in which Negri differentiates between biopolitics-as-biopotere and biopolitics-as-biopotenza

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(Casarino and Negri, 2004). The former he describes as ``the institution of a dominion over life'', a ``power that creates the bios '' (page 167), which for the sake of argument we can say is close to Foucault insofar as we are talking about arts of government which order bodies. Key here is the state and capital, institutionalized and parasitic forms of biopolitics, which represent a limit on productive life. Against this, Negri describes biopotenza, ``the potentiality of constituent power'', as ``the bios that creates power'' (page 167). By this, he means the generative abilities of the multitude, apart from and opposed to the vampire-like reach of capital, which literally give life or spirit to the social world as we know it. This distinction is the guts of Hardt and Negri's criticism of Foucault, as above. For instance, biopotenza is exactly the first-order ``ontological substance of cultural and social production'' (2000, page 28) that Hardt and Negri say is missing in Foucault's functionalist account of power. Indeed, biopotenza means that the counterrevolutionary moments typically center stage in Foucault's work (ie the asylum, the jail, law, the sovereign right of the sword, political economy, etc) are properly corruptive, second-order phenomena. This reversal of power is key to the argument in both Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000) and Multitude (2004), but is perhaps most apparent in the latter. There, Hardt and Negri argue, for example, that the flexibilization and hybridization of present-day workforces, often referred to as post-Fordism, is not a disciplinary strategy imposed on workers in order to increase productivity (2004, pages 140 ^ 153). Rather, post-Fordism signals workers' ability, in the wake of their onetime confinement to the factory, to produce ``not the means of social life but social life itself '' (2004, page 146, emphasis in original). Moreover, Hardt and Negri argue that this biopolitical production (ie biopotenza) is increasingly beyond capital's grasp. Indeed, they argue that the value of ``immaterial production'' labor based on knowledge production, affective relations, communication as well as, crucially, the blurring of work and life spacesis ``excessive with respect to the value that capital can extract from it because capital can never fully capture all of life '' (page 146, our emphasis). In other words, post-Fordism marks the proliferation of modes of social wealth-making internal to labor and external to capital ``a common, living substance ... producing in excess of every traditional political-economic measure of value'' (page 192) that capital can only hope to leach off rather than control. What does biopotenza mean for Hardt and Negri's treatment of space? As explained in both Empire and Multitude, by virtue of its incessant productivity, the multitude is at its core deterritorializing. The multitude is a force that undercuts and dissolves any sort of spatiality predicated on boundaries or on territorialized accounts of identity and its differences. This, in turn, has significant implications for how Hardt and Negri map the global form of contemporary capitalist social order, or biopotere. As the argument in Multitude goes, second-order counterrevolutionary powers (biopolitics-as-biopotere) came gradually in the 20th century to mimic the first-order placelessness of constituent power (biopolitics-as-biopotenza) situated at the ``edge of time'' (Hardt and Negri, 2004, pages 183 ^ 195). From this standpoint, the institutions, infrastructure, and cultural practices associated with `globalization', for example, express capital's attempt to immanently produce and manage social order in the model suggested by the multitude. Indeed, in contrast to modern, transcendental forms of power that operate through a divide and conquer cartography, Empire (ie Hardt and Negri's newly realized counterrevolutionary geography) is a ``society of control'' in which power ``extends throughout the depths of consciousness and bodies of the populationand at the same time across the entirety of social relations'' (Hardt and Negri, 2000, page 24). This is literally biopolitics as biopotere taking on the form of biopotenza: the counterrevolution travels through and exploits the most intimate

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deterritorialized recesses already carved out by the multitude of laborers. Indeed, Hardt and Negri argue that capital, now working everywhere ``through relays and networks of domination, without reliance on a transcendent center of power'', has come to subsume the totality of the social field on which it is dependent, and in so doing has effected a ``smoothing of the striation of modern social space'' (2000, pages 326, 329). In this formulation, Empire is the decentered, diffuse network of ``machines'', or concrete practices and institutions in relation to which subjectivity is formed, that attempt to appropriate the social world by parroting as well as simultaneously exploiting the laboring multitude's spatially immanent capacity for generation and production. A first point that we think deserves to be highlighted in this narrative is the way in which Hardt and Negri give the biopolitical an expressly metaphysical constitution. In contrast with Foucault's archival as well as time-grounded and place-grounded investigation of the mechanisms and technologies of governing that produce social order, Hardt and Negri's account of biopolitics draws on an overarching model of `creative living labor' which is neither historically nor geographically grounded. If anything, Hardt and Negri's shared human ``act of leaning out over the void of the time to-come, ie the adventure beyond the edge of time'' (Negri, 2003, page 152)ie biopotenzais more a programmatic formulation which deduces historical and geographical context from abstracted, general principles. Indeed, we think that Hardt and Negri's critique of Foucault's account of biopolitics as functionalist is better put as a critique of his inductive qua genealogical lens on the social world, which both works from the ground up and problematizes the possibility of a grand explanatory narrative (ie `Empire') and a principal subject of history (ie `the multitude'). We, of course, are not making the claim for a na| ve empiricism, nor that epistemology can be divorced from ontology, as outlined in Walker's exploration of sovereignty that we cite at the outset of the paper. But we do take issue with the caricature of Foucault as mired in functional analysis, as well as with what this sort of inquiry amounts to. For example, in the ge de France during the 1970s, his 1977 essay, spirit of Foucault's lectures at the Colle ``Theatrum Philosophicum'' (Foucault, 1977b), clearly lays out that mechanisms and technologies of social order follow from a first-order protean stew of bodies (ie `phantasm'') and battles (ie `events'). Here, Foucault does not shy away from `real dynamics of production', as Hardt and Negri charge, but is, instead, engaged in a sort of weak metaphysics about the constituent elements of the social world [see White (2000) on `weak ontology']. Importantly, Foucault avoids a comprehensive definition of these elements (ie bodies and battles) and, moreover, does not pretend to know the form that they will take. Instead, he seeks to identify the multifarious logics, strategies, and forces at play that give contextual meat to the bare-bone elements of social life. Indeed, Foucault insists that approaching the social world through preestablished categories and trajectories of production does violence to it as a baffling ``anarchy of difference'' (1977b, pages 186 ^ 187). As he puts it, the ``present is a throw of the dice'' (page 194), not a game with rules, definitions, and parameters that can be gleaned ahead of time. Our point, then, is that biopolitics figures as a strong metaphysical concept in Hardt and Negri's work as opposed to a careful, context-dependent unpacking of sovereign power, as we saw in the section on Foucault, war, and biopolitics. Indeed, for Hardt and Negri, biopolitics-as-biopotenza is a bold explanation of the social world it is, categorically, what animates all social life, everywhere. For Foucault, insofar as it is a `second adjustment' to sovereign power (as above), biopolitics itself warrants explanation a modern technology of government whose contingency on earlier experiments in political and economic governance is the problem to be examined (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). Another way of putting it is that for

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Hardt and Negri biopolitics clarifies the social field of power while for Foucault it complicates it. A second point to be made is how Hardt and Negri's strong metaphysical take on biopolitics paints domination and resistance in universalist hues, and how, as a result, Hardt and Negri are committed to a non-time-specific and non-place-specific account of global social struggle. On the one hand, Hardt and Negri's texts are about a complex intersection of the universal and the particular. But this is an exchange in which the universal inevitably wins out. The easiest way to characterize this is as a gradual slide from the particularities of biopolitical production into more generalized conditions of biopolitical affiliation as well as biopolitical exploitation. For example, following s as the singular temporality of the event in which the Negri's definition of kairo name and the thing coincide, Hardt and Negri do pay attention to the particular contexts in which biopolitical production initially occurs (Mutman, 2007). In Empire they argue that the counterrevolution's constant state of crisis is a result of timespecific and place-specific protest, such as Tiananmen Square, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle (eg Hardt and Negri, 2000, page 56; 2004, page 215). In Multitude, too, Hardt and Negri pinpoint the Fordist/post-Fordist turmoil as, in part, an outgrowth of communication strategies tried out by guerillas waging urban warfare during the 1960s and 1970s (2004, pages 79 ^ 91). On the other hand, Hardt and Negri are adamant that the outcome of these variously situated moments of creation is a multitude of affiliating bodies, and, moreover, that this collective body is increasingly subject to a shared biopolitical exploitation. Indeed, via Empire, capitalist order is reproduced through the like appropriation of literally every body's capacity for linguistic production (Hardt and Negri, 2000, page 385). In this sense, biopolitics biopolitical exploitation, parasitic on biopolitical productionis a hybrid of the singular and the common in which the former is gradually subsumed within the latter. Our key interest here is that, in laying out this argument for a universal condition of exploitation and production, Hardt and Negri link biopolitics to a global geography of power. We think this limits the richness of both biopotere and biopotenza. Sparke (2005, pages 239 ^ 312), for example, offers a convincing critique of Hardt and Negri's geography of biopotere as one which writes off modern geographies of counterrevolutionary power, such as the nation-state, but which in the very same breath `encrypts' American geopolitical dominance at the core of a flat, undifferentiated global space of geoeconomic power. Hardt and Negri thus fetishize a borderless geography of global biopower that repeats the geographic assumptions of neoliberal apologists while paradoxically giving it an American center, albeit not necessarily geographic, as Sparke argues (see also Thomas and Coleman, 2009). We agree with Sparke's assessment, and think a similar metaphysics of geopresence is at play in Hardt and Negri's geography of biopotenza, or the multitude's resistance to Empire. Hardt and Negri are upfront about their disdain for ``celebrations of the local'', noting that these can be ``regressive and fascistic when they oppose circulation and mixture, and thus reinforce the walls of nation, ethnicity, race, people, and the like'' (Hardt and Negri, 2000, page 362). In contrast, struggles are revolutionary when they ``break down the walls that surround the local'' and couch themselves within the concrete universalism of common struggle against biopolitical exploitation (page 362). This practice of breaking down barriers and connecting the local to wider spheres is exactly the essence of Hardt and Negri's imagination of the multitude in terms of the figure of the transnational migrant as well as their definition of resistance as `exodus'. For Hardt and Negri, the migrant only partially attests to regions of inequality and difference across the earth's surface; more importantly, it challenges and eventually undoes the boundaries drawn between the global North and South

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(2004, pages 129 ^ 138). The migrant does so by physically undermining the integrity of militarized borders. Moreover, the migrant develops knowledges, skills, and habits during its border-crossing journeys which come to underpin new categories of collective belonging at odds with the often territorialized logic of identity/difference. As Hardt and Negri explain in Multitude (2004, pages 217 ^ 218), the result is the replacement of the ``contradictory couple identity-difference'' with the ``complementary couple commonality-singularity'', or what they explain as a newly collective and democratic global social body. We should note here that `migration' and `mobility' refer not just to territorial mobility in a narrow sense but to any form of creative `movement' that transgresses social categories of control (eg Sandoval, 2000). Nonetheless, Hardt and Negri's privileging of the migrant qua undocumented laborer as the paradigmatic figure of biopolitical resistance, as well as their treatment of it as an essentially undifferentiated figure of mobility which signals the end of identity/difference politics, avoids the question of how alterity, difference, and singularity are confronted and experienced in the constitution of any resistant subjectivity. For example, Butler suggests that participation in social life is always contingent on historically and geographically specific norms of social intelligibility conditioned through language, practice, and psychic life (eg Butler, 1997; 2004; 2006a). For her, language is at once an enabling and constraining medium; without language, we could not be subjects, but at the same time language limits the possibilities of agency within socially defined norms of recognition (Butler, 2000). Rather than a total and global refusal of sovereignty in the moment of revolution, resistance here involves a slow process of working within and against these norms to redefine who and what counts as legitimate in particular times and places. It also involves working within the cramped confines of one's constitutive relation to others. From this standpoint, as Butler (2006b) notes, foundational identity can never be fully realized, for the particularity of each subject resists generalization and ensures the possibility of generation and novelty. In other words, resistance is about particular scenes of legibilitymultiple potentially contradictory and overlapping social and spatial contexts within which exploitation is experienced and, importantly, recognized and resisted as such. In contrast, we feel that there is little room for the mediation of difference through language or norms of social recognition in Hardt and Negri's conception of the migratory multitude; rather, it takes the form of a ``secular Pentecost'' in which ``bodies are mixed and the nomads speak a common tongue'' (Hardt and Negri, 2000, page 362). Language here is nothing more than a flattened, universal, and magical sign-system within which we exist and that is infinitely capable of being transformed through every body's productive desire (Wolfe, 2007). This friction-less encounter with bodily difference inscribes a global geography of biopolitics (ie biopotenza) that skips over the complex and embodied spatialities of domination and resistance (see also Connolly, 2004; Hawkesworth, 2006; Toscano, 2007). Indeed, for Hardt and Negri, the multitude of producing bodies is immanently constituted across social and spatial difference in a way that dissolves the latter. As Negri (2003, page 155) puts it, ``when a s will be open to other name is said and heard, when it lives in language, every kairo s and altogether these events of naming will, in facing one another, in dialogue kairo and perhaps clashing, constitute common names.'' In essence, Hardt and Negri's privileged and globalizing `view from everywhere' imposes their own form of common measure on the notion of resistance, which, we think, narrows the possibilities for resistant subjectivity by eliding any consideration of historically and geographically specific struggles against violence and cruelty legitimized by the norms through which social life is sustained. Paradoxically, the metaphysical and universal global geography

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that underpins Hardt and Negri's attempts to theorize resistance to capitalist order thereby works against their own ethical and political commitment to openness and freedom. Still, we feel it important to recognize the room for maneuver in Hardt and Negri's work, particularly in relation to what we see as the straightjacket account of biopolitical power that Agamben advances in his work. Even if it is hard to square with Foucault's suspicion of ``total history'' (1972, page 9), and even though we have tried to problematize their universalist cum globalist assumptions about the spatialities of domination and resistance, Hardt and Negri's grounding of the biopolitical in the biopotenza ^ biopotere duel nonetheless clears a space for the possibility of resistance that we find scarce in Agamben's scholarship. Conclusion As we have attempted to highlight, different accounts of the biopoliticalFoucault on war and the normalizing society, Agamben on thanatopolitics, Hardt and Negri on biopotenzaare distinguishable at a very basic level by how they conceptualize key concepts such as power. As a result, in contrast to the way in which biopolitics is sometimes used in an offhand way as a gloss on `nonsovereign' and/or `postsovereign' power, we think the term is anything but a stable concept and cannot be deployed but in reference to specific thinkers and texts. Indeed, the differences between Agamben and Hardt and Negri on Foucault and biopolitics suggests to us that biopolitics should be approached as a site of fervent definitional struggle and disagreement. Three quick concluding points will hopefully draw out what we mean by this. First, if Agamben and Hardt and Negri alike employ biopolitics in order to emphasize the `return' of sovereign power to the center of political life and theory, what results are two very different `homecomings''. First, Agamben's rendering of biopolitics. Here, lifebiosis about the always and everywhere possibility of death, or, rather, the production of bare life that is the essential function of a sovereign power blending nature and politics, life and law. But, even as the mystifications of sovereignty in modern political thought fall by the wayside in Agamben's work, revealing that we are all always potentially homines sacri, we submit that Agamben engages in his own metageographical remystification of sovereignty. Indeed, although Agamben does not resurrect sovereign power in the person of the sovereign per se, and thus in keeping with Foucault decapitates the sovereign, he, nonetheless, calls forth a kind of `black hole' of poweran all-encompassing constituted power which is empty and formless. And, yet, we are unable to remove ourselves from it! As such, we are suspicious that Agambenwhile ostensibly writing a history which seeks in the Foucauldian spirit to ``unmask Rome'' (Foucault, 2006, page 74), in the sense of laying bare the inner workings, contingencies, and injustices of sovereignty's unassailable self-presentationin fact, ends up producing the very opposite via the concept of biopolitics: a ``Roman-style history'' of sovereignty as a ``dazzling effect of power... that petrifies, solidifies, and immobilizes the entire social body, and thus keeps it in order'' (page 74). If, in Agamben's work sovereignty `returns' as the impossibility of thinking life and the possibility of life outside the potentiality of death via the sovereign ban, and, therefore, the impossibility of thinking politics and the possibility of politics outside sovereignty, in Hardt and Negri's work we have a reversal of sorts. In fact, for Hardt and Negri sovereignty cannot be thought outside or beyond life. For example, in Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004) sovereign biopower (biopotere) is not a centripetal force pulling all life within the orbit of its logic. Quite the opposite: once in the form of the `sovereignty machine' (ie dispersing and dividing the multitude through territory, identity, and so on), sovereignty `returns' for Hardt and Negri insofar as the productive

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life (ie biopotenza) of the multitude hails it into a hyperdiffuse and deterritorialized form (ie biopotere). The difference between Agamben and Hardt and Negri on the `return' of sovereignty, then, boils down to two distinct understandings of potentiality and biopower. For Hardt and Negri, in contrast to Agamben, power takes life as its object because power itself cannot produce potentiality; rather, it must parasitically and paradoxicallyfeed off the constitutive power of the multitude it seeks to exhaust. In other words, in an altogether different spirit from Agamben, for Hardt and Negri labor can abandon the state ^ capital nexus in a moment of creativity, whereas the latter cannot abandon the former and so is destined forever to chase after it as its lifeblood. Second, if with Agamben the threshold works so that every and any possible aspect of human life plays in one way or another into a enigmatically boundless space of sovereign biopolitics and the misery and enslavement of bare life, we find a similar metageographical obfuscation of power in Hardt and Negri, albeit in relation to constituent rather than constituted power. For example, we are uncomfortable with how Hardt and Negri skip over the specifics of biopolitical generativity in terms of the `hegemonic' figure of immaterial labor. We are still unsure, for instance, how the mobility and hardships of undocumented labor can be spoken about in the abstract as well as held to stand in for a more general class of informational or affective workers. This has much to do with how Hardt and Negri deal with space. As we argued above, their analysis is based on a globalizing account of biopolitical production as well as exploitation which by definition treats the specifics of time and place as `localities' to be overcome or, alternatively, as tools imposed by biopotere against biopotenza. The upshot is that geography qua context is at best a means for dividing and conquering the generative energies of a global pool of laborers. In contrast, we feel that attending to the `space ^ time embeddedness' of particular forms of labor (and exploitation) might, in fact, help to `unmask' the multitude, and in turn help to demystify it as a less than singular figure. Third, and finally, is there a way in which we can account for both Agamben's and Hardt and Negri's departure from Foucault on what counts as biopolitics? Foucault's approach to the term sees the life that is the object of power which is typically referred to as `population', but, as we saw above, is more accurately about a range of forms of individual and collective life implicated by the discipline ^ biopolitics ^ racism tripletas an effect of power/knowledge. As we argued in the first section of the paper, this does not mean that regimes of power are fragile, here-today-gone-tomorrow `speech acts'. However, it does mean that biopoliticsas well as other modes of power/knowledgecan have no strong metaphysical foundation. Rather, as a mode of power/knowledge, biopolitics describes rationalities and programs of government which are contingent upon certain conditions of possibility. This is where both Agamben and Hardt and Negri part company with Foucault, as signaled by their shared insistence that Foucault does not properly get at the `real dynamics' of biopolitical society, whether in terms of his forgetting of death (Agamben) or his refusal to explore the ontological substance of social production (Hardt and Negri). Agamben, for example, in asserting that the sovereign ban is the original and ongoing political relation, and that the production of bare life is the original and ongoing core of sovereign power, posits biopolitics (the sovereign ban and bare life, together) as a necessary condition of human existence as we know it. Hardt and Negri, despite their obvious differences with Agamben, pursue a similarly metaphysical definition of biopolitics. For them, biopolitics-as-biopotenza describes the innate ability of humans to produce social life at the edge of time. Moreover, the productivity of labor (biopotenza) is, for Hardt and Negri, literally what gives shape and substance to historyincluding

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the many forms of biopotere launched against the multitude. For both Agamben and Hardt and Negri, then, we contend that biopolitics works as a sort of ontological and metaphysical anchor, a transcendentalizing condition of possibility for the human condition.
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