Bioviolence and the Management of Bodies: a Study in Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri

Abstract

Our work aims to identify the power relations affirmed through the biopolitical use of violence, starting from the conceptual approach between two biopower theorists who, although divergent in their apprehension of the Foucaultian notion, identify a same historical moment, sometimes as a paradigm, sometimes as a symptom of latent processes: on the one hand, Giorgio Agamben seeks to designate biopower from the interbreeding, in the body of naked life, or bare life (in its various codenames), between the legal and the political, through the sovereign decision that, acting in a level of indefinition, inserts the life in its exception’s dispositif intending a exclusive-inclusion in the legal order. Otherwise, Antonio Negri observes the state of exception as an implicit moment in the process of expansion of capitalism, in which the decline of the sovereignty of the nation-state materializes, in turn, the emergence of Empire from the union between legal and universal ethical values, such as human rights, designating a legal supranationality that finds in the state of exception one of its main lines of action. Based on the theoretical framework, we intend to demonstrate that violence, operating in the field of exception, both through its “negative” aspects, as a tanatopolitics, and as a regime of biopower, admnistering and regulating space and subjectivities, from their positive and constituents characterists, then apperars as a biopower’s dispositif, or bioviolence, which finds in the fear and image of Enemy it mais sources of legitimation.