State and civil society -- Empire without state -- Politics of life -- Saint Foucault -- Blood-dried codes -- The state of immanence -- Virtual state-making -- When society prevails -- Political and economic theology -- Foucault's apologia of neoliberalism.

This article approaches social media from the theory of the religio-political practice of acclamation revived by Agamben and following twentieth-century social and political thought and theology (of Weber, Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz). It supplements that theory by more recent political-theoretical, historical and sociological investigations and regards acclamation as a ‘social institution’ following Mauss. Acclamation is a practice that forms publics, whether as the direct presence of the ‘people’, mass-mediated ‘public opinion’, or a ‘public mood’ decipherable through countless social media postings. The (...) article surveys issues of differential geographies of access, weighting of posts, value-creation, orality and gesture, algorithmic governmentality, and Big Data and knowledge production. It argues that social media constitute a public from a mass of individualized, private postings. It concludes that they make possible forms of political calculability and action, yet are continuous with ritual and liturgical elements of political life. This study contributes to an analytics of publicity. (shrink)

Countering claims of its impossibility, this paper argues for economic theology as an intelligible figure of contemporary political rationality and organization, and a distinctive analytical strategy in relation to forms of liberal and neoliberal governmentality and the contemporary management of social life. As an analytical strategy, it has two arms: an institutional one, drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work on the pastorate; and a conceptual one, following from Giorgio Agamben on oikonomia, order and providence. Economic theology was the arcana of 20th-century (...) debates on both political theology and governmentality and a condition for their emergence. It formed the horizon of Carl Schmitt’s intervention of a political theology in response to Max Weber, and, as the pastorate, it was for Foucault the historical background of the emergence of the liberal arts of government. While appearing as a new paradigm, it thus has a measure of priority over our more established ones. Furthermore, to the extent that economic theology comes to occupy the place of political rationality in contemporary liberal-democratic societies, the political becomes less a rational public sphere and more a form of public liturgy. (shrink)

While this ‘extraordinary’ book appears as an intermezzo within the Homo Sacer series, it supports two fundamental theses with its own philological, epigraphic, liturgical and religious-historical research, and a close reading of figures such as Ernst Kantorowicz and Marcel Mauss. These theses concern political power first as an articulation of sovereign reign and economic government and, secondly, as constituted by acclamations and glorification. These can be approached theoretically through its author’s engagement with Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality and with the (...) Erik Peterson/Carl Schmitt debate on the closure of political theology. Agamben’s reformulation of power and his derivation of liberal governmentality from the theological oikonomia prove convincing. A renewed analytics of power and politics of resistance should be possible, however, without recourse to a project seeking to deactivate all profane powers including those of public bureaucracies. (shrink)

Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. One fateful day in May 1975, Foucault dropped acid in the southern California desert. In letters reproduced here, he described it as among the most important events of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. That trip helped redirect Foucault's thought and contributed to a tectonic shift in the intellectual (...) life of the era. He came to reinterpret the social movements of May '68 and reposition himself politically in France, embracing anti-totalitarian currents and becoming a critic of the welfare state. Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora examine the full historical context of the turn in Foucault's thought, which included studies of the Iranian revolution and French socialist politics, through which he would come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the left nor the right: neoliberalism. (shrink)

The work of Foucault on liberal government, and that of his followers, is subject to two dangers. The first is to regard the critical character of liberalism (as governing through freedom) as providing safeguards against the despotic potentials of biopower and sovereignty. The second is to regard these heterogenous powers of life and death as somehow simply relocated or reinscribed within the field of liberal governmentality. The latter point is a major methodological error; the former closes the gap between the (...) analytics of government and the normativity of liberalism itself. By working through these dangers, our understanding of the ethos of liberal government is transformed. That ethos today requires us to link governing through freedom to the powers of life and death, the exercise of choice to the sovereign decision, the contract to violence, economic citizenship to moral discipline and obligation, and rights and liberties to enforcement. (shrink)