(Page 6 of 26) - Taking Sovereignty Out of This World: Space Weaponization and the Production of Late-Modern Political Subjects authored by Duvall, Raymond. and Havercroft, Jonathan.

historical framework of [power’s] operation” (Foucault, 1978: 90). As an alternative to
the juridical conception of sovereign power, Foucault introduced the term bio-power,
which operates at two poles. First, there is the disciplinary form of power, whereby
micro-rituals within social institutions constitute individual subjects. Second, at the
macro-level, power is exercised through the management of entire populations (Foucault,
1978). Together, these macro and micro practices of power constitute a regime of rule
that Foucault labeled “governmentality,” which refers to “the conduct of conduct” for
“the right disposition of things so as to lead to a convenient end” (Foucault, 2000: 208).
The implication of Foucault’s analysis is that understanding rule in modern political
society is best approached by not focusing on sovereign power, but instead through
turning one’s attention away from—theoretically “cutting off the head” of—the
sovereign. This means putting behind us the seventeenth century European, juridical
conception (from Hobbes and others) of the state as all-powerful unitary center, whose
will is the law and who sits as maker of final decisions about taking life or letting live—
that is to say, as political subject above (the chaos of) other subjectivities (Havercroft,
2006).

More recently, critical theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri have drawn on Foucault’s concept of bio-power, but they have taken it in
somewhat different directions in attempts to understand modern regimes of (sovereign)
rule. In particular they have reconnected the elements of the distinction between bio-
power and sovereign power that Foucault has emphasized, in order to recover the
continued importance of the latter. Today, most critical theorists seem to believe that
sovereign power, as well as bio-power, must be understood theoretically, but, following
Foucault, not as formal-legal, juridical, concept.

Agamben argues that there is a hidden point of intersection between the bio-political and
the juridical regimes of power. He observes

that the two analyses cannot be separated and that the inclusion of bare
life in the political realm constitutes the original - if concealed - nucleus of
sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical
body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics
is at least as old as the sovereign exception" (Agamben 1998: 6).

Agamben locates this intersection in the Ancient Roman figure of homo sacer, a person
with "a capacity to be killed and yet not sacrificed, outside both human and divine law"
(Agamben 1998: 73). The figure of homo sacer is a schism between one’s political and
biological lives. Homo sacer is “bare life,” the biological aspect of the individual that
exists outside the law and hence outside politics and the state. The paradox of homo
sacer is that the sovereign is the one who decides who homo sacer is, and as such the
sovereign power that excludes “bare life” from the realm of the political also constitutes
“bare life” as homo sacer. As such, the bio-political regime that Foucault distinguishes
from the sovereign regime of power is actually constituted by the sovereign’s capacity to
exclude “bare life” from the political. Agamben links the figure of homo sacer with the
production social spaces in which individuals are stripped completely of their political
life. In this social space of “the camp,” “bare life” has no human rights at precisely the
moment that he or she needs them most. As we shall see, we believe that through the
weaponization of space a new global regime of sovereignty emerges. One of the
constitutive effects of space weapons is their capacity to ban specific individuals from the