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AbstractThe paper focuses on two problems with Alexander Wendt's unification of physical and social ontology on the basis of quantum theory. Firstly, by endowing social phenomena with an ontological foundation in physical reality defined in quantum terms Wendt risks reducing a plurality of worlds as 'fields of sense', ordered by their immanent rules, to the physical world ordered by the laws of quantum theory. Secondly, by defining his quantum social science as an ontology Wendt risks excluding from consideration all that which violates ontological laws, yet may still be said to exist or take place: event, potentiality, and alterity. Although the advantages of a scientific ontology are indisputable, the price we pay for it is a sense of ontological captivity, whereby everything that is definitely is so, being and non-being rigorously distinguished and separated with nothing between them. This captivity may be escaped by supplementing quantum ontology with ethics in the Levinasian sense of 'otherwise than being'.

The article addresses the ongoing debate about the origins of biopolitics. While Foucault's analysis of biopolitics approached it as a modern rationality of government, Agamben's Homo Sacer series presented biopolitics as having a longer provenance, dating back to the antiquity. These polar positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist in these and other theories of biopolitics, which approach its object as both modern and ancient, having its chronological origin in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries yet also possessing a prehistory of precursors. The article interprets this dual origin in terms of Paolo Virno's theory of historical temporality, which distinguishes between the chronological past of historical events and their potential past, which accompanies and is negated in them. Coexisting with its own unrealized potential, every historical event remains incomplete and extends itself both backwards and forwards, positing its precursors and prefiguring its future outcomes. While modern in the chronological sense, biopolitics is retrospectively inscribed in a longer historical lineage, its antecedents easily identifiable in the history of political thought. Finally, we apply this approach to Virno's own account of the history of biopolitics, questioning his identification of past potential with labour-power.

The article addresses the ongoing debate about the origins of biopolitics. While Foucault's analysis of biopolitics approached it as a modern rationality of government, Agamben's Homo Sacer series presented biopolitics as having a longer provenance, dating back to the antiquity. These polar positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist in these and other theories of biopolitics, which approach its object as both modern and ancient, having its chronological origin in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries yet also possessing a prehistory of precursors. The article interprets this dual origin in terms of Paolo Virno's theory of historical temporality, which distinguishes between the chronological past of historical events and their potential past, which accompanies and is negated in them. Coexisting with its own unrealized potential, every historical event remains incomplete and extends itself both backwards and forwards, positing its precursors and prefiguring its future outcomes. While modern in the chronological sense, biopolitics is retrospectively inscribed in a longer historical lineage, its antecedents easily identifiable in the history of political thought. Finally, we apply this approach to Virno's own account of the history of biopolitics, questioning his identification of past potential with labour-power. ; peerReviewed

The article critically engages with Giorgio Agamben's reading of Rousseau in order to explore the affinities between the two authors' subtractive approach to political subjectivation. In The Kingdom and the Glory. Agamben argues that Rousseau's Social Contract reproduces, in a secularized manner, the providential paradigm of government, whose origins Agamben finds in early Christianity. This paradigm establishes a fictitious articulation between transcendent sovereignty and immanent government, presenting particular acts of government as emanating from general divine laws. We shall demonstrate that Rousseau was neither unaware of the problematic character of this paradigm nor did he venture to conceal its problems, but, on the contrary, he highlighted them throughout the Social Contract, whose key motif was the danger of the contamination of general will by particular acts, identities or interests. The same wariness of particularism characterizes Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, often read as entirely heterogeneous to the political project of the Social Contract. By reading these two works together as the affirmation of generic existence against all forms of particularism, we bring Rousseau's analysis closer to Agamben's own attempts to rethink politics as subtracted from all identity predicates and contained in the affirmation of 'whatever being'. The elucidation of affinities between Rousseau and Agamben will permit us to identify the limits of this subtractive approach to politics and outline an alternative to it. ; peerReviewed

The article addresses Giorgio Agamben's critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben's comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respectively empirical and transcendental, which Agamben brings together in a problematic fashion. His account of the sovereign state of exception collapses a plurality of empirical states of exception into a zone of indistinction between different exceptional states and the normal state and then elevates this very indistinction to the transcendental condition of intelligibility of politics as such. Conversely, the notion of bare life, originally posited as the transcendental condition of possibility of positive forms of life, is recast as an empirical figure, whose sole form is the absence of form. We conclude that this problematic articulation should be abandoned for a theory that rather highlights the non-relation between sovereign power and bare life, which conditions the possibility of resistance and transformation that remains obscure in Agamben's thought.

Sergei Prozorov contends that the post-truth ideology leads to the degradation of the public sphere that is essential to democratic governance. He argues instead for a positive role of truth-telling in the democratisation of biopolitical governance.

The article contributes to the genealogy of current tendencies in crisis governance by reconstructing Michel Foucault's analysis of the application of the notion of crisis in 19th-century psychiatry. This analysis complements and corrects Reinhart Koselleck's history that viewed crisis as originally a medical, judicial or theological concept that was transferred to the political domain in the 18th century. In contrast, Foucault highlights how the psychiatric application of the concept of crisis was itself political, conditioned by the disciplinary power of the psychiatrist. Unlike the ancient medical concept of crisis that emphasized the doctor's judgement in observing the event of truth in the course of the disease, psychiatric crisis is explicitly forced by the doctor in order to elicit the desired symptoms in the patient and convert their power of disciplinary confinement into medical diagnosis. The article argues that this notion of crisis resonates with the tendencies observed in contemporary crisis governance in Western societies. While these tendencies are often addressed in terms of 'psychopolitics' that presumably succeeds Foucault's 'biopolitics', we suggest that Foucault's own work on psychiatric power offers a valuable genealogical perspective on the contemporary governance of crises. ; peerReviewed

The article contributes to the genealogy of current tendencies in crisis governance by reconstructing Michel Foucault's analysis of the application of the notion of crisis in 19th-century psychiatry. This analysis complements and corrects Reinhart Koselleck's history that viewed crisis as originally a medical, judicial or theological concept that was transferred to the political domain in the 18th century. In contrast, Foucault highlights how the psychiatric application of the concept of crisis was itself political, conditioned by the disciplinary power of the psychiatrist. Unlike the ancient medical concept of crisis that emphasized the doctor's judgement in observing the event of truth in the course of the disease, psychiatric crisis is explicitly forced by the doctor in order to elicit the desired symptoms in the patient and convert their power of disciplinary confinement into medical diagnosis. The article argues that this notion of crisis resonates with the tendencies observed in contemporary crisis governance in Western societies. While these tendencies are often addressed in terms of 'psychopolitics' that presumably succeeds Foucault's 'biopolitics', we suggest that Foucault's own work on psychiatric power offers a valuable genealogical perspective on the contemporary governance of crises.

Contemporary debates about post‐truth politics have raised the question of the complicity of Michel Foucault's thought in the apparent decline of the authority of truth in Western democracies. In this article we probe this question in the analysis of Foucault's theory of true discourses developed in his 1980‐1981 lecture course 'Subjectivity and Truth'. In this course Foucault argues for non‐necessary and supplementary character of truths in relation to the reality of which they speak. This argument leads him to abandon the familiar approaches to truth as reflecting, concealing or rationalizing reality and look for the effects of truth in the processes of subjectivation. We explore the affinities of this concept of truth with Alain Badiou's theory of truth procedures, which was developed as an alternative to Foucault's alleged empiricism. Finally, we discuss the way Foucault constructs the relation between truth and democracy and highlight its differences from contemporary truth denialism. ; peerReviewed

The chapter elucidates the disposition of the critical IR scholar by exploring the resonances between the political subject and the figure of the critic. While the critical disposition is often contrasted with proper politics as overly negative and devoid of constructive effects, I argue that political praxis and critical activity share a similar modus operandi in overcoming exclusions, overturning hierarchies and abolishing restrictions in a given world. The political subject is not a poet, artist or 'world-maker', but a pitiless critic of the worlds s/he finds itself in. Critical IR is therefore a political intervention into the world of the IR discipline that does not seek to consolidate a specific identity within its disciplinary structure but rather to problematize this structure in its entirety. ; peerReviewed

The article addresses the reinterpretation of the problematic of security in the messianic turn in contemporary continental political thought. I focus on Giorgio Agamben's reinterpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan in Stasis, which restores an eschatological dimension to this foundational text of modern security politics. Hobbes's commonwealth has been traditionally read as a secularized version of the katechon, a force that restrains the state of nature while drawing on its resources. Instead, Agamben argues that for Hobbes, the state is neither the analogue of God's kingdom on earth nor the katechon that delays its arrival, but the profane power that will disappear when the kingdom of God is established on earth. It is thus in principle incapable of attaining the peace and security that it claims to provide, perpetually producing insecurity and violence in the guise of protection. In Agamben's reading, it is precisely this failure of the state's security apparatuses that assists the advent of the messianic event in an oblique fashion. The exposure of this failure does not aspire to the improvement of the apparatuses of security or resign us to inescapable insecurity but only affirms the need to render the present apparatuses inoperative, bringing forth a future without them.