The State as Practice and Prism: Investigating the State as Governmentality, Statification and State Practice with Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben

Michel Foucault’s lecture series Security, Territory, Population (1977-78) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79) were dedicated to writing a ‘history of governmentality’. The notion of governmentality has subsequently become very popular in investigating contemporary forms of government beyond the (sovereign, nation) state. However, few take account for nor analyse the specific context in which Foucault developed it; as a way to investigate the emergence of the modern state without assuming the given entity and universal of the state. One notable exception is Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory (2007). This article uses Agamben’s reworking and radicalisation of the notion of governmentality as a stepping stone to re-evaluate the notion of governmentality as a way to investigate the state both historically and actually.