Progressive Geographies

Mitchell Dean, “Governmentality Meets Theology: ‘The King Reigns, but He Does Not Govern’”, Theory, Culture & Society, May 2012 vol. 29 no. 3 145-158 (requires subscription; via Foucault News). A detailed review with some close discussion of the relation of the book to Foucault’s work on governmentality – Dean is the author of one of the key texts on this period of Foucault’s work (Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society) – and to Carl Schmitt. Here’s the abstract:

While this ‘extraordinary’ book appears as an intermezzo within the Homo Sacer series (Negri, 2008), 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.