Is it possible to speak of political conflict in the modern age? Modern political science can be described as a theoretical operation aimed at excluding conflict by abstracting individuals from their relational fabric and constructing the fiction of a sovereign to obey—since only the sovereign can guarantee peace. Michel Foucault denounced this, attempting to revitalize political conflict after the great modern depoliticization. Decades later, Giorgio Agamben engaged with the theme of civil war, describing it as the great hidden secret upon which modern politics is founded as a guarantor of peace. This series of lectures aims to analyse the different ways in which Foucault and Agamben have used the theme of war to expose modern political theory in its most concealed aspects.
In 1976, Foucault initiated an experiment to rethink politics beyond modern theory. His hope was to revive political conflict by requalifying subjects in a historical and political sense, beyond the modern annihilation of their agency. However, his experiment resulted in failure, as modern subjects tend to replicate the typically modern theological-political dialectic, continuously constituting and reconstituting new sovereigns under whose rule politics remains annihilated.
At that point, Foucault did not go much further than what Carl Schmitt had already acknowledged, while still retaining modern political concepts—namely, the close kinship between politics and war. In a recently added section to one of his 2015 works, which has never been translated into other languages, Giorgio Agamben hypothesizes that Schmitt’s recognition conceals what modern political theory truly fears: not the introduction of war into politics, but the reduction of politics to play. While the antagonistic aspect of modern political theology is acknowledged, what remains hidden is the truly conflictual nature of politics—its agonistic dimension—which modern political theory has annihilated.
Rediscovering the agonistic nature of politics means rediscovering its inherently conflictual nature, in which society is driven by concrete and historical forces engaged in an unending confrontation. This is precisely what Foucault rediscovers in the 1980s by turning to ancient politics, with particular interest in the life of the Cynics.
1. Polemicizing Reality
Michel Foucault’s entire philosophical work is dedicated to questioning the concepts we use in our thinking and actions. These concepts appear universal, ahistorical, and justified by their supposed naturalness. However, they possess a history of their own: they are formulated and upheld by complex theoretical or political strategies aimed at concealing their contingency and partiality, imposing them as universal. Genealogy is a method Foucault developed in the 1970s while engaging with Nietzsche’s work. Through the genealogical perspective, it becomes possible to uncover the tumultuous history behind concepts and the power structures they justify.
In a 1974 lecture, Foucault reconstructs how the modern conceptual constellation asserts itself by projecting its partiality onto a universal scale, thereby obscuring its contingency and effectively preventing any possible contestation. In a seminal 1977 article, Foucault systematizes the genealogical method as a tool for revealing the conflicts from which all historical positivity emerges.
Key Texts:
- Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power (1974), New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 235-247.
- Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1977), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by D. F. Bouchard, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1980, 139-164.
2. Polemology and Self-Dialectization
During the 1976 academic course, Foucault attempts to break through the curtain of modern Hobbesian political theory. He criticizes the depoliticization of human life, achieved by reducing politics to a cycle in which a pure, individual subject—naturally free and equal to all others, abstracted from any relationship—ultimately becomes a subject subjugated to power, relating only to the sovereign authority. There seems to be no room for concrete relationships and conflict in modern political theory.
Foucault questions the nature of conflict in Hobbes. He questions whether there is actually war in Hobbes, since what we find in the pages of the founder of modern political science is merely mutual suspicion, threats, and fear. These are the elements that the theorist of sovereignty employs to describe the establishment of sovereign power as the plea for protection by subjects terrified by fear. Thus, Foucault takes on the task of reactivating the true conflict—not mere mutual fear, nor even the war of all against all, but rather the partisan struggles laden with history and politics.
Even sovereign power itself was once one of these historical-political factions, yet it imposed itself by casting a shadow over political conflict, reducing it to mere fear in the absence of sovereign authority. The lesson aims to show how Foucault’s polemological experiment ultimately fails: the philosopher sought to revive a politics annihilated by modern theory, yet he soon realized that reactivating historical-political factions only led them to reproduce the same dialectic of sovereignty. The problem lies precisely in the geometry of modern power, which frames conflict as an accident to be avoided—an antagonism to sovereign authority that, in the end, merely serves to establish a new sovereign power.
Key Text:
- Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (1976), New York, Picador, 2003, 1-64, 215-237.
3. War as a Challenge for Western Political Ontology
For Foucault, war can be a useful framework for understanding the true nature of historical relations. Agamben’s political ontology does not aim to reignite the historical and political forces that modern political theory has annihilated, but rather to trace the ontological form of all Western thought. Agamben sees in civil war—a war that threatens an established civil order—the opportunity to challenge the distinctions made by Western politics throughout history. If Western culture operates through the exception, which combines metaphysics and nihilism, civil war inverts the movement of the exception and brings to light the original “indistinguishabilities” through which this movement passes. With Agamben, the focus is not so much on historicity, but on the transcendental origin, a condition coextensive with any historicity, and for this reason, civil war is understood not because it is a tumultuous historical element, but because of its ability to illuminate the urgency of Western political ontology to draw zones of indistinction on which sovereign decisions can make their distinctions.
For Agamben, civil war is the reagent that brings to light the intrinsic politicization of what Western thought throughout history has defined as apolitical, in order to impose its sovereign decisions upon it. By reading the historiographical work of Loraux and the Hobbesian classics, Agamben analyses the different historical ways in which civil war can challenge the established order and, for this reason, has been constantly excluded from the political realm. In the premodern world, civil war would demonstrate how the apolitical is always active within the political, while in the modern world, civil war is that from which the political is constituted through its exclusion, but precisely for this reason, it is also what gives the political its meaning.
Key Text:
- Giorgio Agamben, Stasis. Civil War as a Political Paradigm, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2015.
4. Politics Between Seriousness and Play
In an additional chapter of Stasis, published in 2018 and never translated into other languages, Agamben notes how contemporary thought, with Schmitt, has finally accepted the need to come to terms with the polemological dimension of politics, with what modern political thought has always sought to conceal. Yet something still remains hidden; something that political thought still refuses to confess. It is a crucial element, which not only does Agamben not fully develop in a historical analysis of Western politics, but also explains the failure of the Foucauldian experiment and the shift towards ancient ethics.
In some curious passages of his work, Schmitt asserts the seriousness of the political by describing it as the confrontation with the enemy. This grants the utmost seriousness to the political. In so doing, Schmitt excludes the possibility of politics being seen as a game, as Huizinga proposed in his genealogy of play in antiquity. This lesson is dedicated to read and interpret the new section of Giorgio Agamben’s book.
I will discuss how modern politics arises from the depoliticization of relations, from the annihilation of concrete and conflicting relationships, and from the promise of Pax et Justitia. Contemporary politics admits this latent and constant presence of war in modern politics, but only in the form of antagonism, that is, the clash with the established power that represents the people, in other words, the intrusion of the enemy. What contemporary politics continues to deny is the agonism intrinsic to the concrete relations between humans, on whose depoliticization the modern sovereign order is based.
Key Text:
- Giorgio Agamben, Nota sulla guerra, il gioco e il nemico, in Id., Stasis. La guerra civile come paradigma politico. Homo sacer. Ediz. Ampliata, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri 2019 (the lecturer will provide PDF).
Recommended reading:
- Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Interruption of Time into Play, Corvallis, Plutarch Press, 2006.
5. Ancient Agonism as a Revival of Political Conflict
I will assume the modern conceptual constellation as a theoretical aggregate. It consists of the constitution of a power whose actual historical genealogy is rendered inaccessible precisely by theory: the latter describes the formation of sovereign power as the plea of a multitude of frightened individuals. They authorize the sovereign to order their lives through his will, which becomes law. Obedience is owed to the sovereign based on authorization—formally and regardless of the content of the sovereign’s decisions. For this reason, all conflict is excluded. The only form of instability is that which overthrows power and establishes a new one. Schmitt places at the core of his work precisely this struggle against the enemy as the true and only essence of politics, leaving in the shadows the more vivid and concrete agonism that could animate society beyond the formal structure of sovereign power.
The failure of the polemological experiment of 1976 is due to the fact that the antagonistic form through which Foucault sought to revive modern political nihilism is itself part of political modernity. Self-dialectization is precisely the dialectic that Hobbes excludes from his idea of politics and that Schmitt admits to be the only form of politics still possible after modernity. If Schmitt places war at the centre of his definition of the political, it is because he knows that modernity must take care to conceal something even more dangerous: play, in the etymological sense of agon.
Foucault’s research in the 1980s can be understood as an effort to engage with a politics revitalized not through modern antagonism, but through the recovery of premodern agonism. The protagonists are no longer the abstract figures of modernity, that is, transcendental subjects, but rather the concrete relations that segment collective life and imbue both individual and collective identities with meaning. This is not, however, an irenic vision of political life; rather, it is a recovery of true conflictuality after the annihilation of relationships brought about by modern mechanistic thought and its corresponding idea of politics and law.
As an emblem of this agonistic conflictuality, Foucault’s reconstruction of the Cynic practice will be examined. Foucault’s intent proves to be that of escaping an idea of truth as a sovereign (and scientific) horizon. It is, even at the cost of one’s life, about bringing to light the concrete truth of the relational entanglements and powers in which we are immersed, and stretching their threads to the point of even tearing them apart.
Key Text:
- Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth (1984), New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 117-176.
Recommended reading:
- Daniele Lorenzini, The Force of Truth, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago, 2023, 15-54.