Foucault News

Patrick G. Stefan, The Power of Resurrection. Foucault, Discipline, and Early Christian Resistance, Lexington Books / Fortress Academic, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

How did the early Christian movement grow so quickly, and did the idea of resurrection have anything to do with its growth? Patrick G. Stefan offers an answer to both of these questions by searching at the intersection of the investigation of Christian origins and Continental philosophy. He documents the rise of the disciplined subject with the emergence of Christianity and argues that the early success of the Christian movement was due, in part, to the activation and deployment of what Michel Foucault calls disciplinary mechanisms of power. This activation took place through the instantiation of the idea of resurrection in early Christian material and textual existence. The activation of these mechanisms created a sub-class of disciplined individuals with the ability to envision life outside of the sovereign power of Caesar.

By building on Foucault’s methodology of examining how material conditions shape and create individual subjects, this book takes as its point of departure Foucault’s unexplored observation that “[Christianity] proposed and spread new power relations throughout the ancient world.” From this departure point, Stefan seeks to demonstrate that these new power relations were connected to an idea (resurrection) and formed the early history of disciplinary power.

Gavin Rae,Critiquing Sovereign Violence. Law, Biopolitics, Bio-Juridicalism Edinburgh University Press, 2019

Critiques the historically dominant classic–juridical model of sovereign violence and defends a bio-juridical model instead

• Works across the disciplines of critical theory, political theory, biopolitical theory, poststructuralism and deconstruction
• Develops three models – radical-juridical, biopolitical, and bio-juridical – to understand contemporary debates
• Situates current thinking in relation to the classic–juridical model, thereby linking contemporary debates to historical ones
• Moves beyond the dominant biopolitical model to a bio-juridical paradigm

Gavin Rae offers an original approach to sovereign violence by looking at a wide range of thinkers, which he organises into three models. Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari form the radical-juridical perspective; Foucault and Agamben the biopolitical; Derrida the bio-juridical – which Rae argues produces the most nuanced account.