Biopolitics and coloniality. A critical reading of Homo sacer

Alejandro De Oto
adeoto@gmail.com
CONICET / Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco, Argentina

María Marta Quintana
mariamarta.quintana@gmail.com
CONICET / Universidad Nacional de Rionegro, Argentina

Abstract:

This paper revisit Giorgio Agamben’s theses — mainly present in Homo sacer I— on biopolitics, sovereign power and bare life. It aims to formulate a criticism to the author’s arguments emphasizing connection between some law arcana and certain technologies of population control, under the eminently ontological assumption of the question, which —from our perspective—, the phenomenon of biopolitics fall into. More precisely, in relation to the last one, we are asking a question about the place Colonialism occupies, not only in the 19th century, in the historical-conceptual argument Agamben moves through —even though Michel Foucault did it too, to a lesser extent. Conversely, it is noted the subsidiary place within which those colonial regime-like forms of “government on populations” are inscribed by these theoretical frameworks.

Keywords: biopolitics, colonialism, coloniality of time.