Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, and the Thinking of the Beginning

Biopolitics (bio-power, bio-history) is a notion of Foucault’s that Derrida adresses indirectly, targeting Agamben as proxy. To begin with, Foucault himself seems indeed to have backed out from expressing himself in these terms after 1978 and The Birth of Biopolitics. A study of his texts shows that Foucault’s idea of biopolitics or bio-power is closely related to physiocracy considered as an arche of liberalism. But the very notion of such a historical emergence is crucially incompatible with Derrida’s thinking of the livingness of the living, as reasserted in Life Death. It may very well be an example of what Heidegger called the thinking of the beginning, and ultimately a false track. Derrida’s criticism of Agamben in The Beast and the Sovereign hinges on this, precisely insofar as the Italian philosopher took Foucault’s biopolitics hypothesis seriously, up to a certain point.