Please find bellow the corrected date for Daniel McLoughlin's paper on Tuesday.


Date:               Tuesday 3 September
Time:              1 p.m.
Venue:           Morven Brown 310, University of NSW (map reference C20: 
(1.7MB)<http://www.facilities.unsw.edu.au/Maps/pdf/kensington.pdf>)


Dr Daniel McLoughlin (Law, UNSW)



>From Sovereignty to Government: on Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory

The analysis of sovereignty and the state of exception developed by Giorgio 
Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life was profoundly influential 
for critical theory as it grappled with issues of as security, war and state 
violence in the wake of September 11 2001.  Agamben has, however, been 
criticised (particularly by scholars influenced by Marx and Foucault) for 
fetishising law and violence at the expense of analysing the economic and 
governmental forms of power that dominate contemporary capitalist societies.  
In the recently translated The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben turns his 
attention to economy and government and reaches the conclusion that “the real 
problem, the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it 
is not God, but the angel; it is not the king, but ministry; it is not the law, 
but the police - that is to say, the governmental machine that they form and 
support.”  This paper asks whether and to what extent this thesis is consistent 
with his earlier analysis of the political in terms of sovereignty.  I argue 
that, while Agamben’s account of the ‘governmental machine’ is a decisive (and 
much needed) development of his political ontology, it is not a retreat from or 
break with his earlier thought, but has evolved out this work on the state of 
exception.   I conclude by considering the implications of this analysis for 
thinking the political in light of the security concerns that dominated the 
early years of the new millennium, and the current global crisis of capital 
accumulation.

Daniel Mcloughlin is Vice-Chancellor's Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Faculty of 
Law at the University of New South Wales. He is a legal theorist working in the 
critical and continental traditions of thought, and has published on 
sovereignty, political ontology, government, and political crises, with a 
particular emphasis on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt. He is 
currently completing a book manuscript on Agamben's legal and political thought.

Coordinator:
Dr Joanne Faulkner, [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
School of Humanities and Languages


Dr Joanne Faulkner
ARC DECRA Research Fellow
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Room 338, Morven Brown Building
University of New South Wales
Kensington, NSW 2052
Australia

[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
+61 2 9385 2287
https://hal.arts.unsw.edu.au/about-us/people/joanne-faulkner/<http://humanities.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/joanne-faulkner-633.html>
http://unsw.academia.edu/JoanneFaulkner

Co-Government/Institutional Representative, Australasian Society for 
Continental Philosophy: http://www.ascp.org.au<http://www.ascp.org.au/>

Ordinary Member of Council, Australasian Association of Philosophy: 
http://aap.org.au<http://aap.org.au/>/

Branch Vice-President, UNSW Branch of the NTEU, National Tertiary Education 
Industry Union: http://www.nteu.edu.au<http://www.nteu.edu.au/>
NTEU Office Tel: +61 2 9385 2479, email: 
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

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