Course Description

This course is an advanced elective, suited for senior students who have already studied core,  foundational courses of Jurisprudence or Political theory. The elective builds primarily on  the entire oeuvre of Michel Foucault’s work on life and its management. It builds on  Jurisprudence or Political theory courses as it advances further from various theories of  sovereignty by Hobbes, Schmitt and liberal political discourses to understand the micro physics of power. The course stands as a critique of liberal state, thereby unearthing the  unstated assumptions in neo-liberalism by understanding how subjects are formed, how their  lives are constituted, managed, organised and controlled and how the lives are unmade by  focusing on whose lives/deaths are more grievable than others.

This elective is intensely theoretical in its structure but also connected to socio-legal issues.  The predominant theoretical framework for this course is that of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre,  ranging from his archaeological phase to genealogical understanding. Another important  theory relied would be Georgio Agamben’s work on homo sacer and permanent state of  exception. The flow of the lectures is framed in such a way that a trajectory of state power can  be mapped out, starting from creation of the subject to the management of the population and  their lives to finally an erasure of the same.

Although my approach in the course delves primarily with the western theoretical texts  (Foucault, Agamben, Hobbes etc), it also puts these texts in direct, critical conversations with  post-colonial societies. The course substantially deals with the application or rejection of the  theoretical frameworks in non-western societies by Asian, African and Indian scholars like  Sanyan, Partha Chatterjee, Mbembe, Baidik Bhattacharya etc. This intentional inclusion of  non-European and Indian scholarship is to ensure the testing of Western philosophy against  post-colonial socio-legal realities.

I have deliberately excluded literature critiquing the dominant theoretical frameworks of  Foucault and Agamben, for instance Habermas, Nancy Fraser or Ranciere etc. Adding these  would pull the course in a different direction away from the core thesis of the elective. This  elective applies the frameworks to socio-legal realities like anti-terror laws, surveillance debates, securitization as a façade among many others. Focusing on the critiques of Foucault  or Agamben would take the class discussions towards abstract philosophy, instead of teaching  students about ways to identify and resist the micro physics of power.

The flow of the course is structured in three conceptual modules. As mentioned above, the  sequence of the course traces the evolution of state power and sovereignty from the creation  of subject and their lives, through the statistical and organized management of population via  various forms of power, including disciplinary power, biopower, governmentality etc and  finally to the legal unmaking or legal death of the persons.

The first three weeks will focus on understanding the classical Hobbesian model of  sovereignty with the right to kill as contrasted with Foucauldian understanding of power to  “make live”. It explores the ideas of discourse, truth and how docile bodies are created. This  part of the course focuses on the physical body, exploring how various discourses categorize  bodies, thereby creating subjects.

The subsequent four weeks will then take the analysis to the level of population. Having  understood how individual subjects are formed and their lives constructed, the second part of  the course covers concepts like governmentality and biopower. It also integrates the post colonial experiences to understand the management of population through colonial  taxonomies and modern surveillance structures. This module reflects how state, unlike  Hobbesian’s right to kill, does not let people die, but rather actively organises, manages,  surveils them.

The last part of the course (last three weeks) introduces Agamben’s idea of bare life and state  of exception; Mbembe’s necropolitics. As a result of the management and surveillance tactics  established in part 2 above, the state apparatus actively manufactures death and debility. The  students will engage with the idea that rather than being the shortcomings or failures of a legal  system, civil erasure/death, statelessness happens because the system deliberately constructs these notions. The prominent question in this part would be whose lives are more grievable  than others? The discussions will revolve around the core idea that before legally letting  someone die, how does a state epistemologically frame them in such a way that their deaths  are not considered loss?