Politics without action, economy without labor

Politics and economy, sovereignty and governance, Father and Son, law and order: this is the series of binaries along which Giorgio Agamben, in Il regno e la gloria, strings his analysis of the current dominance of management over all aspects of social life. By seeking to demonstrate how the paradigm of oikonomia, particularly as developed in arguments about the Trinity among 2nd-century AD theologians, provides a hidden but crucial current in the genealogy of contemporary forms of power, Agamben parts ways with the main thrust of Western political theory, which focuses its analysis upon sovereignty. Conversely, he refuses the path of many of Michel Foucault's latter day interpreters, who insist that the historical break with sovereignty has been decisive and that power now takes exclusively the horizontal and decentered form of governance. For Agamben, there are always two poles to what he calls the bipolar machine of power. Even if, as today, there is a primacy of governance, both poles remain present. If sovereign power were absent, there would be no government. Rather, there would be another form of power.