Author: YAO Yunfan, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Eastern China Normal University.
Abstract:
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s bio-political paradigm, Giorgio Agamben used the concept of “bare life” to present the dilemma between the operation of modern sovereign power and individual life. With it he attempts to understand the double bind of life and political power through a form-material relationship. In The Highest Poverty: The Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, Agamben seeks to overcome the dilemma by criticizing Michel Foucault’s understanding of the “medieval discipline” of monastic ascetic practices. Foucault regards the monastic religious practices as a typical example of the exercise of priestly power, which led to the control of body through apathetic control of the monks’ souls. By a detailed analysis of the concepts of habitus, meditatio and form-of-life in The Highest Poverty, the author argues that Agamben did not regard monastic rules as a regulative form shaped by leading priests, rather, that these rules were the means of substituting a common life for private or individual life. Unlike Foucault’s critical posture of “de-formalization” of the medieval monastic disciplinary apparatus, Agamben reveals the positive dimensions of monastic life by finding in its operations a “de-materalization” of private life. This paper concludes that Agamben’s operations opened a way to a possible “medieval communism” which would be a critical source for overcoming aporia in the bio-political paradigm.
Keywords:
Bio-politics; Bare Life; Poverty; Regula; Common Life; Form-of-Life
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