Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but ra-ther a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fun-damental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes …

This article argues that queer theory is useful for political theory in thinking about US empire and theorizing modes of resistance to it. In particular, it is argued that the work of Lee Edelman and Jasbir Puar can be appropriated for political theory and, when combined together into a single political project, help illuminate the temporal and sexual contours of US empire, providing crucial resources for theorizing “terrorism” and understanding it as an act of political resistance.