Despite Agamben’s assertion that his project somehow corrects or completes Foucault’s political thoughts, it seems that there are some deep and fundamental differences between them. Foucault rejects any kind of theory of power and believes that the analysis of power in the contemporary world should be freed from juridical-theological presuppositions. In contrast, in Agamben’s thought we come across some obvious elements of the classical understating of power and its theological presupposition so that political theology is a basic constituent of his theory about sovereign power. Though Foucault’s aim is mostly to analyze power’s mechanisms according to a micro-politics, he never thinks about the role of a person or state and his/her or its decision as a foundation for political situation. In contrast, he regards such a point of view as the feature of the classical theories about power. For him power is a Nietzschean concept which is the foundation of everything. Agamben, following Schmitt, regards power as the sovereign power. He believes that there is a logic for our contemporary political situation called “the state of exception”, that is the result of sovereign decision. This article tries to analyze the meaning and mechanism of biopower and biopolitics in both thinkers and explain the way that Agamben’s political theory can be said to be rooted in Foucault’s analysis.

After the post-communist period and the domination of neoliberalism in politics and society, various thinkers tried to find a new way to revive differences in a new age. One of these thinkers is Giorgio Agamben. In his writings and works, he attempts to introduce oppressive differences such as women, refugees, immigrants and others into politics, providing the foundation for the "future community". He is looking for a way to dispel the natural order from the domination of political order, and therefore looks at the "language" as a secure backing. Agamben seeks to build a community in the future that can restore normal human life to the scene. Therefore, the permanent change of the subject in the form of singularity and movement within a happy society creates a kind of permanent fluidity between the entire human being and its unique.

The main concern of Agamben in The Man without Content is the problem of art as a result of and even the foundation of contemporary nihilism. He believes that art since it has begun to be treated as a subject of aesthetics and taste has lost its fundamental functions and powers in opening the human world and revealing the truth. Drawing on Heidegger, Benjamin, and Baudelaire, this article attempts to analyze and interpret the thoughts of Giorgio Agamben about the destruction of aesthetics, what he means by that and how he proceeds. Following Heidegger, Agamben intends to destroy aesthetics in search of rediscovering and reviving the origins (archai) that are hidden and forgotten in the ruins of the tradition. Based on the concept of poiesis as the essential feature of art, in contrast to praxis as the only action of man in modernity, he tries to diagnose the contemporary condition of art. In the search of original structure or the essence of art as poetic action of human beings, Agamben believes that the role of art in our contemporary situation is to fill the gap between the past and the present because in our nihilistic situation tradition cannot transfer its meaning and truth to us, so we encounter it just as a cultural heritage.

The research program of Agamben, the famous philosopher of neo-marxism, exposes the anarchic nature of law as an apparatus for gaining power. This apparatus is used in State of exception through the suspension of the law. Contrary to the government's claim, what provides the ontological basis for the suspension of the law is not the violation of the law, but the originality of the law. Agamben attacks it. It even negates the national state in implicit implications. This negation expresses the ideal of the universal unity of communism. However the historical coordinates of contemporary Iran are: lack of national state, lack of law, projection (conspiracy theory), and political-economic populism. Given these coordinates, a reflexivity of Agamben's theoretical apparatus from a local perspective is necessary. In a statement, Agamben called health protocols in the age of the corona pandemic useless and conspiratorial, in other words, he called us to violate the relevant laws. His remarks confirm the need to consciously confront the views of neo-Marxism in Iran. Accordingly, the present article, with a brief essay on juridical identity, typical identity, and the playing identity of the modern state in Iran, reminds us of the need for indigenous attention to the theories of neo-Marxism. The findings of this analytical article show that the identity of the modern state in Iran is bureaucratic, undemocratic, and antagonistic. Therefore, what has provided the ontological origin of the suspension of law in Iran is not the originality and legitimacy of the law. origin of the suspension of the law in Iran are: the political metaphysics of illegality, the originality of the charisma of the ruling person, the originality of anti-colonialism, the originality of anti-imperialism and global capitalism, the originality of a particular reading from religion.

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading thinkers of our time. He aspires to bring Walter Benjamin's project of future philosophy to completion through a complicated sort of archeological thinking. He believed that Kant had thought of philosophical archeology before Foucault did, and that he did not bring this thought to fruition. Taking the path of philosophical archeology, Agamben's approach is distinguished from that of Foucault due to His debt to Heidegger. This has led to his new treatment of words and the nature of language that can be introduced as an "archeology of concepts." An archeology of concepts involves the application of philosophical archeology to the examination of language and the function of words when man encounters Being as an opened-up being towards Being. The concept is fraught with a particular temporal understanding, in turn loaded with an "arche" which can merely be approached by archeology. This article shows that understanding Agamben's philosophical methodology requires an appropriate conception of an influential concept in his philosophy, namely that of "potentiality". Potentiality paves the way for attaining the arche of things. That is why archeology is fundamentally based on potentiality. This concept has made Agamben's philosophy face new and old problems of man and philosophy in a differentlight. The most significant of these problems is Heidegger's relation of Being and language.

The transitional period of the 1970s Britain being fictionalized in Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Ice Age (1977), provides the ground for theoretical discussion of the present paper that is based on the insights of Giorgio Agamben. It will inspect the way Drabble interprets socio-political issues dominant in the 1970s and the way these issues affect her outlook. In this paper, considering the figure of an excluded existence in The Ice Age, Agamben’s biopolitical insights are examined to see how they may contribute to understanding of the dark side of sovereignty and the potentiality to transform democracies into totalitarian states. Taking the precariousness of the emotional, political and, ontological faculties of “love”, “homo sacer”, and “bare life” allocated to human being by sovereignty, it offers a different view of Drabble’s subjects on love and socio-political problems, maintaining that Agamben’s account of these issues supplies an underlying structure of the form-of-life. The paper also, through the striking features of Agamben’s discourse, approaches the concept of bare life and knits it to the concepts of instrumentalism, labor, slavery, and life, and fundamentally presents the awareness of self in political view. The characters examine some potentialities that may help them to break away from the prevailing deadlocks of the era. It is eventually shown that these practices, which according to Agamben may lead to a form-of-life that is called a happy life, conclude in the exclusion and spiritual void of the individuals.

Shutter Island is a movie that depicts the atrocities of the Second World War by the representation of the traumas inflicted on the modern man’s mind. In the movie Teddy Daniels is trapped in the labyrinth of psychiatry to recover from the trauma of his presence in concentration camps. Therefore, in Shutter Island, concentration camp and psychiatric asylum are intertwined by different images. According to Foucault, the formation of madhouses in modern society and the psychiatric authority on the patients is a means for insertion of modern power on man. He, indeed, believed that these power mechanisms were inserted in two levels. While the first level was psychiatric, the other method, lobotomy or brain surgery, was based on physiological alteration. Furthermore, Agamben introduced camp as a paradigm by which the Western states insert their power on man. He considers camp as the consequence of putting men in state of exception and the best condition for touching their physiological entity. Agamben believes that in this biopolitical procedure the deformed human bodies are made. He names this biological condition “bare life”. Bare life is “a biological condition in which the human is not dead or alive, but living on the opaque inhuman boundary of life and death. In Shutter Island the intertwinement of the images related to camp and psychiatric asylum shows that these two areas play a major role on the formation of Teddy’s identity as the contemporary man. Therefore, in this article, Foucault’s and Agamben’s ideas about the modern man’s formation of lifeworld are utilized. In this article, the intertwinement of camp and asylum images is studied by Jakobson’s and Lodge’s ideas about the entanglement of the metaphoric and metonymic poles. Accordingly, the interrelation of Foucault’s ideas about the formation of docile bodies and Agamben’s ideas about the infliction of “bare life” are used as the theoretical framework. This article clarifies that the process of formation of Teddy Daniel’s life is tantamount to the formation of bare life.

In the tradition of Western political philosophy, there are two general views on the nature of power, which can be called transcendental and immanent approaches. Sovereignty or transcendental power is applied from above and gives power an essential existence and reality which is the source of legitimacy. Governmentality or immanent power is applied from below and at the micro-level of social and political structures and rejects any kind of transcendental origin for power. Historically, Hobbes is the main representative of the first approach, and Foucault is the representative of the second approach to power. According to Agamben, both of these approaches are incomplete and one-dimensional and are unable to present a coherent theory about power. Agamben tries to link these levels again in a general theory. We want to show that, according to Agamben's belief, firstly, the transcendental and immanent dimensions, are two complementary poles of a single structure. And secondly, to show how Agamben seeks the root of this two-dimensional structure of power in Christian theology and considers the paradigms of political theology and economic theology as the roots of the theories of sovereignty and Governmentality, respectively.

The abstract of the present article, drawing on Agamben's insights, examines how the modern state functions as an apparatus in relation to the human subject – a functionality encompassing the management and control of individuals within a complex network of power relations and technologies. In light of these considerations, the authors, in accordance with the concepts of "bare life" and "state of exception," endeavor to scrutinize the subjugation of the human subject by governing authorities and the suspension of legal norms as a fundamental critique of the essence of the modern state. This research seeks to respond to the question, through a ontological approach, in alignment with Agamben's political philosophy, how the modern state and the human subject establish their relationship. The findings of this study demonstrate that Agamben, by introducing profound critiques of the nature of the modern state, calls for a reevaluation of political structures and the revitalization of the inherent dignity and rights of the human subject. In his perspective, the state must be founded on a robust citizenship that supports the fundamental humanity of all individuals, rather than creating categories of exclusion and bare life. The modern state employs mechanisms of control and surveillance to perpetuate its authority, even at the expense of individual freedoms. Agamben, in critiquing the nature of the modern state, advocates for a reexamination of political structures and the restoration of human dignity in society.