Modern Biopolitics and the Marquis de Sade’s Legacy. A Theological-Political Reading

Abstract

This article intends to explore Giorgio Agamben’s hypothesis according to which Michel Foucault engagement with S/M practices and, in a broader sense, his relationship with the works of the Marquis de Sade, convey fundamental elements in order to understand the problem of “governmentality” and biopolitics. Using different theoretical sources, particularly Jacques Lacan’s analysis of Immanuel Kant and Marquis de Sade, the text intends to carry on a genealogy of pain as pleasure in the Christian Political Theology. The influence of Christian Theology in De Sade and Sacher Masoch’s theories is here advanced as a hypothesis together with the identification of the specifically modern contributions that these authors have produced regarding the sexuality as a biopolitical problem. Finally, a reading of Foucault’s theories on S/M practices is also proposed with the aim of establishing both its connections with the Sadean legacy and the possibility of enquiring about an affirmative biopolitics.