ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a fundamental break between G. Agamben and Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and resistance. It examines the potential of Agamben’s inoperativity as a strategic form of radical passivity to jam and disrupt the biopolitical apparatus and this is coupled to fresh insights about how resistance can contribute to ungovernability. For critical social work a trajectory for rethinking a New Left Politics may well be to craft an alliance between communism and insurgency from the perspective of an affirmative biopolitics of transformation. An emerging body of feminist literature develops a novel approach to radical passivity which resonates neatly with Agamben’s political ontology of inoperativity. In Agamben’s biopolitical terms what is performed in the hunger strike is the collapse of the distinctions between sovereignty and bare life, will and passivity, potentiality and actuality.
