ABSTRACT
Early in his writing life, Michel Foucault began working on the history of socially modern institutions that functioned duplicitly to liberate moderns while also excluding them into a network of confinements. Foucault was not alone in exploring the ways modern democratic societies contradict their own false claims to promoting the liberty of individuals. While Foucault’s biopower tends to retain a touch of the liberal democratic assumption that allows the subject some promise of resisting the objective force of political bio-power, Deleuze and Guattari insist that (to put it crudely) a subject’s desires enjoy no particular freedom from the capitalist machine. According to Giorgio Agamben, the democratic State is a state of exclusion in which its sacred values cannot help but lead to death—to death camps as a definitive political order in which all life is bare and all are sacrificed.
