Sovranità dislocate: Foucault contro il Leviatano

Michel Foucault’s research is one of the most innovative and interesting experiments of political thought beyond Leviathan. Indeed, Foucault argues for the need to abandon a model of analysis of power based on the central role of state sovereignty and its predominantly repressive action («What we need is a political philosophy that is not built around the problem of sovereignty, therefore of the law, therefore of interdiction. We must cut the king’s head: it has not yet been done in political theory»). For Hobbes, on the contrary, the sovereign power is absolute (legibus solutus), otherwise it cannot be defined sovereign, and the modern rule of law is born thanks to a pact between the associates in order to overcome the state of nature in which men find themselves to have all of them the same rights over everything and engage in a war that sees everyone against all (bellum omnium contra omnes). Tese are two models of analysis of the concept of “sovereignty”, and therefore of power, apparently opposed to each other but actually displaced on different levels and, therefore, superimposable. Tis article aims to highlight the salient features of the two paradigms of “sovereignty” in Foucault and Hobbes.