In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben criticizes Michel Foucaultʹs distinction between "productive" bio-power and "deductive" sovereign power, emphasizing that it is not possible to distinguish between these two. In his view, the production of what he calls "bare life" is the original, although concealed, activity of sovereign power. In this article, Agambenʹs conclusions are called into question.(1) The notion of "bare life", distinguished from the "form of life", belongs exclusively to the order of sovereignty, being incompatible with the modern bio-political notion of life, that is univocal and immanent to itself. In the era of biopolitics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe ("form-of-life"). (2) Violence is not hidden in the foundation of bio-politics; the "hidden" foundation of bio-politics is love (agape) and care (cura), "care for individual life". (3) Bio-politics is not absolutized in the Third Reich; the only thing that the Third Reich absolutizes is the sovereignty of power (Aryan race) and the nakedness of life (the Jews). (4) St Paulʹs "messianic revolution" does not endow us with the means of breaking away from the closure of bio-political rationality; on the contrary, Paulʹs "messianic revolution" is a historical precondition for the deployment of modern bio-politics. (5) Instead of homo sacer, who is permitted to kill without committing homicide, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat.As Spinoza had said, it is a problem of love and hate and not judgment Gilles Deleuze, To Have Done with Judgment

Even a superficial look at the classical ideas and practices of government of populations makes it immediately apparent that there is a peculiarity in Foucault's genealogy of western bio-politics and governmentality. According to Foucault, western governmental rationality can be traced back to the Judeo-Christian tradition in general and to the Christian ideology and practice of the pastorate in particular. In this article, my purpose is to show that Christianity was not the prelude to what Foucault calls governmentality but rather marked a rupture in the development that started in classical Greece and Rome and continued in early modern Europe. With the rise of Christianity, the majority of these classical practices, including negative eugenics and even family policies, either faded into the background or they were rejected outright.

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