In his recent works, Giorgio Agamben has suggested that it is above all in the Christian theological tradition of oikonomia, dispositio, providentia and gubernatione mundi, that we should search for the roots of biopolitics, one in which non-violence as “spontaneity” and “naturalness” (as opposed to violentus as “unnatural”) is related to the invisibility of the governance. Against this background, the aim of this paper is, firstly, to show that contrary to Agamben’s claims, Michel Foucault was not ignorant, in his late 1970s thought, of these theological (“providential”) roots of the biopolitical rationality of non-violence. Secondly, the aim is to show that in Foucault’s analyses of biopolitical security, the non-violence-”spontaneity”-”naturalness” of the former is most centrally related to its “anti-panoptic” (as well as non-plastic) character, i.e. to a certain “denigration of vision”, to an essential limitation of the powers of seeing and visibility, as well as to concomitant warnings against the hubris of gaze. The paper also discusses the pertinence of these points for studying neo-liberal governance.
