Abstract/Summary

Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer proposes that the public display of power over life and death that Foucault restricts to the 18th century were not displaced by the new disciplinary structures associated with the hospital and the asylum, but remained contemporary with them. This notion of the simultaneity of surveillance and spectacle can be helpful in thinking about Beckett’s novel The Unnamable. Agamben’s work can also demonstrate the centrality of the character of Worm. In this way the broader notion of biopolitics can usefully illuminate the historical and political contexts of the book.