The creative threshold: Foucault, Agamben and representation

Abstract

Michel Foucault's The Order of Things compliments Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer; Sovereign Power and Bare Life to show how the field of epistemic representation is generated. My theory begins with man at the threshold of epistemic representations. Through his analyses of Las Meninas, the cogito, and the possibility of discovering the origin of man's representation, Foucault shows that representations do not fully capture man and that the visibility of discourse connects man to representations. Agamben clarifies the actions within this visibility by showing the sovereign is the example that is the limit which is not figured in the law's representation. Counter to Antonio Negri, Agamben shows how the sovereign example manifesting constituent power is not fully contained in the representational field. Finally, the sovereign's killing of homo sacer at the law's threshold actualizes the representational set. In this thesis I have argued that the threshold generates the representational field.