The emergence of cynegetic knowledge-power and its (dis)continuities in respect to the regime of diciplinary power

Abstract

The article presents an analysis on the emergence of a regime of power which, based on the suggestion made by Chamayou (2012), can be conceptualized as a cynegetic knowledge-power. In the first part, this regime of power will be read in dialogue with the analytical contributions that Foucault developed in his dissection of the disciplinary society. On the basis of a conceptual horizon woven around the notions of penal tactic, war and dramaturgy, it will be argued that the disciplinary regime can be reappropriated in order to show a whole series of continuities and discontinuities that go as far as the shaping of the cynegetic knowledge-power. From there, in a second part, we will focus on the way in which the hunting of people emerges as a war-securitarian rationality that gives rise to different logics of action that are articulated around the killing, the catching and the chasing away. This heterogeneous way of proceeding, configuring diverse dispositives, will ultimately be projected onto those people that the securitarian ethos has characterized in terms of threatening-preys.