As the colonial body was put to work for the global nomos, the European subject experienced Westphalia as a suspension of the threat of annihilation, affirming the primacy of the body. Under the Westphalian system, it was the maintenance of life which acted as ordering principle, with the modern state exercising power over ‘the population in a preventative fashion … optimising life chances’ (link, p. 246).
Foucault describes this mode of power as ‘biopolitics’; that is, power enacted on the biological and collective characteristics of the political community in
the service of life. Now, Hobbes suggests that the traditional incarnation of sovereign power in the pre-Westphalian system was also predicated on the …
