Abstract

The author takes as a starting point Agamben's assumption in The Kingdom and the Glory that the economy through which God rules the world is completely separate from his being and not inferable from it. Hence, from its very beginning we find at the heart of Christian theology an economic managerial paradigm, not at all political and juridical. According to Agamben, the task is to articulate again the genealogy of what Foucault called modern «governmentality», whose source he had come to identify with the Christian «pastorate», namely the «government of souls». The author challenges Agamben's thesis of economic theology contrasting it with Foucault's 1977-79 lectures at the Collège de France on modern governmentality.