In this South Asia Program (SAP) Seminar Series talk, Asad Ahmed examines Foucault’s appropriation of Bentham’s panopticon as the exemplification of a new mode of power by situating it in relation to Bentham’s pannomion to interrogate Foucault’s sharp distinction between sovereignty and disciplinary power. It suggests that a consideration of the pannomion project, that is, of legal codification through its historical instantiation in the Indian Penal Code allows one to track the connections between law, language and government as crucial to forms of power that contribute to a history of the postcolonial present.

Biography:  Asad Ali Ahmed’s research interests include secularism and religion, liberalism, language and the law, colonial and post-colonial studies, ethnography of the state, and South Asia. He received a Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2006), an M. Phil. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (1997), and a M.Sc. in Economic History from the London School of Economics & Political Science (1991).