1 Power as sumbolon: Sovereignty, governmentality and the international. Mitchell Dean, CBS, Denmark, md.mpp@cbs.dk Presented at Biopolitics, governmentality, (security) dispositifs. Concepts for the study of the International?, CERI-Sciences Po, January 13-14, 2014, Paris. While it could be argued that Foucault was concerned with power throughout his entire work, it is in the nineteen-seventies that it receives his most explicit treatment. (As a way of summarizing his manifold contributions to what concerns us in this meeting), I first offer a thought-figure through which we can understand his investigations on power (§i). 1 I next use that figure to offer an overview of the trajectory of his analysis of power and its main concepts (§ii). I shall then suggest how the international domain is approached in these investigations, and how we might think with but go beyond Foucault himself (§iii). I conclude by suggesting how we might remain loyally unfaithful to his approach to power more broadly (§iv). 2 I In the recently published lectures of 1980, Du gouvernement des vivants, Foucault returns to the etymology of the symbol, the Greek sumbolon, a platter in which two halves have been broken. 3 The context is a discussion of the excessive manifestation of truth beyond the effective exercise of power. The same figure appears without name in a comparison of the structure of two plays in the 1983 lectures on parrhesia and forms of truth-telling. He had previously discussed this same figure at length on several previous occasions in his readings of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. 4 The first, in a 1971 lecture in his initial series at the Collège de France, actually contains a table of the sumbolon in that drama reproduced from the notes of an auditor. There is an extended version of the lecture