The Empty Throne: A Biopolitical Reading of Dostoevsky’s “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor”

“Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor,” two adjoining chapters in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, are usually read as a contest between two theologies: theodicy and anti-theodicy, freedom and obedience, Christ and institutional power. This article reads them instead as a contest between two forms of power over human life, what Foucault called biopolitics: power directed at the life of populations rather than at territory or law. Using Foucault’s account of pastoral power as a vocabulary for care exercised over each soul and the flock as a whole, and Agamben’s analysis of how modern government inherits its structure from theological models of providence, the article argues that Ivan’s rebellion treats suffering as a scandal no providential plan can absorb, while the Inquisitor’s program turns vulnerable life into the object of administration. Ivan’s tortured children do not literally fit the Roman category of homo sacer, the figure who could be killed but not sacrificed; they occupy a structurally analogous position as lives included in creation as the price of “eternal harmony” yet excluded from any justice adequate to their suffering. The Inquisitor’s three temptations, bread, miracle, and authority, function as pillars of biopolitical rule: managing material needs, capturing consciousness, and deciding who belongs to the community. Christ’s silent kiss neither refutes nor replaces the Inquisitor’s regime; it briefly suspends the apparatus by treating the speaker as a body rather than as a function of power. Building on Solovieva’s reading of the Dostoevsky–Agamben relation, this article shifts attention from the Inquisitor as a corruption of Christianity to the Inquisitor as the limit case of pastoral care when care becomes total administration. The result is a revaluation of the Grand Inquisitor legend: Dostoevsky presents Christianity as internally exposed to the risk that solicitude, compassion, and the promise of happiness may become techniques for governing life.