{"id":663,"date":"2015-11-24T23:08:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-25T04:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/?p=663"},"modified":"2022-10-24T18:33:34","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T22:33:34","slug":"foucault-613-four-themes-for-society-must-be-defended","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2015\/11\/24\/foucault-613-four-themes-for-society-must-be-defended\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Epilogue: Four Themes for “Society Must Be Defended”"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n

The penetrating comments by Ann Stoler<\/a>, Partha Chatterjee<\/a>, and Bob Gooding-Williams<\/a> raise four important themes for our seminar discussion:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The place of \u201ctruth and historical forms\u201d in Foucault\u2019s discussion of the discourse of race wars;<\/li>\n
  2. The role\u00a0of colonialism as a pivot moment in Foucault\u2019s analysis;<\/li>\n
  3. The function of modern racism in the mechanism of biopower; and<\/li>\n
  4. The relevance of Foucault 1976 lectures to the recent global acts of violence.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I. \u00a0Truth and History<\/h1>\n

    This first theme was raised most directly in Partha Chatterjee\u2019s comment, and it connects these 1976 lectures well with the earlier series.\u00a0In terms of the intellectual trajectory of the Coll\u00e8ge de France\u00a0lecture series, many commentators have identified in the first few lectures (esp. ’71, ’72, and ’73) the project of writing a \u201chistory of truth.\u201d This organizing thread was somewhat less prominent in the 1974 and 1975 lectures, but it returns here vividly: whereas earlier, Foucault had been addressing \u201cTruth and Juridical Forms,<\/em>\u201d as he explained in Rio in 1973, here Foucault is squarely in the realm of \u201cTruth and Historical Forms.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

    Partha Chatterjee captures this brilliantly in his analysis of Foucault\u2019s argument that the historiography of race wars erupts in the seventeenth century (see SMBD pages 57-62) with what Foucault refers to as a \u201chistorical-political discourse,\u201d a \u201ccounter-history\u201d (p. 70) to the earlier (to be simplistic) Roman history and philosophical-juridical discourse.<\/p>\n

    In this sense, the discourse of race wars represents one (new) historical<\/em> form. They have a unique relationship to truth, marked by a de-universalization. As Partha notes, \u201cThese histories \u2026 do not proclaim any universal truth.\u201d In this new discourse, the relationship to truth changes: it is decentered, as Foucault explains on p. 52. I personally think here of the birth of \u201crealist\u201d political discourse in international relations: a decentering from universality, where being biased, having interests is the guardian of truth. (Foucault\u2019s discussion at pages 52-54 is remarkable and makes me think in particular of realist theories).<\/p>\n

    Now this leads to what Foucault refers to at the top of page 54 as historical discourse that functions as \u201ca truth-weapon,\u201d \u201ca truth bound up with a relationship of force.\u201d Or on page 57: \u201cit is a discourse in which truth functions exclusively as a weapon that is used to win an exclusively partisan victory.\u201d<\/p>\n

    This new historical-political discourse intersects with Marx directly, as Foucault draws the connection between race war and class war, a connection that Marx had mentioned in his letter to Joseph Weydemeyer of 5 March 1852. Partha notes this: Marxism, he suggests, is the \u201costensible target of this charge by Foucault.\u201d\u00a0But Partha adds: \u201cI think it is a valid question that can be put to virtually all the truths that we proclaim in our universities and learned societies.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Indeed. So the question we may want to ask ourselves is, how are we, in our own work, able to escape this? Should we even try? Or on the contrary, is that part of our mission? How do we, as historians in this room, political scientists, legal scholars, anthropologists, philosophers, etc. reflect self-reflectively on this question of \u201cTruth and Academic Forms<\/em>\u201d?<\/p>\n

    The notion of race wars will be covered and masked later, as Partha suggests, by the idea of \u201cperpetual peace\u201d (in Kant\u2019s terms) and the white-washing of warlike social relations with the advent of the human sciences and the universalism of the post-revolutionary period. How does our own work contribute to this?<\/p>\n

    II. The Relationship to Colonialism<\/h1>\n

    Ann Sotler asks us, in her insightful\u00a0comment, first, why Foucault had not turned to European imperial formations to explore state racism, and second, why Foucault had not simply turned to France–the France of the time (though little different today), a France marked by \u201cdistressed urban outskirts,\u201d what we call today l<\/em>es\u00a0<\/em>banlieus,\u00a0<\/i>with their brutal living conditions.<\/p>\n

    Here, I would suggest that what Foucault offers are \u201cideas, schematas, outlines\u201d (p. 2) regarding the place of European imperial formations and, specifically, colonialism. So I would like to turn the question back to Ann and ask, not why he did not develop them more, but what can be made of what he does propose.<\/p>\n

    In the fourth lecture on 28 January 1976, p. 65, Foucault argues that the \u201cdiscourse of race war or race struggle\u201d of a sociobiological nature (our first theme) was reworked in the 19th<\/sup> century into a \u201cracist discourse\u201d for purposes, he states, \u201cof social conservatism and, at least in a certain number of cases, colonial domination.\u201d\u00a0So what he is suggesting here is that a primary purpose or function of the introduction of modern racism is colonial domination.<\/p>\n

    In the next lesson, on 4 February 1976, p. 103, Foucault adds another layer and explores what he calls the \u201cboomerang effect\u201d of colonial practice: the way in which these practices of colonial domination would also revert back to the domestic in the West. What he argues is that the same practices that Western nations would export to the colonies would return to the domestic governing mechanisms of the colonizers. \u201cA whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.\u201d (p. 103).\u00a0So here, the suggestion is that one could either look at colonial domination and colonization as the model for the birth and function of modern racism or<\/em> one could look at the domestic boomerang illustrations\u2014which I take it would involve the focus on HLM that we were mentioning, but also generalized policing today, such as the kinds of practices that are being most vehemently contested by the #BlackLivesMatters Movement.<\/p>\n

    Then, after tracing the history of this race war that interests him, Foucault returns to the colonial experience to discuss its racism. Evolutionism and race war, he argues in his eleventh lecture on 17 March 1976, morphs in the 19th<\/sup> century into \u201ca real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, \u2026. and so on.\u201d (p. 257). Foucault states:<\/p>\n

    \n

    \u201cAnd we can also understand why racism should have developed in modern societies that function in the biopower mode; we can understand why racism broke out at a number of privileged moments, and why they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was imperative. Racism first develops with colonization, in other words, with colonizing genocide. <\/em>If you are functioning in the biopower mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations? By using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism.\u201d (p. 257).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Although Foucault turns, at the end of the 17 March 1976 lecture, to Nazism, as one example of \u201cthe most murderous States\u201d (p. 258), that illustration is only supposed to stand in for other forms of colonizing genocide. [As an aside, query whether this responds to Alondra Nelson\u2019s critique that Foucault elides brute violence? It is here, I believe, that we can discover Foucault’s analysis of extreme murderousness, and it turns on race wars blended with modern racism.]<\/p>\n

    The question, then, is whether these schemas and ideas are productive and whether they can serve as useful pistes de recherches<\/i>?<\/p>\n

    III.\u00a0\u00a0Modern racism<\/h1>\n

    Bob Gooding-Williams draws our attention forward to modern racism, discussed most poignantly by Foucault in three passages, pp. 60-62, 81-84, and 254-263.<\/p>\n

    This is the modern racism whose function is so dark: it\u2019s not just racial or ethnic racism, which, Lord knows, can be murderous, as we are seeing today with police shootings–the recent release of the Chicago police shooting being a stark illustration. (Query, incidentally, whether that is an incident of racial\/ethnic racism or Foucaultian modern racism?). It is not just \u201cordinary racism\u201d (p. 258). Modern racism is more penetrating because it justifies and legitimates the death drive of biopolitics\u2014the \u201clet die\u201d euphemism, the right to kill that is wedded to the \u201cmake live.\u201d It is what justifies the elimination of the abnormal, the degenerate, as a means to enhancing the lives of the superior species-beings. And in fact, as Foucault argues, it justifies the most murderous of all racist states, Nazism (p. 259) and Soviet State racism (p. 83).<\/p>\n

    Here, I would like to encourage discussion on this third theme of modern racism, but raise one issue:\u00a0Bob Gooding-Williams suggests that Foucault\u2019s account of modern racism is both too narrow and too broad. Too narrow because it \u201cfails to acknowledge other functions that racism can serve.\u201d (Comment 2.6). But when I listen to the alternative functions\u2014justifying chattel slavery or justifying colonial economic exploitation\u2014I do not hear other functions <\/em>so much as forms of indirect murder.<\/p>\n

    Indirect murder is a key element of Foucault\u2019s account: it\u2019s not just killing that Foucault is interested in, or that biopolitics does, it is \u201cevery form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

    In other words, is the problem that Foucault did not flesh out \u201cindirect murder\u201d \u2013 because I would possibly place slavery or economic subservience in that list \u2013 or did not provide other functions?\u00a0And the larger question, of course, is whether we buy this account of the functions of modern racism in the biopolitical power that is best described as \u201cthe right to make live and let die\u201d? This\u00a0is a very important question because I believe it is at the root of the critique of American neoliberalism that Foucault will develop in his Birth of Biopolitics <\/em>lectures on 21 March 1979. So it is also a theme we will be returning to.<\/p>\n

    IV.\u00a0The Implications for today\u2019s acts of violence<\/h1>\n

    Both Ann Stoler and Partha Chatterjee invoke Society Must Be Defended <\/em>as a useful lens to our current political situation. I agree.\u00a0Earlier, I had mentioned the emergence of \u201crealism\u201d in international relations in the context of a \u201ctruth-weapon.\u201d This kind of realist discourse is, I think, dominant today. In fact, I see it reflected in Partha Chatterjee\u2019s comments, where he discusses security experts with their \u201cthoroughly realist view of the national interest.\u201d To what extent does realism represent one of the truth-weapons functioning in today\u2019s debates?<\/p>\n

    Ann Stoler points our attention to the ritualized blowback to the Paris attacks, seeing there a vivid illustration of \u201cFoucault\u2019s insights about the intensely racialized qualities of the biopolitical modern state.\u201d\u00a0For his part, Partha adds a final twist to the conversation, imagining one of the plotters asking him or herself “What can I learn from the Western Barbarian without compromising the identity of my civilization?” This is, naturally, a pregnant question or formulation\u2014so much so that it may be impossible for us to resolve. I take that to be Partha’s point: the stakes of these lectures may be impossibly high.<\/p>\n

    If we agree that the stakes may be impossibly high, then perhaps there is no way out of this \u201crace war against barbarians\u201d from both perspectives.\u00a0 But I wonder whether we want to leave it there. And so I would like to open that fourth theme for further discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Bernard E. Harcourt The penetrating comments by Ann Stoler, Partha Chatterjee, and Bob Gooding-Williams raise four important themes for our seminar discussion: The place of \u201ctruth and historical forms\u201d in Foucault\u2019s discussion of the discourse of race wars; The… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38940,38959],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foucault-613","category-posts-6-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}