Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society

Foucault in an Age of Terror Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society Edited by Stephen Morton and Stephen Byg...

Author: Stephen Morton | Stephen Bygrave

11 downloads 1632 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Foucault in an Age of Terror Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society

Edited by

Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Feng Chia University - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05

Foucault in an Age of Terror

10.1057/9780230584334 - Foucault in an Age of Terror, Edited by Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave

Also by Stephen Morton GAYATRI SPIVAK: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Also by Stephen Bygrave COLERIDGE AND THE SELF: Romantic Egotism KENNETH BURKE: Rhetoric and Ideology USES OF EDUCATION: Readings in Enlightenment in England WRITERS AND THEIR WORK: Samuel Taylor Coleridge



SALMAN RUSHDIE: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity

Foucault in an Age of Terror

Edited by

Stephen Morton and

Stephen Bygrave



Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society

Editorial matter and selection © Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave 2008 Chapters © their individual authors 2008

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978 0 230 57433 5 hardback hardback ISBN-10: 0 230 57433 5 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 17

9 16

8 15

7 14

6 13

5 12

4 11

3 10

2 09

1 08

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Contents vii

Notes on the Contributors

viii

Introduction Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave 1

2

3

1

Life Struggles: War, Discipline and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault Julian Reid

14

Poetry Must Be Defended: Post-Waterloo Responses to ‘Power’s Ode to Itself’ Simon Bainbridge

43

Sovereignty, Biopolitics and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker Alex Houen

63

4

Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biology John Marks

5

Biopolitics, Biological Racism and Eugenics Clare Hanson

6

Some Reflections on Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended and the Idea of ‘Race’ David Macey

118

War and Peace, or Governmentality as the Ruin of Democracy Lucy Hartley

133

7

88

106

8

Necropolitics Achille Mbembe

152

9

Torture, Terrorism and Colonial Sovereignty Stephen Morton

183

v



Acknowledgements

10

11

Contents

‘Manual for a Raid’ and ‘Henslowe’s Diary’: Foucault and the Multiple Meanings of the Document Rebecca Fensome Foucault, Auden and Two New York Septembers Stephen Bygrave

Index

196

215

230



vi

Most of the essays in this book originated as papers in a seminar series at the University of Southampton in 2004–5, and we are grateful to colleagues and students in English and the School of Humanities for their participation and support. Among them, special thanks must go to Peter Middleton as Head of English and to one of our contributors, Lucy Hartley, who suggested the series. Thanks also to Rana Dasgupta and Monica Narula of Raqs Media Collective, Delhi, to Melanie Blair at Palgrave Macmillan and to Ruth Willats. The publisher and editors thank the following for permission to reproduce earlier versions of three of the chapters included in this volume: Alex Houen, ‘Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker’. Theory & Event Volume 9, no. 1 (2006). Copyright The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, in South Atlantic Quarterly, in Volume 15, no. 1, pp. 11–40. Copyright, 2003, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher. Julian Reid, ‘Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault’, in Social Text, Volume 24, no. 1 (Spring), pp. 127–52. Copyright 2006, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

vii



Acknowledgements

Simon Bainbridge is Professor of Romantic Studies and Co-Director of the Wordsworth Centre at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (2003). Stephen Bygrave is Reader in English at the University of Southampton, UK. His research interests include Enlightenment and Romantic cultures, rhetoric and poetry. Rebecca Fensome is currently working on the Renaissance and the postcolonial at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. Clare Hanson is Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK. She is the author of A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture in Britain 1750–2000; a study of the short story; books on Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf; and a monograph on the woman’s novel: Hysterical Fictions: the Woman’s Novel in the Twentieth Century (2000). Lucy Hartley is an Associate Professor of nineteenth-century British literature in the Department of English, University of Michigan, USA. She is the author of Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2001). Alex Houen is Senior Lecturer in Modern Anglophone Literature and American Studies at Sheffield University, UK. He is the author of Terrorism in Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (2002). David Macey is an independent scholar and translator – of Society Must be Defended amongst others – and biographer of Frantz Fanon, and the author of The Lives of Michel Foucault. John Marks is Associate Professor in French, Department of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research interests include French cultural debates, especially those relating to science and technology. Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon and educated at the Sorbonne, Paris, is Research Professor in the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is the viii





ix

Stephen Morton is Senior Lecturer in Anglophone Literatures at the University of Southampton, UK. His publications include Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (2007) and Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (2006). Julian Reid is a Lecturer in War Studies at King’s College, London, UK and Visiting Professor of International Relations at the University of Lapland, Finland. He is the author of numerous critical works on the relations between war and modernity, including The Biopolitics of the War on Terror (2007).



author of books and articles on African history and politics, notably On the Postcolony (2001).



This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

The posthumous publication of Michel Foucault’s 1976 lecture series, delivered at the Collège de France under the heading Il Faut Défendre la Société, by Gallimard/Seuil in 1997, and subsequently translated into English by David Macey for Penguin Books as Society Must Be Defended in 2003, signals a shift in Foucault’s thinking on biopolitics and sovereign power. This shift not only may mean that we should reassess the trajectory of Foucault’s thought, but it also highlights the continuing relevance of Foucault’s thought to society, politics and culture in the early twentyfirst century: an era that has been marked by the US-led war on terror and the emergence of security as the raison d’état. The 1976 lecture series stands between the publication of Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality Volume One (1976). As such, Society Must Be Defended seems to form a bridge between Foucault’s work on disciplinary power and biopolitics. As John Marks explains, ‘disciplinary power has as its target the individual, employing surveillance, normalizing techniques and a “panoptic” grid of institutions. Biopower, on the other hand, has as its target the population as a whole.’1 The missing link that Society Must Be Defended provides between these two approaches to power and the individual is the hypothesis that a discourse of war or battle forms the ‘basis for civil society, as both the principle and the motor of the exercise of political power’.2 What is more, Foucault argues that this discourse of war was articulated as both a racial antagonism and a class struggle within Western political society at the end of the nineteenth century. In doing so, he challenges the assumption that war disappears with the development of civil society and law; instead, he argues that ‘beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular’ (SMBD, 50). In Foucault’s analysis, war is not only something that happens between two sovereign political powers; it is also ‘a battlefront [which] runs through 1





the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other’ (SMBD, 51). As we shall suggest, Foucault’s observations about war and power are extremely prescient for understanding the political significance of the so-called ‘war on terror’, and the way in which this war is often articulated as a clash of civilisations. Before doing so, however, the following section assesses how some of the key concepts in Foucault’s thought have been taken up by contemporary theorists.

Biopolitics, bare life and the society of control Foucault’s writings on sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Volume One have been widely influential in social and political thought, as well as in literary and cultural studies. Recent theories of the techniques of biopolitical power and social control employed by the state in the twenty-first century often invoke the work of Michel Foucault. In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s cite Foucault’s historical analysis of disciplinary power as an important precursor to their account of an ‘historical, epochal passage from disciplinary society to the society of control’.3 Further, Hardt and Negri have argued that Foucault’s work allows them to ‘recognize the biopolitical nature of the new paradigm of power’.4 In a similar vein, the Italian political and legal philosopher Giorgio Agamben has acknowledged Foucault’s theory of biopolitics as an important intellectual resource for his account of bare life and sovereign power in his study Homo Sacer. For Agamben, Foucault’s idea of biopolitics forms one of the cornerstones for his rethinking of the political. At the same time, contemporary thinkers have questioned whether Foucault’s hypothesis of biopolitics can fully account for the contemporary society of control and biopower. Hence in Empire Hardt and Negri suggest that Foucault’s account of biopolitics ‘constructed implicitly . . . the paradox of a power that, while it unifies and envelops within itself every element of social life . . . at that very moment reveals a new context, a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularization’.5 By contrast, they argue that it is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who ‘make’ this paradox of power ‘explicit’ in A Thousand Plateaus. In a similar vein, Agamben argues in Homo Sacer that there is a ‘vanishing point’ in Foucault’s analytic of power, which cannot account for the ‘point of intersection . . . at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge’.6 Although this ‘line of thinking’ is ‘logically implicit in Foucault’s work’, Agamben claims to examine ‘this



2

3

hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power’ with greater scrutiny, and in doing so, he argues that ‘the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’.7 As a consequence, Agamben questions Foucault’s suggestion in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Volume One that the modern state is doing something new by placing ‘biological life at the centre of its calculations’.8 Instead, he argues that sovereign political power is founded on the exclusion of bare life. While such readings certainly acknowledge Foucault’s enduring influence as an historian and theorist of power, they also suggest that his work on sovereignty, biopolitics and governmentality is becoming increasingly inadequate to describe the complexity of contemporary forms of sovereign power and biopolitical control. This would be to overlook the significance of Foucault’s arguments in Society Must Be Defended, their relevance to the contemporary war on terror and the racial logic that underpins this war. In Precarious Life, for instance, Judith Butler invokes Foucault’s discussion of governmentality and argues that he allows for the theoretical possibility that sovereign power and governmentality coexist, even though ‘Foucault makes what he calls an analytic distinction between sovereign power and governmentality, suggesting at various moments that governmentality is a later form of power’.9 In Butler’s argument, Foucault was unable to ‘predict what form this coexistence [of sovereign power and governmentality] would take in the present circumstances, that is, that sovereignty, under emergency conditions in which the rule of law is suspended would reemerge in the context of governmentality with the vengeance of an anachronism that refuses to die’.10 Like Agamben, Butler suggests that Foucault failed to spell out the logical implications of his analytic distinction between sovereignty and governmentality. Yet her claim that there is something unprecedented about sovereignty re-emerging through the back door of governmentality as a result of the Bush administration’s emergency suspension of the rule of law in response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 does not take account of the precise historical argument that Foucault makes in Society Must Be Defended. The contributors to this book alternately discuss particular historical examples and explicitly address the relevance of Foucault’s thought to the post-9/11 world. To some extent such an alternation can be discerned in the examples and speculation in his own writing. It is as well to remember too that the lectures come out of a third historical context, that the present on which Foucault insists has different characteristics from the present in which this book is being read: he was delivering



Introduction


his lectures eight years after 1968, at a time before François Mittérand became President of the Republic (or for that matter before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom), when the Berlin Wall still stood and when, for example, he could allude to the death of the Spanish dictator General Franco as a recent event. Epochal change no longer seemed imminent, subjects must have felt themselves to be particularly determined and immobilised by power that had merely found new institutions. In those circumstances the historical examples Foucault adduces may be surprising. In the lectures comprising Society Must Be Defended, the ‘discourse of perpetual war’ he identifies, and which has such clear resonances in the present, is said to originate with the radicals of the English Revolution. In Britain those radicals have long provided a lineage for Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson, but for Foucault the seventeenth-century radicals do not predicate a war between classes, but a race war and in turn a form of state racism (SMBD, 58–61). He claims the transmutation or internalisation of war to have occurred first in England during the Commonwealth period and to have been transplanted in turn to France of the ancien régime. The role of war had become ‘no longer to constitute history but to protect and preserve society’ (SMBD, 216). Henceforth the interpretative difficulty (‘How can we understand a struggle in purely civilian terms?’ [SMBD, 225]) was always answered by a denial of that possibility, by the tacit insistence that war is indeed the continuation of politics by other means. Clearly, this rests on a chronological (or, Foucault would say, a genealogical) account which leaves out many of the interim stages that would need to be filled if he were offering a conventional narrative history. Foucault does offer something like a conventional stadial history from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, and it may be tempting to characterise his account of the movement from sovereign power to disciplinary power to biopower as a grand metanarrative. For this account is after all a story of the replacement of monarchy by discursive institutions (prisons, medicine, the law, education), the power of which is expressed as discipline over the individual, usually expressed on the body, then the replacement of such disciplinary power in turn by what he calls biopower. Biopower is the new discursive regulation of populations through surveillance and control of their health, sexuality, reproduction, and so on. While the power of the sovereign was principally that of life and death over his subjects – which meant principally the power to have them put to death – biopower assumes the right to life over a whole population.



4

5

This is not, however, conventional narrative history, in part because Foucault is interested in the interactions of these forms of power, in their working as a system at whatever time may have constituted their present: often this is expressed in terms of spatial rather than temporal metaphors such as that of a network. Disciplinary power and biopower emerged successively but operated simultaneously. So, several chapters here identify Foucault’s history of the forms of power as a circular rather than linear movement by which biopower recapitulates sovereign power. The regicide in France, for instance, can be read as the transfer to institutions of the power of the monarch rather than as the end of monarchy: ‘The Revolution has to be read as the culmination of the monarchy . . . they decapitated the king but they crowned the monarchy’ (SMBD, 232). Julian Reid, in chapter 1, ‘Life Struggles: War, Disciplinary Power and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault’, demonstrates how essential the problem of war is to the development of Foucault’s political and social thought. He begins by mapping the development of his analysis of war in relation to the extension of his analysis of power from disciplinary power to biopower as well as to the political rationalities of governmentality. In particular, he shows how Foucault’s thinking on war, while originating as an interest mainly in military organisation as a specific and influential source for the emergence of disciplinary power within modern societies, develops into a much deeper and wider-ranging concern for the new forms that war assumes among societies as a result of the development of biopolitical forms of power concerned with the regulation of populations. Moving from Discipline and Punish through The History of Sexuality to Society Must Be Defended, Reid recovers the ways in which the development of Foucault’s conceptualisation of the problem of war establishes the great paradox and crisis of political modernity. From demonstrating in Discipline and Punish the role of discourses and practices deriving from the military-strategic domain in the strategies of pacification that modern regimes exert on their societies through the development of disciplinary power over life, Foucault moves on to address the ways in which the development of biopower mobilises populations that wage war in the name of life necessity. In Society Must Be Defended Foucault’s primary concern is with war understood not as a source of specific institutions, discourses or practices, but with war understood as constitutive of specific types of force relations. In arguing for an understanding of war as constitutive of modern power relations Reid claims that Foucault lays down a challenge to the major traditions of political theory and their allied conceptualisations of war, specifically those of Hobbes and Machiavelli (SMBD, 87–111). War



Introduction


figures ultimately for Foucault not as a primitive state of being against which modern societies and their power relations are to be differentiated, nor simply as a utile instrument for the pursuit of the grand strategies of states in paradoxical compromise of the civil condition of modern societies, but rather, as ‘a condition of possibility’ (SMBD, 165) for the constitution of modern power relations in which the aleatory nature of species life is variably recruited, set free, conditioned and put to work in the development of modern social arrangements. This argument, in turn, thrusts Foucault’s own thought into crisis. Recognising the roles of historico-political discourses of war in the constitution of the power arrangements of modern societies leads him to question the efficacy of his own thought in promoting the desubjugation and pursuit of the liberation of disqualified peoples and their knowledges (SMBD, 8). How can we escape thinking politics as the continuation of war, in spite of the desubjugatory potential for doing so, when it is that very principle and condition for the practice of politics which accounts for the strategising techniques with which power recruits and utilises life? This is the question that haunts Foucault throughout Society Must Be Defended and which, given his untimely death and failure to complete an answer to the question, must ultimately be addressed by anyone interested in doing justice to his thought. In a different vein, Simon Bainbridge, in chapter 2, ‘Poetry Must be Defended: Post-Waterloo Responses to “Power’s Ode to Itself” ’, takes Foucault’s description of history as ‘the uninterrupted ode in which power perpetuated itself’ (SMBD, 174) as a starting point. In doing so, Bainbridge examines Foucault’s interest throughout Society Must Be Defended in the relationship between literature – and particularly literary genres – and power, seen in his description of Sir Walter Scott’s novels as ‘of great historical importance for the historical consciousness of the nineteenth century’ (SMBD, 100), in his account of the gothic novel as a form which took up, at the level of the imaginary, the eighteenth-century obsession with the problem of feudalism at the level of right, history and politics, and in his analysis of Shakespearean tragedy as a genre which ‘dwells on the wound, on the repeated injury that is inflicted on the body of the kingdom when kings die violent deaths and when illegitimate sovereigns come to the throne’ (SMBD, 174). As this last example illustrates, in Foucault’s analysis the literary can disrupt the workings of power, but in all his references to poetry Foucault aligns it with history rather than with what he terms ‘counterhistory’. Indeed, the ‘ode’ would appear the form that best embodies the force of power at its most intense – what Foucault terms ‘the dazzling



6

7

discourse that power uses to fascinate, terrorize, and immobilize’ (SMBD, 68). Bainbridge explores Foucault’s argument by reading it alongside the work of three writers of the post-Waterloo years: William Hazlitt, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. For these writers the ode – particularly in the form of Wordsworth’s ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ – comes to symbolise what they perceive to be an unholy alliance between power and poetry, though they respond to the challenge of this problematic alliance in different ways. Both Hazlitt and Byron present poetry as the ultimate form of power, but they adopt very different strategies in response to its destructive dazzle and Foucault’s models of ‘history’ and ‘counter-history’ as laid out in Society Must Be Defended can help us think about and characterise these different responses. His analysis alerts us to the extent to which both writers see war as something that is continuing to operate in society and politics, rather than something that was brought to an end at Waterloo. The issue of the relationship between war and society, which Foucault particularly examines in these lectures, was raised in horrifically dramatic form by the events of ‘Peterloo’ in August 1819. The epithet ‘Peterloo’ itself presents the incident as an awful parody of Waterloo and suggests the internalisation of war within the state investigated by Foucault. For Percy Shelley, ‘Peterloo’ provided a focus for his thinking about the relationship between poetry and power, and while his writing on the subject is illuminated by Foucault’s analysis of the greatness of power, it shows a desire to move beyond the structuring patterns of war that Foucault would himself reject, or at least strive to make more complex, after this exploratory series of lectures. Alex Houen, in chapter 3, ‘Sovereignty, Biopolitics and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker’, opens with a discussion of Society Must Be Defended as marking a shift in Foucault’s analysis from disciplines to war and wider networks of power. This change in focus leads Foucault to posit a new form of networked power: ‘biopolitics’. In subsequent writings, he continues to develop his ideas on biopolitics as a more general form of governmentality, and contrasts such governance with disciplinary and sovereign power. After discussing this contrast in relation to Foucault’s later works, Houen examines the ways in which sovereignty and biopolitical networks – particularly economic, bureaucratic and media networks – have recently become entwined in the war on terror. Offering the US military detention camps at Guantánamo Bay as a new configuration of biopolitics and sovereignty, Houen also engages with recent writings on biopolitics by theorists such as Butler, Hardt and Negri.



Introduction


Contrary to Butler’s recent analysis of US sovereignty and biopolitical governmentality, Houen argues that there are two divergent forms of power emerging from the US: on the one hand, an executive administration acting against established laws in order to revive the sovereign’s power over life, death and exceptions; and, on the other, a disciplinaryjuridical apparatus acting against the federal executive to extend its own jurisdiction over foreign territories and individuals. The contest between these two strands is literally a struggle for power over the same foreign bodies to the extent that both contribute to an imbrication of sovereignty and biopolitics through a range of global networks. This imbrication is clearly not being driven solely by the US – as is evident from the range of anti-terrorism legislative measures introduced in the UK, Israel, Russia and Australia, among others. Accordingly, Houen argues that contrary to Hardt and Negri’s claims that biopolitical governmentality has subsumed forms of state sovereignty, what we are witnessing is a growing parallelism of state sovereignty and transnational biopolitics. Houen concludes with a discussion of Acker’s writing on hostage-taking and prisoners, and relates this to his earlier arguments on sovereignty, biopolitics and the war on terror. Acker, an author who was avowedly influenced by Foucault, permits a consideration of the extent to which she offers her writing as a way of resisting the kinds of biopolitical governance that Foucault outlines. John Marks, in chapter 4, ‘Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biology’, returns to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics – perhaps his most intriguing ‘unwritten’ project – in order to tease out some of the strictly biological preoccupations that inspired the formulation of this concept and that might have fed into the project in a finished state. The concept of biopolitics is discussed in the final section of The History of Sexuality Volume One, as well as the final lecture of the 1976 series Society Must Be Defended. In these texts, Foucault argues that biopower supplements and interacts with the regime he had previously identified as disciplinary. As biopower grows in importance, the right to take life is replaced by the recognition of the need to foster and administer life. For centuries, Foucault claims, the figure of ‘man’ corresponded to Aristotle’s conception of a living animal with an additional capacity for political existence. ‘Modern man’, however, is an animal whose existence as a living being is challenged by politics. In short, in the modern era life makes its entrance onto the political scene, and the legal subject is overlaid with the crucial figure of the ‘living’ being. This living being achieves biopolitical significance insofar as it is a component of the new political object of the population, and biopolitics as a concept is designed to analyse the ways in which modern



8

9

political practices and institutions seek to govern and foster this complex unit of life, which Foucault defines as a ‘multiple body’. Foucault focuses in the final chapter of Society Must Be Defended on the way in which the emergence of biopower insinuates racism into the mechanisms of the modern state. However, he also gives us glimpses of another dimension of biopower, a dimension that has grown enormously in importance in the 30 years or so since he delivered the Society Must Be Defended lectures. This is the dimension of biopower that emerges in the second half of the twentieth century with breakthroughs in the field of molecular biology, and subsequently in the fields of genetic engineering, biotechnology and human genomics. Foucault refers to this briefly in his final lecture as the power to ‘proliferate life, to construct living systems [le vivant], to construct monsters’ (SMBD, 254; translation modified). The second half of this chapter looks at how this particular perspective on biopolitics has its origins in Foucault’s earlier ‘epistemological’ work. In conclusion, Marks deploys Deleuze’s reading of Foucault in order to contextualise the ‘death of man’ formulation of the 1960s within an ongoing preoccupation in French intellectual culture with the broadly biopolitical theme of the possibility of an ontological shift towards new forms of humanity. Clare Hanson, in chapter 5, ‘Biopower, Biological Racism and Eugenics’, considers the interpretive possibilities offered by Foucault’s concept of biopower in relation to twentieth-century eugenic thought. Hanson starts by examining how Foucault, in lecture 11 of Society Must Be Defended, complicates and extends his well-known account of the disciplinary power of medicine, suggesting that in the late eighteenth century such power intersects with a new ‘technology of life’ directed towards the regulation of the population, defined by Foucault as ‘a multiple body, a body with so many heads’ (SMBD, 245). For Hanson, the aim of such regulation is mass homeostasis, or the health of the multiple body at the expense of those individual bodies that threaten its equilibrium. It is at this point that Foucault introduces the powerful concept of biological racism, that is, the excision of parts of the multiple body on the grounds that they threaten the health of the whole. In Hanson’s argument, Foucault invites us to consider a symmetry between an ethnic, epidermal racism based on colour which legitimates colonial violence, and a biological racism based on the concept of ‘fitness’ which legitimates violence against the sick, the disabled, those considered a threat to social health and vitality. David Macey, in chapter 6, ‘Some Reflections on Foucault: Society Must Be Defended and the Idea of “Race” ’, examines Foucault’s thesis



Introduction

that a national society can be the theatre of a war between antagonistic ‘races’ defined, in pre-modern terms, by historical characteristics and common origins rather than by racial signifiers such as skin colour or what Frantz Fanon calls the epidermalisation of racial difference. In particular, Macey considers Foucault analysis of the long debates in France that trace the history of an ongoing war between the Franks and Gauls. In Macey’s analysis, these debates are a way of establishing (or demolishing) the legitimacy of, respectively, the aristocracy and the monarchy. It is the ‘export’ of this model of an internal race war that generates the racism characteristic of colonialism and imperialism, as exemplified by the French conquest of Algeria, when it becomes condensed with a belief in French racial superiority and the conviction that ‘inferior’ races are doomed to extinction that so influenced early anthropology. Lucy Hartley, in chapter 7, ‘War and Peace, or Governmentality as the Ruin of Democracy’, considers a question Foucault poses in Society Must Be Defended: ‘Who saw war just beneath the surface of peace; who sought in the noise and confusion of war, in the mud of battles, the principle that allows us to understand order, the State, its institutions, and its history?’ (SMBD, 47). In Hartley’s account, these hermeneutic questions are superior to the normative questions asked about how a ‘war on terror’ might be prosecuted and provide the shifting ground from which Foucault’s examination of civil order emerges. As with so much of his work, Foucault’s central concern in Society Must be Defended is with the operation of power, with the institutions as well as the agents that construct power as knowledge, knowledge as power. War not only defines its apparent opposite – peace – it also structures the order of the state so, on the one hand, we have an historical (constituent) model of war that appeals to us ‘to defend ourselves’ from without because forces connive against us from external sources, such as state apparatuses, the law and power structures; and, on the other, we have the biological (medical) model that turns the imperative back on itself so that it becomes the means ‘to defend society’ as power is exercised by us from within via the exercise of biological power. Hence, the critique of history presented in Society Must Be Defended pivots on competing understandings of what it means to be governed; ‘the right of sovereignty’ and ‘disciplinary mechanisms’ are, Foucault contends, ‘the general mechanisms of power in our society’. Hartley examines the ramifications of these claims by means of the example of Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous account of the functioning of a democratic nation in Democracy in America (1835–40); She proceeds to identify the complexities of the link between the problem of war and the



10 Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave

11

discourse of history, and attempts to show how De Tocqueville’s identification of the balanced republic in the early United States suggests not only a genealogy for the contradictions inherent in a ‘war on terror’ but also a model for balancing contradictions so as to respond collaboratively rather than conflictually to 9/11 and after. Achille Mbembe in chapter 8, ‘Necropolitics’, investigates the relationship between sovereignty and death in Palestine and South Africa. Drawing on theories of sovereignty in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and Georges Bataille, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s account of bare life and the state of exception, Mbembe develops a theory of necropolitics that complements and complicates theories of biopower. Following Foucault’s argument in Society Must Be Defended that race figures ‘prominently in the calculus of biopower’, Mbembe examines how slavery and colonialism are crucial to an understanding of modern terror. Indeed, it is the colony that represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law and where ‘peace’ is more likely to take on the face of a ‘war without end’. In this colonial state of exception, the native is represented as ‘another form of animal life’, who shares no human bond with the conqueror. The sovereign power of the coloniser is thus defined by his capacity to subject, control and even kill the colonised. Two examples of the way in which necropower operates are the South African township under apartheid and the occupied territories of Palestine. In both cases it is the spatial seclusion of the colonial territory that makes possible the exercise of necropower and the assertion of colonial sovereignty. In the face of the bare life to which the colonised are forcibly subordinated, Mbembe finally suggests that for Palestinians the act of suicide bombing can be seen as a singular form of agency because it releases the subject from a permanent state of pain. The practice of torture and indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, can be seen to exemplify the continuity between sovereign power and biopolitics articulated in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. However, this would be to ignore the specifically colonial character of torture and indefinite detention in the current war on terror. Although Foucault never applied the insights of his writing on sovereign power and biopolitics to the colonial context, his lectures on race and class in Society Must Be Defended provide a conceptual vocabulary with which to interpret the function of torture and indefinite detention for the maintenance of imperial power. With reference to Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended and Discipline and Punish, Stephen Morton, in chapter 9, ‘Torture, Terrorism and Colonial



Introduction

Sovereignty’, argues that the practice of torture and indefinite detention in British-occupied Kenya, French-occupied Algeria and apartheid South Africa articulates a relationship between racism, biopolitics and modern forms of sovereignty. By reading Foucault against the writing of Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Achille Mbembe, Morton proceeds to consider how the exercise of torture and indefinite detention in the colonial context illustrates how sovereign power is geopolitically differentiated. Rebecca Fensome, in chapter 10, ‘ “Manual for a Raid” and “Henslowe’s Diary”: Foucault and the Multiple Meanings of the Document’, turns from Society Must Be Defended to analyse, in the light of the critical reassessment of Foucault’s thought, how his earlier work on the archive relates to the development of discourses of power he identifies. Specifically, she reactivates Foucault’s discussion of the statement and the archive in Archaeology of Knowledge11 by examining two very different documents: ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ and the ‘Manual for a Raid’.12 At stake in such a comparison are both the nature of the continued use of Foucault in early modern studies and what the legacy of readings of ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ can reveal about the problems of interpreting archives such as the ‘Manual for a Raid’. Finally, Stephen Bygrave, in chapter 11, ‘Foucault, Auden and Two New York Septembers’, focuses on a specific, telling example of Foucault’s account of race, war and biopolitics by tracing the ‘reactivation’ of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘September 1 1939’ following the events of 9/11. Auden’s is a public poem addressed to an isolationist United States; the date in its title is that of the annexation of Danzig and the day Nazi troops marched into Poland. That title, the poem’s New York setting and its evocation of the way ‘the unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night’ led to its being often cited after 9/11. Its own author had later rejected the poem, but its most famous line, ‘We must love one another or die’, contains imperatives that could seem ironic even before they were silenced. These are imperatives of the kind Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended articulates in its account of war as the occluded foundation of civil society in Europe since the medieval period. Bygrave suggests setting that account against the response Jürgen Habermas makes in an interview in which the events of 9/11 are seen, rather, as susceptible analytically to the models of communication elaborated in his earlier work. If the poem itself reveals that the safe vantage-point from which it might feasibly address a ‘public’ was no longer available, the 2001 responses to it also reveal the changes both political and aesthetic discourse may have undergone since Auden’s poem adumbrated solutions



12 Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave

Introduction

13

to a perceived crisis in the public sphere in a vocabulary that was at once both Christian and psychoanalytic.

1. John Marks, ‘Foucault, Franks, Gauls: Il faut défendre la société: The 1976 Lectures at the Collège de France’, Theory, Culture & Society, 17 (2000), 123. 2. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–6, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 18. Hereafter cited in the main body of the text as SMBD. 3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 22–3. 4. Ibid., 23. 5. Ibid., 25. 6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 6. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 53. 10. Ibid., 54. 11. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002). Subsequently referred to as Archaeology. 12. Hassan Mneimneh’s translation of pp. 2–5 of the document are appended to Makiya and Mneimneh, ‘Manual for a “Raid”’, in Robert B. Silversand and Barbara Epstein (eds.), Striking Terror: America’s New War (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002). All quotations from Henslowe’s Diary are taken from R. A. Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Subsequently referred to in the text as Henslowe.



Notes

Life Struggles: War, Discipline and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault Julian Reid

For Michel Foucault the problem of war is the problem of political modernity par excellence. He broached the problem of war while gradually extending his analysis of power from disciplinary to biopolitical regimes and the phenomenon of governmentality. Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, was significant for its early examination of the role and development of the military sciences in the disciplining of individual bodies.1 The History of Sexuality attempted a more ambitious theory of the relations between war and biopower.2 Facing death, Foucault declared that ‘if God grants me life, after madness, illness, crime, sexuality, the last thing that I would like to study would be the problem of war and the institution of war in what one could call the military dimension of society’.3 The depth of these intentions is clear from lectures given at the Collège de France in 1976, recently published for the first time in English as Society Must Be Defended. There we discover Foucault posing fundamental questions: How, when and why was it noticed or imagined that what is going on beneath and in power relations is a war? When, how and why did someone come up with the idea that it is a sort of uninterrupted battle that shapes peace, and that the civil order – its basis, its essence, its essential mechanisms – is basically an order of battle? Who came up with the idea that the civil order is an order of battle? Who saw war just beneath the surface of peace; who sought in the noise and confusion of war, in the mud of battles, the principle that allows us to understand order, the State, its institutions, and its history?4 This chapter traces the development of Foucault’s articulation of the problem of war from its beginnings in Discipline and Punish where he 14



1

locates the emergence of the military sciences, and especially eighteenthcentury thought on military tactics, as among the original sources for the expression of disciplinary power. It is in the eighteenth-century military sciences that Foucault discovers the object of disciplinary power most clearly constituted. That object was the ‘natural body’.5 Foucault’s thought on war, while originating as an interest mainly in military organisation as a specific source for the emergence of disciplinary power in modern societies, develops into a deeper and wider-ranging concern for the new forms that war assumes between and within societies as a result of the development of biopolitical regimes of power concerned with the regulation of populations. Moving from Discipline and Punish through The History of Sexuality to Society Must Be Defended, I explain how the development of Foucault’s conceptualisation of the problem of war establishes the great paradox and crisis of political modernity. From demonstrating in Discipline and Punish the role of discourses and practices deriving from the military sciences in the strategies of pacification that modern regimes pursue against their societies through the development of disciplinary power over life, Foucault shifts to focus on how the development of biopower mobilises populations to wage war in the name of life necessity. In writing the first volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault argued that modern power’s engagement with life pacifies societies while exacerbating the problem of war inter-socially to the point where it is the life of the species itself that is at stake in practices of modern warfare. In Society Must Be Defended Foucault’s primary concern is with war understood not as a source of modern institutions, discourses or practices, but with war conceived as constitutive of specific types of modern power relations. In examining how war is constitutive of modern power relations he likewise lays down a challenge to the major traditions of political theory and their allied conceptualisations of war, specifically those of Hobbes and Machiavelli.6 War figures ultimately for Foucault not as a primitive state of being against which modern societies and their power relations can be differentiated, nor simply as a utile instrument for the pursuit of the grand strategies of states in paradoxical compromise of the civil condition of modern societies, but rather as ‘a condition of possibility’ for the constitution of modern power relations in which the aleatory condition of species life is variably recruited, set free, manipulated and put to work in the development of modern social arrangements.7 War for Foucault in Society Must Be Defended is the cipher of the forms of peace that modern societies realise. This argument in turn thrusts Foucault’s own thought into crisis. Recognising the roles of historico-political discourses of war in the



War, Discipline and Biopolitics 15

constitution of the power arrangements of modern societies makes him question the efficacy of his own thought in promoting the desubjugation and liberation of disqualified peoples and their knowledges.8 This autocritique develops alongside his increasing concerns with the racialised techniques of biopolitical regimes of power. How can we escape thinking politics as the continuation of war, in spite of the desubjugatory potential for doing so, when it is that very principle for the practising of politics which accounts for the racial techniques with which power strategises and utilises life? This is the question that haunts Foucault throughout Society Must Be Defended and that, given his early death and failure to complete an answer to the question, must ultimately be addressed in order to do justice to his thought.

Disciplinary power, natural bodies and techniques of pacification As is argued throughout Foucault’s later works, what distinguishes modern forms of power are their propensities to ‘make’ life as opposed to the ‘taking’ of life and the ‘letting’ live that characterised pre-modern forms of power. Concerned with exploring how modern regimes developed techniques for making life, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is a paradigmatic text. This study is, of course, best known in this context for its account of the disciplinary power of the panopticon. Less well-known is that in narrating the development of panoptical techniques Foucault insisted on the emergence of modern military institutions and the broad domain of modern military science as a particularly important realm of enquiry. As he describes, by the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made: out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has ‘got rid of the peasant’ and given him ‘the air of the soldier’.9 The militarisation of men, the making of soldiers, by means of ‘the supervision of the smallest fragments’ of their life and bodies, functions for Foucault as a disciplinary model that describes in essence the mechanisms of a then burgeoning social machine to which all become subjected ‘in the context of the school, the barracks, the hospital or the workshop,



16 Julian Reid

a laicized content, an economic or technical rationality for this mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite’.10 Traditionally, we are taught to think about issues of military organisation, strategy and tactics as discrete enterprises that concern, specifically, the interests of the sovereign power of states in extracting efficient force from bodies of men for the deployment of organised violence towards rationally grounded and objectified political ends.11 Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is important for its radically challenging account of the rationalities that underlie modern military science. For Foucault the rationality of military science resides not only, or even centrally, in the violent ends towards which military force might ultimately be deployed, but more integrally in the nature of the forms of order that are mapped out in the theorisation and implementation of military organisation itself. The strategic stakes of the military endeavours of modern states reside not simply in the clash of forces that distinguishes combat, but in the process of preparing for conflict, in the disciplining of the life of bodies that comprise organised military forces. In a war that is being fought for political order, not among states or on the territorial battlefields where military forces clash, but on the terrain of the human body. It is the order that life assumes within the human body that is at stake, Foucault argues, in the struggles to discipline the body that define the remits of modern military sciences. In Discipline and Punish Foucault documents the emergence of a range of different disciplinary techniques that distinguished modern sciences of military organisation: enclosure, partitioning, ranking and serialisation. While these techniques originated in the military domain for the spatial control of recruited troops, they would gradually be adjusted and become applied, he argued, to societies as a whole. Sciences of military organisation provided not only the means with which to control mass armies, but a model framework for a new form of thinking about social organisation that shaped the broad development of techniques by which modern regimes learnt to govern societies. The chapter of Discipline and Punish titled ‘Docile Bodies’ carefully records the emergence of these techniques with attention to their specifically military remit. It was through the technique of enclosure that men came to be assembled under one roof in the form of the barracks. This technique of enclosure allowed for new forms of control and security: the prevention of theft and violence; the dissipation of fears of local populations at the incursions of marauding bands of troops; the prevention of conflict with civil authorities; the stopping of mass desertion; and the management of expenditure.12 Through the technique of partitioning,




militarised groups of men were individualised. Knowing where and how to locate individuals, to control communication between individuals, to supervise the conduct not only of the mass body but the life of bodies individually, comprised an essential technique in the development of modern military organisation. The innovation of new systems of rank represented a further technique by which bodies were not only individualised but also cast within a network of relations of exchange, allowing for their better distribution and circulation. The organisation of serial spaces providing fixed positions for individuals but permitting their circulation and interchange allowed for new forms of tactical arrangements in the composition of military forces. Foucault demonstrates with ample reference to the work of the French military tactician the comte de Guibert how the modern military science of tactics encapsulated this newfound understanding of the potentialities of techniques of ranking and partitioning in the production of recombinant forms of order. ‘Blinded by the immensity, dazed by the multitude . . . the innumerable combinations that result from the multiplicity of objects’, Guibert mused at the end of the eighteenth century.13 The advent of these new disciplinary techniques in the military sciences was, as Discipline and Punish shows, much concerned with the reordering of relations between bodies and space. Yet they were also interested in the disciplining of relations between time and bodily activity, or what Foucault called ‘the temporal elaboration of the act’.14 He documents how modern military organisation was predicated on the creation of meticulously detailed ‘programmes’ according to which the ‘correct use of the body’ would be specified in order to allow for ‘a correct use of time’.15 For example, between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, ordinances developed to refine the movements of marching soldiers across space and time. While in the seventeenth century marching was only vaguely regulated to assure conformity, by the eighteenth century ordinances specified distinctions between four different sorts of marching step; the short step, the ordinary step, the double step and the marching step, each differentiated according to duration, extension and comportment.16 As disciplinary power was concerned with the correct use of time, so it was also concerned with what Foucault called ‘the instrumental coding of the body’ through the creation of a ‘body–machine complex’.17 Foucault considered that traditional forms of subjection involved only the extraction of the product of labour, the exploitation of bodies for their surpluses. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is about more than that. Its aim is to assure and regulate the correct procedure by



18 Julian Reid

which the body carries out its labour as an end in itself. In this vein, Foucault focused again on innovations occurring in the domain of military organisation – centrally on the specifications made in the same late eighteenth-century military ordinances as to how to fire a weapon, which were meticulous in their detailing of how body and weapon interact.18 All of these innovations, reflecting what Foucault identified as a new ‘positive economy’ of time through which modern societies attempted to intensify their use of time with increased speeds and increased efficiencies, resulted, he argued, from changes occurring in the domain of war. Prussia’s mid-eighteenth-century successes, enabled by the military systems of Frederick II, were the harbinger of most of these developments.19 Through the development of these techniques with which to organise for and conduct war emerged a new object for the organisation of power relations. That new object was, as Foucault described it, ‘the natural body, the bearer of forces and the seat of duration; it is the body susceptible to specified operations, which have their order, their stages, their internal conditions, their constituent elements’.20 The ‘natural body’ is the object of power constituted through the emergence of techniques of discipline deriving from the changing forms of warfare. Not simply a docile body subjected in absolute terms to the manipulations of discipline, but rather a body which, in being natural, is defined by its own specific requirements, spontaneous needs and demands, which in turn offer a set of constraints and resistances to disciplinary power. It is the body that disciplinary power must adjust itself to, grasp the feel of, develop intimate knowledge of and learn to adapt from. It is the nature of a body that disciplinary power itself idealises and aims at the realisation of. This idealisation of the ‘natural body’, this recognition of the ways in which discipline aims not simply at the correction of natural life in the pursuit of some mechanised ideal, but rather the pursuit of natural and organic life at the expense of a rational mechanics, becomes especially clear for Foucault in the domain of military organisation. Such properties are exemplified for Foucault in Guibert’s remarkably homoerotic works on tactics, from which he quotes the following: If we studied the intention of nature and the construction of the human body, we would find the position and the bearing that nature clearly prescribes for the soldier . . . since the hip-bone, which the ordinance indicates as the point against which the butt end should rest, is not situated the same in all men, the rifle must be placed more




20 Julian Reid

Disciplinary power seeks, then, to establish a subjection of the body which is first premised primarily on knowing the nature of the body. It seeks to develop techniques of subjection which will give recognition to the differences that pertain between individual bodies. Foucault saw these developments of disciplinary power occurring most forcefully in the field of military organisation. For example, in the gradual drawing of distinctions between periods of training and periods of practice, the separation of the instruction of military recruits from the exercise of veterans, the creation of separate military schools for the armed services, Foucault identified emergent processes of the segmentation of disciplinary time aimed at an increasing differentiation of the particular skills and requirements of individuals. This segmentation and serialisation of disciplinary activity also worked importantly, Foucault argues, to create a newly ‘evolutive time’.22 Discipline subjects the individual to an evolution understood in terms of genesis. It programmes the individual for a series of graduated tasks and exercises geared towards the production of some terminal state of being. In this sense the forms of disciplinary power that emerged through the military sciences are revealed for their promotion of the ‘growth’ and ‘genetic development’ of both communal and individual bodies. The military sciences, in their forging of techniques of disciplinary power, were from their outset intersecting with, and themselves contributing to, practices expressly concerned with asserting control over life processes. Individuation, this essential premise of disciplinary power, owed more, according to Foucault, to developments within the military sciences than to any other domain of innovation. In drawing the frequent comparisons he does between the new forms of military organisation and techniques in other domains of social organisation (particularly in criminology, production and pedagogy), Foucault accounts for how the development of modern military science was enabling a new evolutionary account of the order of life. In doing so he supplemented his well-known account of the epistemological shift that underwrites modern social and political orders, the shift according to which human life becomes for the first time an object of knowledge and power, with reference to war. It is within the order of war, Foucault asserts in Discipline and Punish, that moderns first began to fantasise of a society that would function as a machine – not a



to the right for some, and more to the left for others. For the same reason of inequality of structure, the trigger-guard is more or less pressed against the body, depending on whether the outer parts of a man’s shoulder are more or less fleshy.21


that would cover the whole territory of the nation and in which each individual would be occupied without interruption but in a different way according to the evolutive segment, the genetic sequence in which he finds himself.23 In constituting the natural body as the object of disciplinary power, the military sciences also begin to conceive of populations themselves as species bodies defined by a common genesis, evolutionary patterns and survival rates. Foucault’s major assertion, attested to originally in Discipline and Punish, is that it is in the domain of war that these two intrinsic features of what he would subsequently address in terms of biopolitics and biopower originally appeared. The constitution of the species life of populations has, however, very different implications for how modern regimes of power over life respond to, or at least affect, problems of war and peace. Disciplinary power is based on the development of tactical mechanisms for the pacification of the natural life of individual bodies. Biopower, concerned with the regulation of the species life of populations, provides new substance for the strategies of modern regimes at war with each other. Towards the end of the ‘Docile Bodies’ chapter Foucault fleshes out his distinctions between discipline and biopower, individual and population, tactics and strategy more fully: In the great eighteenth-century states, the army guaranteed civil peace no doubt because it was a real force, an ever threatening sword, but also because it was a technique and a body of knowledge that could project their schema over the social body. If there is a politics-war series that passes through strategy, there is an army-politics series that passes through tactics. It is strategy that makes it possible to understand warfare as a way of conducting politics between states; it is tactics that makes it possible to understand the army as a principle for maintaining the absence of warfare in civil society. The classical age saw the birth of the great political and military strategy by which nations confronted each other’s economic and demographic forces; but it also saw the birth of meticulous military and political tactics by which the control of bodies and individual forces was exercised within states.24



mechanical machine, but a machine that functions as a natural body; a socio-military machine

Here Foucault distinguishes between how power over life functions via discipline to induce peace within its boundaries by subduing the natural life of the individual body, while at the same time constituting the species life of populations in exacerbation of war inter-socially. Discipline and Punish, in its account of disciplinary power, was concerned with demonstrating the alacrity with which modern regimes have sought to establish peace by fostering a uniform docility of individualised bodies. Through the inculcation of docility within bodies, modern regimes establish the absence of war within the civil societies they govern. Foucault’s subsequent major work, The History of Sexuality, in contrast was concerned with the question of how and why it is, in spite of the development of these newly refined techniques for producing peace within their own societies, that modern regimes have simultaneously intensified the phenomenon of war inter-socially. It is in Foucault’s account of biopower as opposed to disciplinary power that this chapter locates the paradoxical logic through which modern regimes induce peace simultaneous with war.

Biopower, species life and the mobilisation of war It is in the final chapter of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, first published in 1976, titled ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, that Foucault reconceptualises the relation of war to society. Discipline and Punish shows how the development of military sciences had functioned to establish an ‘absence of war’ in societies through the creation of ‘docile bodies’. In The History of Sexuality the focus shifts to address how the emergence of a form of power concerned with exerting control over life leads to a proliferation and intensification of the problem of war among societies. As Foucault himself observed, ‘wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations’.25 Here, then, Foucault outlines for us in theoretical terms the paradox that haunts political modernity in evermore forceful terms. How do we explain the fact that regimes of power expressly concerned with the promotion of life, the establishment of peaceful civil societies, in turn create forms of warfare among and within societies involving unprecedented forms of slaughter? For Foucault it is the very shift in the orientation of power to the exertion of control over life rather than the more traditional assertion of the right of death that explains the expansive tendencies of



22 Julian Reid


wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars.26 Contrary to influential readings of Foucault, he does not argue that the traditional orientation of sovereign power to the right to kill was displaced altogether by this new form of life-administering power.27 Rather, he contends that a parallel shift occurs in the role of the right to kill in the operations of power to allow its alignment with the exigencies of these new life-administering forces: ‘The power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence’.28 Through this formula Foucault makes an adjustment to, and creates a new categorical distinction within, the theory of disciplinary power developed in Discipline and Punish. The overwhelming emphasis in Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power is on the implications of the entry of life into the order of power for the control of the natural life of the individual body. The chapter on ‘Docile Bodies’ is to a great extent concerned with the new ‘tactics’ of power, particularly its abilities to arrange, control and dispose of the life of the individual body. In The History of Sexuality Foucault shifts focus from the relations between power and the individual to those of power and the population as well as from tactics to ‘strategy’. No longer homogeneous in character, power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles – the first to be formed, it seems – centered on the body as a machine; its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the



modern societies towards increasingly barbarous forms of war among and within themselves. Under modern conditions, he argues,

biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed.29 In theorising the relations between modern regimes and war this distinction, first drawn in The History of Sexuality, is of crucial importance. In developing power over life, a bifurcation occurs within modern regimes with radically differing consequences for the problem of war. In their development of disciplinary techniques modern regimes afford themselves new degrees of control over the individualised human body. That newfound docility of the individual provides modern regimes with the ability to secure an absence of war within the civil societies they govern. Yet in their development of biopolitical techniques, focused on the collective bodies of populations, modern regimes afford themselves a new substance for the mobilisation of war. Given the biopolitical context in which power is now authorised, the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.30 Traditionally, war functioned as a means of resolving disputes between sovereigns whose power was based on a fundamental disjuncture between themselves and their subjects. Where subjects were called on to participate in the defence of the sovereign, such participation occurred through an exercise of the negative right of seizure by the sovereign on the subject’s body. In a biopolitical context where power is exercised at the level of the life of populations, war occurs in the form of a struggle between populations whose particular existence as expressions of species life is at stake. The participation of populations in war is therefore reconceived not as the product of a right of seizure, but as a positive, life-affirming act. The entry of life into the order of power, while allowing for the production of a docile peace within civil societies, affords simultaneously new forms of biopolitical war in which entire populations are mobilised for the defence of the selfsame civil societies.



24 Julian Reid

Techniques of discipline assure modern regimes the peace of the civil societies they govern, while biopolitical techniques provide them with newfound powers to wage war inter-socially. Simultaneously, the military sciences provide new knowledge for the control of civil societies while the life sciences provide the demographic knowledge for the mobilisation of populations in war. In advancing his account of disciplinary power thus, Foucault overturns the received ways of understanding the distinctions between civil and military domains of society and their cognate purposes in relation to power. The military-strategic domain, ordinarily understood in terms of its utilities for the waging of war, is recontextualised as a resource for the internal ordering of societies. The civil domain, customarily understood in terms of its distinction from that of the military, is recontextualised as a resource for the mobilisation of populations for war. Power over life, then, according to Foucault at this point, affords new forms of peace simultaneously with new forms of war. Yet there is a further, crucial twist to Foucault’s advance of the problem of war in relation to modern regimes and their wielding of power over life. In an earlier chapter of The History of Sexuality, the chapter entitled ‘Method’, Foucault revisits an observation first made in Discipline and Punish. At the end of ‘Docile Bodies’, Foucault made a characteristically tentative suggestion. ‘It may be’, he argued in an inversion of Carl von Clausewitz, ‘that war as strategy is a continuation of politics. But it must not be forgotten that “politics” has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly and directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder’.31 Arguing so, Foucault insisted that the tactical models of military organisation were of utmost importance for an understanding of how war invests the order of power. Here the strategic discourses of states in which war is understood as a form of activity that determines the balance of power internationally is of marginal importance for Foucault when compared with the effects of the models of tactical organisation for the ordering of societies as a whole. Yet in the chapter on ‘Method’ Foucault returns to this debate, revisiting the relations between strategy, war, tactics and power over life. Following an account of power understood in terms of the immanence of force relations rather than institutional state power, he reformulates the claim of Discipline and Punish in the style of a question: should we turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate rather that this




26 Julian Reid

In the chapter on ‘Method’ Foucault advances the formulation of the problem of the relations between war, power and life in novel terms. He writes especially of the precedence of the ‘strategic model’ as an explanation for how and why it is ‘one of the essential traits of Western societies that the force relationships which for a long time had found expression in war, in every form of warfare, gradually became invested in the order of political power’.33 But in reference to the role of a ‘strategic model’ Foucault is making a distinctly different argument about how war invests political order compared with Discipline and Punish. In the latter Foucault examines war’s indirect influence via the role of tactical models of military organisation as a kind of transferable projected social schema for peace and order over an otherwise disordered multitude. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault develops an argument about how war invests the order of political power immanently. The influence of war on society does not refer simply to the discrete influence of an institutionalised military and its bodies of tactical knowledge, but to the ‘multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization’.34 Here Foucault is developing a conception of war as the source of specific forms of force relations that are constitutive of power relations. War becomes the source that accounts for the forms of life that generate power relations rather than being the source of influence by proxy through military institutions and discourses which wield power over the life of individuated bodies. There is, then, we can say, a relational force to the ways in which war intersects with power and life under modern conditions as much as there is an individuating force. Whereas, for Foucault, war is the source of the individuating techniques of discipline, it is also the source of the forces that constitute power relations within modern societies. It is the source of the forces that comprise populations biopolitically, as well as the source for techniques of discipline that subjectify individuated bodies. It is in this context that we can understand how Foucault begins to employ the concept of strategy in The History of Sexuality. Disciplinary power evolves through the development of tactical measures with which to render the natural life of the individuated body the object of power over life. Biopower, in contrast, evolves through the development of



multiplicity of force relations can be coded – in part but never totally – either in the form of ‘war’ or in the form of ‘politics’; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations.32

strategies with which to constitute bodies in relation as populations. Tactics divide, segment and serialise, while strategies combine, integrate and coordinate. Yet these are not antithetical features of power over life.35 There is no discontinuity, he argues, between the functioning of tactics in the individuation of bodies via discipline and the operations of strategies in the constitution of populations biopolitically. ‘Rather, one must conceive of the double conditioning of a strategy by the specificity of possible tactics, and of tactics by the strategic envelope that makes them work.’36 The strategies through which the social body is mobilised as a population are inconceivable in isolation from those tactical mechanisms that determine how the natural life of bodies comes to be individualised. Affording peace via the development of tactical schemata that become deployed over societies as a whole, modern regimes employ the very same principles of power over life to initiate strategies for the mass mobilisations of societies in warfare. Knowledge and control of life affords modern peace at the same time as it affords modern war. Strategy in this context, for Foucault, describes the processes by which the natural life of individuated bodies is rendered into the species life of populations. In terms of explaining how modern regimes overcome their commitment to the promotion of life and articulate forms of war that are waged in the name of life necessity this is an absolutely key manoeuvre. I choose in this work to apply the term strategisation to describe those processes by which natural life is rendered biopolitical. This addresses several urgent questions. How is it that in enabling the expression of natural life, modern regimes simultaneously shape populations biopolitically, the conditions of which are established on the basis of the threats posed by natural life at the biopolitical constitution of society? How is it that the aleatory fixation of the natural body becomes the enemy against which the norm of a population is defined? How is it that those norms which constitute society, aided by the demographic sciences of population become the foundation for a security project through which the populations involved become mobilised? Never was such an account of the processes of strategisation by which modern regimes utilise their commitments to the promotion of life and assert their right to death in the form of war more necessary. How else might we explain the tendencies of regimes of power over life to insist consistently on their right of death? How else might we explain the paradoxical contrast between network societies of such complex segmentations and cleavages on the one hand, and such coordinated mobilisations on the other? More pressingly, though, how might we escape or refuse the ways in which our bodies and subjectivities come to be deployed biopolitically in




the wars of modern regimes of power? How might we engage otherwise with the seemingly inexorable role of war in the organisation of modern societies as well as the now decidedly ‘permanent’ commitment of even the most liberal of modern regimes to the waging of war? In an important sense these are precisely the questions that Foucault himself posed in his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France under the title Society Must Be Defended. Only recently translated into English, these lectures clearly informed elements of the argument that Foucault deployed in The History of Sexuality, but they also extended and in ways departed from the framework for interrogating the relationship between war and modern regimes developed there. The lectures allow us to push this question of Foucault’s understanding of the relations between war, power and societies in yet more urgent directions.

War, race and life struggles In the first lecture of the series Society Must Be Defended, delivered on 7 January 1976, Foucault calls for reflection on the substantial and proliferating efficacies of what he termed ‘dispersed and discontinuous offensives’ within Western societies during the previous decade. Referring to the increasingly autonomous, decentralised and anarchistic character of contemporary forms of political struggle, a feature that was still enduringly new enough at the time to be referred to with surprise, Foucault demanded that his audience think about how and why it was that the emergence of these new forms of struggle – struggles such as the anti-psychiatry movement that helped in opening up the space of the asylum for social and political critique – were conditioned by the appearance of ‘disqualified knowledges’37 – disqualified knowledges that ‘contained the memory of combats’ involving a ‘meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights’.38 With a nod in acknowledgement of the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Foucault reinscribes his own genealogical method of approach to historical knowledges as an attempt to enable the opposition and struggle of disqualified knowledges against their various forms of coercion and domination.39 Opening thus, Society Must Be Defended is not only an analysis of the various ways in which war has infiltrated modern power relations and constituted modern societies, but situates Foucault’s own genealogical method within the development of a counter-state strategic discourse. In this context he articulates the ways his work until then dovetailed with the various reconceptualisations of war, politics and resistance at large in French political and social thought, most especially that pursued



28 Julian Reid

by Deleuze and Guattari, as is also attested to in his preface to their celebrated Anti-Oedipus.40 War can be understood to anchor the power relations that pervade modern societies, Foucault argues, in the most elementary of ways. The concept of war is deployed throughout the lectures to describe a certain type of force relation ‘that was established in and through war at a given historical moment that can be historically specified’.41 Political power does not establish and reproduce peace in the uncomplicated manner that social contract theorists argue, but rather sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium of forces established in historically specifiable wars out of which modern power relations were born.42 Against the ‘contractoppression schema’ Foucault poses the ‘war-repression schema’.43 The proliferation of dispersed and discontinuous offensives that characterise contemporary societies are to be understood as outcomes of the generative power that war invests in modern political relations. Foucault, however, does not come simply to enjoin, once more, this mode of conceiving politics as the continuation of war. While situating his own genealogical method within this ‘war-repression schema’ he less than tentatively suggests that we need to think our way beyond or outside of it. As he states, It is obvious that everything I have said to you in previous years is inscribed within the struggle-repression schema. That is indeed the schema I was trying to apply. Now, as I tried to apply it, I was eventually forced to reconsider it; both because, in many respects, it is still insufficiently elaborated – I would even go so far as to say that it is not elaborated at all – and also because I think that the twin notions of ‘repression’ and ‘war’ have to be considerably modified and ultimately, perhaps, abandoned. At all events, we have to look very closely at these two notions of ‘repression’ and ‘war’; if you like, we have to look a little more closely at the hypothesis that the mechanisms of power are essentially mechanisms of repression, and at the alternative hypothesis that what is rumbling away and what is at work beneath political power is essentially and above all a warlike relation.44 Here, then, we find Foucault posing the problem of war as a generative principle of force relations that account for modern political orders not in the form of an ontological claim as defines the works on war of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as the early work of Paul Virilio and to some extent the contemporary works of Hardt and Negri.45 In response




to modern regimes’ attempts to pacify the life of societies biopolitically, these thinkers have each sought an answer in the return to and an insistence on war as a condition of possibility for the expression of resistance against the state and its allied regimes of power. Faced with the grand paradox of a modernity in which the promise of peace has always meant the targeting of rogue societies and subjectivities with the means of war and state terror, these thinkers have insisted on responding with their own wars of resistance. The fundamental question that each of their politics turns on is how to assume war as a condition of possibility for the constitution and generation of resistance to a given regime of power. What form does life take when peace is no longer its foundation, but its enemy? Against such polemologies, we find the Foucault of Society Must be Defended posing the problem of war and its relation to modern political power in starkly different terms of a problematisation. The relevant question for Foucault is not how war can be waged in generation of political change, but when it was that war first came to be conceived as the source of political relations, when it was that war first came to be used as a ‘grid of intelligibility’ for the analysis of social relations.46 How, when and why it was first noticed or imagined that what is going on beneath and in power relations is a war? When, how and why did someone come up with the idea that it is a sort of uninterrupted battle that shapes peace, and that the civil order – its basis, its essence, its essential mechanisms – is basically an order of battle? Who came up with the idea that the civil order is an order of battle?47 In answer to these rhetorically posed questions Foucault focuses on what he describes as the emergence of ‘historico-political discourse’ in which war, as he demonstrates, is first understood as a ‘permanent social relationship, the ineradicable basis of all relations and institutions of power’.48 Representatives of popular movements in seventeenth-century England, such as Edward Coke and John Lilburne, and French authors such as Henri Boulainvilliers, abbé Sièyes and Augustin Thierry, are cited as the main instigators of this discourse by which politics is conceptualised, in prefigurative inversion of Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum, as the continuation of war. Within this historico-political discourse Foucault finds an essential counterpoint to the more traditional philosophicojuridical discourses in which political power is understood as antithetical to war. Stressing the continuations between war and politics, historicopolitical discourse allows for the re-evaluation of peace as a form of



30 Julian Reid

‘coded war’.49 Conceiving political order as such enables the analysis of social relations as orders of battle in which ‘there is no such thing as a neutral subject’ and in which ‘we are all inevitably someone’s adversary’.50 The social body is no longer conceived in the Hobbesian terms of an organic homogeneity, but rather as a series of proliferating binary divisions allowing for the exploration of new antagonisms, new lines of division and the decentring of new forms of subjectivity that lay claim to their own particular conditions of possibility. The subject that inhabits these force relations, that is subjectified in accordance with the generative force of their power, is a subject that is literally fighting to survive, waging war in pursuit of the truth that he or she is. The seeking of the truths of subjectivity is a decentring task. It is the fact of being on one side – the decentred position – that makes it possible to interpret the truth, to denounce the illusions and errors that are being used – by your adversaries – to make you believe we are living in a world in which order and peace have been restored. The more I decentre myself, the better I can see the truth; the more I accentuate the relationship of force, and the harder I fight, the more effectively I can deploy the truth ahead of me and use it to fight, survive and win.51 In the eighth lecture of the series, therefore, we find Foucault arguing as to the broader state strategies to which these forms of desubjugated knowledges contribute. What happens, he asks, to conceptions and roles of knowledge and truth when politics is understood as the continuation of war? The emergence of historico-political discourses allow for the elaboration of forms of knowledge and claims to truth that challenge the state’s insistences that knowledge and truth are necessarily aligned to justice and peace and that the sovereignty of the state is a precondition of knowledge and truth.52 Historico-political discourses conceive knowledge, alternatively, as a weapon in a struggle over truth. That struggle is eternal. Because politics is conceived as the continuation of war, so any political claim to the truth is an act of war. The struggle for knowledge is no longer that of a homogeneous body pursuing the victory of objective truth over error, of knowledge over ignorance, of reason over nature, of experience over superstition. Instead it leads to a construal of the struggle for truth as that of ‘an immense and multiple battle between knowledges in the plural – knowledges that are in conflict because of their very morphology, because they are in the possession of enemies, and because they have intrinsic power-effects’.53




This construal of knowledge as a weapon in a war over the terrain of truth has, no doubt for Foucault, certain emancipatory implications. It allows for the reproblematisation of the universality with which the state attempts to stamp its seal on truth as well as discipline knowledge in the service of state interests. Conceiving knowledge as a weapon in war, conceiving war itself as a condition of possibility for the act of laying claim to the truth, historico-political discourses make of truth a perpetual game of offensives, sieges and tactical deployments. Yet they also make for a new condition in which knowledge ‘cannot get away from war, or discover its basic laws or impose limits on it, quite simply because war itself supports this knowledge, runs through this knowledge, and determines this knowledge’.54 Once war functions as a condition of possibility for the truth, once knowledge becomes a matter always of tactical deployments, so we become soldiers of the truth in endless and serial fields of political struggle. The various, differentiated fields of political struggle that defined the development of modern societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most especially and poignantly those of race, nation and class, were each, Foucault argues, defined by their mutual deployments of historico-political discourses as ‘a sort of discursive weapon’.55 The constitution of force relations among different races, different nations, different classes, the various degrees of inequality among them, structure the organisation of modern societies, according to Foucault, in the most elementary sense. Here, then, we find Foucault extending a thought that was central to his account of the problem of war in The History of Sexuality. There he was concerned with explaining why, with the birth of the modern era, ‘the principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living’ – became the principle that defines the strategy of states internationally and how the existence of entire populations came to be wagered on the outcomes of wars between state powers.56 In Society Must Be Defended Foucault argues that the logic which explains the total wars between modern states is to be located in the origins of modern social struggles. Of central concern in this respect is the theme of race. In The History of Sexuality Foucault claimed that it is as ‘managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race’ that modern political regimes have been able to wage wars biopolitically. In Society Must Be Defended we find Foucault incorporating these propensities of modern political regimes, their biopolitical foundations, involving their racialised ideologies of inclusion/exclusion, within a genealogy that involves the origins of modern social struggles.



32 Julian Reid

At its origins, Foucault argues, the concept of race designated nothing beyond a certain form of historico-political divide, the simple matter of two peoples not sharing the same language or religion, but conjoined by a history of violence, wars, invasions.57 Historico-political discourses of insurrection, revolution, resistance and emancipation are inextricably tied to this elementary racial discourse of a war between two competing peoples distinguished on grounds of their differing ways of life. To an extent, as Foucault describes, no understanding of the emergence and development of such counter-state discourses is complete without examining how these discourses were and continue to be bound up with this essential capacity to draw reference to distinctions of race. The vast history of class struggles which defined the development of modern societies is unthinkable for Foucault without accounting for the role of race. Indeed, to a certain extent this is precisely why Foucault tentatively offers a degree of ‘praise’ for the discourses of race.58 As such, it is only owing to the racialised foundations of counter-state discourses of politics understood as a continuation of war that modern political regimes have been able to wage war, specify enemies and create modes of inclusion and exclusion in a biopolitical manner, Foucault argues. The modern state colonises this originally counter-state discourse of ‘race war’ and inverts it to its own ends. In turn it becomes a ‘discourse of a battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage’.59 Foucault’s central point throughout Society Must Be Defended is that understanding the biopolitical foundations of modern warfare, the capacities of states to construe dangers in biological terms and to wage war on enemies that are characterised variously as animal or inhuman, requires examining the complex genealogical relations between strategies of states and counter-state discourses and struggles. For it is in the latter, he argues, that we find the thematic of ‘race war’ first appearing. Needless to say, there are immense problems with the embodiment of these historico-political discourses in discourses of race. Foucault’s argument is ultimately that the emergence of the modern state is founded upon the colonisation and conversion of this discourse. Simultaneously, he argues, this conversion involved a fundamental and all-important distortion; distortion by which the theme of historical wars and struggles between two peoples is displaced by ‘the post-evolutionist theme of the struggle for existence’.60 This was no longer a war in the form of a bipolar confrontation, but ‘a struggle in the biological sense: the




differentiation of species, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest species’.61 Displacing race as a criterion of distinction allowing for the historicisation and politicisation of power relations from below, the idea of racial purity and state racism being pursued from above emerges. Political sovereignty invests and takes over the decentring discourse of race struggle and turns it to its own universalising ends. And so an era of biopolitical wars ensues in which populations are constituted via their orientation around racialised norms, enemies are distinguished by their racial differentiation from the norm and wars are waged in which populations are mobilised in defence of racial norms against rival populations defined by a perception of racial abnormality. In these senses Society Must Be Defended adds substance to the arguments made on the problems of biopolitical war in The History of Sexuality. It helps explain the complex entrails of state racisms, the bio-logics by which enemies are defined by modern regimes and their populations mobilised in defence of particular ways of life and biological traits. Yet in constructing Society Must Be Defended it is clear that Foucault had an enemy of his own in his sights, not simply the modern state. Foucault’s larger disagreement is with how war in the modern era functions as a condition of possibility for the political mobilisation of subjugated groups within Western societies. Not so much wars of the state as wars against the state. And here he is referring not only to celebrated histories of class struggles but the minor wars, those ‘dispersed and discontinuous offensives’ that he names in the very first lecture of the series. This argument resonates strongly with Frantz Fanon’s remarkable phenomenological account of the experience of ‘the war’ ‘the black man must wage’ against his subjugation within the ‘racial epidermal schema’ of colonial power relations.62 In his Black Skins, White Masks, first published in 1952, Fanon describes how, through a counter-genealogical analysis of his heritage, the ‘audit’ of his ‘ailments’, the colonised subject searches to reclaim his sense of negritude from out of the conditions that determine his subjugation within that schema.63 And yet how, in the determination of those conditions, in the secretion of the potentiality of a minor race that wages war against its subjugation, the colonised subject discovers a more fundamental subjugation, the subjugation to the ‘racial epidermal schema’ itself. A slave to comparison, preoccupied with self-evaluation, the grounding and pursuit of the possibility of a truth of himself that is always contingent on the presence of his white enemy within that schema, ‘the Negro’ discovers himself subject to the neurosis of a race war which cannot be won because the conditions of his own martial subjectivity forbid it.64



34 Julian Reid

The affinity between Fanon’s phenomenological lament of the experience of race war and Foucault’s critique of the roles of concepts of race and war in constituting historico-political discourse is remarkable. It underlines the otherwise disputed importance of Foucault to broader issues of postcolonial theory in a way that undercuts recent critiques made by theorists such as Paul Gilroy. Foucault was by no means uninterested in nor did he neglect ‘the meaning of racial differences’ in the context of the development of species life as a unified object of knowledge and power.65 As the publication of the 1976 lectures make clear, few statements could be further from the truth. What Foucault’s work reveals is that modern forms of racism are not, as Gilroy’s renewed investment in the potential of a Fanonesque humanism for the ‘unmaking of racialized bodies and their restoration to properly human modes of being in the world’ would otherwise suggest, the result of a violation of species life.66 Modern forms of racism are, rather, the product of an epistemology of which the concept of species life is formative. It is because we moderns think life in the terms that we do, replete with the attributes of origins, genesis and historicity that life succumbs to the regimes of differentiation, grading and scale within which all modern racisms emerge. No restitution of humanism, given that the concept of the species is intrinsically humanist, can overcome this. The concept of species life is in this context an epistemological obstacle to be traversed in approaching the problem of racism rather than the source of its transcendence. The problem, however, is not only the ways in which the tactical deployments of truth as a discursive weapon makes society possible, albeit in the form of a diffuse battleground, as a result of conceiving politics as a continuation of war. The larger problem is that of what happens when the pursuit of sovereignty is achieved and legitimised upon the claim to superiority of a particular social group which holds its truth to be universal. What new forms of force relations come into being when it is no longer a case of different nations conceiving themselves in competitive interrelation, but instead, a discourse of one nation that pertains to universality? How might this understanding of how politics has been conceived as a continuation of war help in explaining the character of the societies of nation-states, particular the genocidal tendencies of modern nation-states? To some extent this was, of course, the question haunting Foucault in The History of Sexuality to which he provides some suggestive answers in the introduction. Yet here in the final two lectures of Society Must Be Defended we find a more thoroughgoing engagement with this question. In the tenth and penultimate lecture Foucault argues that a marked shift occurs in the role of war with the emergence of the




36 Julian Reid

is no longer as a condition of existence for society and political relations, but the precondition for its survival in its political relations. At this point, we see the emergence of the idea of an internal war that defends society against threats born of and in its own body. The idea of social war makes, if you like, a great retreat from the historical to the biological, from the constituent to the medical.67 With the emergence of the nation-state the role of historico-political discourses is transformed, or at least displaced and fractured. The dominant discourse of war is no longer that of a subjugated group whose politics is an expression of a will to destroy the unity of the state and subject it to its own particular ends. The newly dominant discourse is that of a society conceived in alliance with the state, that pertains to serve the state and that duly assumes the position of the state itself; under threat the nation or population or society is constituted in danger, imperilled by enemies whose threat is defined by the degrees to which they differ from whatever biopolitical principles define the society of the state. Hence the coming into being of the idea that ‘society must be defended’. The roots of modern statist discourses of security and insecurity reside in a complex genealogical relation with counter-state tropes. Indeed it is not so much a case of the nation-state itself allowing for this shift in historico-political discourses as of a shift in the nature of historicopolitical discourses in direction of the defence of the state. Only with the latter do the concepts of nation and state begin their convergence. Originally conceived in terms of their exteriority to the state, certain of these historico-political discourses are reconceived in terms of internal capacities and potentials of service to the state. For Foucault, Sièyes’ famous text ‘What is the Third Estate?’ is a prime example.68 In turn, discourses of war and politics undergo a marked shift. No longer is the politics that war continues a war against the state in which state institutions are the sources of domination and subjugation; instead, politics becomes a continuation of a war for the state. Simultaneously, the form of this war changes so that it more closely resembles a struggle or striving toward an ideal of the universality of the state. In turn, the institutions of the state, its economy and various administrative domains become reconceived as the terrains of a struggle for universality rather than the sources of domination or exploitation.69 The security of these institutions becomes the guiding criterion for the pursuit of war – security



nation-state. With the French Revolution especially, and with the emergence of a fully formed nation-state, the role of war

of the universality of forms of life, emerging from specific localities, defined by specific capacities for self-administration, and the ‘innovatory instincts’.70 This struggle for the security of the state constitutes, then, biopolitical war. A war that is waged continually against those aleatory forces, these ways of life, that do not, cannot, or will not contribute to the increasingly universalised ideal of a self-administrative, radically innovative, biopolitically constituted society. It is in turn in response to this reconceptualisation of war, a war in defence of the state rather than against the state, that we see the emergence of the discourse of population and the development of the range of biopolitical techniques that guarantee the existence and proliferation of what George Ensor described classically in 1818 as ‘populousness’.71 If state security is, according to Foucault, the object of war by the end of the eighteenth century, it is also more importantly the strategic object of war to secure the life of populations themselves. The species life of populations becomes the battlefield on which these new forms of biopolitical war are to be waged. Such a war is conducted through the development of security mechanisms that act ‘to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population . . . so as to optimize a state of life’.72 The commitment to state security is always by necessity a commitment to the security of society which is also always a commitment to the security of a particular form of life. The development of the range of normalizing techniques, the constitution of populations around various discourses of the normal is in turn, Foucault insists, a kind of continual race war. ‘What in fact is racism?’ he asks. It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control, the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population.73 The constitution of species life itself as the referent object of the security practices of state power allows for the specification of any and every form of life that can be held to install degenerative effects within the field of population as the enemy against whom war must be waged. Not necessarily a war of the military type, but a war of quiet extermination,




carried out with the continual deployment of regulatory and normalising techniques; a war that rages at the heart of modern societies; a war of the ‘biological type’.74 At the same time that we see wars of the military type addressed as a moral scandal and the major political problematic of modernity, so we see the legitimisation of new forms of war-making as the right to kill becomes aligned in proximity to the new necessity to ‘make live’.75 In turn we see the emergence of new practices of colonisation justified on racial grounds. Subsequently, we witness the emergence of fascist states and societies in which the power over life and death, adjudicated on explicitly racial criteria, is disseminated widely, to the point where everyone ‘has the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing, which effectively means doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with’.76 Likewise the emergence of socialisms based on the pursuit of the elimination of class enemies within capitalist society emits, for Foucault, an essential form of racism.77 These strategies of states, as well as counter-state, counter-hegemonic struggles, are all fundamentally tied up with this problem of the relations between war, life and security. Once politics is construed as the continuation of war, once war becomes conceived as a condition of possibility for life, for the pursuit of its security and the increase of its being, however that conception may be grounded, the conditions are created whereby life itself becomes the object for variable forms of destruction, annihilation and quiet extermination. The clarity with which Foucault specifies the problem of biopolitics in connection to fascism is especially interesting given Agamben’s criticisms of him for failing to do precisely that.78 It is distinct too from Agamben’s more recent attempt to reduce the problem of the relation between biopolitics and war to that of a fictitious representation of a more fundamental threshold of law.79 In contrast, what is truly problematic is Foucault’s failure to pursue the concept of biopolitical war to its limits. In the last lecture of Society Must Be Defended he makes an observation and then poses a final question. ‘Of course’, he says, ‘Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this play is in fact inscribed in the workings of all States. In all modern States, in all capitalist States? Perhaps not’, he replies to himself.80 That vacillation, the doubt as to whether or not the problem of biopolitical war extends to liberal societies, the organisation of which exceeds the parameters of more statist models, must no doubt be regarded as a failure on Foucault’s part. In the context of a war on terror in which liberal capitalist regimes assure us that the future



38 Julian Reid

development of the human species is at stake against an enemy regarded as vermin, Foucault’s failure must be treated as a provocation to the pursuit of the analysis of the problem of biopolitics beyond epistemological obstacles that he himself was unable to overcome.81 Simultaneously, we must recognise that without Foucault no attempt to problematise the relationships of war to power, life and security in this manner would be possible.

Conclusion As the modern ideal of the establishment of a civil society was founded on the task of the ‘removal of war’ from society, so, for Foucault, the source of the problem of war was found to be located in the nature of the forms of life that inhabit society. Specified so, the problem of war was identified from the outset as a problem of how to attain and exert power over life, how best to shape and make life to render it conducive to peace not war. Paradoxically, it was in the development of modern forms of military organisation, as Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish, that the tactical mechanisms with which to wield power over life’s aleatory indeterminacy found their most pronounced expressions. In turn, organisation for war provided regimes with templates with which to subdue and shape life in the name of civil peace. The uniform docility of bodies afforded by disciplinary power over life in the name of peace in turn provided resources of population for the mobilisation of societies in warfare with other rival forms. This is the great paradox and crisis of political modernity that Foucault identifies in The History of Sexuality. Modernity is characterised by a type of society that has sought refuge from the indeterminacy of life, its radical undecidability, in techniques of discipline, regulation and normalisation, which in turn have exacerbated unprecedented forms of warfare inter-socially. The problem of modernity was never the problem of war as such, but in the still prevalent forms of solution to war – that is to say, in the ways modern societies construe peace. Understood thus, the imperative question of politics, which he specifies more clearly in Society Must Be Defended, and which reiterates Fanon’s original postcolonial critique, is that of how to disengage from the processes of subjectification by which life comes to be variably pacified and mobilised. What form does life take when it is no longer subordinated to a modern teleology of peace achieved through the means of war? Yet, in detailing this imperative and posing the question, Foucault abandons us on a word of prohibitive caution. Those many and long traditions of counter-opposing the imposition of peace by declaring it war,




which find their culmination now in a multitude of ‘dispersed and discontinuous’ offensives, and among which he contextualises the thrust of his own earlier work, provide no substantial ground, he argues, from which to escape the peace and war schemata. If we desire a resolution of this fundamental paradox of political modernity we must establish other ways of construing the life of political being, ones that compromise its seemingly endless polemologies.

Acknowledgements Thank you to Michael Dillon, Randy Martin and especially Patrick Deer for their comments on this work. A draft version of this chapter was presented at the Security Bytes Colloquium at Lancaster University in the UK in July 2004. A different version of this argument is presented in Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007).

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 135–69. 2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 92–159. 3. Michel Foucault, ‘What Our Present Is’, in Foucault Live: Interviews 1961– 1984, interview by André Berten, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext, 1996), 415. 4. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 47. 5. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 155. 6. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 87–111. 7. Ibid., 165. 8. Ibid., 8. 9. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135. 10. Ibid., 140. 11. This owes largely to the extent to which the study of strategy and the function of military organisation has been contained within the military sciences themselves. The tradition of military-strategic science and organisation founds itself largely on a claim deriving from readings of von Clausewitz that war can be understood simply as a continuation of state policy. However, the reading of von Clausewitz on which this claim is founded is extremely narrow. See Julian Reid, ‘Foucault on Clausewitz: Conceptualizing the Relationship between War and Power’, Alternatives 28 (2003), 1–28. For a contemporary example of such a narrow rendition of the concept of strategy and the function of military organisation, see Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17–23.



40 Julian Reid

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 142. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 153. Ibid. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 155. Ibid. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 168. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 136–7. Ibid., 137. See Charles Taylor’s reductive reading of Foucault, ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, in David Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 82–3. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 137. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 137. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 168. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 93. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 100. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 7–8. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 10. Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’ to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Athlone Press, 2000), xi–xiv. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 351– 423; Julian Reid, ‘Deleuze’s War Machine: Nomadism against the State’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32 (2003), 57–85; On Virilio’s theory of war and modernity, see Julian Reid, ‘Architecture, Al-Qaeda and the World Trade Center: Rethinking the Relations between War, Modernity and City Spaces After 9/11’, Space and Culture, 7 (2004), 396–408; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); Julian Reid with Keith Farquhar, ‘Immanent War, Immaterial Terror . . . ’, Culture Machine 7 (2005), http://www.culturemachine.net. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 163.




47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 51. Ibid. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 189. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 137. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 77. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 80. Ibid. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 13, 112. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 210–13. Paul Gilroy, ‘Scales and Eyes; “Race” Making Difference’, in Sue Golding (ed.), The Eight Technologies of Otherness (London: Routledge, 1997), 194. Paul Gilroy, After Empire (London: Routledge, 2004), 45. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 216. Ibid., 217–24. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 235. Georg Ensor, An Inquiry Concerning the Populations of Nations (New York: Kelley, 1967), 12. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 246. Ibid., 254–5. Ibid., 255. Ibid., 256. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 261–2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2005), 4. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 260–1. For a classic example of the construction of the enemy as vermin, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 1–8.



42 Julian Reid

Poetry Must Be Defended: Post-Waterloo Responses to ‘Power’s Ode to Itself’ Simon Bainbridge

In the fourth lecture of Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault defines what he terms the ‘traditional function of history’ from the period of ‘the first Roman annalists until the late Middle Ages, and perhaps the seventeenth century or even later’ as having been ‘to speak the right of power and to intensify the luster of power’.1 The various forms of history, as practised in both Roman civilisation and the society of the Middle Ages, had two functions, Foucault argues. The first operated through the ‘recounting of history, the history of kings, the mighty sovereigns and their victories (and, if need be, their temporary defeats)’, the point of which was to ‘use the continuity of law to establish a juridical link between men and power, because power and its work were a demonstration of the continuity of the law itself’ (66). ‘History’s other role’, Foucault continues, ‘was to use the almost unbearable intensity of the glory of power, its examples and its exploits, to fascinate men’. He writes: the yoke of the law and the lustre of glory appear to me to be the two things historical discourse strives to use to reinforce power. Like rituals, coronations, funerals, ceremonies, and legendary stories, history is an operator of power, an intensifier of power. (66) In searching for a language with which to define this function of ‘history as the discourse of power’ (68), Foucault reaches beyond history itself to literature, specifically to poetry, describing history as ‘the uninterrupted ode in which power perpetuated itself, and grew stronger by displaying its antiquity and genealogy’ (70). Poetry, specifically the ode, provides the form for Foucault’s history, and he repeats this poetic characterisation of ‘history as the discourse of power’ a number of times in the lectures, twice describing the history of the king as ‘power’s ode to 43



2

itself’ and arguing that until the reign of Louis XIV the ‘historiography of the monarchy had been . . . an ode to power itself’ (174, 177, 176). Foucault’s repeated transformation of history into poetry is one element of his recurring interest throughout the lectures in the relationship between power and literature, particularly literary genres, seen in his Lukácsian description of Sir Walter Scott’s novels as ‘of great historical importance for the historical consciousness of the nineteenth century’ (100), in his account of the gothic novel as a form which took up, ‘at the level of the imaginary’, the eighteenth-century obsession ‘with the problem of feudalism at the level of right, history, and politics’ (212) and in his analysis of Shakespearean tragedy as a genre which ‘dwells on the wound, on the repeated injury that is inflicted on the body of the kingdom when kings die violent deaths and when illegitimate sovereigns come to the throne’ (174). As his analysis of Shakespearean tragedy reveals, the literary can disrupt the workings of sovereign power; if ‘the court’s essential function is to constitute, to organise, a space for the daily and permanent display of royal power in all its splendour’, ‘tragedy undoes and . . . recomposes what court ritual establishes each day’ (75–6). But in all his references to poetry, Foucault aligns it with history rather than with what he terms ‘counter-history’, the latter being the form of history that Foucault argues appears ‘at the very end of the Middle Ages or, really, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’ and breaks up both the unity of sovereign law and the continuity of glory (70). The ‘ode’ becomes the embodiment of power at its most sublime, what Foucault terms ‘the dazzling discourse that power uses to fascinate, terrorize, and immobilize’ (68). Over 150 years before Foucault, the radical essayist and literary critic William Hazlitt had identified a similar unholy alliance of politics and aesthetics as structuring the reactionary and repressive ideology of the post-Waterloo era, writing: ‘the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’.2 For Hazlitt, as for Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, one particular ode came to epitomise both the ideological force of poetry and its seemingly inevitable support of power, William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode, 1815’, also known as the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, written to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, which became notorious for its suggestion that the slaughter of the battle was part of God’s divine plan: We bow our heads before Thee, and we laud And magnify thy name, Almighty God! But thy most dreaded instrument, In working out a pure intent,



44 Simon Bainbridge

Post-Waterloo Responses to ‘Power’s Ode to Itself’ 45

Hazlitt, Shelley and Byron frequently invoked this poem, and particularly these lines, as exemplifying the challenging alliance of poetry and power in the post-Waterloo period. Hazlitt, for example, supported the comment quoted above by citing the phrase ‘Carnage is thy daughter’ and adding ‘Poetry is right-royal’. For all three, Wordsworth’s poem raised the problem of the ideology of the aesthetic (could there be such a thing as a ‘counter-poetry’, akin to Foucault’s ‘counter-history’?), a dilemma to which they produced different responses. Hazlitt and Byron both present poetry as the ultimate form of power, but they adopt very different strategies in response to its destructive dazzle. Foucault’s models of ‘history’ and ‘counter-history’, as set out in Society Must Be Defended, can help us think about and characterise these different responses. While Hazlitt and Byron adopt the position of what Foucault terms the ‘warring subject’, Shelley rejects such a subject position. As this might suggest, if Foucault’s ideas in Society Must be Defended can be illuminating for thinking about these writers, their works can be used to interrogate his exploratory theory. The post-war historical moment in which they were writing can be seen to offer a test case for examining Foucault’s claims that war is the ‘motor’ of society and the ‘grid’ for analysing it, which he outlines as follows: Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefield runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary. (50–1) As we shall see, Hazlitt presents a similar vision of power relations in the supposedly peacetime years following the Battle of Waterloo, and Foucault’s claim that civil war is the essential structure of society, even peacetime society, seemed to be lent support by the most notorious incident in post-Waterloo Britain, the so-called ‘Peterloo Massacre’ of 16 August 1819, when the British yeoman cavalry charged on a peaceful



Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter, – Yea, Carnage is thy daughter. (ll .277–82)3

demonstration protesting for parliamentary reform at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, killing at least six civilians and injuring hundreds more. The name by which this event became known, ‘Peterloo’, itself presents the incident as an awful parody of Waterloo and suggests the internalisation of war within the state that Foucault posits. For Shelley, ‘Peterloo’ provided a focus for this thinking about the relationship between poetry and power, and while his writing is illuminated by Foucault’s analysis of the operations of power, it shows a desire to move beyond the structuring patterns of war that Foucault would himself reject, or at least strive to make more complex, after this exploratory series of lectures.

Partisanship against power: William Hazlitt Both Hazlitt and Foucault identify the strength of the alliance of power and poetry as a result of their mutual appeal to the imagination. Foucault writes that ‘history is the dazzling discourse that power uses to fascinate, terrorize and immobilize’ (68), while Hazlitt comments: Power is the grim idol that the world adore; that arms itself with destruction, and reigns by terror in the coward heart of man; that dazzles the sense, haunts the imagination, confounds the understanding, and tames the will, by the vastness of its pretensions, and the very hopelessness of resistance to them. (VII, 149) While Foucault (or his translator) may sometimes read as if he has been studying Hazlitt (for example, when he refers to ‘the famous dazzling effect of power’ (70)), what reading Society Must Be Defended alongside Hazlitt’s various writings highlights is how close the Romantic essayist is to anticipating Foucault’s suggestion that war is the ‘motor’ of society and the ‘grid’ for analysing it. However, it also reveals that Hazlitt was a thinker who remains locked within a model of power as force and can only find the resistance that Foucault believes identifies power in a mirrored version of power itself. For Hazlitt, resistance is achieved only through reversal. Hazlitt and Foucault are alike in challenging conventional models of war; the possibilities that Foucault investigates – that ‘politics is the continuation of war by other means’, that war continues to operate ‘just beneath the surface of peace’ and that ‘civil order is basically an order of battle’ – call into question not only the customary distinction between war and peace, but also many of the dominant theories of war, including the Enlightenment understanding of war between states as something



46 Simon Bainbridge

being gradually eroded by commercial progress, the Clausewitzian model of ‘total’ war and the ‘nation-making’ account of war associated, for example, with the work of Linda Colley. Foucault’s lectures instead seem to carry out the plan he first outlined in 1972 when he commented that he wanted to analyse power relations by looking at ‘the most disparaged of all wars, neither Hobbes, nor Clausewitz, nor the class struggle: civil war’.4 Hazlitt similarly challenges the conventional understanding of the dominant form of war as one fought between nations; as he argues in his Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the 22 years of conflict between Britain and France ‘was never a national quarrel, but a struggle between the different classes and races of men, whether one should be considered as an inferior order of being to the other . . . the real gist of the argument is . . . between the natural rights and the hereditary and lasting bondage of the people’ (XIV, 182). And this war, rather than having been brought to a close by Waterloo, continues into the present and is fought with both physical and imaginary weapons, as Hazlitt writes in the ‘Preface’ to the Political Essays, again emphasising the alliance of power and poetry: ‘kings at present tell us with their swords, and poets with their pens’ that the people ‘have no rights, that they are their property, their goods, their chattels, the live-stock on the estate of Legitimacy’ (VII, 10). For Hazlitt, then, as for Foucault, ‘war continues to rage within the mechanisms of power’ (268) and for both this is a war that must be fought to a decisive end. Foucault argues that ‘it is not enough to rediscover the war as an explanatory principle’; war ‘has to be reactivated’, and he adds, ‘we must pursue it until the decisive battle for which we have to prepare if we wish to be the victors’ (268). Hazlitt is similarly bellicose, adopting a strategy of confrontation and opposition. For example, in his essay ‘On the Spirit of Partisanship’ he argues that unlike Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, the leader of the Whig opposition in the 1790s, had ‘too much of what we mean by “the milk of human kindness” to be a practical statesman’ (XVII, 36). What Fox failed to realise, Hazlitt argues, is that ‘Political is like military warfare. There are but two sides, and after you have once chosen your party, it will not do to stand in the midway, and say you like neither’ (XVII, 40). He recommends to ‘our political mediators’ the words of Shakespeare’s Henry V to his soldiers before Harfleur, that they ‘imitate the action of the tiger’ (XVII, 39). For Hazlitt ‘modest stillness and humility’ are weakness even in peacetime – the blast of war resonates in our ears continuously and perpetually. Like Foucault, then, Hazlitt rejects the Kantian position Foucault describes as that of the ‘legislator or the philosopher who belongs to neither side, a figure of peace and armistices . . . [placed] between the




48 Simon Bainbridge

As active partisans, we must take up with the best we can get in the circumstances, and defend it with all our might against a worse cause (which will prevail, if this does not), instead of ‘letting our frail thoughts dally with faint surmise’; or, while dreaming of an ideal perfection, we shall find ourselves surprised into the train, and gracing the triumph, of the common enemy. (XVII, 40) Hazlitt, then, can be seen to participate in Foucault’s critique of sovereign power and, with his argument for the continuing presence of war within society, has a significant place in the genealogy of Foucault’s own project. (Indeed, his emphasis on the need for partisanship might appear to anticipate Carl Schmidt’s figure of the partisan – a figure derived from the Peninsular War – which has been seen to inform Foucault’s own figure of the Barbarian).5 Hazlitt can also be seen to undertake part of the function that Foucault ascribes to what he terms ‘counter-history’, the role of which will be ‘to show that laws deceive, that kings wear masks, that power creates illusions, and the historians tell lies’ (72). For example, Hazlitt writes in the review of Coriolanus, in which he claims that ‘the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’, that ‘the history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of political justice; it is a noble or royal hunt in which what is sport to the few, is death to the many’ (V, 350). As Foucault comments, ‘the triumph of some means the submission of others’, and Hazlitt’s emphasis on the victims of history might suggest that he is one who will ‘speak from the side that is in darkness, from within the shadows’ (70) rather than concentrating on those who ‘flaunt themselves in their power and their glory’. But Hazlitt does no such thing. Rather than offering a history of ‘the misfortunes of ancestors, exiles, and servitude, or enumerating defeats’ (71) in the mode of Foucauldian counter-history, Hazlitt strives to appropriate the glory he associates with power to his own political cause, finding in Napoleon a figure in whom he could combine a representative of his own anti-monarchical politics with a forceful appeal to the imagination. Though usually a devastating critic of idolatry, Hazlitt conspicuously fostered Napoleon as ‘the God of mine



adversaries, in the centre and above them, imposing one general law on all and founding a reconciliatory order’ (53). And, like Foucault, Hazlitt’s subject is ‘a subject who is fighting a war’, to use Foucault’s phrase (54). Where Foucault describes the ‘historico-political discourse’ as a ‘discourse in which truth exclusively functions as a weapon that is used to win an exclusively partisan victory’, so Hazlitt writes:

idolatry’ (VII, 10), in both an epic biography of the French emperor and in his other writing, using him to represent ‘abstract right’, but dressing him out in ‘pride, pomp, and circumstance’, making him a figure who combined ‘power’ and ‘poetry’. What the case of Hazlitt reveals is the danger of becoming locked in a partisan subject position which understands society, politics and the individual through the figure of war. While much of Hazlitt’s writing undertakes the Foucauldian task of ‘deciphering power’s secrets and demystifying it’ (77), his political sensibility was founded on ‘hatred’, as his friend Crabb Robinson commented in a comparison of their politics in 1815. Robinson writes: Hazlitt and myself once felt alike on politics, and now our hopes and fears are directly opposed. Hazlitt retains all his hatred of kings and bad governments, and believing them to be incorrigible, he from a principle of revenge rejoices that they are punished. . . . His hatred . . . predominate[s] and absorb[s] all weaker impressions.6 Robinson’s assertion is consistently illustrated by Hazlitt’s own writing. For example, in the opening of the ‘Preface’ to his Political Essays, published in 1819, he makes his most explicit declaration of his political position: ‘I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a partyman: but I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could’ (VII, 7). In ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, Hazlitt presents antagonistic violence as something which has always structured the individual and society, commenting: ‘We give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence and principle of hostility . . . Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring and thought of action’ (XII, 125–6). Finding this Foucauldian structure of civil war within both the individual and society, Hazlitt presents himself as without ‘room for further hope or disappointment’. All that history leaves us with, as Hazlitt comments in a review of Wordsworth’s Excursion, is ‘hatred and scorn as lasting’ (XIX, 18).

Singing against power: Lord Byron I have been arguing that Hazlitt responds to power’s ode to itself by singing his own ode to Napoleon, his Life of Napoleon reforging the alliance of poetry and power rather than prising apart its links.




50 Simon Bainbridge

Waterloo has made the world your debtor – (I wish your bards would sing it rather better). (IX, 3)7 Rather than replicating the alliance of poetry and power as Hazlitt does, Byron undertakes Foucault’s counter-historical task by striving to ‘decipher power’s secrets and demystify it’, promising to offer ‘Glory’s dream / Unriddled’ in the war cantos of Don Juan (VIII, 1). In the face of a model of ‘History’ which can only ‘take things in the gross’, he offers a counterhistory which enables us to ‘know them in detail’, focusing on the ‘loss’ of war rather than its profit. I want to look now at some stanzas from the war cantos of Don Juan, VII and VIII, to examine Byron’s formulation of this counter-history and to see how it is figured in response to what he, like Foucault and Hazlitt, sees as an unholy alliance of poetry and power. Throughout his writing on war, Byron attacks poetry as the most powerful mediation of war to the reading public. For example, in the manuscript drafts of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which takes the Peninsular War as its subject, he denounces the poets who celebrate war as ‘prone to lie’ and ‘fabling poets’,8 and writes in the published canto of Albuera, the scene of a major battle: Thy name shall circle round the gaping throng, And shine in worthless lays, the theme of transient song. (I, 43) Similarly, in the manuscript drafts describing the corpses that ‘feed the crow in Talavera’s plain’, Byron had attacked poetic celebrations of the battle: There shall they rot – while rhymers tell the fools How honour decks the turf that wraps their clay! Liars avaunt!9 This denunciation of the poetics of war gains force through its allusion to William Collins’ celebrated ‘Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746’, which begins ‘How sleep the brave’ and describes the ‘sod’ where the brave ‘sink to rest / By all their country’s wishes blest!’: There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey, To bless the turf that wraps their clay . . . (ll. 9–10)10



By contrast, Lord Byron, himself the author of an ‘Ode to Napoleon’, sought an alternative poetics to that of power; as he joked in his address to Wellington in canto IX of Don Juan:

As Byron’s rewriting emphasises, his pilgrim, Harold, comes to the battlefield not to cover the war dead with laurels, but to view the corpses that ‘fertilize the field that each pretends to gain!’ Similarly, in his treatment of what he terms in The Vision of Judgement the ‘Crowning Carnage, Waterloo’ (l. 38), Byron attacks the triumph of the allied forces of power and poetry that the battle seemed to enact, the brilliant phrase ‘crowning carnage’ revealing the strength of the coalition, presenting the battle with its 50,000 casualties as the culminating slaughter of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, emphasising its role in the restoration of monarchical regimes across Europe, while also invoking the notorious phrase ‘Carnage is thy daughter’ from Wordsworth’s ‘Thanksgiving Ode’. The culmination of Byron’s attack on the poetics of power and warfare comes in the siege cantos of Don Juan, written in 1822 and taking as their subject the Russian assault on the Turkish fortress at Ismail of November/December 1790, during the Russo-Turkish wars of 1787–91. For Byron, war had always been part of his epic agenda for Don Juan and in canto VIII he makes a claim for the special, if ambiguous, role of ‘the blaze / Of conquest and its consequences, which / Make Epic poesy so rare and rich’ (VIII. 90). Acknowledging here the hold of violence over the imagination, Byron seeks to ‘break the continuity of glory’ (to use Foucault’s phrase [70]) or to offer ‘Glory’s dream / Unriddled’ to use his own (VIII, 1), insisting throughout that one of the major fabrications of idealising narratives of war is ‘glory’ – ‘what story / Sometimes calls “murder” and at others “glory”’ (VII, 26). While Byron exposes glory as illusory, commenting, ‘But Glory’s Glory; and if you would find / What that is – ask the pig who sees the wind!’ (VII, 84), he recognises its abstract yet pervasive power: the Russian general Suvorov exploits it in his speech to his troops, and during the assault the poem’s hero, Juan, battles ‘In search of glory’ (VII. 64; VIII. 31, 52). Byron identifies the ideological force of glory, not only in the role it plays in driving soldiers into battle, but in bolstering the established order: Yet I love Glory; – glory’s a great thing; – Think what it is to be in your old age Maintained at the expense of your good king: A moderate pension shakes full many a sage, And heroes are but made for bards to sing, Which is still better; thus in verse to wage Your wars eternally, besides enjoying Half-pay for life, make mankind worth destroying. (VIII. 14) 10.1057/9780230584334 - Foucault in an Age of Terror, Edited by Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave



Here again poetry takes on the role that Foucault allocates to history, operating as power’s ode to itself. Alluding to both Wordsworth, the ‘sage’ of Grasmere and bard of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ who had taken a government ‘pension’ as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and to Wellington, the subject of numerous poems and whose pensions Byron frequently invokes, the passage shows how ‘Glory’ has been used not only to justify the destruction of mankind, but to maintain the positions of those individuals who have most benefited from the recent wars. It is through the figure of Suvorov, appointed to lead the siege, that Byron represents the force of history as it enacts itself through war and embodies itself as poetry, and it is in response to this figure that he offers his own counter-history and statement of his poetics. In his efficiency, ruthlessness and willingness to expend any number of soldiers to achieve his aim, Suvorov, whose ‘trade / Is butchery’ (VII. 69), comes to represent both the professionalism and devastation of modern warfare. But his position as one of the ‘great men’ who makes history, possessed of ‘the spirit of a single mind [that] / Makes that of multitudes take one direction’ (VII. 48), is achieved only as a result of his limited vision of history, as is seen when Byron describes his attitude to the anticipated devastation of the siege: Suwarrow, – who but saw things in the gross, Being much too gross to see them in detail, Who calculated life as so much dross, And as the wind a widowed nation’s wail, And cared as little for his army’s loss (So that their efforts should at length prevail) As wife and friends did for the boils of Job, – What was’t to him to hear two women sob? Nothing. – The work of Glory still went on . . . (VII, 78–9) Suvarov’s limited vision – seeing in the gross, unable to see in detail, calculating life as dross – becomes for Byron a personification of history itself, which he describes in the following canto while also offering an alternative: History can only take things in the gross; But could we know them in detail, perchance In balancing the profit and the loss, War’s merit it by no means might enhance,



52 Simon Bainbridge


It is against history’s ‘gross’ vision that Byron writes in Don Juan, countering its Suvorovian values with a detailed account of the true cost of war, redefining territory rather than human life as ‘so much dross’ and focusing on the individual victims of battle. And it is also against the Suvorovian model of history enacted through war that Byron defines his own role as a poet, for once again at the culminating moment of power’s triumph – the completion of the siege – the form that history takes is poetry: Suwarrow was now conqueror – a match For Timour or for Zinghis in his trade. While mosques and streets, beneath his eyes, like thatch Blazed, and the cannon’s roar was scarce allayed, With bloody hands he wrote his first despatch; And here exactly follows what he said: – ‘Glory to God and to the Empress!’ (Powers Eternal!! such names mingled!) ‘Ismail’s ours.’ (VIII, 133) In his note to these lines, Byron observes of Suvorov’s dispatch that ‘it was a kind of couplet; for he was a poet’ and in the following stanza describes the general as the ‘Russ so witty [who] / Could rhyme, like Nero, o’er a burning city’ (VIII. 134 and p. 1057). At the culminating moment of violence, history, writing with bloody hands above the burning city, becomes poetry; carnage becomes a couplet, violence becomes verse and arson becomes art, as power writes its ode to itself. But just as Suvorov’s embodiment of history’s ‘gross’ vision prompts Byron’s alternative detailed vision, so the fatuous and inappropriate ‘couplet’ of this ‘Russ so witty’ stimulates Byron’s climatic statement of his own poetic role in the siege cantos. He continues: He wrote this Polar melody, and set it, Duly accompanied by shrieks and groans, Which few will sing, I trust, but none forget it – For I will teach, if possible, the stones To rise against Earth’s tyrants. Never let it Be said that we still truckle unto thrones; –



To waste so much gold for a little dross As hath been done, mere conquest to advance. (VIII. 3; emphasis added)

54 Simon Bainbridge

Defining his song against Suvorov’s ‘Polar melody’, Byron here gives his most ambitious statement of the function of his poetry and the part it will play in bringing about a ‘free’ world. Adapting the ‘things as they are’ slogan and aesthetic of the English Jacobin novelists, Byron presents his role as an educative one that will lead to change; he will ‘teach’ by showing ‘what things were’. But if Byron offers a poetics of counterhistory, singing the ‘shrieks and groans’ of war, and one which envisages a free future world without violence, we should also recognise that like Foucault’s model of counter-history it is itself founded on violence. In his account of the siege cantos to his friend Moore, Byron described his ‘sarcasm on those butchers in large business, your mercenary soldier’. He adds: With these things and these fellows, it is necessary, in the present clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard. I know it is against fearful odds; but the battle must be fought; and it will be eventually for the good of mankind, whatever it may be for the individual who risks himself.11 And in canto IX of Don Juan, Byron declares: And I will war, at least in words (and – should My chance so happen – deeds) with all who war With Thought; – and of Thought’s foes by far most rude, Tyrants and Sycophants have been and are. (IX, 24) While Byron never identifies civil or internal war as something that structures society in the way that Foucault and Hazlitt (and as we shall see Shelley) do, his examination of the culture of conflict in Don Juan identifies its continuing role even in peacetime, and his vision of a future world free of war is, like Foucauldian counter-history, posited on the idea of a final, decisive battle.

Love not war: Percy Shelley In his 1821 essay A Defence of Poetry, Shelley commented that during the reign of Charles II, ‘all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to



But ye – our children’s children! think how we Showed what things were before the world was free! (VIII, 135)

be expressed became hymns to the triumphs of kingly power over virtue and liberty’ (520).12 For him, as for Hazlitt and Byron, the tradition of poetry as power’s ode to itself lived on into the present day and was particularly associated with the work of Wordsworth. In his 1819 satire of Wordsworth, Peter Bell the Third, Shelley presents the older poet as a political apostate who was abused by the Reviews ‘when he wrote for freedom’, but who gained their praise ‘so soon as in his song they spy / The folly which soothes Tyranny’ (ll. 619–24). This recognition prompts a new stage in the poetic career of Peter (Shelley’s version of Wordsworth), which is described as follows: Then Peter wrote odes to the devil; – In one of which he meekly said: – ‘May Carnage and Slaughter, Thy niece and my daughter, May Rapine and Famine, Thy gorge ever cramming, Glut thee with living and dead! ‘May death and Damnation And Consternation, Flit up from Hell with pure intent! Slash them at Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds and Chester; Drench all with blood from Avon to Trent! ‘Let thy body-guard yeomen Hew down babes and women, And laugh with bold triumph till heaven be rent! When Moloch in Jewry Munched children with fury. It was thou, Devil, dining with pure intent.’ While it redefines history as the working out of a diabolical nature rather than a divine intent, Shelley’s treatment of Wordsworth’s Ode is striking for the way in which it appropriates the language of a poem about national war to describe the poet’s desire for civil conflict, a call for the continuation of war within the nation itself. This rewriting of Wordsworth signals a reconceptualisation and relocation of the place of war in post-Waterloo society, as war shifts from the borders of the nation to operate within the nation itself. Interestingly, during the war with France Wordsworth had himself been concerned about precisely




56 Simon Bainbridge

Woe be to that country whose military powers is irresistible! I deprecate such an event for Great Britain scarcely less than for any other Land . . . If a nation have nothing to oppose or to fear without, it cannot escape decay and concussion within. Universal triumph and absolute security soon betray a State into abandonment of that discipline, civil and military, by which its victories were secured . . . My prayer, as a Patriot, is, that we may already have, somewhere or other, enemies capable of resisting us, and keeping us at arm’s length.13 For Wordsworth, then, maintaining war at the borders of the state keeps it at arm’s length and prevents it from moving inside the state itself. Indeed, Wordsworth’s anxiety was seen to have been fulfilled later in the century when the (admittedly mentally unstable) protagonist of Tennyson’s Maud says of the 40 years’ peace supposedly instituted by Waterloo: Why do they prate of the blessings of Peace? we have made them a curse, Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own; . . . Is it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword.14 The protagonist identifies this period of peace as actually a time of war and finds the possibility of personal and national redemption through the idea of war with another country. Foucault’s analysis of the way war is understood as being at the borders while in fact it moves within the state is helpful here; Tennyson suggests that by locating war at the borders we can mask or resist internal war. To return to Shelley, his rewriting of Wordsworth in Peter Bell suggests that it was precisely this internalisation of war within the nation that was taking place in the post-Waterloo era, a process symbolised most forcefully by ‘Peterloo’, alluded to in the line ‘Slash them at Manchester’, and the subject of two of Shelley’s most famous poems, ‘England in 1819’



this potential relocation of war, though his wish was the opposite of Peter’s. Writing in 1811 to Captain C. W. Pasley, author of The Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, Wordsworth presented the value of national war as lying precisely in its power to prevent civil war:


An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn, – mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. A people starved and stabbed in th’untilled field; An army, whom liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless – a book sealed; A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed – Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Here we have a fragmented nation which is at war with itself; the people are ‘stabbed’ in the untilled field, the army kills liberty and is defined by the verb ‘prey’ (to plunder, pillage, spoil, rob) and the laws ‘slay’, Shelley’s rhyme words emphasising the social condition of war. The poem would appear to align itself with Foucault’s hypothesis that ‘war continues to rage within the mechanisms of power, or at least to constitute the secret motor of institutions, laws, and order’ (268), and we might be tempted to read the ambiguous image of the army as a ‘two-edged sword’ with its suggestion of the rebound of violence on those who use it within Foucault’s dynamics of power as conflict. For example, he talks in the lectures about the discourse of race as ‘a way of turning that weapon against those who had forged it’ (81). But to do so would be to misread this poem, which rejects violence as a means of bringing about the tentatively wished-for era of the poem’s final couplet. Unlike Hazlitt and Byron, who operate from within a warring subject position of the sort posited by Foucault, Shelley’s glorious phantom is not to be brought about by a final, decisive battle; rather, the targets of Shelley’s invective are incorporated into the cycle of death and resurrection structured by the sonnet’s delayed main verb (‘are’) as we come to the end of history: the king is dying, the princes are the dregs of their race, while the leechlike rulers fall from the body of their country ‘without a blow’. If the sonnet remains uncertain about how change will be brought about or



and ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. In ‘England in 1819’ war appears to have moved inside the nation:

what the future will look like, the one thing of which it seems certain is that if it is to be brought about it will not be through violence. While for Foucault war is inherent in peacetime society, for Shelley the opposite is true: peace is inherent in the condition of war. We can see a similar rejection of violence despite the prevailing condition of civil war in Shelley’s extended examination of the events of Peterloo, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. This was Shelley’s first poetic response to the news of Peterloo, of which he learned while he was in Italy, and its opening stresses both his distance from the event and the form of the poem as a dream vision: As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy. (ll. 1–4) For Shelley the power of poetry is very different from that identified by Hazlitt or that he himself saw as its role in the reign of Charles II; rather, it fulfils a function closer to Foucault’s model of counter-history, showing that laws deceive, that kings wear masks and that power creates illusions. The title of the poem, of course, puns on masquerade while suggesting the deceptive disguises adopted by power, an emphasis seen in the opening of the poem as the poet meets ‘Murder’ who ‘had a mask like Castlereagh’ (ll. 5–6) and sees: many more Destructions [who] played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies. (ll. 26–9) The final figure in the masquerade is Anarchy himself, whose description is worth quoting in full: Last came Anarchy: he rode On a white horse, splashed with blood; He was pale even to the lips, Like Death in the Apocalypse.



58 Simon Bainbridge


With a pace stately and fast, Over English land he past, Trampling to a mire of blood The adoring multitude. And a mighty troop around, With their trampling shook the ground, Waving each a bloody sword, For the service of their Lord. And with glorious triumph, they Rode through England proud and gay Drunk as with intoxication Of the wine of desolation. (ll. 30–49)

Foucault’s argument in Society Must Be Defended is particularly helpful when analysing this passage because it highlights two of the main ideas that Shelley is exploring. The first is the representation of Anarchy’s power as a discourse, constituted through and as language – ‘I am God, and King, and Law’, a phrase that even becomes a kind of poem as the ‘hired Murderers’ ‘sing . . . “Thou art God, and Law, and King”’ (ll. 60–1). The second is how this discourse works to disguise the conditions of war and violence which operate in and structure society. For Shelley, it is poetry that enables this act of interpretation; the visions of poesy enable a decoding of war’s role in peace. But again Shelley resists the extension of the Foucauldian argument that this is a war which must be fought, an argument we have encountered in Byron and Hazlitt, contending instead for a programme of passive resistance, albeit one he presents through the language of battle:

‘Stand ye calm and resolute, Like a forest close and mute, With folded arms and looks which are Weapons of unvanquished war,



And he wore a kingly crown, And in his grasp a sceptre shone; On his brow this mark I saw – ‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’

60 Simon Bainbridge

While Shelley represents the ‘Men of England’ as engaged in a continuing war, it is one in which the folded arms and looks of passive resistance provide the weapons, prompting a revolution in the minds of the soldiers, shamed by the violence in which they have engaged. Like ‘England in 1819’, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ identifies a continuing war within the fabric of post-Waterloo English society, but looks beyond war as the means of bringing about transformation. Both poems raise the question of how society is to be transformed if violence is to be rejected, an issue with which Shelley had wrestled in another poem completed in 1819, though one which pre-dates Peterloo, Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s completion and rewriting of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is perhaps his greatest examination of power and history, and it is a work in which the entire dramatic action stems from Prometheus’ rejection of a warring subject position. The play begins with Prometheus bound to a precipice in the Indian Caucasus where he has been tortured for 3,000 years by the tyrant Jupiter with whom he is locked in a seemingly unending struggle of domination and rebellion. Yet while Prometheus’ opening speech details this contest, it also contains the crucial action of the play as Prometheus rejects hatred and perpetual war and embraces pity, revoking the curse that he had put on Jupiter and announcing that ‘I am changed so that aught evil wish / Is dead within!’ (I, i, 70–1). Writing about the same mythological figure in 1816, Byron had used Prometheus as a figure for his post-Waterloo defiance, the conclusion emphasising his continuing occupation of a warring subject position: ‘Triumphant where it dares defy, / And making Death a Victory’ (‘Prometheus’, ll. 58–9). It is precisely this embattled mental state that Shelley’s Prometheus rejects at the opening of Prometheus Unbound; the curse which he recalls, and in so doing invokes, begins: ‘Fiend, I defy thee! . . .’ (I, i, 263). Prometheus’ rejection of hatred and defiance produces the fall of Jupiter, the negative parts of his own self as well as the figure for potential tyranny, and instigates his reunion with Asia, a figure of love, the transformative power of which the play traces. After war comes marriage, and the final act consists of an extended marriage hymn for Prometheus and Asia, part of which involves the sexual union of the Earth and Moon. These couplings are part of the larger transformation



And let Panic, who outspeeds The career of armed steeds Pass, a disregarded shade Through your phalanx undismayed.’ (ll. 319–26)


This is the Day which down the void Abysm At the Earth-born’s spell yawns for Heaven’s Despotism, And Conquest is dragged Captive through the Deep; Love from its awful throne of patient power In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, And narrow verge of crag-like Agony, springs And folds over the world its healing wings. (IV, i, 554–61) A world structured by a mind locked into an antagonist relationship defined by war, conflict and conquest is transformed into a poetics that celebrates love and sexuality as its creative force. (Might we trace something of a parallel with the trajectory of Foucault’s own thinking here, as he moves away from using war as a means of analysing politics to focus on sexuality, a field which allows for a much greater emphasis on negotiation, play and perhaps more positive forms of resistance than those offered by war?) Shelley’s use of sexual union and marriage as the structuring theme of Prometheus Unbound and as the forms that can both transform bellicose society and take its place offer us an alternative to the model of war for thinking about the operations of power in the writing of the Romantic period, a model that we might find in the work of William Blake, the poet of ‘mental fight’, who nonetheless argues that ‘opposition is true friendship’ and that ‘Without contraries is no progression’, while producing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.15 Perhaps it is in the marriages of Blake and Shelley, rather than the warring subject positions occupied by Byron and Hazlitt, that we find the most valuable responses to the conflict that characterised the Romantic period and the most engaging alternative poetics to that which sees poetry as ‘power’s ode to itself’.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 66. References are hereafter presented within parenthesis within the text. 2. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols, ed. P. P. Howe (London; J. M. Dent, 1930–4), IV, 214. References to these works are hereafter cited within parenthesis within the text.



of the world, as conquest gives way to love, described by Demogorgon in the play’s closing speech:

3. Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989). 4. Quoted by Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, ‘Situating the Lectures’, Society Must Be Defended, p. 282. 5. See Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 2000). 6. Quoted in Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life, From Winterslow to Frith Street (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 172. 7. References to Lord Byron’s poetry are to Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). References to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan are by canto and stanza. 8. Quoted in The Works of Lord Byron, 13 vols, Poetry, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London and New York: John Murray and Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899) II, 32. 9. Ibid., II, 50. 10. Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith (London: Longmans, 1969), 437. 11. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–82), IX, 191. 12. Percy Shelley’s work is quoted from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, second edition (New York: Norton, 2002). 13. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, Part I, 1806– 1811, ed. E. de Selincourt, second edition revised by Mary Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 480. 14. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1989), 518–19. 15. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pls. 20 and 3.



62 Simon Bainbridge

Sovereignty, Biopolitics and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker Alex Houen

I Foucault’s introduction to Society Must Be Defended (1997) announces a major shift in his analysis of power: ‘Until now, or for roughly the last five years, it has been disciplines; for the next five years, it will be war, struggle, the army.’1 The stated intention is thus to turn away from the detailed analysis of disciplinary institutions that he had just presented in Discipline and Punish (1975) in order to engage with a different undercurrent of power. Accordingly, Foucault declares that the course of lectures will explore a new proposition: that ‘Power is war, the continuation of war by other means’ (SMBD, 16). As he goes on to explain, this is also to imply that ‘power relations’ in society ‘are essentially anchored in a certain relationship of force that was established in and through war at a given historical moment’ (SMBD, 16). On the one hand, then, this new analysis of power is introduced as a further development in his work on disciplinary institutions. Society Must Be Defended is intended to show that disciplinary power is rooted in political sovereignty, the military and war. On the other hand, Foucault emphasises that his new analysis will not be limited to looking at particular institutions of sovereignty or the military, for he sees this martial side of power as pervading social life in general: ‘According to this hypothesis, the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals’ (SMBD, 16). Simultaneously, then, in Society Must Be Defended Foucault sets up a new approach to power and for the first time posits a new form of generalised power, a form that he proceeds to outline in the lectures as one of ‘biopolitics’. Thus the shift in analysis does not simply introduce a new genealogical 63



3

approach to disciplinary power, it is at the same time an attempt to consider how power operates outside institutions and disciplines through wider social networks. In that sense, Foucault offers the Society Must Be Defended lectures as positing a different, ‘non-disciplinary’ dynamics of power. As he goes on to explain, whereas disciplinary power is aimed at individual bodies, biopolitical power suffuses the general processes of life and death for a whole population. This concern with a more general governance of social life underlies all of Foucault’s writings after Society Must Be Defended. Indeed, by 1978 he was restating his ideas on biopolitics as an interest in ‘governmentality’ in a wider sense.2 And by 1983 Foucault was using the notion of biopolitical governmentality as a way of refiguring the overall trajectory of his work: when one sees what power is, it is the exercise of something one could call government in a very wide sense of the term. One can govern a society, one can govern a group, a community, a family; one can govern a person. . . . it is governmentality in the wide sense of the term, as the group of relations and techniques which allow these relations of power to be exercised, that is what I studied.3 But such governance is not only the domain of wider social networks. In The History of Sexuality and other contemporaneous writings, Foucault examines Ancient Greek and Roman notions of a ‘government of the self’ whereby individuals use specific techniques of writing to maintain ethical relations with their ‘self’. How these two strands of governance – individual and social – might relate in a contemporary context is what I shall focus on here. My reasons for pursuing the contemporary relation are threefold. First, although Foucault subsequent to Society Must Be Defended continues to write on these two strands of governance, he does not outline ways in which they might relate in a modern context. Second, to the extent that the Greek and Roman practices of ‘self-governance’ involve specific writing techniques, Foucault locates an ‘aesthetics of existence’ (Gilles Deleuze points this out) at the heart of the ethical relation that the individual develops with his/her self.4 Again, though, how this aesthetics of existence might relate to biopolitics and sovereignty in a modern context is not addressed in any great detail. Third, although relations of ‘self-governance’ and the ‘aesthetics of existence’ to modern biopolitics remain to be theorised more fully with respect to Foucault’s work, theorists such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Eric Alliez have recently asserted that one way individuals



64 Alex Houen

65

might help combat the ‘biopolitical’ effects of contemporary, global ‘sovereign’ power is through aesthetic practices.5 But while their assertion clearly takes up Foucauldian terms of reference, it is not pursued in terms of his work on ‘self-governance’, nor does it detail specific ways in which aesthetic practices might engage with biopolitics or sovereignty in a contemporary context. Taking these three points into account, my aim is to offer a new way of relating the various strands of Foucault’s thinking on governmentality. Pursuing this in terms of recent discussions of sovereignty and biopolitics, I shall develop a more particular understanding of how an ‘aesthetics of existence’ might be used to combat the effects of contemporary power networks. This will first entail examining Foucault’s analysis in Society Must Be Defended of the way biopolitics develops from sovereignty and disciplinary institutions as a new form of power. I shall then consider how Foucault’s arguments on these forms of power pertain to contemporary developments. Discussing the recent engagement with Foucault by the theorists Judith Butler, Hardt and Negri, I shall outline specific ways in which the current ‘war on terror’ can be seen as posing new configurations of sovereignty, war and biopolitics – particularly in the instance of the US military detention camps at Guantánamo Bay. Having addressed these developments, I shall then examine the extent to which Foucault’s discussion of ‘self-governance’ might be adequate for resisting some of the effects of the new configurations of power. In particular, I want to argue that Foucault’s ideas on the Stoics’ practice of ‘selfwriting’, which he offers as exemplary for self-governance, have been developed along different lines through contemporary literary writing. Using the novelist Kathy Acker as an example, I shall finish with a consideration of how Acker offers her texts as a means of self-potentiating. Partly inspired by Foucault, Acker’s narrative techniques turn Foucault’s ideas of ‘self-writing’ in a new direction – one that offers new means of pitting an aesthetics of existence against contemporary power networks.

II First, then, let us turn to Society Must Be Defended and the notion of martial power, which Foucault links to political sovereignty. Sovereignty was the predominant structure of Western power from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the sixteenth century, Foucault argues, and essentially it involved instituting the state’s absolute power over its territory. Contrary to the forms of disciplinary power that develop out of sovereignty,



Sovereignty, Biopolitics and the Use of Literature

sovereign power was ‘exercised over land and the produce of the land, much more so than over bodies and what they do’ (SMBD, 36). As figureheads of this power, sovereigns were charged with the responsibility for presiding over the common good. But as Thomas Hobbes suggested in Leviathan (1651), the sovereign is also the embodiment of the people’s renunciation of power, a living symbol of their willingness to pledge their lives for the good of the ‘common-wealth’.6 In that respect, the sovereign does have power over individual bodies, for it is the sovereign alone who ultimately has the right to decide which subjects live and die. Accordingly, Foucault argues, ‘in terms of his relationship with the sovereign, the subject is, by rights, neither dead nor alive. From the point of view of life and death, the subject is neutral, and it is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive or, possibly, the right to be dead’ (SMBD, 240). Investing the sovereign with power over such matters clearly militates against citizens taking law and life into their own hands. But, as Max Weber argued, this also implies that the state’s power and ‘right’ are predicated on giving the state a monopoly on violence. As Foucault points out: ‘The immediate effect of this State monopoly was that what might be called day-to-day warfare, and what was actually called “private warfare”, was eradicated from the social body’ (SMBD, 48). In other words, sovereignty prevents war from taking place within the state by claiming war for itself. Consequently, says Foucault, the state subsumes war and centralises it, the result being that war increasingly takes place between states. The internal peace within political realms thus arises from the state’s arrogation of the right to violence. It is on this basis that Foucault asserts that ‘War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war’ (SMBD, 51). However, there is an incipient shift in the dynamics of sovereignty evident at the end of the sixteenth century, argues Foucault; a shift that extends through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and culminates in the rise of biopolitics. That is not to say that sovereignty was wholly dominant prior to this. For Foucault, sovereign power had already been compromised by the need for ‘one of bourgeois society’s great inventions’: ‘disciplinary power’ (SMBD, 36). Having to rely on other legal and political institutions to enforce its right, sovereign power was already being supplemented and supplanted before the end of the sixteenth century: ‘the theory of sovereignty had to find expression in the juridical apparatus and had to be reactivated or complemented by judicial codes’ (SMBD, 37). If sovereignty guarantees the legitimacy of such legal codes, its power is also refracted by them. Moreover, managing



66 Alex Houen

67

territory through legal and political institutions becomes increasingly problematic for sovereigns when faced with the rise of bourgeois mercantilism. With the livelihood of states becoming caught up in imports, exports and monetary circulation, state power became increasingly tied to matters of political economy. The need to manage new forms of economic relations necessitated fresh strategies of social regulation. As Foucault argues in ‘Governmentality’, a new form of management starts to be theorised in a variety of treatises on ‘the art of governing’ published at the end of the sixteenth century. Rather than focus on sovereignty’s power over territory and subjects, these treatises (Guillaume de La Perrière’s Le Miroir Politique (1567) being exemplary) addressed the need for a more general governance of things: ‘The things . . . with which government is to be concerned’, argues Foucault, ‘are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those things that are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, and so on.’7 It is this general governmentality that heralds the birth of biopolitics. What this biopolitics seeks to regulate is the increasing interdependence of economic and social relations that has begun to emerge. Consequently, argues Foucault, the new governmentality also calls for a shift from disciplining individual subjects to regulating the populace as a ‘mass’, one ‘that is characterized by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on’ (SMBD, 243). By the mid-eighteenth century, Foucault states, the exercise of biopolitics had started to be developed through specific techniques of social management: ‘the mortality rate has to be modified or lowered; life expectancy has to be increased; the birth rate has to be stimulated’ (SMBD, 246); ‘it is, in a word, a matter of taking control of life and the biological processes of man-asspecies and of ensuring that they are not disciplined but regularized’ (SMBD, 247). Just as Foucault claims sovereign power is represented and refracted by ‘non-sovereign’ disciplinary institutions, so he sees biopolitics as complementing and supplanting sovereignty and disciplinary power. Yet to the extent that biopolitics is disseminated through non-juridical networks, it also undermines the intimacy of sovereignty and the law: with sovereignty, the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim – that is, obedience to the laws – was the law itself. On the contrary, with government it is a question not of imposing law on men but of disposing things: that is, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics – to arrange things in such




68 Alex Houen

But if biopolitics undermines the intimacy of martial and legal power, how is it an evolution of power as ‘a continuation of war by other means’? We have seen how the sovereign’s right to decide who lives and dies relates to the power of juridical and political apparatuses that enforce the state’s monopoly on violence. To the extent that biopolitics instantiates a new means of wresting control over life and death, it clearly arises as the evolution of a new strand of martial power. As Foucault argues in Society Must Be Defended, ‘Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization [that] consists in making live and letting die’ ( SMBD, 247). This does not mean that biopolitics pacifies the thanatopolitics that Foucault locates at the heart of sovereignty. To the extent that biopolitics regulates the populace’s wealth and health, it also takes the lives of individuals hostage. If, as Foucault contends, the subject is ‘by rights, neither alive nor dead’ (SMBD, 240) in relation to the sovereign and disciplinary institutions, then both the subject’s life and death are held in balance all the more through biopolitics. There is a new issue implicit here, though: anonymisation. For Foucault, disciplinary power is primarily concerned with breaking a ‘multiplicity of men’ into ‘individual bodies’, whereas biopolitics ‘is addressed to a multiplicity of men’ (SMBD, 243). While sovereign and disciplinary power are charged with policing life as individual subjects, then, biopolitics disenfranchises each individual’s life and death by turning it into a generalised matter of population. If the subject is ‘neutral’ in relation to sovereign and disciplinary power, s/he becomes a statistic in terms of biopolitics. As Foucault states, sovereign power maintains an appearance of being enforced ‘subject to subject’ (SMBD, 44), even if, in reality, this necessitates a network of power already being in place. Disciplinary power is similarly ‘subject to subject’ in appearance – a criminal is sentenced by a judge, a pupil is instructed by a teacher. With biopolitics, though, individuals live and die as a result of an anonymous, bureaucratised regulating that may involve things such as taxation, irrigation, sanitation, etc. In other words, the biopolitics that anonymises the life and death of individuals is itself diffuse, exercised through flexible and floating networks that can be as anonymous as the flooding of a river. Is the term ‘biopolitics’ a catachresis, then? Would it not be more appropriate to refer to a ‘biopower’ that is itself an index of the extent to which politics has been absorbed by other social and economic relations?



a way that, through a certain number of means, such-and-such ends may be achieved.8

69

One answer is to refer to a wider ‘governmentality’, as Foucault does in his later work. Indeed, in his 1978 article on governmentality he implies that the term undermines the predominance of state politics: ‘Maybe what is really important for our modernity – that is, for our present – is not so much the statization of society, as the governmentalization of the state.’9 It is important to point out here that Foucault denies that sovereign power was simply ‘replaced’ by disciplinary power, and that disciplinary power was in turn replaced by governmentality. ‘In reality’, he argues, ‘one has a triangle, sovereignty–discipline–government’.10 Yet the extent to which biopolitical governance might undermine the other two remains a distinct problem – an issue that the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt raised in relation to the newly established liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic. In The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt bemoans what he considers to be nascent tendencies of economic imperialism: An imperialism based on pure economic power will naturally attempt to sustain a worldwide condition which enables it to apply and manage, unmolested, its economic means, e.g., terminating credit, embargoing raw materials, destroying the currencies of others, and so on. . . . Pure economic imperialism will also apply a stronger, but still economic, and therefore . . . nonpolitical, essentially peaceful means of force. A 1921 League of Nations resolution enumerates as examples: economic sanctions and severance of food supply from the civilian population.11 For Schmitt, then, economic biopower appears decidedly ‘nonpolitical’. Indeed, he argues, the very point at which politics becomes entangled in social and economic processes is the point at which the state loses its grip on the political: ‘The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.’12 As Schmitt makes clear, in colonising state politics, biopower also emerges as a new ‘imperialism’ – a novel way of disguising war as peace-keeping. If political power is increasingly diffused within states, is there any other ‘special distinction’, asks Schmitt, that might characterise ‘the political’? His answer is the distinction between ‘friend and enemy’, to which ‘political actions and motives can be reduced’ in general. This distinction is also applicable to Foucault’s discussion of race and biopolitics in Society Must Be Defended. With biopolitics being directed at the mass life of the population, its ultimate tendency, states Foucault, is to control




‘relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species’ (SMBD, 245). Consequently, the dissemination of biopolitics nurtures racism. For while biopolitics consolidates the state as a national race, it also draws the livelihood of the race into economic relations with other nations, other races. The imbrication of state identity, race and economics is thus implicit in the sort of ‘economic imperialism’ that Schmitt describes, an imperialism Foucault also addresses when he discusses the history of European colonialism (SMBD, 60–1). If the livelihood of the race comes to involve feeding off other races, the necessity for enforcing the integrity of the state becomes all the more important. And this becomes a prime cause of racism: ‘[Racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (SMBD, 254). Such racism, he continues, ‘make[s] the relationship of war – “If you want to live, the other must die” – function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower’ (SMBD, 255). But might it not be the case that the power to decide who lives and who dies can be used by the state as a way of reasserting political control over biopower? And might this not involve rejuvenating state sovereignty and pitting it against biopower’s undermining of sovereignty? Such a state of affairs is precisely what Foucault gestures towards in his conclusions about the racism of Nazi Germany: ‘The Nazi state makes the field of life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people’ (SMBD, 260). This ‘coextensive’ relation is not reducible to one of compatibility, though. By associating Jews with the evils of usury and international capitalism, the Nazis figured the Jewish race as a threat derived from biopower, a biopower threatening the political integrity of the state. And the extent to which this biopower was figured as anti-statist is the extent to which the Jews were deemed not to be political subjects – hence their status was ultimately reduced by the Nazis to that of an anti-race, a kind of non-human being as Foucault intimates towards the end of Society Must Be Defended: ‘the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term: they are threats, either external or internal, to the population’ (SMBD, 256). Biopower and sovereignty may be ‘coextensive’, then, but they can also antagonise each other: in the case of Nazi Germany, the state was rejuvenated as sovereign power through figuring and exterminating biopower as forms of nonpolitical, nonhuman being. That is not to say that sovereignty and biopower are



70 Alex Houen


71

The adversary is . . . no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity. A war waged to protect or expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last war of humanity.13 Thus, it is not a question of biopower ultimately being an instrument of sovereignty, or vice versa. As Foucault suggests, each has existed in varying degrees of ascendancy in relation to the other. Moreover, as the examples of European colonialism and Nazi Germany evidence, biopower and sovereignty have clearly melded with varying degrees of compatibility. But what about the contemporary situation? If what many theorists describe as ‘postmodernity’ is fundamentally a predominance of economic biopower, can sovereignty continue to operate effectively? And if sovereignty sustains itself by deciding the biopolitical rights to life and death, how can it do this without invoking the legacy of Nazi Germany? Both questions relate to the one Foucault says is ‘still a problem’ at the end of Society Must Be Defended: ‘How can one both make a biopower function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the function of death, without becoming racist?’ (SMBD, 263). Clearly, one option would be to target not other political races, but new forms of alien humanity, new forms of non-political human being. Aside from his responses to the 1979 revolution in Iran, the political relation between sovereignty and biopower is not an issue that Foucault pursues in his later writings.14 His work on ‘governmentality’ subsequent to Society Must Be Defended splits primarily into two concerns: the biopolitics of sexual practices in Ancient Greece and Rome; and ‘techniques of life’ with which individuals can practise a ‘government of the self’. In the rest of this chapter, then, I shall move to a consideration of how ‘self-governance’ and ‘self-writing’ might relate to contemporary problems of biopower and sovereignty that have arisen from the current war on terror. Before addressing Foucault’s discussions of self-governance, though, we need to examine briefly how his notions of sovereignty and biopolitics have been taken up by other theorists.



essentially incompatible: in persecuting the Jews, the Nazis nevertheless invested in formalising biopower, and they also built up biopower industries to exterminate Jewish people. As Schmitt argues, biopower can also be employed to strip an enemy of political status; in the case of economic imperialism, he writes,

72 Alex Houen

Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) has been the most prominent recent engagement with Foucault’s work on biopolitics. Contrasting disciplinary and contemporary power structures, Hardt and Negri contend that ‘biopower’ has attained such a global hegemony that its controls social life everywhere: ‘this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and floating networks’.15 Functioning through the meshing of these transnational networks – financial, economic, industrial, communicational, military – Hardt and Negri present biopower as a process that conjoins postmodernism and globalisation. In so far as biopower saturates the globe, it also decentralises itself, resists location. And because it exists ‘everywhere and nowhere’ (E, 190), argue Hardt and Negri, biopower is irreducible to state borders and sovereignty. For example, ‘multinational and transnational’ corporations now ‘tend to make nation-states merely instruments to record the flows of . . . commodities, monies, and populations that they set in motion’ (E, 31). Communications and media networks have a similar effect, they contend; instead of their being subordinated to national sovereignty, ‘sovereignty seems to be subordinated to communications – or, actually, sovereignty is articulated through communications systems’ (E, 346). As we have seen, for Schmitt economic biopower presaged new modes of imperialism at the same time as undermining political sovereignty. For Hardt and Negri, because biopower is irreducible to state borders, it undermines state imperialism and spreads a new global ‘empire’ of anonymised, networked power. Far from being ‘coextensive’ with state sovereignty, then, biopower subsumes it as far as Hardt and Negri are concerned. I want to argue, though, that in the current war on terror the decision by the Bush administration to create military camps and military tribunals for ‘unlawful combatants’ amounts to a reconfiguration of the way national sovereignty and biopower relate. After the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the US, the declaration of a war on terror effectively involved a new war between sovereignty and biopower. Operating as a non-state, terrorist organisation using global communications and finance networks, al-Qaeda has been characterised by a number of commentators as a new form of militant, multinational organisation.16 But despite being a non-state enemy, the magnitude of its 11 September attacks was taken by the US and other NATO states to be tantamount to an act of war. This lack of distinction between terrorism and war, the non-political and political, was further consolidated on 13 November 2001 with the issue of President Bush’s military



III

73

order entitled ‘Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War against Terrorism’. The ‘certain non-citizens’ targeted by the order were specified as ‘unlawful combatants’, ‘enemy aliens’ such as the al-Qaeda operatives who were deemed to be waging war without observing established laws of war. But in this respect, the presidential order instituted its own legal indistinction in the name of sovereign power. As the lawyers Diane Orentlicher and Robert Goldman have argued: Citing the President’s constitutional authority as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, the Order provides that the President may order certain individuals to be detained by the Secretary of Defense and to be prosecuted exclusively before military commissions for ‘violations of the laws of war and other applicable laws’ by military tribunals. In a legal and conceptual non-sequitur, the Order defines its field of application in terms of individuals whom the President suspects of participation in international terrorism, a term the Order nowhere defines, against the United States. Thus the President seeks to detain suspected terrorists on the basis of his authority to prosecute war criminals. Like the figures in M. C. Escher’s lithograph ‘Verbum’ that morph from frogs into birds and then fishes, the President’s order shifts from one legal paradigm to another.17 The presidential order thus resuscitated sovereignty in two ways. The first relates to Schmitt’s definition in Political Theology (1922) of the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the exception’.18 This exception, Schmitt argues, ‘is not codified in the existing legal order’ and ‘can at best be characterised as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state’.19 With Bush’s military order, the performativity of deciding the exception is complex. As Orentlicher and Goldman suggest, the order itself violates the legal distinction between war and terrorism in order to pose the category of ‘unlawful combatant’ as someone who violates the laws of war. That is to say, the power of the sovereign arises from acting outside established law in order to decide who is an outlaw. This leads to the second way in which the military order revived sovereignty, for it placed the life and death of unlawful combatants outside US federal law, international law and international conventions on human rights.20 Consequently, the presidential order allowed for unlawful combatants to be detained indefinitely in the US military camps at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere without being formally charged and without recourse to legal representation. Denying the usual ‘due legal process’ to such




detainees, the presidential order specified trial by a military tribunal consisting entirely of military personnel; it also authorised the president to uphold the death penalty for those convicted.21 In this case, then, instituting exceptions clearly resuscitated the sovereign right that Foucault identifies in Society Must Be Defended: the right to ‘take life and let live’. What about the issue of biopolitical government, though? We saw earlier that in ‘Governmentality’ Foucault maintains that with sovereignty ‘the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim – that is, obedience to the laws – was the law itself’. In contrast, he argues, ‘governmentality’ uses ‘laws themselves as tactics – to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, [certain] ends may be achieved’. But if we accept Schmitt’s characterisation of the sovereign as the one who decides legal exceptions, we must accept that sovereignty always potentiates governmentality to the extent that it tacitly institutes new orders of legality. That this is the case with Bush’s military order is implicit in a statement made by John Yoo, US Deputy-Assistant Attorney-General when the order was coming into effect: ‘What the administration is trying to do’, he explained, ‘is create a new legal system’.22 Butler is thus right to argue that with the war on terror and the US detention camps we are witnessing a general convergence of sovereignty and the kind of governmentality that Foucault identifies: I would like to suggest that the current configuration of state power, in relation both to the management of populations (the hallmark of [Foucault’s] governmentality) and the exercise of sovereignty in the acts that suspend and limit the jurisdiction of law itself, are reconfigured in terms of the new war prison.23 Since the publication of Butler’s article, though, sovereignty and US federal law have also come into conflict. According to the US administration, the Guantánamo Bay camps did not fall under the jurisdiction of US federal courts because although Guantánamo Bay is a US military base it is leased from the Cuban government. However, on 28 June 2004 the US Supreme Court ruled that unlawful combatants at the base do fall under federal jurisdiction and can thus apply for habeas corpus – the right to contest the grounds of their detention in a US federal court. Essentially, then, the juridical apparatus has sought to oppose the Bush administration’s marriage of sovereignty and governmentality. How effective this challenge will be remains to be seen. Only a handful of the detainees’ cases have been heard in federal courts to



74 Alex Houen

75

date, and while the US Supreme Court granted detainees the right to habeas corpus, it did not grant them substantive rights, which means that they can still be put on trial by military tribunal rather than in a federal court. Moreover, extending habeas corpus to a foreign territory such as Guantánamo Bay has other ramifications. Meaning ‘you shall have the body’, ‘habeas corpus’ was first introduced in 1215 in the Magna Carta to ensure that no one could be convicted in law without being brought before a court. So while it enshrines the right of an accused to have a fair legal hearing, it also ensures the right of the law to have the body of the accused brought before it. Extending habeas corpus to Guantánamo Bay as a foreign territory might mean its detainees have a right to challenge their case in US federal courts, but as Martin Puchner has argued, it also means that people residing in other foreign territories could be charged in the US and forced to appear in a US court.24 In light of these developments, I want to argue that there are two divergent strands of power emerging from the US: on the one hand, an executive administration acting against established laws in order to revive the sovereign’s power over life, death and exceptions; on the other hand, a disciplinary-juridical apparatus acting against the federal executive to extend its jurisdiction over foreign territories and individuals. The contest between these two strands is literally a matter of fighting for power over the same foreign bodies, and to that extent both contribute to spreading biopower globally. Admittedly, it is the Bush administration’s resuscitation of sovereignty that has, to date, succeeded in gaining the upper hand. I would argue that it is also succeeding in solving the question posed by Foucault at the end of Society Must Be Defended: ‘How can one both make a biopower function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the function of death, without becoming racist?’ (SMBD, 263). By ratifying the category of ‘unlawful combatant’, the US administration is not characterising its ‘non-citizen’ enemy as a specific race or nationality. Rather, as someone declared to be waging war outside established laws and without state backing, the unlawful combatant is configured as anti-state, antinational and anti-political, and so cannot be seen as a political citizen. Without the rights of a political subject, such human ‘non-citizens’ are stripped of the rights to be human, while the question of whether they will live or die is held in suspension. That is to say, not only is their status as human suspended, so is their existence as a living being. In that respect, the exercise of sovereignty here has not been a matter of ‘taking life’ so much as producing a state of suspended animation,




a state of being that is neither alive nor dead, but latent. Furthermore, the longer such unlawful combatants are deemed a threat, the longer the new sovereignty can justify its powers of suspension. Indefinite detention is thus an infinite prolongation of sovereignty’s resuscitated power. So far I have limited my analysis of the war on terror to the current US administration, but I acknowledge that other nation-states have been making their own contributions. To name but a few, the UK, Israel, Russia and Australia have all used the war on terror to justify their adoption of emergency measures to combat with terrorism. Aside from powers of detention, the new anti-terrorism measures have also introduced state powers of surveillance over financial and communication networks, as well as over immigration and extradition. Counter to Hardt’s and Negri’s claim that biopower has largely subsumed state sovereignty, then, what we are witnessing in the war on terror is a growing parallelism of state sovereignty and transnational biopower. And the fact that various non-state, militant organisations also wage their wars through the same biopower networks is all the more reason why the war on terror is indicative of the extent to which the martial undercurrent of biopower has continued to suffuse all aspects of social relations. Just as the 11 September terrorists carried out their attacks on the World Trade Center by aiming US technology at the heart of economic and media networks, so the recent spate of hostage-taking in Iraq was conducted using internet broadcasting, thereby ensuring that the life of a single hostage can be figured as an example of networked life and exchanged for a host of economic and political demands. Not only are nation-state sovereignty and non-state militancy fighting over the same biopower networks, then, they are also becoming bound into a circuit of mutual exchange through these networks – witness, for example, the hostage-takers in Iraq dressing their hostages in orange jumpsuits like those worn by the Guantánamo Bay detainees. Taking all of this into account, Foucault’s statement that ‘War is the motor behind institutions and order’ (SMBD, 51) has never been more apposite, for the war on terror is permeating not just state institutions, but the very networks of biopower that permeate our lives to different degrees around the world. How are individuals to take back some control over their lives and deaths? How might they be able to resist the current effects of sovereignty and biopower if these are combining and extending in novel ways? Clearly, there is very little an individual can do if caught in a ‘state of domination’ that involves being detained indefinitely



76 Alex Houen

77

or taken hostage.25 But there are ways individuals can resist some of the effects that biopower networks exert on social life more generally. Hardt, Negri and Alliez have recently asserted that aesthetic practices offer one way of combating biopower and its pervasive undercurrent of war. In a text commissioned for a 2002 art exhibition, Alliez and Negri address the current spread of what they view to be ‘total war’ being waged under the guise of global policing for ‘total peace’.26 If, however, territory globally is increasingly being turned into a battlefield where the distinction between war and peace is unravelling, then literature and art can still pose counter-zones of reflective peace for the individual: When it devotes itself to war, modern literature always dramatises the moment on the battlefield when man discovers his own solitude. . . . The return to peace entails the natural restoration of the sensory presentation of the world; the aesthetic restoration of being-within an outside.27 For Alliez and Negri art or writing can thus construct discrete zones of sensation that stand outside the battlefield as a haven for an individual. Having suggested this, though, they do not address specific techniques of aesthetic resistance nor of ‘self-governance’ despite framing the current issues of war in Foucauldian terms of ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘biopolitical’. Moreover, might not an individual’s capacity for aesthetic sensation and expression be contaminated by the very effects of biopower that s/he seeks refuge from? Such a scenario is implied in Hardt and Negri’s Empire when they discuss relations between language and biopower. Communications networks help ‘create subjectivities’, they argue, because they ‘integrate the imaginary and symbolic within the biopolitical fabric, not merely putting them at the service of power but actually integrating them into its very functioning’ (E, 33). If that is the case, then art and literature cannot be seen as inherently autonomous havens in relation to power; rather, they would need to be developed as specific combat techniques against power. Hardt and Negri do point to the potential for such combat, for if ‘All the elements of corruption and exploitation are imposed on us by the linguistic and communicative regimes of production’, then ‘destroying them in words is as urgent as doing so in deeds’ (E, 404). Yet having said that, they do not go on to detail what such linguistic resistance might entail. I want to argue that we can develop a better understanding of linguistic resistance by turning to the Stoics’ techniques of ‘self-writing’ that Foucault examines, and then by relating




78 Alex Houen

these techniques to the experimental writing of contemporary novelists such as Kathy Acker.

In ‘The Subject and Power’ (1982), Foucault writes that ‘There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self knowledge.’28 So, in ‘Ethics of the Concern for Self’ (1984), he argues that his notion of governmentality also involves ‘the relation of the self to itself’.29 It is this relation that Foucault pursues in terms of the ascetic techniques of self-discipline and self-writing practised in Ancient Greece and Rome. In The Use of Pleasure (1984), for example, Foucault considers the struggle for enkrateia (self-control) discussed by Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle. Fundamentally, argues Foucault, enkrateia involved ruling over one’s pleasures and desires, which were viewed by the ancients as ‘enemy force[s]’: ‘The battle to be fought, the victory to be won, the defeat that one risked suffering – these were processes and events that took place between oneself and oneself. The adversaries the individual one had to combat were not just within him or close by; they were part of him.’30 Attaining enkrateia thus called for askesis – specific techniques enabling the individual to develop a kind of martial ‘art of living’ (tekhné tou biou). This is particularly evident, argues Foucault, in the ‘self-writing’ advocated by the Stoics. There were two primary forms of writing employed: hypomnémata, which involved collating one’s own thoughts along with useful quotations from others; and correspondence, whereby one reflected on one’s self in letters to others. And because both forms of writing involved the relation of self to self and self to others, argues Foucault, they both helped the individual to embody an ethical stance in relation to his or her own life. For using these practices is less a matter of writing about one’s life than of constituting one’s life through writing – Seneca’s hypomnémata being exemplary of this for Foucault: The role of writing is to constitute, along with all that reading has constituted, a ‘body . . . And this body should be understood not as a body of doctrine but, rather – following an often-evoked metaphor of digestion – as the very body of the one who, by transcribing his readings, has appropriated them and made their truths his own: writing transforms the thing seen or heard ‘into tissue and blood’ . . . It becomes a principle of rational action in the writer himself.31



IV

79

Could it be that such techniques of ‘self-writing’ could be used by individuals today to institute a new plea of habeas corpus – one shall have one’s own body? If only power were what it was in the time of Seneca! As Hardt and Negri have suggested, one of the crises facing individuals now is that our ‘imaginary and symbolic’ life is increasingly colonised by biopower networks. Thus we do not need a writing to control our passions and desires so much as a writing that liberates them, along with our imaginary and symbolic life, from biopower networks. We do not need to bring our selves in line with what Aristotle called the ‘orthos logos’ of rational order; we need to escape from the current logoi of biopower that place our lives beyond our reach. Foucault suggests as much when he relates Kant’s question ‘What is the Enlightenment?’ to the contemporary world: Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political ‘double bind’, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.32 One way ‘to imagine’ what we ‘could be’ is to adopt new forms of selfpotentiating through literature. For that we can turn to the kind of experimental writing practised by authors like Kathy Acker. Why single out Acker as an exemplary ‘potentialist’ here? For two main reasons: first, because she explicitly relates bodies, language and autobiography to questions of discipline and social power; and second, because her interest in social power was avowedly inspired by reading Foucault. But Acker is the first to acknowledge that her prose experiments follow from the work of other experimental writers, in particular that of William S. Burroughs: ‘Burroughs really was doing the major work because he was dealing with how politics and language come together, the kind of language, what the image is, all that early Burroughs work.’33 What Acker is referring to is Burroughs’ notion of the ‘word’ as a ‘virus’. As Burroughs explains, there is no ‘metaphor’ involved in this: ‘The virus I’m talking about is something you can see. It’s an actual organism.’34 Just as viruses spread as units of genetic information, argues Burroughs, so words replicate specific corporeal effects: ‘The word BE in English contains, as a virus contains, its precoded message of damage, the categorical imperative of permanent condition. To be a body, to be nothing else, to stay a body.’35 This is just one example, but Burroughs’ point is that language in general functions as a form of social ordering that contaminates the living potential of individual bodies. Moreover, states Burroughs, the viral power of language is indissociable from the power of governmental




and media networks that help police it: ‘The virus power manifests itself in many ways. In the construction of nuclear weapons, in practically all the existing political systems which are aimed at curtailing inner freedom, that is, at control.’36 In this sense, the notion of a martial, linguistic virus supports Foucault’s thesis in Society Must Be Defended that ‘War is the motor behind institutions and order’. And as with Foucault, Burroughs’ notion of a ‘war universe’ clearly results from sovereign and disciplinary power structures joining forces with wider biopolitical networks.37 How can one combat such viral power, then? Burroughs’ suggestion is similar to Hardt and Negri’s: attack the powers embedded in language by ‘explor[ing] alternative methods of communication’.38 Accordingly, in the 1960s Burroughs developed a new form of linguistic resistance in the form of his ‘cut-up’ technique, whereby he would take at least two texts, cut them into fragments and then combine them into new syntactical composites. In The Third Mind (1976), Burroughs discusses various ways in which the cut-ups and related techniques can scramble viral power and present counter-viruses. And it is The Third Mind that Acker cites as having been instrumental in developing her own prose style. Just as Burroughs cut up found texts to liberate new composites, so Acker’s early experiments blended autobiography with writing by others: I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t and I went to texts of murderesses. I just changed them into the first person, really not caring if the writing was good or bad, and put the fake first person next to the true first person.39 In her posthumously published novel Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective (2002), for example, Acker offers a parodic detective story embedded with autobiographical material about her relationship with Peter Gordon. With the impact of others’ narratives on the self becoming her primary concern, Acker’s introduction to poststructuralist theory in the early 1980s was thus felicitous, as she herself recognised: ‘[it] gave me a way of verbalizing what I had been doing’; ‘when I read [Deleuze and Guattari’s] Anti-Oedipus and Foucault’s work, suddenly I had this whole language at my disposal.’40 One of the directions in which this language led her was away from the ‘self’. The ‘I became a dead issue’, Acker states, ‘because I realized that you make the I and what makes the I are texts’; and ‘If there’s no problem with the I, then in terms of text there was no self and



80 Alex Houen

81

other, I could use everyone else’s writing.’41 So, in Blood and Guts and High School (1984) and subsequent novels, Acker combines plagiarised material with her own fiction in order to engender an otherness for both. This is in direct contrast to the Stoics’ ‘self-writing’, as discussed by Foucault. As Foucault suggests, for Seneca and others the hypomnémata were used to constitute one’s self and body according to the principles of a general body politic. For Acker, though, stealing and perverting others’ texts is a way of critiquing their influence and creating for oneself an other self, an other body. Moreover, the liberating power of this ‘other writing’, or allobiography, is explicitly presented by Acker as contrasting with the power bound up in hostage-taking and political detention – precisely the kinds of ‘state of domination’ that are prevalent in the current war on terror. In Blood and Guts in High School, for example, the main protagonist, Janey, is held prisoner by an Iranian slave trader, Mr Linker, who wants to force her into prostitution. With time to kill, Janey starts learning Persian by writing ‘poems’ in the language and then translating them: Janey is an expensive child, but cheap. ... to have Janey to want Janey to see Janey42 In this situation, learning a new language does not mean learning new orders of social being; the supposedly poetic phrases that Janey forms here highlight the extent to which she is linguistically positioned as an object of desire rather than a desiring subject.43 Other poems deviate to an extent, though, as in the fragment: ‘the smallest building in this street is Janey’s cunt’.44 Here Janey’s body is once again presented as an object, but the use of metaphor at least opens a door to the imagination. So while Janey’s experiments in Persian poetry cannot act directly on the physical ‘state of domination’ in which she is caught, they do allow her to gain a critical purchase on how her identity is in part constituted through language, and she begins to combat this with her own poetic experiments. Acker pursues the predicament in Empire of the Senseless (1988), a novel in which the main protagonists, Abhor and Thivai, join forces with revolutionary Algerians who are occupying Paris. Subsequently




82 Alex Houen

It wasn’t just my isolation. It was the evil. Prisoners are evil. . . . You know why? Cause prison is a being, a social being, who is against human life. So anyone who is in prison is evil. The fact is that all prisoners should be killed by the state and, since they haven’t been, they’re in actuality beyond death. Thus, prisoners are sacred. Their lives are imaginary, imaginary as in ‘imaginary number’, not rationally possible. (EOS, 148) Acker astutely identifies a performative function of imprisonment here, one that I want to relate to the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. For Thivai, because the state’s prison isolates him from human social life, it actively constitutes him as a form of antihuman being and, therefore, as ‘evil’. And just as I argued that the ‘unlawful combatant’ is placed in a legal and physical state of ‘suspended animation’, so Thivai sees the prisoners as ‘beyond death’ to the point of having an ‘imaginary’ existence, one that is ‘not rationally possible’.46 In such a state of domination, then, individuals become impossible beings – hovering between life and death, prevented from acting on their own potentials. Thivai’s reaction is similar to Janey’s; he starts learning Persian, narrates stories of himself as Sinbad the Sailor, and retreats into other allobiographic flights of fancy, for example: ‘When I turned eight years old, [mother] told me that my real father wasn’t Alpha-Centaurian, but robotic. Thus I became a sailor’ (EOS, 155). Again, such acts of imagination are obviously powerless to change the material conditions Thivai is constrained by. As he admits at one point: ‘I got up off that concrete, bare-assed, and thought to myself: I’ve just been pretending I’m a pirate and an Arab terrorist and have no morals. Actually, I ain’t none of these’ (EOS, 175). But his acts of imagination do allow him to suspend his own relation to being in gaol and to rewrite the narratives that he thinks constitute his ‘self’. Whereas the ‘suspended animation’ of detention takes control of an individual’s potentiality, fiction and the act of imagination suspend the individual from social control and allow a refigured self to become possible. Acker is thus under no illusion about the extent to which fiction can resist forms of social power. It cannot alter states of domination or disciplinary practices; it cannot fight force with force. But willing fiction’s ‘suspension of disbelief’ can suspend one from one’s surroundings, and



gaoled by the CIA, Thivai begins to think that his isolation is ‘the isolation of air’45 :


83

The sex of pirates: Now the pirates are Japanese. Two of them, a male and a female, (pirates aren’t always either male or female), are in a Japanese kitchen where they’re cooking. Only the woman is doing the cooking because the man’s sexist. Since she’s a pirate, she won’t have anything to do with humans: either she’s cooking for animals or she’s cooking up an animal. One is the same as the other. ... . . . vast memories of sacred cities have become lands in themselves . . . strewn across deserts most of whose shifting grounds no human will ever touch . . . traces where there were once no traces . . . these are dreams.47 If for Foucault one response to biopower is ‘to refuse what we are’, this is precisely what Acker is seeking through her pirate writing. It explores other forms of expression, as in the above Burroughsian cut-up of phrases that posits the narrative space as a suspended landscape in itself. And in exploring different linguistic orders, it affirms new, pirated subjectivities that cannot be reduced discursively to race, sex or even species. Combating effects of biopower through specific allobiographical techniques is thus literally envisaged by Acker as a way of developing different orders of life. That is not to say that what takes place in her fiction simply becomes actual. Rather, the fiction is intended to suspend individuals from biopower networks and give them breathing space to explore potentiality. Such potentiality is an affective power (potentia) in itself; to incorporate other possibilities of experience through writing or reading fiction is to build new capacities for thinking and being.48 For Foucault, human ‘capacities, possibilities [and] potentials’ are what social power has in its sights (SMBD, 44). Discussing Foucault’s later writings, Paul Patton also notes the importance of this link between power and human capacity: For bodies with the complexity and specific powers of human beings, power is the capacity for various kinds of action upon oneself and others. The kinds of action of which a human body is capable will



can also suspend the effects of biopower that circulate through language. Just as Burroughs offers his cut-up experiments as synthesising new linguistic and corporeal potentials, so Acker incorporates pirated material in her later fiction in order to figure new pirate selves and bodies. Pussycat Fever (1995) is a prime example:

84 Alex Houen

Patton thus presents the capacity to act on oneself and on others as an instance of negotiating ethics and politics, respectively. I am arguing that Acker shows how an ‘aesthetics of existence’ can also play a role in acting on oneself and negotiating social and moral frameworks. For Acker, ‘Potentiality is kin, and I am talking politically, kin to the imagination’,50 and on that basis she sees works of literature as working out modes of personal liberation. As she argues: ‘to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream.’51 Unless one is held hostage or detained indefinitely, translating such capacities for wonder into capacities for action remains a real possibility. Acker thus provides one concrete instance of how we might relate and develop Foucault’s writings on the two strands of governmentality – individual and social – in terms of a contemporary context. In that respect, examining her allobiographical techniques facilitates a clearer understanding of how the aesthetic resistance proposed by Hardt, Negri and Alliez might operate. Let me be clear on two points in closing, though. First, I am not arguing that Acker’s writing techniques should be privileged over other aesthetic techniques of biopolitical resistance being developed in the fields of poetry, music, visual arts or internet technology. My reason for singling Acker’s fiction out is that her interest in Foucault means her writings present a particularly clear indication of the directions in which ‘self-writing’ and ‘self-governance’ can turn. Second, I am not arguing that aesthetics should be privileged over other modes – economic, technological, political – of resisting current configurations of power. Indeed, aesthetic practices are clearly weak as forces to use as means of disrupting actual networks of biopower and sovereignty. Nevertheless, they do provide potent means of fighting the effects of these networks within ourselves. As Deleuze wrote regarding philosophy: ‘Not being a power, philosophy can’t battle with the powers that be, but it fights a war without battles, a guerrilla campaign against them. . . . Since the powers aren’t just external things but permeate each of us, philosophy throws us all into . . . a guerrilla campaign against ourselves.’52 And with Acker’s writing we see a clear example of how aesthetic practice can join forces in such a campaign.



depend in part upon its physical constitution, in part upon the enduring social and institutional relations within which it lives, but also upon the frameworks of moral interpretation which define its acts.49


85

1. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–6, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 23. Hereafter cited in the main body of the text as SMBD. 2. See Foucault, ‘Governmentality’ (1978), in Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–84, Vol. 3: Power, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 201–22. 3. Foucault, ‘What Our Present Is’ (1983), in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–84, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 410, Foucault’s emphases. 4. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (1986; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 100–1. 5. See Eric Alliez and Antonio Negri, ‘Peace and War’, Theory, Culture & Society. 20, 2 (2003). 109–18; also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 209–10. 6. See, for example, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (London: Penguin Books, 1985), Part 2, ch. xxi. 7. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, 209. 8. Ibid., 211. 9. Ibid., 220. 10. Ibid., 219. 11. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 79. 12. Ibid., 22. 13. Ibid., 79. 14. Regarding Foucault’s responses to the Iranian revolution, see, for example, Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (1989; London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 285–95; also Foucault, ‘Open Letter to [Iranian Prime Minister] Medhi Barzgan’ (April 1979), in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–84, Vol. 3: Power, 441. 15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 23. Hereafter cited in the main body of the text as E. 16. See, for example, John Gray, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 1; also Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 38. 17. Diane F. Orentlicher and Robert Kogod Goldman, ‘When Justice Goes to War: Prosecuting Terrorists before Military Commissions’, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 25, 2 (Spring 2002), 654, Orentlicher’s and Goldman’s emphases. 18. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 5. 19. Ibid., 6. 20. For detailed discussions of the legal implications of the military order, see Daryl A. Mundis, ‘The Use of Military Commissions to Prosecute Individuals



Notes

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Accused of Terrorist Acts’, American Journal of International Law, 96, 2 (April 2002), 320–8; and George P. Fletcher, ‘On Justice and War: Contradictions in the Proposed Military Tribunals’, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 25, 2 (Spring 2002), 635–52. For a detailed account of the legal and political implications of the Guantánamo Bay camps, see Diane Marie Aman, ‘Guantánamo’, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 42, 2 (2004), 263–348; and David Rose, Guantánamo: America’s War on Human Rights (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). Quoted in Aman, ‘Guantánamo’, 286. Judith Butler, ‘Indefinite Detention’, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 53. See Martin Puchner, ‘Guantánamo Bay: A State of Exception’, London Review of Books, 26, 24 (16 December 2004), 7. Foucault distinguishes ‘states of domination’ as distinct arrangements of power: ‘When an individual or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversibility of movement by economic, political or military means, one is faced with what may be called a state of domination. In such a state, it is certain that practices of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained and limited’ (‘Ethics of the Concern for Self’, 434). Alliez and Negri, ‘Peace and War’, 110–12. Ibid., 112, authors’ emphases. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–84, Vol. 3: Power, 331. Foucault, ‘Ethics of the Concern for Self’, in Foucault Live, 448. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2 (1984), trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 67. Foucault, ‘Self Writing’ (1983), in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954– 84, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 213. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, 336. Kathy Acker, ‘Devoured by Myths’ [interview with Sylvère Lotringer] (1989– 90), in Hannibal Lecter, My Father (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 4. William S. Burroughs, ‘A Moveable Feast’ [interview with Tom Vitali] (1986), in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–97, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), 631. Burroughs, ‘Academy 23’ (1969), in The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs, ed. Daniel Odier (1974; London: Penguin Books, 1989), 200. Burroughs, ‘Rencontre avec William Burroughs’ [interview with Eric Mottram] (1964), in Conversations with William S. Burroughs, ed. Allen Hibbard ( Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 12. See Burroughs, ‘The War Universe’, in Painting and Guns (New York: Hanuman, 1992), 53–6. Burroughs, ‘Rolling Stone Interview with Robert Palmer’ (1972), in Lotringer, Burroughs Live, 189. Acker, ‘Devoured by Myths’, 7. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (New York: Grove, 1978), 72, 84.



86 Alex Houen

87

43. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue: ‘Words are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker’ (A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi [1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], 76). 44. Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, 89. 45. Acker, Empire of the Senseless (London: Picador, 1988), 147. Hereafter cited in the main body of the text as EOS. 46. Acker’s reference to the prisoner as ‘sacred’ can be correlated with the ‘homo sacer’, the ancient class of Roman criminal who was figured as a ‘sacred man’ and who could be killed with impunity; see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (1995; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), Part Two. 47. Acker, Pussycat Fever (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995), 32, Acker’s emphasis. 48. Regarding this notion of a ‘potentialist’ literature, see my Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 228–9; also ‘Novel Spaces and Taking Place(s) in the Wake of September 11’, Studies in the Novel, 36, 3 (Fall 2004), 419–37. 49. Paul Patton, ‘Foucault’s Subject of Power’, in The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, ed. Jeremy Moss (London: Sage, 1998), 74, Patton’s emphasis. 50. Acker, ‘Writing, Identity, and Copyright in the Net Age’, in Bodies of Work: Selected Essays (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 99. 51. Acker, ‘Seeing Gender’, in Bodies of Work, 159. 52. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (1990; New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), i.




4 John Marks

A self-reflexive genealogy Foucault’s 1976 lectures at the Collège de France can be read, in isolation, as an exploration of one of the key themes of his work; namely, the way in which – neatly reversing Clausewitz’s formula – politics is a continuation of war by other means.1 In this sense, the lectures are an expression of Foucault’s attempt to analyse power in terms of its operation, functions and effects, rather than in terms of sovereignty and juridical models. They are a continuation of his project to look at power from the perspective of its functions and strategies, as it operates ‘under the radar’, as it were, of the juridical system of sovereignty (SMBD, 39). However, as far as the wider context of his work is concerned, the lectures also mark the point at which Foucault begins to shift his focus from a genealogy of power-knowledge. As Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani note in their essay contextualising Society Must Be Defended, the lectures were delivered at a point when Foucault was beginning to think of power in new ways.2 In this sense, they are an exercise in self-reflexive critique. In the course of analysing the history of discourses that draw on this model of war, Foucault undertakes the genealogy of an important component of his own method. He feels that his work up to this point has been couched in the ‘struggle-repression schema’, and he now wants to scrutinise the assumption that power mechanisms are essentially repressive. Also, he wants to interrogate the notion that the social field is characterised by a permanent war that is ‘rumbling away’ beneath the official structures of political power. Consequently, like so much of his work, this lecture series is a summation, a leave-taking, an attempt to gather what has been useful from a period of research, and to move on to new, more fruitful areas. In the final lecture of the series we encounter, for example, 88



Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biology

one of Foucault’s first allusions to biopower, and in a subsequent lecture series Foucault focused more and more on the analysis of what he called governmentality. As for the immediate socio-political context within which Foucault delivered these lectures, it has been claimed that they express, in coded and indirect ways, an ambivalent relation with the French Left at that point in the mid-1970s.3 Colin Gordon, for example, makes the claim that 1976 is the pivotal year when Foucault begins to distance himself from the ‘militant ideal’.4 In this chapter, after some preliminary analysis of the reassessment of the model of war that Foucault is undertaking in the lectures, I want to concentrate in particular on the significance of the themes of biology and population. In modifying the strugglerepression schema Foucault does not entirely abandon the model of war; rather, he gives it an important biological inflection. It will be argued that the emergence of the concept of population enables Foucault both to move on in his work and also to reconnect with, and make sense of, earlier biological themes. In conclusion, I will consider the utility of Foucault’s work on discipline and governmentality in the light of the ongoing genetic revolution.

The lectures As indicated above, the Society Must Be Defended lectures trace the genealogy of the historical and sociological method of which Foucault himself is an inheritor; that is to say, the mode of analysis that draws out the material reality of the permanent war which underpins the frequently complacent and self-satisfied accounts with which the state provides itself. In the compelling narrative arc that Foucault sets out, this is initially a ‘counter-history’, a challenge to the official histories that celebrate and legitimise the ‘lustre’ of power. However, always attentive to the strategic reversibility of discourses, Foucault reveals, in a narrative twist at the end of the lecture series, that the dissident discourse of permanent social war has itself become an ‘official’ state discourse. In short, the discourse of war ultimately finds expression as a discourse of state racism in the twentieth century. In the course of the lectures, we are taken through a series of discursive reversals and ‘filterings’ of this polyvalent discursive tendency: the counter-historical claims of the Diggers and the Levellers in England; the discourse of ‘aristocratic bitterness’ directed against Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century; the bourgeois discourse of ‘national universality’ that develops out of the period of the French Revolution; and finally the genocidal state racism of National



Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biology 89

Socialism in Germany. Where official forms of history and political philosophy see order and peace arrived at by dint of contracts proposed and accepted and rational arguments won, this critical discourse focuses on material differences and imbalances which continue to operate across the social field (SMBD, 60). In schematic terms, Foucault makes the claim that Western historical discourse has two centres of gravity: the ‘Roman history’ of sovereignty and the ‘biblical history of servitude and exiles’ (SMBD, 77). The opening lectures of the series are, he acknowledges, in some ways a paean to this counter-historical discourse of ‘war’ which draws attention to the real battles, bloodshed, subjugation and suffering that underpin the airbrushed ‘Roman’ history of sovereignty. As Foucault sees it, there is, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what amounts to a dissident attempt to reveal the web of domination and violence that actually founds the sovereignty of kings. The link between this historical discourse and the project he has been pursuing since the late 1960s is that both seek to revive subjugated knowledges. There is a family resemblance between the ‘autonomous and non-centralized theoretical production’ (SMBD, 6) that Foucault and many of his contemporaries have undertaken and the apparently archaic erudition of the counter-historical evocation of forgotten battles. Just as the form of critique that Foucault has attempted to carry out does not require validation from any wider, more systematic theoretical project, so the discourse of ‘war’ that he traces in these lectures is a guerrilla discourse that is forced to operate at the margins. It is, in this sense, the first genuinely historico-political discourse. It is unashamedly partisan, and is consequently frequently disqualified as ‘uncouth’ and resentful (SMBD, 57–8). As a proponent of the discourse of war Foucault deconstructs philosophico-juridical discourses which seek to domesticate or tame the reality of war and domination. He is, for example, dismissive of Hobbes’ attempts to cast the war of ‘all against all’ as a play of representations. Superficially, Hobbes’ discourse may seem shocking and bracingly bleak with its talk of war, but it is ultimately a philosophical expression of the discourse of the state, making the claim that the defeated have accepted their subjugation and are happy with the protection that the victor affords them: Hobbes ‘speaks the discourse of contracts and sovereignty’ (SMBD, 98). Audaciously, Foucault recasts Hobbes’ Leviathan as an attempt to elide the uncomfortable reality of the Norman Conquest in English history. Similarly, Foucault points to the fact that the Hegelian dialectic, although it appears to be a discourse which attempts to grapple with the dynamic of history and contradiction, is in fact



90 John Marks

nothing less than the ‘colonisation’ of historico-political discourse by the philosophico-juridical order (SMBD, 58–9). As commentators have remarked, a key figure for Foucault in these lectures is Henri de Boulainvilliers, a French nobleman who started his career in the military, but who is best known as an historian. Foucault indicates that Boulainvilliers can be regarded as the precursor of much right-wing discourse in France (SMBD, 135). Boulainvilliers challenges the discourse of right, contracts and sovereignty, and promotes an historical perspective organised around domination and relations of force by establishing a particular historical trajectory for the French nobility, which feels itself to be threatened during the reign of Louis XIV. Rather than calling directly for rebellion, he encourages the nobility to recover the memory of its own history as a distinct ‘race’: in this sense, Boulainvilliers articulates a discourse of knowledge and history. The French nobility can claim its rightful place as a subject of history only by gaining historical self-awareness (SMBD, 155). There are, Boulainvilliers argues, no ‘natural’ rights which are disrupted by history’s succession of conflicts; there are only the rights that can be claimed as a result of the inequalities that are the consequences of conflict. Freedom is defined precisely by the capacity to deprive others of it. The fact that there may have been some sort of primal egalitarian state of natural rights does not make these largely hypothetical rights in any way foundational, since the law of history prevails over the law of nature (SMBD, 158–9). War continues to be a valid model for the analysis of society long after the actual battles have been fought, since fluctuations in the general economy of weaponry and shifting political positions mean that the strong can become weak, and vice versa. Foucault cites the example of the Frankish aristocracy, which appropriated land when it invaded Gaul. Subsequently, it isolated itself from the king because it was preoccupied with the raising of taxes and internal struggles. In this way, the source of their initial strength eventually led to a position of weakness. Boulainvilliers’ historical perspective is, then, not simply an account of winners and losers: it is an ongoing calculation of forces in all their complexity. Viewed through this lens of shifting allegiances and reversals of fortune, war emerges as a model for society at all times: For his part, Boulainvilliers makes the relationship of war part of every social relationship, subdivides it into thousands of different channels, and reveals war to be a sort of permanent state that exists between groups, fronts, and tactical units as they in some sense civilize one




92 John Marks

As Todd May points out, Foucault sees in Boulainvilliers a working example of power/knowledge.5 Boulainvilliers situates himself as an historian not in some sort of objective position, but rather as an actor in the battle. Also, as May emphasises, Boulainvilliers is committed to revealing a truth that pertains to those who are dominated, rather than those who dominate. Boulainvilliers defines power, perhaps for the first time, as relational. There is no universal history that works to reveal truth over time, but rather a shifting set of power relations.

Discipline and Punish The Society Must Be Defended lectures provide, in this way, an analysis of the methodological approach that Foucault himself adopts in Discipline and Punish, which was published in French in February 1975, some ten months before these lectures started in January 1976.6 In Discipline and Punish Foucault sets out in painstaking detail the relentless training procedures that proliferated around modern societies’ drive towards normalisation. This book marks the point at which Foucault formulates a comprehensive account of the discursive construction and training of the ‘modern’ individual. Inspired by Nietzsche, he delves beneath the great discourses of rationality, Enlightenment, sovereignty and contract, in order to reveal a meticulously detailed history of the disciplined body and to show how the ‘soul’ emerges as the ‘prison of the body’. As Julian Bourg remarks in a recent essay on the Society Must Be Defended lectures, the theme of war appears in several guises in Discipline and Punish.7 Initially, there is the gruesome pre-disciplinary spectacle of public execution, by means of which the sovereign expresses and reinforces his capacity to crush his enemy in the form of the criminal. Foucault argues that the meticulous ceremonial aspects of this ‘theatre of terror’ are designed not to restore the balance of justice, but to emphasise the ubiquity of the sovereign. The criminal act is interpreted as being a direct attack on the body of the sovereign, and the punishment will emphasise the force of the sovereign in response to such an attack. As such, the ceremony of public execution has an explicitly military tone: as Foucault puts it, the same sword that punishes the criminal also destroys the enemies of the sovereign. The spectacle of public execution is not only a form of deterrent, it is also a reminder of the sheer force of the sovereign (DP, 50).



another, come into conflict with one another, or on the contrary, form alliances. (SMBD, 162)

The next manifestation of the theme of war in Discipline and Punish is the description of the way in which the soldier emerges as a key figure in the early development of a disciplinary society. The techniques that are developed within the army in order to construct docile bodies, from which to extract the maximum military force, give rise to what Foucault calls a ‘military dream of society’ (DP, 168). Finally, Foucault shows how the ‘carceral’ system that emerges in the nineteenth century takes this mass militarisation a stage further by superimposing mental training on the training of the body. For Foucault, the carceral system is completed in 1840, with the opening of the Mettray Penetentiary for young delinquents (DP, 293). This institution combines elements of the cloister, the prison, the school and the regiment, and those who run it carry out a meticulous physical and psychological training of the inmates. The modelling of the body is inextricable from the development of a body of knowledge relating to the individuals in the institution (DP, 294–5). Mettray signalled a new era in the supervision and production of ‘normality’, drawing not only on established, military-style training, but also the supposed scientificity of medicine and psychiatry. For Foucault, Mettray is a significant cornerstone in the emerging carceral archipelago, in that it contained both convicted delinquents and individuals who had been acquitted or were held simply because they appeared to be impervious to ‘parental correction’ (DP, 296). In this sense, Mettray is representative of the blurring of the boundaries between criminality and categories such as delinquency or ‘abnormality’, which constitute a potential danger for society. The carceral net is cast wider and wider in order to pick up even the slightest irregularity and convert it to normality. At this point, the figure of the deviant emerges as a social danger (DP, 299–300). This new carceral society tends to efface the distinction between punishing and ‘rectifying’, and is characterised primarily by the drive towards normalisation. As Foucault argues in his 1974–75 lecture series, Abnormal,8 penal practice takes on an ‘Ubu-esque’, grotesque bureaucratic quality, in that it doubles the criminal infraction with a pathology of ‘psychologico-ethical’ irregularity or abnormality (A, 12–18). The eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries see the gradual construction of the ‘dangerous’, potentially degenerate individual, against whom society must be defended. Crucially, Discipline and Punish closes with a brief discussion of a letter which appeared in 1836 in the nineteenth-century social science journal La Phalange. The anonymous correspondent offers what amounts to a succinct critique of penal reform which draws on the discourse of war as a model for understanding society that runs from Boulainvilliers through




94 John Marks

In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration’, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle. (DP, 308) Foucault’s primary reference point here is Nietzsche, and his reminder that the codes of law are always covered in dried blood: ‘What an enormous price man had to pay for reason, seriousness, control over his emotions – those grand human prerogatives and cultural showpieces! How much blood and horror lies behind all “good things!”’9 It is precisely this discourse of ‘perpetual war’ – so succinctly summarised by the anonymous correspondent in La Phalange – the genealogy of which Foucault proposes to undertake in his 1975–6 lecture series. As he indicates to his audience at the Collège in the third lecture of the year, this discourse interests him because it is not only resolutely historical, but also maverick and marginal. It is, in short, the discourse to which Foucault lays claim: It is interested in rediscovering the blood that has dried in the codes, and not, therefore, the absolute right that lies beneath the transience of history; it is interested not in referring the relativity of history to the absolute of the law, but in discovering beneath the stability of the law or the truth, the indefiniteness of history. It is interested in the battle cries that can be heard beneath the formulas of right. . . . It is the indefiniteness of its eternal, the eternal dissolution into the mechanisms and events known as force, power, and war. (SMBD, 56) Foucault suggests, then, that the grotesque spectacle of the public execution is replaced by a system that is entirely different in its mode of operation, but nonetheless has a ‘warlike’ dimension. It is as if the intensity of this display of disproportionate sovereign power is redistributed, in dilute form, across the entire social field. The myriad components of the disciplinary network retain, it is suggested, a faint echo of real battles carried out at other times and in other places. They are expressions of



Nietzsche to Foucault. Directing satirical scorn at ‘philosophers, legislators, flatterers of civilisation’, the correspondent proposes a map of Paris in which ‘all like things are gathered together’. The suggestion is that the disciplinary network, for all its order and regularity, is an expression of the violence that is never far away:


ongoing battles and a reminder of origins that official discourses would rather forget.

In the penultimate lecture of the year, Foucault locates the point at which the discourse he has been tracing begins to transform into something like an official discourse of the state. Military struggle becomes simply an exceptional moment within a wider civil struggle oriented towards establishing the universality of the state (SMBD, 225). Foucault presents abbé Sieyès’ discourse of national universality as a departure from the rightist noble discourse that establishes relations of war between different ‘nations’. Whereas French noblemen such as Boulainvilliers attacked the state’s ‘justificatory or liturgical’ discourse, Sieyès proposes a discourse which is less directly polemical. In short, rather than focusing on resurrecting and uncovering the web of historical struggles which underpin the ‘formal façade of the state’, this new nineteenth-century discourse looks at the present. The state is no longer identified with the body of the king, nor is it seen as a site of struggle between nations, but rather the state is now seen as coextensive with the nation. This is the outcome of the Revolution: The bourgeoisie or Third Estate thus becomes the people, and thus becomes the nation. It has the might of the universal. And the present moment – the moment when Augustin Thierry is writing – is precisely the moment when dualities, nations, and even classes cease to exist. (SMBD, 236) In terms of discourse, this is the point at which what we now understand as a social field appears. Foucault describes it as a ‘moment of totalization’. A ‘statist totality’ is constituted that is an expression of the ‘national collectivity’ (SMBD, 233). The choice of terminology is significant in that Foucault suggests that this moment constitutes the birth of state racism, a racism which reaches a point of paroxysm with the Nazi regime and the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union. The component of war is not lost; it is translated into a war on internal threats to the national collectivity, in the shape of the people or the proletariat. This brings us to the final lecture of the 1975–6 series, in which Foucault discusses biopower, a new form of power that emerges in the second half of the eighteenth century and which develops out of disciplinary techniques, embedding itself in them and building on them. The key



Biopower, state racism and genocide

feature of this new technique is that it focuses not on the individual body, but on the population. More precisely, this new technology focuses particularly on the population as a living mass. Whereas discipline concerns itself with the training of the body, ‘biopower’ takes as its object ‘man-as-species’ (SMBD, 242–3). As it begins to establish itself, biopower is concerned with the statistical analysis of vital processes – birth rates, longevity, accidents, illnesses, morbidity – that occur within the population. It also introduces mechanisms such as insurance and savings, as well as programmes to control the relations between human populations and the environment they live in. Whereas discipline has as its object the individual body, biopower focuses on regularising wider biological processes (SMBD, 246–7). In short, its object is life. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality,10 Foucault claims that life enters the political scene in the eighteenth century. For centuries, the figure of ‘man’ corresponded to Aristotle’s conception of a living animal with an additional capacity for political existence. ‘Modern man’, however, is an animal whose existence as a living being is challenged by politics. The legal subject is overlaid with the crucial figure of the ‘living being’11 and the fact of existing as a living being in a particular environment began to register as a political preoccupation: For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. (HS, 142–3) Both discipline and biopower are ways of enabling power to extend its reach in order to govern the complex economic and political field that develops with the growth of industrial society. The organising principle that has sovereignty as its primary reference point is no longer capable of covering the entire field; adjustments have to be made. Discipline provides a first adjustment, in the shape of the disciplinary/carceral network of barracks, schools, hospitals and so on; a second adjustment comes at the end of the eighteenth century, with the addition of a focus on the biological phenomenon of the population as a living mass



96 John Marks

(SMBD, 249–50). These two approaches complement and interpenetrate each other. It seems that Foucault is not simply adding the development of biopower as one more nuance to his broad historical framework. He is actually reassessing the significance of discipline. Discipline and Punish is, as we have seen, formulated in terms of the discourse of war. Now, however, he recognises that discipline must also be understood in terms of a wider process which involves the colonisation of history and war by biology. The population not only has a history, but also a biological reality; and, with the pervasive influence of evolutionary theories, biology itself acquires an historical dimension. Discipline is now seen by Foucault as one element of a wider historical move from sovereignty to ‘regularisation’, or biopower. Whereas sovereignty either takes life or ‘let[s] live’, biopower ‘consists in making live and letting die’ (SMBD, 247). The power of the sovereign was primarily oriented towards ‘deduction’: the right of seizure over lives, goods, services and taxes. However, from the seventeenth century onwards, a new form of power emerges: ‘Deduction’ has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. (HS, 136) Although biopower in this sense has a relatively benign focus, it is undeniable that wars have become increasingly bloody and costly in terms of human life. In the nineteenth century the idea develops that war is a way of making one’s own ‘race’ stronger. The changes in the nature of warfare culminate in the phenomenon of so-called ‘total war’ in the first half of the twentieth century and the threat of global nuclear annihilation in the second half. Also, states become willing to carry out genocide on groups within their own population. As far as Foucault is concerned, this new right of death is simply the reverse side of the drive to foster and protect the life of the population. All wars become race wars, in that population is ranged against population. Also, war frequently becomes a question of racial survival. In short, there is a genocidal tendency that is inescapable in the exercise of modern power (SMBD, 257–8). The ‘racist’ logic of contemporary warfare depends on biological dimensions, and this logic is expressed most clearly in the rationale of Nazism. The Nazi state is faced with both internal and external ‘enemies’, and to a large




degree it is not sufficient simply to defeat them; they must be exterminated in order to make the life of the Aryan race healthier and purer. What is more, as far as internal enemies are concerned, it is not only the weak, ‘degenerate’ fraction of the population that constitutes an internal danger, but potentially the entire population. In Nazi Germany this leads to the ‘Final Solution’, the plan to exterminate the Jewish ‘race’ and all other internal enemies of the Nazi state, and to the attempt to bring about the ‘suicide’ of the entire German population.12 Foucault had already explored the perceived biological threat of the dangerous, abnormal individual in the Abnormal lectures. Here, he sets out the way in which psychiatry in the nineteenth century effectively ceases to cure and takes on the role of the scientific protection of society (A, 316). By means of the notion of degeneracy and a focus on the dangers of heredity, psychiatry is able to ‘plug into’ more traditional forms of ‘ethnic racism’ in order to abandon its ambition to cure and instead to identify dangerous individuals. The degenerate cannot be reached by legal penalties; nor can they be cured.

Population Effectively, Society Must Be Defended represents the point at which Foucault begins to make sense of his interest in biology. As discussed above, the concept of population is particularly significant in this respect. In one sense, what Foucault does in the eleventh lecture is reconnect with a biology – a theme and a preoccupation that is always present in his work, but which perhaps he was never able to deal with in an entirely comprehensive manner. It is highly significant that Foucault formulates the idea of social war in terms of ‘a great retreat from the historical to the biological, from the constituent to the medical’ (SMBD, 216). It is not hard to see why biology is so interesting for Foucault: it is a human science that draws on the ‘hard’ sciences, and, in straightforward terms, it is in intimate contact with the body. It works away, quietly, frequently beneath the official level of legal and constitutional discourses, organising, producing and sustaining life, which is conventionally thought of as somehow extra- or pre-political, a given. The intellectual roots of this interest can be traced, in part at least, to the conceptual impact of molecular biology on Foucault’s thinking. Two key works – both reviewed enthusiastically by him – stand out here: François Jacob’s La Logique du vivant 13 and Jacques Ruffié’s De la biologie à la culture.14 Jacob’s book sought both to introduce the French public to the significance of recent advances in molecular biology (advances in



98 John Marks

which he had played an important role) and at the same time put these advances in the context of an epistemological history of biology. In this sense, it might even be viewed as a companion piece to Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses.15 Jacob’s history of biology is related in terms of a series of four paradigm shifts – visible structure (the seventeenth century), organisation (end of the eighteenth century), chromosomes and genes (beginning of the twentieth century) and the molecule (post-Second World War) – and one major theory – evolution. Molecular biology is seen as giving scientific validity to Darwinism, in that natural selection can be explained in terms of genetic mutations. It is for this reason that Jacob has been labelled a neo-Darwinist. Foucault’s a review of La Logique du vivant comes at the end of what might be regarded as his ‘structuralist’ period.16 Consequently, it is clear that he feels that Jacob’s book confirms his thesis that the figure of ‘man’ as created by the human sciences in the modern era is under threat. The discovery of DNA as a form of code constitutes nothing less than a Copernican revolution at the cellular level. Just as Copernicus showed human beings that they were not at the centre of the universe, so molecular biology has shown us that chance and discontinuity are constitutive elements of human life. Reproduction can no longer be understood in terms of the individual, but rather in terms of the ‘dream’, as Jacob puts it, of the molecule to become two. It is now necessary to think in terms of a ‘pure repetition’, which is anterior to the individual organism. Rather than focusing on the individual as a unique expression of ‘life’, Jacob argues that we should think in terms of ‘living systems’. Accordingly, sexuality and the birth and death of individuals can now be seen not in terms of the individuals that embody these events, but as a means of assuring the system of heredity. We must no longer think of life , ‘la vie’, as the ‘continuous and attentive’ creation of individuals, but rather of ‘le vivant’ as a ‘game’ of chance and reproduction. Jacob’s claim that a limited amount of genetic information in the germ line produces a vast number of protein structures in the soma is clearly related to the key structuralist concept of bricolage: in simple terms, nature creates diversity by endlessly recombining ‘bits and pieces’. In summary, the structuralist Foucault appears to read Jacob as outlining a version of what Dawkins would later term the ‘selfish gene’ theory.17 However, as far as Foucault’s later work is concerned, Jacob’s subtle conceptual understanding of the epistemological shift that takes place in the nineteenth century towards a model of population, which he also sets out in The Logic of Living Systems, is perhaps more important. Jacob identifies the Darwinian theory of evolution with a wider




paradigm shift in the nineteenth century. It is nothing less than a shift in the way in which objects are conceptualised, which is common to both the study of living beings (Darwin, Wallace, then Mendel) and the study of matter (Boltzmann and Gibbs) (LLS, 173). Previously, a collection of objects belonging to the same class, such as gas molecules or the organisms in a particular species, tended to be seen as copies corresponding to a common model. Deviations from the original were only ever seen as negligible and relatively inconsequential. The properties of the individual organism were of less importance than the type to which the object referred. Now, however, in the mid-nineteenth century, a new way of looking at a collection of objects emerges. They constitute a population of individuals which are never identical, and it now becomes important to have information relating to the population as a whole and in terms of its statistical distribution: ‘What has to be known, then, is the population and its distribution as a whole. The average type is just an abstraction. Only individuals, with their particularities, differences and variations, have reality’ (LLS, 173). Jacob sees the move towards this new way of seeing a collection of individuals as marking nothing less than the beginning of modern scientific thinking. A dual focus emerges: only the individual has reality, but the significance of this individuality can only mean something in the context of a population. On reading Jacob’s The Logic of Living Systems, Foucault was particularly struck by the simultaneous emergence of a statistical model of population in the apparently unrelated fields of biology and physics.18 That is to say, he seems to agree with Jacob that the concept of population has a major epistemological import. The figure of population has both an historical and, I would argue, a crucial methodological significance in Foucault’s later work. From an historical point of view, population emerges as a solution to the impasse that the art of government found itself in throughout the seventeenth century and into the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is caught between the framework of sovereignty, which is too unwieldy and abstract, and the economic model of the family.19 From a methodological perspective, the analogy that Jacob traces between the theory of evolution and the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann and Gibbs gives us a clue as to how the concept of population moves Foucault’s work on. As Jacob remarks, both statistical mechanics and the theory of evolution establish the notion of contingency as being ‘at the heart of nature’ (LLS, 197). The statistical method employed by Boltzmann and Gibbs does not seek the causes of particular events, but rather tries to predict probabilities:



100 John Marks


In broad terms, this is the approach Foucault identifies in the governmental strategies of biopower. Biopower attends not to individual cases – discipline already takes care of that – but rather to the general laws of probability that pertain to the population. Similarly, biopower does not, unlike discipline, attempt to establish a chain of causality, but rather seeks to work ‘with the grain’ of the tendencies and probabilities that it is able to perceive.

Eugenics As we have seen, Foucault alludes to eugenics in both the Abnormal and Society Must Be Defended lecture series, as well as in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. What emerges from this fragmentary treatment of the subject is that eugenics stands at the point of intersection between at least three regimes of power, as described by Foucault. It is a technology that draws on discipline, biopower and the archaic preoccupations with blood and law. Eugenics is, Foucault claims, a ‘technology of the instincts’ in that it is, along with psychiatry, a disciplinary technology that seeks to root out and eliminate the ‘dangerous’ individual (A, 113–14). As such, it depends entirely on the technique of the norm, which can be applied to the individual body or the population as a whole (SMBD, 252–3). However, its preoccupation with heredity and degeneracy also means that it draws on what Foucault calls a ‘symbolics of blood’ (HS, 148–50). Eugenics combines the ‘modern’ medical-biological fear of contagion and the older preoccupation with the purity of blood-lines. Nowhere is this intersection of different regimes of power clearer than in the state racism of the Nazis. Their regime brought together disciplinary zeal, regulatory measures (insurance, welfare, etc.) and the murderous power of the ‘old sovereign right’ to take life (SMBD, 259). In the aftermath of the Second World War eugenics was inevitably associated with the genocidal racial politics of the Nazi era and lost any credibility it might have enjoyed as a ‘medical’ discourse drawing on the science of evolution and heredity.20 Scientific developments in the field of molecular biology led a number of scientists to argue that racial theories of human biology were no longer scientifically tenable. For one



These predictions were valid only for the totality of events, excluding details and exceptions. In fact, one of the characteristics of the statistical method is that it deliberately and systematically ignores details.. . . The aim is to obtain a law which transcends individual cases. (LLS, 200)

thing, molecular biology claims to confirm scientifically the notion that the motor of evolution is a process of genetic mutation and selection. This means that degeneracy cannot occur by means of acquired characteristics. Molecular biology also encourages the view that humans do in fact constitute a single ‘race’, and that this race is effectively a vast pool of intercommunicating genes.21 At the same time, growing emphasis is placed on the importance of culture in the formation of human beings. The figure of ‘Unesco Man’ comes to embody this paradigm of biological unity and racial diversity.22 Foucault himself appears to have been influenced by the challenge laid down by molecular biology to racist forms of thinking. In 1976, he published a review of Ruffié’s De la biologie à la culture.23 Foucault isolates three fundamental propositions in Ruffié’s book. First, ‘race’ for a biologist makes sense only as a statistical concept, that is to say a ‘population’. Second, the genetic polymorphism of a population does not constitute a form of degeneration; it is, rather, biologically useful, since racial purity makes adaptation more difficult. Third, a population cannot be defined in terms of its manifest morphological characteristics (phenotype). Humanity should not be thought of in terms of races that are juxtaposed to one another, but rather ‘clouds’ of populations that intermingle, and in the process accentuate the favourable condition of genetic polymorphism. Humanity is a ‘pool’ of intercommunicating genes. Foucault ends on an unusually optimistic note, claiming that Ruffié lays the foundations for a ‘bio-politics’ that would focus not on divisions and hierarchies, but rather on ‘communication and polymorphism’.24 However, I would like to conclude by suggesting that the apparent disappearance of eugenics in the post-war era cannot entirely be explained by repugnance in the face of Nazi eugenics and scientific advances in the field of molecular biology. There are, I would contend, what might be called technological and conceptual reasons for the withdrawal of eugenics, and Foucault’s work may be useful in helping to think through the reasons for this withdrawal and also ways of understanding new forms of eugenics that may be emerging. This reconsideration of the fate of eugenics hinges on the issue of population. For one thing, it can be argued that eugenics, in its various forms, never really establishes a workable biopolitical rationale. That is to say, it has tended to address the issue of population from the perspective of a fairly crude, mechanistic causality. It reasons that, by eliminating unsuitable individuals, or by preventing them from procreating, the ‘quality’ of the population can be ‘improved’. Although arguments relating to the freedom of individuals and the inherent ‘dignity’ of human life



102 John Marks

inevitably – and in many cases justifiably – take precedence in response to these claims, the point can also be made that such an approach is premised on a conceptually impoverished model of the population. We might go so far as to say that, in Foucaldian terms, eugenics in the forms it has taken up to the present wages war on the population, and in particular on individuals perceived as being degenerate within a population. In reaction to this, it was recognised in the post-war era that the welfare and vitality of a particular population cannot be promoted by means of direct interventions into the life processes of individuals. However, with the steady development of genetic technologies since the 1970s, a new biopolitical era may well be emerging in the form of ‘liberal’ eugenics. Foucault’s work on governmentality has as a central focus the way in which neoliberalism constructs the entrepreneurial self as a vector for governmental action – a route into the field of population – and any new eugenics will inevitably make use of this entrepreneurial self. Individuals are already encouraged to ‘take responsibility’ for managing and maximising their own life chances and possibilities, and will no doubt be encouraged to avail themselves of new genetic techniques in order to do so in the future.25 As Kevin Thompson argues, in an era of neoliberal governmentality, it is plausible that ‘health’ will increasingly be associated with the ability of the individual to engage in an active and ongoing project of the ‘perfection’ of the self: Health, then, is no longer malleability, but plasticity, the ability to mold one’s fundamental structure, to reconfigure it subtly and continually, doing so always under the injunction of docility: increase capacity, decrease resistance. Plasticity is more open to reconfiguration than mere optimality, but for all that, it still must function under the sway of social and political rule. One must fashion one’s self so that one adapts appropriately. Hence, to be healthy is constantly to make and remake one’s self as a better, more productive employee, a more loyal, more committed citizen.26 Techniques such as genetic screening (for single-gene diseases such as cystic fibrosis and Tay Sachs), cloning and genetic therapies hold out the promise of improved health for individuals. However, they also threaten to produce a new eugenics which no longer seeks to wage war on the dangerous, ‘degenerate’ individual. Instead, the individual will be incited to manage a range of genetic risks. Discussion of the new eugenics tends to focus on ethical and philosophical issues such as the threat to dignity and autonomy posed by techniques such as cloning. However, Foucault’s




104 John Marks

emphasis on the everyday functioning of power points to another set of questions. How far will the individual have the ‘right’ to be unwell, to submit to a genetic ‘flaw’, even to become old and ‘unproductive’?

1. See Todd May, ‘War in the Social and Disciplinary Bodies’, Radical Philosophy Review, 7, 1 (2004), 41–58. 2. Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, ‘Situating the Lectures’, in Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 273–93. The English version of the published lectures is henceforth referred to as SMBD. 3. See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 290–1. 4. Discussion entre Jacques Donzelot et Colin Gordon, ‘Comment gouverner les sociétés libérales? L’effet Foucault dans le monde anglo-saxon’, Esprit (novembre 2005), 82–95. 5. May, ‘War in the Social and Disciplinary Bodies’, 48. 6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane 1977). Henceforth referred to as DP. 7. See Julian Bourg, ‘ “Society Must Be Defended” and the Last Foucault’, Radical Philosophy Review, 7, 1 (2004), 1–16. 8. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003). Henceforth referred to as A. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 194. 10. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978). Hemceforth referred to as HS. 11. See Paul Rabinow, ‘La recherché génétique et la connaissance du vivant: un regard ethnographique sur le débat français’. Entretien avec Paul Rabinow’, Esprit, 284 (mai 2002), 137–8. 12. Foucault refers here to Hitler’s order, contained in Telegram 71 of April 1945, for the final destruction of the ‘living conditions of the German people’ (SMBD, 260). 13. François Jacob, La Logique du vivant: une histoire de l’hérédité (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). English translation, The Logic of Living Systems: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (London: Allen Lane, 1974). Henceforth referred to as LLS. 14. Jacques Ruffié, De la biologie à la culture (Paris: Flammarion, 1976). 15. See Michel Foucault, ‘Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir’, in Dits et écrits 1954–1988: II 1970–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 524. Here, Foucault states that Jacob told him that he was influenced by Les Mots et les choses. 16. See ‘Croître et multiplier’, in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. II 1970–1975 (Paris: Gallimard. 1994). 17. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).



Notes

18. See Michel Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’, interview with J. G. Merquior and S. P. Rouanet in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. II 1970–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 160. 19. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Mitchell (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1991), 99–100. 20. It must be acknowledged, however, that, in Sweden, for example, a policy of forced sterilisation was in place up to 1976. 21. See François Jacob, ‘Le racisme a-t-il des fondements scientifiques?’ Le Monde (10 septembre 1973), 36–40. 22. On the notion of ‘Unesco man’, see Kenan Malik, Man, Beast and Zombie: The New Science of Human Nature (London: Phoenix, 2001). 23. Michel Foucault, ‘Bio-histoire et bio-politique’, in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. III 1970–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 95–7. 24. Ibid., 97. 25. See Kevin Thompson, ‘The Spiritual Disciplines of Biopower’, Radical Philosophy Review, 7, 1 (2004), 60 and 64. 26. Ibid., 65.




5 Clare Hanson

Theorising biopower This chapter explores the interpretive possibilities offered by Foucault’s concept of biopolitics with specific reference to eugenic thought in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Foucault’s most extended account of biopolitics can be found in the lectures published in Society Must Be Defended, in which he offers a more detailed exploration of issues raised in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality. In the lectures Foucault formulates his argument that biopower emerged as a field of force alongside the development of the modern nation-state, as the older sovereign right ‘to kill and let live’ was complemented by the new right ‘to make live and let die’. This formulation neatly captures the turn towards the active management of life by political and other authorities, which Foucault associates with the rise of the life sciences and clinical medicine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What is new in Society Must Be Defended is the more extended discussion of the second of the two levels on which biopower operates. The first level is through techniques centred on the disciplining of the individual body familiar from Foucault’s earlier work in The Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish; and the second through regularisation, which is not simply a variant form of discipline, but a new technique which infiltrates and encases it. This technique is addressed not to the individual body but to man-asspecies, conceived as ‘a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on’.1 Foucault describes this technique as a ‘biopolitics of the human race’. It involves the acquisition of knowledge about rates of reproduction, fertility, longevity and mortality. It deals with birth control and develops natalist policies; it also addresses the question of morbidity, not at 106



Biopolitics, Biological Racism and Eugenics

107

the level of the epidemics which had haunted the Middle Ages but of ‘endemics’, that is, those illnesses that can be expected to develop within a population over time. It deploys statistical and regulatory mechanisms in order to predict and manage events, with the aim of establishing homeostasis within the population. What is perhaps most striking in Foucault’s account is his characterisation of ‘the’ population in this context as a hybrid entity, neither wholly abstract nor concrete: What we are dealing with in this new technology of power is not exactly society (or at least not the social body, as defined by the jurists), nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted. (SMBD, 245) In the light of the extended discussion of Thomas Hobbes in Society Must Be Defended, this arresting metaphor might be read as a reworking of the famous image on the title-page of the first printing of Leviathan, in which the head of the king dominates over a torso composed of many tiny bodies.2 Foucault, by contrast, ‘cuts off the head of the king’ and figures the population as a hydra-like monster which continually threatens to escape regulation and control. The implication is that the monstrousness of the population inheres not so much in its ever-increasing size as in its aleatory, unpredictable character: it is this construction which turns the population into ‘a problem which is both scientific and political’ (SMBD, 245). Foucault also links biopower with a particular formation of racial discourse. As Ann Laura Stoler has pointed out in her illuminating account of the History of Sexuality, for Foucault ‘race’ is an extraordinarily mobile category which is continually being ‘reconverted’ and reinscribed.3 His provocative contention here is that in nineteenth-century Europe the new technique of biopower converts a discourse of races into a discourse of race. The older theme of a ‘struggle between races’ is supplanted by a ‘post-evolutionist’ theme of the struggle for existence, and it is at this point that racism becomes inscribed within the mechanisms of the state: It is no longer a battle in the sense that a warrior would understand the term, but a struggle in the biological sense: the differentiation of species, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest species. Similarly, the theme of the binary society which is divided into two races or two groups with different languages, laws, and so on will be replaced by that of a society that is, in contrast, biologically monist. Its only




108 Clare Hanson

State racism is born ‘at the point when the theme of racial purity replaces that of race struggle’. Such racism supports the belief that the more degenerates and ‘deviants’ are eliminated, the stronger will be the lives of those who remain within the (multiple) body politic. This beliefformation is characterised as follows: ‘“The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I – as species rather than individual – can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate.”’ This is what Foucault means by ‘biological racism’, the construction of ‘the enemies who must be eliminated’ as external and internal threats to the health of the population. In this biopolitical system, the imperative to kill is acceptable if it results ‘in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race’ (SMBD, 255–6).

The Royal Commission on Population, 1949 Keeping in mind Foucault’s engagement with the deep structure of ‘biological racism’, I now turn to a particular moment in post-war British history in order to set his thought to work in an excavation of a particular episode in the history of eugenics. After the Second World War, just as after the Boer War and the First World War, concerns were expressed by the government about a long-term decline in the birth rate, leading to the setting up of a Royal Commission on Population, which reported in 1949. The Commission was charged with examining population trends, their causes, effects and consequences, and with considering ‘what measures, if any, should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population’.4 Their overall conclusion was that steps must be taken to bring the population up to replacement rate and counteract the trend towards small families. This argument rested in part on concerns relating to external threats to the nation, as a large population had traditionally been considered critical to military strength and strategy. Evidence submitted to the Commission showed that as Western populations were declining, those of ‘the Oriental world’ were accelerating, and it was thought that this constituted a serious threat to ‘the prestige and influence of the West’. However, the report goes on to emphasise that ‘[t]he question it should be observed is not merely one of military strength and security; that question becomes merged in more



problem is this: it is threatened by a certain number of heterogeneous elements which are not essential to it. (SMBD, 80–1)

109

fundamental issues of the maintenance and extension of Western values, ideas and culture’ (Royal Commission Report, 134). It is at this point that the terms of the argument begin to shift, as it is suggested that the ‘maintenance and extension’ of Western values can be assured only through the continued ‘vitality’ of the population – a term which, importantly, implies qualitative health as much as quantitative strength. The salience of this factor becomes clearer in the discussion of the need for a ‘continued growth of the British elements in the population of the Dominions’ in order to maintain the effectiveness and force of the ‘Western commonalty’ on the world stage. Drawing on the analytical framework offered by Foucault, it can be argued that elements of a biopolitical conception of warfare are indeed discernible here. The maintenance of a strong population (in terms of quantity and quality) is presented as a kind of continuation of war by other means, such warfare being legitimated primarily in terms of a ‘biological struggle’ over ‘the survival of the fittest species’ rather than in terms of a response to military threat. However, the main focus of the Commission’s report is not on global matters but the more immediate problem of the quantity and quality of the domestic population. In relation to the issue of quantity, the report concluded that the decline in the birth rate was the result of a complex web of social changes, most notably the emancipation of women and the widespread adoption of birth control. In addition, despite a general rise in living standards, the costs of parenthood remained high and parents of large families had benefited least from increased prosperity. Accordingly, the report recommended greater financial support for parents and, more nebulously, that efforts should be made to influence public opinion by stressing the value of ‘family living’. In relation to quality, the report offered a chapter on ‘differential fertility’, in a gesture towards a longstanding campaign by British eugenicists, who had made repeated attempts to prove that the lower classes were more fertile than the upper and middle classes.5 In consequence, they claimed, the nation was at risk of being overrun by ‘inferior stock’, the concept of ‘inferiority’ taking on different aspects as social and historical contexts changed. In the years immediately following the Second World War, attention became focused on IQ as a marker of reproductive fitness, hence the particular inflection of the report’s study of differential fertility. Drawing on statistical data from the Family Census and from a fertility study carried out by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Commission found that there was a clear correlation between higher levels of income and education and smaller families. Having taken evidence from many other sources, including the eugenicist R. A. Fisher, the




geneticist J. B. S. Haldane and the controversial psychometrist Cyril Burt, the Commission also concluded that there was a correlation between high intelligence and the incidence of small families. Acknowledging that the evidence they had received on this point was ‘speculative’, the report concluded nonetheless that as the more intelligent had smaller families there was a real danger of ‘a steady decline in the native stock of intelligence’ and urgently called on the government to support research into the ‘very serious issues’ associated with differential fertility (155). In general, the Royal Commission was circumspect in its recommendations as to the ‘measures to be taken’ in response to population trends in Britain, and while it did pay attention to potential threats from within the population, most notably in relation to levels of IQ, it was cautious in its approach to positive eugenics and silent on the question of negative eugenics. However, despite the oft-repeated claim that negative eugenics had became unthinkable in the post-war period, such measures were being advocated at this time in relation to the very issue which had so exercised the commission, that of IQ.

Feeblemindedness In 1947 the eugenicist Eva M. Hubback published The Population of Britain. Hubback was an economist and population specialist who had served on the boards of The Family Endowment Society, The Family Planning Association and the Children’s Nutrition Council; she also sat on the Population Investigation Committee and the Council of the Eugenics Society. The range and extent of her activities can be read as something of an index of the complexity of the eugenic network in this period. Hubback was not unusual in the diversity of her connections and indeed it can be argued that much of the vitality of the eugenic project had always derived from its eclectic, non-sectarian character. Eleanor Rathbone is a particularly intriguing figure in this respect. She was closely and famously aligned with a number of progressive causes and yet, as her interest in maternity and her tireless campaigning for family allowances might suggest, she also had connections with the Eugenics Society which dated back to the 1920s. The Population of Britain was dedicated to Rathbone, although it seesm unlikely that she would ever have endorsed Hubback’s effective disqualification of the ‘feebleminded’ from civic society. Hubback argued that those who are ‘mentally defective’ should be placed in institutions where they would be segregated and trained, and urged voluntary sterilisation of the ‘unfit’, breezily claiming that this operation was ‘trivial in the case of a man and involves no danger in



110 Clare Hanson

111

the case of a woman’. With equal confidence she claimed that such provisions would ‘certainly prevent the births of many individuals whose lives are bound to constitute a burden to themselves’.6 In raising the issue of ‘mental deficiency’ Hubback was returning to familiar eugenic territory. The Eugenics Society had long argued that the social residuum (in economic terms, the bottom 10 per cent of the population) was responsible for a range of social problems, including alcoholism and illegitimacy; they also claimed that it was the generally low intelligence of this group which was the primary cause of criminality and anti-social behaviour. The Mental Deficiency Act 1913 had explicitly linked mental defect with immorality, including among its four classes of mentally defective persons ‘moral defectives; that is to say, persons in whose case there exists mental defectiveness coupled with strongly vicious or criminal propensities and who require care, supervision and control for the protection of others’.7 As psychiatrists were later to demonstrate, there was no statistical correlation between mental deficiency and criminality, yet the argument for this link was sustained and even intensified in the post-Second World War period. Particularly significant in this respect was the appointment of the General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, the psychiatrist C. P. Blacker, to produce a plan for the future of mental health services within the new National Health Service. Despite his reputation as a ‘reforming’ eugenicist, Blacker continued to argue for the existence of a ‘problem group’ who posed a particular threat to society. Recognising that defectives were not necessarily criminal or immoral, Blacker nonetheless perpetuated the myth of a sub-group combining the inherited characteristics of dullness, instability and ineducability. In his influential report Neurosis and the Mental Health Services (1948) he argued that the welfare state could easily become overwhelmed by the ‘excessive demands’ of such defectives, who constituted more of a threat to society than the mentally ill because of their immorality and tendency to profligate breeding.8 Blacker warned that they could dilute the mental fitness of the entire population and recommended that they should undergo surveillance and control. The category of mental deficiency was particularly open to abuse because it was not a clear-cut clinical entity.9 The accepted classifications in the post-war period were as follows: ‘idiots’ denoted those with severe mental impairment and an IQ of less than 20 points; ‘imbeciles’ were of a higher grade, with an IQ of up to 50; the feebleminded had an IQ of 50–70. The ‘normal’ range covered those with an IQ of 70–130. The vast majority of people of low intelligence lived within the community and were never ‘classified’ as feebleminded: it was only when they came




to the notice of the authorities for whatever reason that they were at risk of classification and its effects. The supposed link between mental deficiency and ‘immorality’ was particularly unfortunate in this respect. If mental deficiency was associated with even minor criminal activity, it could attract extraordinarily harsh penalties, including detention in a mental hospital for several years. The psychiatrist L. T. Hilliard describes the vicious circle which could then ensue: [Such defectives] are usually high grade, or near normal, intellectually and they often feel that had they been sent to prison they would have been free in a few weeks. They may be detained in the hospital, however, for several years and during that time may acquire a reputation for unreliable behaviour. Consequently those responsible for their detention under order hesitate to grant them parole or leave, the patients become more frustrated and their period of detention is correspondingly prolonged.10 The eugenicists’ persistent argument for an association between mental deficiency and criminality thus had real and damaging material effects. Defectives found to be ‘delinquent’ and falling into the subgroup of the ‘morally defective’ could be incarcerated for decades, thus being placed under the ‘surveillance and control’ recommended by Blacker and being rendered ‘functionally sterile’ by virtue of their incarceration. The fact that such a policy was pursued in the post-war period under the aegis of a prosperous and ‘enlightened’ state can be read as illustrative of Foucault’s thesis that the discourse of racism is not constructed as a response to external threat or crisis (the ‘scapegoat’ theory of race) but is endemic, always available for recuperation, and integral to the workings of the biopolitical state. For women, the link between feeblemindedness and immorality was most often understood in terms of promiscuity and the risk of illegitimate pregnancy, an unsurprising emphasis given the nexus of concerns about the fertility of the feebleminded and the passing on of hereditary taint. The punishment for mother and child in these cases was also often extremely harsh. Hilliard, who worked with adult defectives at the Fountain Hospital, Streatham, offers the following representative case history: Rose was simpleminded and when, at the age of 21, she had an illegitimate child she was certified and sent to an M.D. institution. Her daughter, Rosina, in due course was also certified as feebleminded, on



112 Clare Hanson

113

leaving special school, and sent to another M.D. institution. When 26 the daughter was transferred to the Fountain Hospital and within a month she was licensed to her aunt and discharged. She earns very good money in a television factory and has remained in the community for the last 8 years. Rosina asked for her mother to be transferred to the Fountain and this was arranged. The mother was found various jobs on licence and was later also discharged. She recently married at the age of 54.11 Although Hilliard states categorically that Rose was ‘simple-minded’, she was not classified as such until she became pregnant: this was the precipitating factor in her diagnosis and treatment. The fact that she lived successfully in the community after her release suggests that she was needlessly institutionalised for more than 25 years. Hilliard was particularly concerned with the treatment of ‘feebleminded’ women and argued that not only was the classification of patients such as Rose profoundly damaging, but some women were being actively misdiagnosed in relation to pregnancy. In a 1954 paper in the British Medical Journal he reported on 100 of his female patients and suggested that in a ‘considerable proportion’ of these cases the pregnancy had by itself been enough to support a diagnosis of mental defect.12

Biological racism? In Society Must Be Defended Foucault defines biological racism in terms taken directly from eugenic discourse – for example, ‘the purification of the race’. He virtually identifies eugenics and biological racism: the implication is that such racism is articulated with and through eugenic thought. It can be argued that there are slippages between Foucault’s analysis and the ways in which eugenic thought is mobilised and expressed in specific historical contexts. For example, it can seem difficult to reconcile the specifics of the eugenics project in post-war Britain with Foucault’s argument for biological racism as an entirely new formation, removed from earlier conflicts grounded in class-struggle. As Mazumdar has shown, the eugenics movement in Britain was from its inception inseparable from class-based goals and preoccupations and, as we have seen, the post-war (re)construction of feeblemindedness as a medical category continued the eugenic targeting of the working classes.13 Eugenic thought in Britain thus continued to be shot through with class assumptions and infused by social prejudices. Yet Foucault’s point is that it is the discursive formation of biological racism which is




new, and which must be understood as marking a decisive break with previous conceptualisations of rights and power relations. It is this epistemological break which makes it possible to reconceptualise the subject as a bio-citizen and which provides ‘a mechanism that allows biopower to work’, mobilising concepts of health and biological fitness in order to legitimate power relations. Hence the critical purchase afforded by Foucault’s account of biopower, which derives precisely from the fact that, in Stoler’s words, it unsettles ‘the conventional coupling of a discourse with a specific political ideology’.14 Foucault’s analysis of biological racism thus allows us to understand ‘eugenics’ as a ‘reconversion’ of racial discourse which is mobile, polyvalent and, most importantly, not necessarily linked to a reactionary social politics. As we shall see, this is particularly helpful for thinking about some of the more unexpected manifestations of eugenic thought in post-war Britain. It has been argued by both Mazumdar and Soloway that the eugenic project petered out in post-war Britain under the pressure of changed social relations.15 Mazumdar claims that ‘[t]he disintegration of the eugenic problematic after the end of the war was mainly a product of changed social attitudes. Post-war reconstruction was dominated by the idea that a time of triumphant social justice was now here.’16 However, as this discussion of mental deficiency has shown, eugenic ideas continued to exert considerable influence in this period. To an extent, eugenics continued to reflect and perpetuate the reactionary class bias with which the movement is usually associated. However, in other contexts and arenas eugenic thought was able to reinvent and reconfigure itself, particularly through a number of strategic alliances developed with those involved in the planning of the new welfare state. A pivotal figure in this respect was Richard Titmuss, a statistician and population expert who had worked for the Eugenics Society before the war and subsequently became an adviser to the wartime and Labour governments. In 1950 he was installed as the first Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics. I would suggest that his trajectory can be read not only as a personal move from the political centre to the left; it also reflects and embodies a resituating of key eugenic ideas within the project of post-war reconstruction. For Titmuss and for others working in social policy, eugenic thought provided important conceptual resources and ways of thinking about policies designed for social improvement. In particular, the eugenic concern with the identification of the factors which made for mental and physical ‘fitness’ was taken up and integrated into aspects of the planning of both public health and educational services. However, in the context



114 Clare Hanson

115

of a political culture focused on equality and the redistribution of equity, ‘fitness’ was increasingly defined and managed in terms that cut across class boundaries. In consequence of this shift and an increasing emphasis on ‘fitness’ in the world of work, all social groups were becoming vulnerable to pressures previously experienced only by the social residuum. Titmuss recognised this, noting in a 1955 lecture on ‘The Social Division of Welfare’ that: This is perhaps one of the outstanding social characteristics of the twentieth century; the fact that more and more people consciously experience at one or more stages in their lives the process of selection and rejection; for education, for work, for vocational training, for professional status, for promotion, for opportunities of access to pension schemes, for collective social benefits, for symbols of prestige and success, and in undergoing tests of mental and physical fitness, personality, skill and functional performance.17 Titmuss refers here to a wide range of selection processes in the modern industrial-welfare state, but the key point is that the primary criterion of selection remains biological – a form of the selection of the fittest. As its title would suggest, Such Darling Dodos, a collection of short stories by Angus Wilson, is concerned precisely with such evolutionary processes and in particular with the pressures experienced in the post-war period by the upper and middle classes. One story in particular, ‘A Little Companion’, brilliantly condenses a number of the themes explored in this chapter. The protagonist is a middle-class, middle-aged spinster of irreproachable character who becomes haunted to the point of nervous breakdown by a ghost-child. The haunting is ‘explained’ initially as a manifestation of her regret at not having a child of her own, signalling contemporary fears over differential fertility. However, the particular characteristics of the child point to deeper and more complex anxieties: The very squalor of the child’s appearance was revolting to Miss Arkwright, for whom cheerful, good health was the first of human qualities. Sometimes the sickliness of the features would be of the thick, flaccid, pasty appearance that suggested rich feeding and late hours, and then the creature would be dressed in a velvet suit and fauntleroy collar that might have clothed an over-indulged French bourgeois child; at other times the appearance was more cretinous, adenoidal, and emaciated, and then it would wear the shrunken uniform and thick black boots of an institution idiot.18




The ghost-child can be interpreted not only as a symbol of Miss Arkwright’s childlessness but also as a metaphor for those children who have been eliminated or excluded from ‘the’ population, either by negative eugenics or institutionalisation. Thus the cretinous ‘institution idiot’ can be read as representing the thousands of mental defectives who had been classified, detained in mental deficiency institutions and prevented as far as possible from reproducing, all in the name of the health of the nation. More interestingly perhaps, the description of the effete Lord Fauntleroy figure gestures towards an upper-class degeneracy (or deviancy) which is the result of overindulgence of appetite: such ‘sickliness’ is also understood in terms of a threat to the health of the body politic. Yet the irony of the text lies in the fact that although for Miss Arkwright ‘good health was the first of human qualities’, her health is empty and unproductive. Thus implicit in Wilson’s text is a critique of such crude and illiberal attempts to control sexuality and reproduction on both moral grounds and because they are likely to fail on their own (biological) terms. Wilson’s text taps into a significant and overlooked aspect of post-war reconstruction, whereby eugenic thought had a significant influence on aspects of social and medical policy. In this respect, it could even be argued, counter-intuitively, that it was post-war social reconstruction which ensured the continuing dynamism of eugenic thought in this period. It was not – or at least not simply – that the threat of social change reanimated eugenic concerns about undesirable social groups, leading to the mobilisation of eugenic thought in opposition to the construction of a ‘welfare’ state. Rather, in a more complex alignment of positions, eugenic thought also proved to offer useful analytical tools for the rational planners of the welfare state, and was thus in a number of respects incorporated into its structure. To this extent biopower – the play between a power based on the sovereign right to kill and the biopolitical management of life – can be said to have inhered not only in the fascist and socialist states analysed by Foucault, but also in Britain’s post-war welfare state.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 243. Subsequent references are incorporated into the text. See also The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1976); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).



116 Clare Hanson

117

2. The image also appears on the cover of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998). 3. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 89. 4. Royal Commission on Population, Report (London: HMSO, 1949), 1. Subsequent references are incorporated into the text. 5. In this respect, see in particular the Report of the Mental Deficiency Committee (Wood Report) (London: HMSO, 1929). Eugenicists were well represented on the Wood Committee. 6. Eva M. Hubback, The Population of Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1947), 237–8. 7. Quoted in L. T. Hilliard and Brian H. Kirman (eds.), Mental Deficiency, second edition (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1965), 7. 8. C. P. Blacker, Neurosis and the Mental Health Services (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1948), 104–5. 9. See Mathew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy and Social Policy in Britain, c 1870–1959 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) for an extended discussion. 10. L. T. Hilliard, ‘The Adolescent and Adult Defective’, in Hilliard and Kirman, Mental Deficiency, 424. 11. Ibid., 427. 12. L. T. Hilliard, ‘Resettling Mental Defectives: Psychological and Social Aspects’, British Medical Journal, 1 (1954), 1372–4. 13. See Pauline Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings (London: Routledge, 1992), ch. 1. 14. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 88. 15. See Mazumdar, Eugenics, and Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 16. Mazumdar, Eugenics, 258. 17. Reprinted in Richard M. Titmuss, Essays on ‘The Welfare State’ (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958), 43. 18. Angus Wilson, Such Darling Dodos and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), 29.




Some Reflections on Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended and the Idea of ‘Race’ David Macey

We are in the year 50 BC. The whole of Gaul has been occupied by the Romans . . . The whole of it? No: one village populated by invincible Gauls is still holding out against the invader. And the Roman legions garrisoned in the fortified camps in Babaorum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Petitbonum are having a hard time of it. To skip 1,100 years of history: The Norman Conquest of 1066 was remarkable for its completeness . . . However, the Isle of Ely became what we have come to term a ‘pocket of resistance’. It was then that the natural defences of the Isle became of prime importance, and were exploited by the Saxon leader, Hereward the Wake . . .!’ The first little text is taken from the frontispiece of Astérix le Gaulois, first published in 1961 and still selling very well. The second is borrowed from the website of a tourist information office in Ely. They could, you will agree, scarcely be more trivial, but that does not make them insignificant. Both are the beginnings of narratives that tell of invasion, conquest and resistance. And they speak of the racial basis of these conflicts. They touch, that is, on one of the major themes dealt with by Michel Foucault in his lectures Society Must Be Defended. They, and Foucault, are concerned with variations on the ‘Norman yoke’ thesis, which finds its classic literary expression in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and which proves to be evoked with surprising regularity even today. In a roundabout way, this is a reminder of what I have come to see as one of the hallmarks of Foucault’s work: its immediacy and relevance to our lives despite its seeming abstraction and its undoubted difficulty. 118



6

119

If, to schematise almost to the point of caricature, we can describe the main areas that concern him as pertaining to madness, criminality, punishment and sexuality, it is apparent that he speaks to us all. Before going any further, I think it important to note that there is one issue to which he remains astonishingly blind: gender. Indeed, he is so oblivious to the issue that in the lectures on psychiatric power (1973–74) he refers to ‘the hysteric . . . he’,1 even though he is discussing a period when hysteria was usually seen as being a specifically female complaint. Reading Foucault, one would not know that men and women were imprisoned and committed to psychiatric institutions for different reasons. Holloway is not full of serial killers, and the special unit at Her Majesty’s Prison Wakefield is not overcrowded with wretched drug mules from West Africa and the Caribbean. If I pointed this out in France, I would be accused of being a ‘communitarian’, and in the present climate that is a nasty accusation. In the rather different climate in which we live and work, we can perhaps see why Foucault is so silent on this issue. Before we attempt to look at the idea of race, let us approach the question of just how concrete and immediate Foucault can be from a rather different angle. Between one in ten and one in four of us (the statistics are not as reliable as one might wish) will, at some point in our lives, suffer from some form of mental illness, ranging from clinical depression to schizoid or paranoid episodes. Some of us may at some point be diagnosed as presenting a personality disorder, defined by DSM IV (the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) as an enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that deviates markedly from the expectation of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress and/or impairment. A personality disorder is not, strictly speaking, an illness, as it does not necessarily disrupt emotional, intellectual or perceptual functioning. It may, however, trigger a serious mental illness. Precisely what causes personality disorder is not known. Personality disorders are not uncommon and come in a variety of forms ranging from antisocial personality disorder to borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and so on. They will probably respond to a short course of cognitive behaviour therapy, which is the form of psychotherapy that is most widely available on the British National Health Service. If they do not, you may have a serious problem. Personality disorders appear to be proliferating, though this is in part the effect of shifts in diagnostic categories: ‘manic depression’ tends to be described as bipolar disorder. There is now a Journal of Personality Disorders. There are self-diagnostic



Society Must Be Defended and the Idea of ‘Race’

websites that allow you to work out if you have a personality disorder. There are also sites that will tell you if you are in a relationship with someone who has one. I do not recommend using them. The White Paper ‘Reforming the Mental Health Act’ (December 2000) proposes the establishment of special services to treat a minority of offenders deemed be ‘Dangerous People with Severe Personality Disorder’. Such people are known to most of us as psychopaths or sociopaths. They are deemed to pose a significant risk to themselves and others; most are serious violent and sex offenders and 98 per cent of them are men; no one knows why this is so. According to the former Health Minister Rosie Winterton, the proposed changes mean that ‘the small minority of people with mental health problems who need to be treated against their wishes, normally for their own protection but occasionally to protect the public, will get the right treatment at the right time’. Being treated ‘against their wishes’ means that individuals suspected of having a severe personality disorder can be detained indefinitely. Cases can be referred to a Mental Health Review Tribunal by a carer, a general practitioner, a criminal justice agency or under special powers available to the Home Secretary. The individual does not have to have committed an offence or to have been charged with an offence before being referred. This is how Derek Chiswick, a consultant forensic psychiatrist who works in Edinburgh, describes the implications of the proposed legislation: the law will permit lifelong detention in hospital of people facing no criminal charges but whose alleged type of personality disorder places them at risk of dangerous offending in future . . . the only means of extending the incarceration of a dangerous personality disorder beyond the maximum imposed by the sentencing judge will be by detention in a hospital under mental health law . . . it may be possible for [forensic psychiatrists] to sidestep the new role of clinical supervisor but that role, at least for DSPD patients, will be essentially titular: crucial decisions will be taken elsewhere.2 It is the reference to decisions being taken elsewhere that is so disturbing. The diagnosis has already been made elsewhere. The term DSPD was first used in 1999, and the government document in which it appears admits that it is not a recognised medical term or diagnosis. It is a product of what Foucault might call a juridico-medical domain. The term has no specific author, but emerged from the deliberations of a government committee. Its emergence is probably a response to the horrific murder



120 David Macey

121

in 1996 of Lin Russel and her daughter Megan. Society must, after all, be defended. I don’t suppose for one moment that Dr Chiswick has spent much time reading Foucault, but he provides a very succinct summary of the main themes of the lectures on psychiatric power (1973–74, published 2003) and on the abnormal (1974–75, published 1999), and of the many shorter pieces on ‘dangerousness’ and the ‘dangerous individual’. There is a considerable overlap between those lectures and Society Must Be Defended: ‘the madman as society’s adversary, as a danger to society;’3 ‘the potentially pathological nature of the criminal’,4 and so on. We all think we know what a psychopath is. A psychopath is the monster we are all afraid of and we can easily name him (or, more rarely, her). This is how a judge recently addressed one such person, who strangled a gay trainee rabbi and then dismembered him before leaving the body parts out for the dustmen. The accused denied murder, but admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. His plea was rejected, with the Crown arguing that he was a ‘controlled psychopath’ who knew what he was doing. The judge stated, ‘I will sentence you on the basis that you are a dangerous psychopath’. A police spokesman described the man as ‘a predatory psychopath’, ‘a grave threat to the public and to members of the gay community in particular’. Sentencing was adjourned for psychiatric reports from the ‘personality disorder unit’ at Rampton high security hospital.5 Drawing up the reports will take some three months. It is likely that detention for specialist care and treatment will be recommended. Discharge and release from detention will not depend on the response to treatment, but on the criteria of dangerousness and public safety. It is unlikely that the treatment will be successful; all that is on offer is a form of therapy developed for women who self-harm. Unable to pass sentence on a man who has been found guilty because he is uncertain as to that man’s mental state, the judge turns to the forensic psychiatrists and their ‘clinical or classificatory discourse’, which will guarantee the ‘truth’ implicit in the guilty verdict.6 But the clinical or classificatory discourse that describes DSPD is not backed up by either medical or legal versions of the truth: it is, at least in part, the brainchild of a government committee reacting in panic to a nasty double murder and concluding that society must be defended. Ultimately, we end up with the tautology: a murder has been committed by a murderously dangerous individual. We move, that is, from an act to a type of personality. If you have read the saga of Pierre Rivière, you will be familiar with the logic at work here: ‘any madman is a potential criminal’.7 Foucault: ‘pinning




madness on to a crime, or ultimately pinning some element of madness on to any crime was a way of founding psychiatric power, not in terms of truth ... but in terms of danger: we are there to protect society because the possibility of crime is inscribed at the heart of all madness.’8 In a sense, we are all in the same position as the judge. We are trapped between two discursive positions. On the one hand, so-called psychopaths cannot be detained for psychotherapeutic treatment because they will not respond to it. On the other, it is because they will not respond to it that they must be detained to protect society. Foucault on the ‘abnormal: ‘The penal system . . . can no longer judge . . . it is obliged to ask questions of the psychiatrist . . . Before it became a medical specialism, psychiatry was institutionalised as a domain of social protection, protection against all the dangers that might threaten society as a result of illness or anything that can, directly or indirectly, be likened to illness’.9 Significantly, the first specialist psychiatric journal to be published in France was entitled Annales d’hygiène publique. The invocation of Dangerous People with Severe Personality Disorder represents what Foucault would call the psychiatrisation of a criminal act. Psychiatrisation is at work in other domains too. The emergence of the category ‘homosexual’, which is both juridical and ‘medical’, is only one example: it represents the shift from the old category of ‘sodomy’, which could be remarkably elastic (I think I am right in saying that it also covered bestiality), to the nineteenth-century category ‘homosexual’ – a category that is at once legal and medical – basically, a psychological type characterised by a deviant sexual preference. The parents of a child who refuses to attend school may be recommended to take her to a psychotherapist, even though her problems may not come within the remit of psychotherapy: fear of bullying is scarcely a personality disorder. And the field of psychiatrisation appears to be expanding now that recruitment agencies supplement techniques like graphology – a truly occult pseudo-science if ever there was one – with psychometric testing and psychological profiling. One day, we will all have our very own designer-label personality disorders. Let me add, just for the record, that I do not seek to condone, excuse or trivialise atrocious crimes. I was as horrified by the murder of Lin and Megan Russell as anyone. I don’t know what to do about such cases either. Nor do I dismiss out of hand modern psychiatry or psychotherapy. On the contrary; I have benefited greatly from a course of psychotherapy. I merely suggest that we need to be more suspicious about many things and to be wary of some of the explanations and theories that are proposed to solve our problems.



122 David Macey

123

Speaking of the nineteenth-century crusade against childhood masturbation in March 1975, Foucault almost apologises to his audience at the Collège de France: ‘I can’t give you any guarantee that I can provide you with a solution, and I can even say that any outline solution I can give you will probably be imperfect, but we do have to try to make some progress.’10 Nowhere is this more obvious than in the lectures, as Foucault himself explains in his lecture of 7 January 1976. The lectures are exploratory, tentative and suggestive. A lot of the time Foucault appears to be uncertain as to where he is going. Sometimes all that is on offer are the ‘pleasures of useless erudition’ with which we are all no doubt familiar. This is typical of a man who was not joking when he said that there is no point in writing a book if you know from the start how it is going to end. It is also something to be expected of a professor teaching at an institution whose members teach to no syllabus and award no qualifications, but who are required to present original research in a series of lectures that anyone can attend. In passing, I suggest that we need to be wary of those who claim to ‘have studied with Foucault’. In many cases, this probably means simply that they attended lectures given to hundreds of people in an overcrowded lecture theatre. I don’t think he had any need to apologise for his inability to come up with solutions. I certainly can’t either. The best teachers and, I would add, the best doctors are those who are confident enough to say ‘I don’t know’. Unlike his more devoted and, dare I say it, fundamentalist disciples, I do not take the view that Foucault’s great thesis is that ‘the market, sexuality, delinquency, madness and the State . . . don’t exist’.11 I should, in all fairness, add that the author of this remark – Frédéric Gros – has produced some very good work on Foucault.12 It is true that, for Foucault, the theme of sexuality has little to do with actual sexual practices and a great deal to do with the constitution of what we call habitually ‘sexuality’. It is true that we call them madness or criminality through discursive formations, but it is also true that there is something distinctly non-discursive about suffering from clinical depression, being incarcerated or being in bed with someone. Somehow, we have to be able to recapture some phenomenological sense of experience without lapsing into pure subjectivism, and at the same time retain the radical scepticism of Nietzsche and Foucault. At the opposite extreme, I cannot accept the criticism that Foucault is some kind of postmodernist whose almost absolute relativism makes it impossible to pass judgement on anything. His politics was predicated on a very definite sense of what is and what is not ‘intolerable’. Foucault supported the Tunisian student movement in the 1960s, helped to found the GIP (Groupe d’information




sur les prisons) in the early 1970s, was active in anti-racist campaigns and was vocal in his support for Polish trade unionists and the Vietnamese boat people often at considerable physical risk to himself. When it came down to street level, Foucault’s politics was in the Voltairean tradition: this is intolerable; we are governed, and we therefore have the right and duty to make demands of those who govern us. The same might be said of the politics of the much maligned Jacques Derrida. To start going back to Astérix, let us see if we can ‘make some progress’ in understanding the idea of race. If ‘personality disorder’ is a slippery concept, what are we to make of that of race? From now on, I will place ‘race’ and terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ in inverted commas; as I cannot verbalise inverted commas, you will have to visualise them. Few people would now maintain that ‘race’ has any biological or genetic basis. Indeed, most people would agree that ‘race’ is, in many ways, something that does not actually exist, even though racism does. And yet we go on talking about it. If we try to avoid the term and speak instead of ‘ethnicity’, the terms of the debate do not change greatly. Even the most well-intentioned projects and initiatives can be based on astonishingly confused premises. A couple of years ago, a community writing project in Leeds organised a short story competition open to the ‘black’ population, defined as meaning ‘black and Asian, including Chinese.’ I have never – never – met a Chinese person prepared to describe him- or herself as ‘black’. At roughly the same time, some offshoot of the Nation of Islam organised a meeting open exclusively to ‘men of African descent’ – and therefore excluded most of the city’s ‘non-white’ population. From time to time, I have to fill in ‘ethnicity’ forms sent out by the children’s school. The categories invoked here are not quite as arcane as those in the Chinese encyclopaedia quoted at the beginning of The Order of Things, but they are puzzling. Some refer to nationality (Irish), others to geography (South Asian) and some to a combination of skin colour and nationality (white British/black British). ‘Jewish’ does not normally appear on the list, so Jewish friends tend to avail themselves of the category of ‘Other’. The British census does not use the same ‘ethnicity’ categories as the US census. The French census does not use any at all, and it would be illegal for a French school to gather information about its pupils’ ethnic background. Astérix has blue eyes and blonde hair, and generations of French schoolchildren were taught that their ancestors looked like him. As Foucault remarks, ‘the expression “our ancestors the Gauls” . . . makes us laugh because it was taught to Algerians and Africans’ (SMBD, 125). He’s right: it does make some people laugh, but we still have to ask who this



124 David Macey

125

‘we’ is. Black children in Martinique, an integral part of France since 1946, were also taught that their Gaulish ancestors had blonde hair and blue eyes. That is one of the reasons why they could write essays that begin: ‘I like holidays because I’ll be able to run through the fields, breathe fresh air, and I’ll come back with rosy cheeks.’13 It is hard to imagine a more total alienation. This is Frantz Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs. He is not laughing. Astérix has at least something in common with Robin Hood (who became a Saxon thanks to Sir Walter Scott), even though he is not an outlaw. He fights oppressors. He enjoys feasts in the open air, though he dines on wild boar and not poached venison. His friend Obélix – fat, strong, none too clever and with an enormous appetite for food and drink – is in some ways a cross between Friar Tuck and Little John. I think we can safely assume that the Astérix books deal with a Robin Hood myth and with a variation on the Norman yoke thesis, so neatly summarised in Ivanhoe: Norman saw on English oak, On English neck a Norman yoke; Norman spoon in English dish, And England rules as Normans wish; Blithe world in England ne’er will be more Till England’s rid of the four.14

I cite Scott once more: A circumstance which greatly tended to enhance the tyranny of the nobility, and the sufferings of the inferior classes, arose from the consequences of the conquest by Duke William of Normandy. Four generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by a common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat.15 Ivanhoe centres on the resolution of this binary opposition and looks forward to the emergence of a new, stronger race. The opposition is resolved, obviously enough, thanks to the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rebecca, but its successful resolution also requires the exclusion of Rebecca. At one level, this is banal: the hero cannot marry both women. The exclusion from merry England of Jewishness implies, however, that even a united




country must exclude some Other: there must always be something, someone, that cannot be assimilated. It strikes me that there is something uncannily modern about Scott’s handling of Jewish stereotyping, which obviously owes a lot to The Merchant of Venice: it is because he belongs to a race ‘detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility’ that Isaac has ‘adopted a national character’.16 As Sartre put it in 1947, it is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew. Surprisingly, Réflexions sur la question juive does allude to Ivanhoe, though I cannot think of other references to Scott in Sartre: he picks up the reference because of the association of ‘beautiful Jewish woman’ with ‘rape’ which he also detects in French novels from the 1930s. Scott is not, of course, the originator of the ‘Norman yoke’ thesis. Although its origins go back much further – possibly to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which asked ‘When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?’ – it is essentially a creation of the Levellers and Diggers of the seventeenth-century English revolution. Foucault’s source of information is the classic one: Christopher Hill’s ‘The Norman Yoke’, originally written in 1956 and subsequently collected in Puritanism and Revolution. The notion of recovering or restoring rights that were lost or confiscated in some distant past is a very common feature of radical movements and radical periods. Revolution can mean re-enactment: the discourse of 1789 re-enacted the history of the Roman Republic (also an important theme in neoclassical art). Some feminists seek to restore an ideal matriarchal society, even though no vestige of it has ever been found. Marxism dreamt of primitive communism. In May 1968 in Paris, almost everyone seemed to be re-enacting something. Think of Serbian nationalists and their references to the Field of Blackbirds. And so on. Ivanhoe is about a race war between Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Society Must Be Defended argues that a war is going on within society and uses the work of nineteenth-century historiographers – Boulainvilliers, Augustin and Amédée Thierry, Guizot – to illustrate that thesis. I won’t go into great detail as there is little to be gained by expounding Foucault. What is at stake in this quarrel over the origins of the French monarchy? Why does it matter that it can be claimed that the origins of the monarchy lie not in Troy as a very old story would have it, but in a Frankish invasion? What is at stake is, of course, the legitimacy of sovereign power. For Foucault, sovereign power is literally that of a sovereign. As he demonstrates in Surveiller et punir, it is because the criminal – the regicide – dares to touch the body of the sovereign that he must be punished in such



126 David Macey


127

Genealogy must …magnify the name of kings and princes with all the fame that went before them. Great kings found, then, the right of the sovereigns who succeed them, and they transmit their lustre to the pettiness of their successors. We might call this the genealogical function of historical narratives (SMBD, 67). We might also call it the subject-matter of Shakespeare’s histories, indeed, of much tragic drama. The emphasis on the genealogy of legitimacy immediately raises the idea of illegitimacy. At what point does the king become illegitimate? At what point does the sovereign monarch become a monster? The question is implicit in Ivanhoe’s duo of good king, bad prince, which is not a racial issue. The most serious challenge to sovereign legitimacy comes not from disgruntled aristocrats, but from Sièyes’ pamphlet on the Third Estate (1789), ‘which is nothing but will be everything’, and which has no genealogical legitimacy. For the theorists of the Third Estate and the pamphleteers of the Revolution, the king and queen were monsters. Marie-Antoinette, who made the mistake of being Austrian, was ‘scandalous’, bloodthirsty, debauched. She was both incestuous and a lesbian. She was an abnormal monster.17 No legitimacy there. For similar reasons, Leveller and Digger tracts habitually refer to William the Conqueror as ‘William the Bastard’ or ‘the Norman bastard’. The Revolution was, for both Guizot and Thierry, a moment of reconciliation in which, as at the end of Ivanhoe, the master/slave, conqueror/conquered dichotomy is overcome thanks to the emergence of one people, one law and one free and sovereign nation.18 Over the next century we see the gradual coming into being of the modern Republic, which, at least in theory, derives its legitimacy from the people. In turn, it confers legitimacy on its citizens, but only insofar as they are individuals. In the French Republic, there are individual citizens but no races, groups or communities. That is why, ultimately, I would expose myself to the charge of communitarianism by raising the issue of Foucault and gender. It is suggested by a footnote added to Society Must Be Defended that Scott is the source for Thierry’s knowledge of the ‘Norman yoke’ view



spectacular fashion. The main source here is Ernst Kantorowicz’s ‘study in medieval political theology’ and the thesis that the king has two bodies: a temporal body that will die and a spiritual body that will not. Hence the expression ‘the king is dead, long live the king’. Spiritual body or not, sovereign power – unlike disciplinary power – must constantly demonstrate its legitimacy, and that legitimacy can therefore be contested:

of history. The suggestion is also made by Stephen Knight in his lively account of the Robin Hood myths; he further suggests that there may also be a debt to Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian (1822).19 I have no way of verifying this but, judging by the other source material cited by Foucault, there is probably no point in looking for a single source: the idea of a race war within society appears to have been circulating widely. Yet there are times when Augustin Thierry does sound very much like Scott: ‘We believe ourselves to be a nation, but we are two nations within one land, two nations which are enemies because of what they remember and because their projects are irreconcilable: one once conquered the other.’20 It is worth remembering that Scott was very popular and highly influential. He was a major influence on the Romantic novel – Balzac, Hugo – and on Romantic painting. Delacroix painted scenes from Quentin Durward and on two occasions he painted ‘The Abduction of Rebecca’: in 1846 (New York) and 1858 (Louvre). Rebecca is dressed in the Jewish North African costumes he saw on his trip to Morocco in 1832. So much for poor Scott’s concern for historical accuracy. In 1830, a monarchical government anxious about its popularity or legitimacy at home, not to mention its prestige abroad, exploits a supposed diplomatic incident and dispatches a fleet to attack Algiers. The conquest of Algeria begins. It was a slow, difficult conquest. And it was extremely brutal. But it could be legitimised. ‘A nation that does not colonise is irrevocably doomed to socialism, to the war between rich and poor. There is nothing shocking about the country of an inferior race being conquered superior race which settles there in order to govern it.’ That is Ernest Renan, writing in 1871.21 The model of a race war within the nation had been successfully exported. By 1871, the ‘conquest’ of Algeria was all but complete and the last great rebellion was being put down with enormous violence. But the violence can be ignored for the sake of a greater good. This is Jules Ferry speaking to the Assemblée nationale in July 1885: Can you deny, can anyone deny, that there has been more justice, more material and moral order, more fairness and more social virtues in North Africa since France conquered it? . . . Is it possible to deny that the wretched populations of Equatorial Africa have had the good fortune to come under the protection of the French nation or the English nation?22 It sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?



128 David Macey

129

Neither Scott nor the historians discussed by Foucault use ‘race’ in its modern sense, which proves very, very difficult to pin down. They seem to be using it in its original French sense: membership of the royal (and noble) families of the Middle Ages. That meaning is now archaic, but traces of it survive in everyday usage. A chien de race is a pedigree dog. The constant references made by Scott’s characters to ancestry, lineage and ‘breeding’ suggest that this sense is still active. Scott also works with a proto-evolutionary schema: Scotland will become what England is. Scott’s ‘race’ was probably becoming archaic even as he wrote Ivanhoe, but the novel also contains hints of the coming of something very ominous. The stake has been prepared for Rebecca; ‘Beside this deadly apparatus stood four black slaves, whose colour and African features, then so little known in England, appalled the multitude, who gazed on them as on demons employed about their own diabolical exercises . . . They expanded their blabber lips, and showed their white fangs’ (382–3). If you are familiar with Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, you will recognise this scene. It took place in a park in Lyons: ‘Tiens, un nègre . . . Maman, regarde le nègre, j’ai peur.’23 ‘Look, a negro [or nigger] . . . Look at the negro, Mum …I’m frightened’. I think that we can detect in Scott the emergence of the modern signifier of race: skin colour, pigmentation, or what Fanon calls the ‘epidermalisation’ of racial difference. No longer Saxons and Normans, Gauls, Franks and Romans, but white, yellow and black races. As Scott did his research on ‘the domestic antiquities of England, and particularly of our Saxon forefathers’ (5), the anthropologists and the comparative anatomists had already begun to measure skulls and bones. For Blumenach, writing in 1775, the comparative study of skulls revealed the existence of five primary races: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay. Writing slightly later, Cuvier concluded, on the basis of similar evidence, that there were three ‘varieties’ of the species Homo sapiens: the fair or Caucasian, the yellow or Mongolian, the negro or Ethiopian.24 And once different species or races begin to be identified, a hierarchy begins to be constructed. It would not be long before The Descent of Man could speak of the inevitable extinction of inferior races that come into contact with superior races. Even before the emergence of ‘social Darwinism’ – a term current from 1900 onwards – and eugenics, the foundations of scientific racism had been laid. In 1988, Serbian scientists began once more to study ancient skulls and detected no fewer than 20 ‘types’. Those who fought the wars in the former Yugoslavia saw their enemies in quasi-racial terms: tall, blond Serbs versus tall, dark Croats.25




Modern racism is, it is widely recognised, a product of the late Enlightenment, and it appears to be then that the epidermalisation signifier comes into play. It is surprising to find, for example, that when he discussed his cannibals (who came from Antarctic France or Brazil) Montaigne did not trouble to mention the colour of their skin. He looks, not for signifiers or difference, but for evidence of a common humanity. I have neither the time nor the competence even to begin to trace the origins of the idea of ‘race’. To do so would mean a prolonged immersion in natural history, biology, comparative anatomy and what came to be known as anthropology. It would mean looking at how linguistics and philology contribute to the creation of national notions of race: German, French, British and so on. We could, if we had time, rework much of Les Mots et les choses, shift the emphasis, and call it ‘the archaeology of race’. We could take as a starting point Foucault himself, and, almost at random, Marek Kohn’s The Race Gallery (1995), Patrick Brantlinger’s Dark Vanishings (2003) – it deals with the discourse of ‘race extinction’ – and the very useful anthology Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 compiled by Hannah Franziska Augstein in 1996.26 It is, of course, true that modern versions of race do not emerge ex nihilo. They have a prehistory. Part of it was written by Montesquieu and the various theorists of climatic determinism. Races living in hot countries tend to have dark skins, to be indolent – food is ready to hand – and to produce despotisms. This particular myth proves to be remarkably durable. Well into the twentieth century, French race psychologists were still contending that Algerians were indolent because they lived in a warm country where food was readily available without labour; they were also inferior because they had a pre-logical mentality. It snows in the mountains of Algeria. In Kabylia, the villages are, for defensive reasons, high in the mountains. The olive groves, the citrus groves, the figs and the barley are grown in the valleys. Producing anything in Kabylia is a very labour-intensive process, but we cannot let reality get in the way of a good theory. The notion of a binary racial division within society proves, on reflection, to be surprisingly widespread and pervasive. It is, for example, quite common to describe the urban working classes as a quasi-race that must be understood in anthropological terms: they are the Other. I think here of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1951–62), Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (completed in 1903) and of the description of the New York slums in Jacob A Riis’s How The Other Half Lives (1890). Social reform movements may not have spoken explicitly of ‘conquest’, but they definitely used the vocabulary of



130 David Macey

131

colonisation: there were missionaries, crusades and settlements. Variants on this theme became a literary trope long before Chandler’s Philip Marlowe began to walk the mean streets of Bay City. The dark areas of the urban jungle, with its distinct and different population (‘the other half’), are major themes in the literature of the slums from Eugène Sue to Emile Zola, from Charles Dickens to Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896). The current vogue for pseudo-Victoriana – most of it very enjoyable – reworks this material: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (also 2002); the list could go on. Some of these survivals border on the grotesque. Certain members of the Countryside Alliance seem bent on portraying the ‘rural community’, with its God-given right to hunt foxes, as a quasi-race. Writing in the Guardian, one of the opponents of foxhunting describes it as a remnant of feudal society, which is why we have to ban it. Citing the important work of Marion Shoard, George Monbiot argues that hunting with dogs is a tradition originating in the superiority of Norman lords: ‘By taking on the hunt, our MPs are taking on those who ran the country for 800 years, and still run the countryside today. This class war began with the Norman conquest. It still needs to be fought.’27 Monbiot does not actually use the phrase ‘the Norman yoke’, but the references to William’s forest laws indicate, surely, that it is present in his thinking. That the foxhunting debate masks important issues relating to access to land, use of land and above all ownership of land is beyond dispute. Yet the logical implication of the Norman yoke view of history would, I think, be a demand for the freedom to hunt foxes – and anything else that moves – on the Duke of Devonshire’s estates and in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. And to the best of my knowledge, the Norman invaders did not hunt foxes. To end, if I may, on a more personal and anecdotal note. The last person I interviewed when I was working on the Fanon biography was an elderly man originally from Martinique. As a boy, he played football with Fanon; as a young man, he fought alongside him in the Free French Army. As their unit moved north towards Alsace, it began to snow. The black colonial troops from West Africa were pulled back because they could not be expected to fight in such conditions. The black troops from the West Indies were expected to fight on. The withdrawal of the African troops was officially described as ‘the whitening of the regiment’. The West Indians had become honorary whites. As we came to the end of the interview and simply began to chat, my informant offered me a glass of punch – white rum, sugar syrup and lime. He couldn’t join me because he had been ordered not to drink by




132 David Macey

Notes 1. For example, Michel Foucault, Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique (Paris, Seuil, 2003), 312. 2. Derek Chiswick, ‘Dangerous Severe Personality Disorder’, Psychiatric Bulletin, 25 (2001), 282–3. 3. p. 98. 4. Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1999)., 84. 5. Guardian, 30 September 2004. 6. Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique, 134. 7. Ibid., 250. 8. Ibid. 9. Les Anormaux, 108, 109. 10. Ibid., p. 222. 11. Frédéric Gros, ‘Le Déplacement de l’horizon’, Le Monde, supplement ‘Michel Foucault: La rupture permanente’ (19–20 septembere 2004), v. 12. Frédéric Gros, Michel Foucault, que-sais je, 1996; Foucault at la folie, 1997 and ed. Foucault: le courage de la vérité, 2002. 13. Peau noire, masques blancs. (1952; Paris: Points, 1971)., 132 n. 14. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. and intro. Graham Tulloch (London: Penguin, 2000), 255. 15. Ibid., 16. 16. Ibid., 47. 17. Les Anormaux, 90–1. 18. Dominique Colas, Citoyenneté et nationalité (Paris: Folio, 2004), 62. 19. Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 124. 20. Society Must Be Defended, 226. 21. Cited in Colas, Citoyenneté et nationalité, 64. 22. Cited ibid., 122. 23. Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 90. 24. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 19–20. 25. Marek Kohn, The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 17 and 18. 26. Brantlinger Dark Vanishings; Kohn. The Race Gallery; Hannah Franziska Augstein (ed.), Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996). 27. George Monbiot, ‘Class War on the Hoof’, Guardian (14 September 2004).



his doctor. A Martinican who cannot drink punch with a guest is a very, very sorry sight. And then he leaned forward, took my hand and stroked it. Black fingers on white skin. Very simply, he told me: ‘Fanon, race, racism …it’s nothing to do with that.’

7 Lucy Hartley

How, when, and in what way did people begin to imagine that it is war that functions in power relations, that an uninterrupted conflict undermines peace, and that the civil order is basically an order of battle? Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 1 Empire rules over a global order that is not only fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies but also plagued by perpetual war. The state of war is inevitable in Empire, and war functions as an instrument of rule. Today’s imperial peace, Pax Imperii, like that in the times of ancient Rome, is a false pretence that really presides over a state of constant war. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude2 We live in deeply troubling times. The so-called war on terror, inaugurated by the United States and Great Britain after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, has brought about the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and, with Iran in its sights, this most inglorious of alliances has reinstalled the imperialist project at the heart of international relations. As Hardt and Negri have persuasively argued, the Iraq conflict pivots on the issue of governmentality, and in particular the exercise of global power, the power of empire, in the name of democracy. What, we might ask, is the purpose of governmental intervention into the affairs of individuals and states? Under what conditions can these forays be justified? And what are the costs as well as the benefits of such actions?3 Terrorism is a notoriously slippery category of action performed for political ends; and one of the most horrifying of many aspects of the war on terror is that it presupposes a literal (and all 133



War and Peace, or Governmentality as the Ruin of Democracy

too often physical) manifestation of ‘terror’ can be isolated and identified even though there is no received consensus at the national or international levels about how to define terrorism, in terms of either the activities involved in committing terrorist acts or the intentions that might motivate them.4 A war on terror is, in other words, an ‘uninterrupted conflict’ and a ‘constant war’ because it has no referent – neither a fixed object nor a precise target. A British report by Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, an independent reviewer of terrorism legislation – requested by the chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, the Rt. Hon. John Denham MP and approved on 9 November 2005 by the then Home Secretary, the Rt. Hon. Charles Clarke MP – examines the various resources, political, religious and moral, which might help us reach a universally accepted, and of course legal, definition of terrorism.5 Carlile notes that the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989 defines terrorism as ‘the use of violence for political ends, and includes any use of violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the public in fear’; and he proceeds to explain that the definition incorporated into the Terrorism Act 2000 was actually the operational definition used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the late 1990s, namely, ‘the use of serious violence against persons or property, or threat to use such violence, to intimidate or coerce a government, the public or any section of the public, in order to promote political, social or ideological objectives’.6 After surveying the various arguments that have been made for a more precise definition of terrorism, and outlining the pros and cons of each, Lord Carlile concludes that the legal definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act is ‘consistent with international comparators and treaties, and is useful and broadly fit for purpose’. However, he recommends that ‘existing law should be amended so that actions cease to fall within the definition of terrorism if intended only to influence the target audience; for terrorism to arise there should be the intention to intimidate the target audience’.7 Resting on intentionality, the distinction between influence and intimidation is striking for it seeks to separate language from force, rhetoric from conduct, words from actions. The assumption is that intention can be calibrated as a kind of arithmetical scale to measure influence and intimidation and so produce a definition of terrorism with legal validity; if and only if we can recognise the ‘intention to intimidate’ as the sign of violence against the government and/or the public, then we will be able to distinguish terrorism from other quite similar but nonetheless non-threatening actions. There are, of course, subtle and important differences between influence and intimidation, but what is



134 Lucy Hartley

remarkable about this suggestion is that it places intention as a reliable index of what counts as terrorism while also folding intention into the contingent so that actions leading ‘only to influence’ become less powerful, and therefore dangerous, than those that express a purposeful desire to ‘intimidate the target audience’. In other words, influence as rhetorical effect is, for Lord Carlile, of less concern in the prosecution of terrorism than the use of violence to exert force, primarily in the form of fear, awe or inadequacy and principally via bombing, kidnapping, assassination, skyjacking and suicide. Yet as literary and cultural critics as well as historians know all too well, intention is a hugely problematic category of analysis as it purports to attribute meaning and purpose, or we could say solidity and certainty, to expressions that may well not bear the weight of sustained enquiry, let alone critique. The phrase ‘war on terror’ is an obvious example since, as we have seen, there is neither a universally acceptable definition of terror nor a strong consensus about the scope and limitations of its meaning. Yet it has been co-opted to serve as the literal object of, and moral justification for, military invasions and conflict on an international scale. The distinction Lord Carlile makes between influence and intimidation is fascinating, therefore, and especially his use of intention as occupying both sides of the question of what counts as terrorist activity. Is it because influence is invisible – one thing causing another to happen, one body acting on another – that Lord Carlile excises it from his definition of terrorism? Or is it because of the moral ramifications of the term as a means of exercising power, of affecting thoughts and emotions? Perhaps it is worth recalling the astrological sense of influence as an ethereal fluid that flows from the stars and affects character and destiny because it emphasises precisely the immaterial yet determining nature of influence as a causal agent that Lord Carlile seems so willing to discount. Embedded within these current debates on war and terror is the idea of power as an action upon actions, which can influence and also intimidate populations (domestic and international) in the name of governmentality. Thus, I would like to examine the conceptual terrain that locates sovereignty and democracy as the pillars of political organisation and the means of asserting governmental power in civil society. As the opening quotation indicates, Foucault’s course of lectures at the Collège de France in 1976, Il faut défendre la société, recently translated into English as Society Must De Defended, focuses on the exercise of power (both sovereign and biological) in relation to war. The lectures adumbrate an historical framework for understanding struggle, domination and subjugation, and especially the knotty issue of protection and prohibition, for



Governmentality as the Ruin of Democracy 135

Foucault ponders the place and importance of war in organising society, asking whether war is ‘a primal and basic state of affairs’, which generates ‘antagonism, confrontations, and struggles among individuals, groups or classes’, constructs power relations according to ‘a set of notions derived from strategy and tactics’, and translates ‘military and warlike institutions, and more generally the processes that are implemented to wage war’ into political institutions.8 Thirty or so years after they were first delivered, the lectures present a timely, if somewhat incomplete, series of reflections on power relations that might help us to rethink how we live in a global world, and why the war on terror is a battle against democracy.9 Thus it is to them that I shall turn first before extending my discussion to include Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous account of democracy – a noticeable and surprising omission from Foucault’s lectures – as well as more recent responses to war and empire refracted through the lens of terrorism. In this way, I hope to draw out the theoretical stakes and ambitions of Foucault’s project on power and then consider its relevance to our present life in a post-9/11 world, and also our future way of living.

I Society Must Be Defended 10 begins modestly enough for the Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. In the first lecture, delivered on 7 January 1976, Foucault reviews the purpose of all the lectures delivered at the Collège de France, an institutional space for research, founded in 1530, which does not award degrees and is not a public institution but, instead, appoints 52 esteemed chairs across a wide range of subjects to offer free and open lectures for students and the general public alike (with the only constraint on attendance being space).11 Professors, elected by their peers, name their own chair and choose a different research theme for each year of their appointment. So, after his inaugural lecture on 2 December 1970, Foucault – who taught at the Collège de France for twelve years (with a sabbatical year in 1977) until his death in June 1984 – gave lectures on ‘Security, territory, population’ in 1977–8, ‘The birth of biopolitics’ in 1978–9 and ‘Of the government of the living’ in 1979–80. Interestingly, the nature of the institution and the form of the lectures seem to have been a source of both pleasure and frustration for Foucault, as he explains in the opening lines of the first SMBD lecture: These are suggestions for research, ideas, schemata, outlines, instruments; do what you like with them. Ultimately, what you do with



136 Lucy Hartley


There is a strong sense of contingency here.12 Foucault draws attention to the instrumental aspect of the lectures, imparting words of wisdom from an authoritative source while also stressing the provisional and incomplete nature of his remarks as ‘suggestions’, and later ‘fragments’ and ‘bits and pieces’ (SMBD, 3). Indeed, the opening lecture and ten subsequent ones repeatedly attempt to strike a balance between specialist (historical) knowledge of discourses of power and struggle and popular (civil) interest in themes such as force, conflict and domination. The name for this approach is, Foucault says: ‘genealogy . . . [the] coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories, which allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics’ (SMBD, 8). Focusing attention on ‘two forms of knowledge – the buried and the disqualified’ (SMBD, 8), Foucault’s project in SMBD is to disentangle the operation of power from the institutions (economic, political and legal) as well as the agents (sovereign and civil) that construct it as ‘a relationship of force’ and also ‘that which represses’ (SMBD, 15). He imagines power relations as inchoate, a kind of force-field that founds the ‘agonism’ between will and freedom as ‘a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle: less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation’.13 And so genealogy, an oft-used word in Foucault’s writings, combines scholarly and local forms of understanding to push against the grain of hierarchies, unities and the centralisation of power, and especially as embodied in scientific discourse: ‘genealogies . . . are about the insurrection of knowledges’ (SMBD, 9). The lectures set out to investigate five main themes – repression, war, power, race and struggle – drawing on theories of sovereignty and law from Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Henri de Boulainvilliers in order to mull over the following question: ‘Who saw war just beneath the surface of peace; who sought in the noise and confusion of war, in the mud of battles, the principle that allows us to understand order, the State, its institutions, and its history?’ (SMBD, 47). Inverting Claus von Clausewitz’s well-known proposition, Foucault contends that ‘politics is the continuation of war by other means’ (SMBD,



them both concerns me and is none of my business. It is none of my business to the extent that it is not up to me to lay down the law about the use you make of it. And it does it concern me to the extent that, one way or another, what you do with it is connected, related to what I am doing. (SMBD, 2)

15); hence, war is not only a structuring principle in civil society, but always already contained within peace. To put it slightly differently, we might say that Foucault posits a hermeneutic of power in which he parses the classic categories of government by the one, the few and the many into three distinct kinds of structures: sovereign power, extended at the level of freedoms, rights and liberties on people constituted as a whole social body; disciplinary (or governmental) power, applied at the national level to individual bodies via surveillance and subjugation; and biopower, exercised at the global level on general populations through the regulation of fertility and morbidity. These poles of enquiry are not, of course, unique to SMBD, but can be found in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976), which bookend the lectures of SMBD. Together they represent a triptych of works on the complex ways in which individuals and groups are controlled and normalised via discursive networks of power contained in penal, educational and legal institutions.14 Yet what is distinctive about SMBD, in this triptych is its elaboration of biopower as the cause of civil war and biopolitics as its justification. Foucault concentrates on tracing the historical trajectory of the ‘juridico-political theory of sovereignty’, which emerged in the Middle Ages and became established in four different monarchic roles as a mechanism of feudal power, an instrument with which to constitute administrative power, a weapon used to limit and bolster royal power in political struggles and, by the eighteenth century, a construct that offered an alternative to absolutist regimes via parliamentary democracies. The substantive claim is that by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the newer dimensions of power as weapon and power as construct (the third and fourth of these roles) brought about a profound split between ‘a new mechanism of power which had very specific procedures, completely new instruments, and very different equipment’ and ‘relations of sovereignty’ (SMBD, 35). Foucault proposes that the physical existence of the sovereign was challenged by a nascent mechanism of power that extracted time and labour from bodies ‘and what they do rather than . . . the land and what it produces’; and so the development of industrial capitalism had by the nineteenth century instituted a ‘non-sovereign’ or ‘disciplinary’ power (SMBD, 36) that set the limits for governance of the social body between ‘a right of sovereignty and a mechanics of discipline’ (SMBD, 37). Central to SMBD is the problem of how to extract power, and its processes of governance, from its intimate connection with the economy.



138 Lucy Hartley

Where Marx perceives the division of labour as responsible for antagonistic relations between labour and capital, Foucault places biology at the forefront of his analysis of power relations, and in particular ‘race struggle and class struggle’ (SMBD, 19). The formulation is a simple one: the individual is to discipline as the population is to government. Thus, he identifies two kinds of production (from land and bodies), which present an economic nexus of labour–commodity–capital on the one hand, and a biological matrix of body–war–population on the other. At stake is the double-edged question of who rules and how they do so, and in both instances resistance and struggle – in other words, agonism – codify power: Beneath the omissions, the illusions, and the lies of those who would have us believe in the necessities of nature or the functional requirements of order, we have to rediscover war: war is the cipher of peace. It divides the entire social body, and it does so on a permanent basis; it puts all of us on one side or the other. (SMBD, 268) The Darwinian overtones of war as the code for peace are all too obvious, though tacitly acknowledged, for Foucault claims that the war ‘going on beneath order and peace’ is social warfare, pitting an historicobiological conception of race against a biological-social one. Rather than accept class struggle as the defining characteristic of the rapidly industrialising nineteenth century, then, he sees a ‘racist thematic’ operating in the state and predicts that it is ‘a racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization’ (SMBD, 62). Foucault sketches the historical emergence of this state racism in the middle lectures of the series (lectures 4–8) , traversing a broad field of reference which includes Roman and biblical history, revolutionary discourse, laws of nature, fascism as well as the myths of national origins, including the Trojans, Franks and Gauls.15 His stated goal is to demonstrate the inadequacy of the notion of ‘repression’ as the explanation for the workings of power. Not only Marx but also Hobbes and Boulainvilliers are vital but often difficult interlocutors as Foucault seeks to describe how a fault-line opens up between sovereign and disciplinary (governmental) power in the historical context of the nineteenth century which is accompanied by a fine but potentially more significant split in political ideas about controlling and regularising bodies as well as populations.




140 Lucy Hartley

With sovereignty, the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim – that is, obedience to the laws – was the law itself. On the contrary, with government it is a question not of imposing laws on men but of disposing things: that is, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics – to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such-and-such ends may be achieved.16 The final three lectures of SMBD (9, 10 and 11) weigh the connotations of the ineradicable separation of sovereignty from governmentality, described here as a shift from laws to tactics, imposition to disposition of power, and in particular the rise of biopolitics as an interventionist mode of political action distinct from but related to disciplinary power. Biopolitics is, Foucault suggests, the product of a society that materialises out of a regime founded on ‘the right to take life or let live’ into one functioning on ‘the right to make live and to let die’ (SMBD, 241).17 Appearing first in the second half of the eighteenth century and gaining potency through the course of the nineteenth century, the new ‘technology of power’ named the biopolitical is no longer disciplinary or sovereign but global, ‘applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species’ (SMBD, 242). It has three major domains, relating to the problems of life and death, ageing, and the environment, respectively, and Foucault lays out these the ‘starting points’ for an exploration of a ‘new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (SMBD, 245). Biopolitics is, therefore, concerned with the population at large, its ‘aleatory events’ and the ‘regulatory mechanisms’ necessary to control life and ‘the biological processes of ‘man-as-species’ (SMBD, 246–7). The return to contingency in the final lecture is noteworthy because it points to the difficulty of containing, and the putative governmental need for controlling, biological processes linked to birth and mortality rates, disabilities and environmental issues in the face of a mobile and rapidly proliferating population that can no longer be constituted as a social body or perceived as individual bodies, but instead acts as a mass, ‘a multiple body’. We must, therefore, choose to defend ourselves as



The fault-line dividing sovereignty from governmentality has profound significance for the constitution and composition of society as Foucault explains in a later essay:

individuals against the encroachment of the state and legislature upon our rights, liberties and freedoms, or protect civil society in the face of governmental intervention into the racial struggles of human life, of the living. This seems a stark choice but, as Alain Pottage explains, ‘the essential point is that this apparently simple and austere distinction between a right to dispense death and a power to foster life expresses a vital transformation in the fabric of society and in the operation of social processes’.18 A prefiguration of the choice can be found in the binary of the savage and the barbarian, which Foucault gleans from Boulainvilliers. The savage is essentially a man who exchanges . . . he exchanges rights and he exchanges goods . . . he founds society and sovereignty . . . he constitutes a social body which is, at the same time, an economic body’ whereas ‘the barbarian, in contrast, is someone who can be understood, characterized, and defined only in relation to a civilization, and by the fact that he exists outside it . . . he takes possession and seizes; his occupation is not the primitive cultivation of land, but plunder.’ (SMBD, 194–5) What interests Foucault is the political applicability of the barbarian: how we might translate barbarism, with its use of force to secure domination, into a ‘fair constitution’ (SMBD, 197). The contemporary resonances of the question are painfully evident in the Iraq war, licensed by the war on terror and justified by the spreading of democracy across the globe. Before considering them, however, I want to look at a subtly different model of the exercise of power, which stresses citizenship and the things we hold in common rather than structures and the conflicts they produce, and places the savage over the barbarian as the natural state that most successfully fosters democracy.

II Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40) is rightly famous as a foundational political treatise about ‘equality of conditions’ as the mechanism for the advancement of society.19 Although Tocqueville’s emphases – on land, community, domesticity and interest – appear to be quite distinct from the importance Foucault places on the biopolitical, SMBD shares striking conceptual and thematic similarities with DIA. Some background might be helpful to understanding these connections. On 31 October 1830, Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont submitted a mission request to the French government to travel to the United States




and conduct a study of the prison system there and its recent reforms for the French government. The proposal was eventually granted on 6 February 1831, but no government funding was provided and so the two men relied on their own families to finance the trip. Tocqueville and Beaumont set sail from Le Havre on 2 April 1831 and arrived in Newport, Rhode Island on 9 May 1831; they spent the following nine months travelling through the eastern regions of America, as far north as Quebec City, as far south as New Orleans, and as far west as Memphis, Tennessee. Following their return to France at the end of February 1832, the men submitted their penal report and Beaumont subsequently started work on a study of race relations, while Tocqueville prepared an exposition of democracy. The resulting two volumes of DIA, published in 1835 and 1840 respectively, chronicle the development of the United States as a nation founded on freedoms, rights and liberties that fostered, in particular, the growth of ‘the unlimited power of the majority’. In equal parts a utopian vision and a cautionary tale, the first volume of DIA examines the origins, social conditions and political constitution of the American nation, emphasising the general structures and individual actions necessary to establish and sustain democracy, whereas the second volume explores the progress of opinion and the influence of feelings and manners on the American people, focusing on the affective dimensions of life that flow from democracy – and contain the possibilities for its continuing survival as well as its potential limitations. Opening with an analysis of the exterior physical form of North America, Tocqueville’s book proceeds to investigate the internal functioning of the democratic nation, tracing the principle of the ‘sovereignty of the people’ as embodied at every level of society by townships and municipal bodies, the legislative and executive power of the state, and, finally, the federal Constitution, with its Senate and House of Representatives and elected president. There are two methods of ‘establishing equality in the political world; every citizen must be put in possession of his rights, or rights must be granted to no one’, Tocqueville proposes (DIA, 1, 51). It was the former method, he argues, that made America’s ‘social state a most extraordinary phenomenon’, dissolving class distinctions and enabling equal opportunities ‘in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal than their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance’ (DIA, 1, 50). The principal impetus for this state of affairs was the open and seemingly transparent distribution of power, which ensured that people of this nation exercised influence at all levels of social organisation, from the smallest form of the township to the



142 Lucy Hartley

largest of the Union of States. Stressing the importance of townships as a model of governance, Tocqueville believes they represent democracy in ideology and action, a practical means of realising citizenship which required people to come together to reach a consensus on matters relating to their everyday lives and to hold the representatives of any one township accountable to their particular community. The democratic republic of the United States has been maintained, Tocqueville argues, because of the ‘unlimited power of the majority’ (DIA, 1, 257). And in the face of the failure of the French nation to sustain its own republican vision, he perceives three reasons for the present success of the American model: ‘I. The peculiar and accidental situation in which Providence has placed the Americans. II. The laws. III. The manners and customs of the people’ (DIA, 1, 292). Luck, laws and mores make a compelling combination for Tocqueville, who is especially intrigued by the remarkable spirit of adventure expressed by the American people. He marvels at their fearlessness and bravery in pursuit of fortune, and admires their tendency to seek improvement as the key factors in the making of this relatively youthful but rapidly maturing nation: The American republics of the present day are like companies of adventurers formed to explore in common the waste lands of the New World, and busied in a flourishing trade. The passions which agitate the Americans most deeply are not their political but their commercial passions; or, to speak correctly, they introduce the habits they contract in business in their political life. They love order, without which affairs do not prosper; and they set an especial value upon a regular conduct, which is the foundation of a solid business; they prefer the good sense which amasses large fortunes to that enterprising spirit which frequently dissipates them; general ideas alarm their minds, which are accustomed to positive calculations, and they hold practice in more honour than theory. (DIA, 1, 301) These are a revealing set of generalisations, laden with the language of colonialism and imperial expansion. Tocqueville perceives ‘commercial passions’ to be the main reason for the political organisations, social structures and ethical choices contributing to the formation of this republican nation. Hence, ‘order’, ‘regular conduct’, ‘good sense’, ‘positive calculations’ and ‘practice’ define the essential characteristics of the American people. The overwhelming impression is of enterprise and industry; this is a vision of a nation established on business practices applied to politics and civil society, and yet Tocqueville also conveys a




strong sense of the reliance on the natural resources of the land, sustained by trade, for he holds out adventure and passion above all else as the mechanisms for dealing with the ‘natural obstacles’ of the land. Unlike Foucault’s interest in the figure of the barbarian, then, Tocqueville focuses on the other side of the binary, presenting the figure of the savage, or natural man as economic man, as instrumental in forging the new democratic nation. Obviously, there are parallels to be drawn between, and lessons to be learnt from, the recent revolutionary events in France and the United States; the threat of further uprisings casts a long shadow over the volumes and so Tocqueville takes pains to stress the opportunities and threats of a democratic as opposed to a sovereign model of governance.20 A democratic state is not a static entity, he explains, but a physical body subject to its people: Every individual being in the possession of rights which he is sure to retain, a kind of manly reliance and reciprocal courtesy would arise between all classes, alike removed from pride and meanness. The people, well acquainted with its true interests, would allow that in order to profit by the advantages of society it is necessary to satisfy its demands. In this state of things the voluntary association of the citizens might supply the individual exertions of the nobles, and the community would be alike protected from anarchy and from oppression. (DIA, 1, 8) The logic of this passage is worth unpicking because it expresses two related formulations of the social body, which are highly significant for the idea of natural man as economic man. Setting the conditions for democracy presupposes first, that as long as the individual possesses rights then classes develop reliance, and, second, that as long as the people are able to calibrate individual and common ‘interests’ society can advance from ‘anarchy’ and ‘oppression’. This is a democratic body that develops organically according to the principles of right and interest, principles that provide a natural means of balancing individual and society, citizen and community. In sum, Tocqueville contends that America is constituted by a developing ethos that locates its people squarely in the natural sphere; therefore, its experimental form of government worked from the ground up, as it were, to teach the values of citizenship and association alongside the right of liberty. But, as he readily acknowledges, the abstract ideal of democracy is put under considerable pressure by the very notion of ‘interest’, which both underpins the physical manifestations



144 Lucy Hartley

of democracy in and through citizenship, community and society, and exposes the potential weakness of democratic governance in its advocacy of individualism and support for commerce.21 It appears, therefore, that the very idea of natural man might slide rather too quickly for Tocqueville’s liking away from an attachment to the land in favour of a preoccupation with the acquisition of goods. It is the notion of acquisitiveness that seems to trouble Tocqueville greatly for he recognizes that it is a necessary evil, vital to the growth of the nation, but ultimately divisive, a source of conflict and struggle. Wistfully, he ponder the alternatives thrown up by different political models – sovereign and aristocratic – and separate historical trajectories – the old world of Europe compared to the new world of America.22 The nub of the matter is whether the commercialisation of political action, and the exercise of power, come at the expense of equality insofar as it might encourage tyranny. Take the following example: Mark, for instance, that opulent citizen, who is as anxious as a Jew of the middle ages to conceal his wealth. His dress is plain, his demeanour unassuming; but the interior of his dwelling glitters with luxury, and none but a few chosen quests whom he haughtily styles his equals are allowed to penetrate into this sanctuary. No European noble is more exclusive in his pleasures, or more jealous of the smallest advantages which his privileged station confers upon him. But the very same individual crosses the city to reach a dark countinghouse in the centre of traffic, where every one may accost him who pleases. If he meets his cobbler upon the way, they stop and converse; the two citizens discuss the affairs of the State in which they have an equal interest, and they shake hands before they part. (DIA, 1, 179) A recasting of the parable of rich man and poor man, here citizenship is that which both transcends and underlines the class barriers of wealth, luxury, privilege; the home indicates a cultivated detachment from civic life, but it is the city that requires participation in it, hence the opulent citizen’s crossing from home into city constitutes citizenship as a performative act that hinges on the recognition of ‘equal interest’ over ‘luxury’. Yet, of course, the public (social and political) interest in ‘the affairs of the state’ that enables the ‘cobbler’ to converse on equal terms with the ‘opulent citizen’ does not, at the same time, provide him with the private (economic) interest to enter the rich man’s home where ‘none but a few chosen guests whom he haughtily styles his equals are allowed to




penetrate into this sanctuary’. Publicly the opulent citizen avoids the ostentatious displays of privilege he indulges in privately; he dresses in plain clothes and cultivates an ordinary appearance, clearly marking the contrast between the ‘glitter’ of his home and the ‘darkness’ of the counting-house (and the association with European nobility simply serves to underline the exclusivity of his taste). What should we make of this vignette, with its apparent nostalgia for the old European order of things and delight in the symbolic egalitarianism of the new American democratic nation? Are luxury and privilege the forms of tyranny that lie beneath the surface of the democracy, the product of and incipient threat to its very nature as a community of individuals? J. G. A. Pocock locates the tension between the interestedness of self-regarding action and the goodness of action for the community at the heart of the Atlantic republican tradition, of which the United States is the exemplary instance. The civic humanist discourse of the eighteenth century deemed virtue to be the rational determinant of public action whereas interest was all about appetites and passions, as Pocock explains: The decline of virtue has as its logical corollary the rise of interest. If men no longer enjoyed the conditions thought necessary to make them capable of perceiving the common good, all that each man was capable of perceiving was his own particular interest; and to the extent that there survived the very ancient presumption that only perception of the common good was truly rational, perception of one’s interest was primarily a matter of appetite and passion and only secondarily of profit-and-loss rational calculation which might extend so far as perception of one’s interest as interdependent with that of another’s . . . Interest was both a limiting and an expanding force.23 For Tocqueville, the tensions between different uses of ‘interest’ in America present a choice between two kinds of governance: a society that is orderly, regularized, moral and commercial, where its citizens exercise individual rights and join together in various associations; or, by contrast, a society that puts aside such communitarian principles in the pursuit of individual wealth and status and is therefore subject to tyranny and anarchy. To put it in other words, democracy will be sustained provided that the opulent citizen and the cobbler can meet on the streets of the city and converse about ‘affairs of the state in which they have an equal interest’. Hence, what SMBD shares with DIA is a recognition



146 Lucy Hartley

of the power invested in the many, whether conceived of as a ‘multiple body’ or ‘the majority’, to forge common interests and influence the actions of government. If Tocqueville is more generally optimistic about the prospects for democracy than Foucault is about the rise of biopolitics, and if Foucault emphasises a transnational perspective on the exercise of power where Tocqueville trains his eye on a clearly defined nation-state, it is clear that (despite being separated by a period of some 140 years) Tocqueville and Foucault reach extraordinarily similar conclusions about the war that percolates through the material life of society. What lessons can we learn from them? Do Foucault’s opinions about war and state racism play into contemporary debates about the global exercise of power as a means of spreading of democracy? And could Tocqueville’s perceptions of governmental responsibility and the rights of individual citizens add much-needed nuance to the prevailing notion of a war on terror?

III Let me conclude by drawing on a couple of reflections on war, empire and terrorism as possible answers to these important questions. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Judith Butler responds to the events of 9/11 by considering it a missed opportunity for the United States ‘to redefine itself as part of a global community’. Assuming an aggressive militaristic stance, the US government attempted to collapse the finely wrought distinction of self-interest from common good in the name of an all-embracing international cause but, according to Butler, this strategy of force misread individualism as autonomy: ‘one insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition I can will away’.24 Precarious Life surveys the shifting landscape of this ‘dependency’, seeking in the examples of New York, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo, Israel and Palestine the disclosure of a method with which to theorise our reliance on others for our own life. Butler argues that using violence as a response to the violence of 9/11 is wrong-thinking for strategic and moral reasons, because our collective responsibility not merely as a nation, but as part of an international community based on a commitment to equality and non-violent cooperation, requires that we ask how these conditions came about, and endeavour to re-create social and political conditions on more sustaining grounds.25




Co-existence is the keyword, a notion that was crucially overlooked in the months and years following 9/11, Butler suggests. She fears that self-determination as a practice of governance will be mistaken for a refusal to grant international human rights, and yet she believes that self-determination must be understood in the context of an international social body. Applying Foucault’s distinction between sovereignty and governmentality, she stresses the circumstances under which governmentality might depend on, rather than substitute for ‘the devitalization of sovereignty in its traditional sense’.26 Thus she stakes a claim for a theory of global co-existence on governmentality as containing the capacity to form a revised sovereignty: ‘it may be, as Foucault maintains, that governmentality cannot be derived from sovereignty . . . But this does not preclude the possibility that governmentality might become the site for the reanimation of that lost ground, the reconstellation of sovereignty in new form’.27 Where Butler folds governmentality into sovereignty in order to reanimate and reconstitute the latter, Hardt and Negri develop Foucault’s ideas about biopower and biopolitics into an explicitly ideological account of the conditions for, and considerable limits on, democracy in a globalised world. Following Empire, their hugely influential examination of the new political order of globalisation,28 their next book, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), offers a trenchant critique of imperialist ventures, such as the invasion of Iraq as a protectionist strategy for safeguarding the interests of the wealthy and powerful.29 As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, they argue that ‘the global state of war forces all nations, even the professedly most democratic, to become authoritarian and totalitarian’,30 because the violence employed to preserve the ‘contemporary hierarchy of global order’ begets ‘violence that threatens that order’.31 More manifesto than philosophical contemplation, Hardt and Negri’s book nonetheless shares with Butler’s a refreshingly idealistic preoccupation with the production of the common, ‘the social basis on which it is possible today to begin a project of the multitude’.32 That is to say, the life we hold in common with each other is the ameliorative force necessary to craft another world from the ruin of democracy, ‘beyond sovereignty, beyond authority, beyond every tyranny’.33 What is so compelling about Hardt and Negri’s vision is that they resist Foucault’s efforts to prise biology apart from economics and instead deem production to be an immanent form, creating social relationships through collaboration and so proffering the best mechanism for a global future that is not inevitably predicated on war, conflict and struggle. ‘Today’, they ask,



148 Lucy Hartley


Hardt and Negri claim the revolution will come from the multitude. I, for one, hope they are right; it is only by taking up something like ‘a project of the multitude’ that we will be able to create the social and political conditions for the rescue of democracy for, in the end, influence rather than intimidation has to be the more effective means of exercising power.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (1976; London: Penguin Books, 2003), 266. 2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), xiii. 3. Some of the most interesting recent work on terrorism has come from the field of public economics: see especially Todd Sandler and Walter Enders, ‘An Economic Perspective on Transnational Terrorism’, European Journal of Political Economy, 20 (2004), 301–16; and ‘After 9/11: Is it All Different Now?’ Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49, 2 (2005), 259–77; Todd Sandler, ‘Collective versus Unilateral Responses to Terrorism’, Public Choice, 124 (2005), 75–93. 4. In ‘Collective versus Unilateral Responses to Terrorism’, Sandler defines terrorism as ‘the premeditated use or threat of use of violence by individuals or subnational groups to obtain a political or social objective through intimidation of a large audience beyond that of the immediate victims. Terrorists try to circumvent the normal political process through violence perpetrated on a public who may then pressure the government to concede to the terrorists’ demands’ (75). 5. ‘The Definition of Terrorism. A Report by Lord Carlile of Berriew QC Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation’. 15 March 2007. See also ‘The Government Reply to the Report’, by the Home Secretary, Rt. Hon. John Reid MP, 7 June 2007. 6. ‘The Definition of Terrorism’, sections 7 and 9, pp. 3–4. 7. Ibid., section 86, point 11, p. 47. 8. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 266. 9. David Macey casts the lectures in a nationally-specific context: ‘one can discern coded messages in Foucault’s weekly public lectures, a series of arrows aimed at the heart of the French polity. His targets include the conventional narrative of French history, the claim to ‘universalism’ which emerges from the Revolution, the legitimation of violence by the militant Left, and, crucially, his own intellectual position’.



would it be possible for a revolution, aware of the violence of biopower and the structural forms of authority, to use the constitutional instruments of the republican tradition to destroy sovereignty and establish a democracy from below of free men and women?34

10. Hereafter referred to in the body of essay as SMBD, followed by the relevant page numbers. 11. See http://www.college-de-france.fr/default/EN/all/college/index.htm. See also Joseph Tanke, ‘Michel Foucault at the Collège de France, 1974–76’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 31, 5–6 (2005), 687–96. 12. In a suggestive phrase, Alain Pottage describes Foucault’s notion of governmental biopower as ‘the concept of a social fabric characterized by contingent interactions’; see ‘Power as an Art of Contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault’, Economy and Society, 27, 1 (1998), 13. 13. ‘At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an “agonism” – of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle: less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation’. ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 221–2. 14. See, in particular, Julian Reid’s essay in this volume, ‘Life Struggles: War, Discipline and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault’; as well as Thomas F. Tierney, ‘Suicidal Thoughts: Hobbes, Foucault and the Right to Die’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 32, 5 (2006), 601–38; and Maria Bonnafous-Boucher, ‘From Government to Governance’, Ethical Perspectives, 12 (2005), 521–34. 15. John Marks explores this particular dimension of SMBD in an astute essay on ‘Foucault, Franks, Gauls: Il faut défendre la société: The 1976 lectures at the Collège de France’, Theory, Culture and Society, 17, 5 (2000), 127–47. 16. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–94. Volume 3: Power, ed. James Faubion (1978; London: Penguin Books, 2002), 211. 17. For an informed (and personal) view of Foucault as political theorist, see Pasquale Pasquino’s ‘Political Theory of War and Peace: Foucault and the History of Modern Political Theory’, Economy and Society, 22, 1 (1993), 77–88. 18. Pottage, ‘Power as an Art of Contingency’, 8. 19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, new edition, 2 vols. (1835–40; London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889). Hereafter as DIA followed by the volume and page numbers. 20. For a more detailed analysis of this important aspect of Tocqueville’s work, see Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968); Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Alan Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville (1992; New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001). 21. See DIA, 2, ch. II, and compare to 1, chs. VIII and XV. Kahan offers a good account of the political ramifications of the growth of commerce in his second chapter on ‘The Spirit of the Majority’, 34–57. 22. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1, 226–31. These two sections compare America to France, discussing the effects of corruption by democratic government on public morality, and the importance of national efforts, when necessary, to uphold the institutions of democracy.



150 Lucy Hartley

23. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 521–2. 24. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Morning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), xi–xii. 25. Ibid., 17–18. 26. Ibid., 53. 27. Ibid., 97. 28. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 29. For a broader understanding of the influence of Foucault’s ideas about power on Hardt and Negri’s work, see in particular: Frederick M. Dolan, ‘The Paradoxical Liberty of Biopower: Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on Modern Politics’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 31, 3 (2005), 369–80; and Réal Fillion, ‘Moving beyond Biopower: Hardt and Negri’s post-Foucauldian Speculative Philosophy of History’, History and Theory, 44 (December 2005), 47–72. 30. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 18. 31. Ibid., 32. 32. Ibid., 95. 33. Ibid., 354. 34. Ibid., 355.




8 Necropolitics

Wa syo’ lukasa pebwe Umwime wa pita [He left his footprint on the stone He himself passed on] Lamba proverb, Zambia This chapter assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.1 Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitutes the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. One could summarise in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control.2 But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer? Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? War after all is as much a means of achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill. Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?

152



Achille Mbembe

Necropolitics

153

In order to answer these questions, this chapter draws on the concept of biopower and explores its relation to notions of sovereignty (imperium) and the state of exception.3 Such an analysis raises a number of empirical and philosophical questions I would like to examine briefly. As is well known, the concept of the state of exception has been often discussed in relation to Nazism, totalitarianism, and the concentration and extermination camps. The death camps in particular have been interpreted variously as the central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence and as the ultimate sign of the absolute power of the negative: ‘There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death.’ 4 Because its inhabitants are divested of political status and reduced to bare life, the camp is, for Giorgio Agamben, ‘the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized’.5 In the political-juridical structure of the camp, he adds, the state of exception ceases to be a temporal suspension of the state of law. According to Agamben, it acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that remains continually outside the normal state of law. The aim of this chapter is not to debate the singularity of the extermination of the Jews or to hold it up by way of example.6 I start from the idea that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty – and therefore of the biopolitical. Disregarding this multiplicity, late modern political criticism has unfortunately privileged normative theories of democracy and has made the concept of reason one of the most important elements of both the project of modernity and of the topos of sovereignty.7 From this perspective, the ultimate expression of sovereignty is the production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of free and equal men and women. These men and women are posited as full subjects capable of self-understanding, selfconsciousness and self-representation. Politics, therefore, is defined as twofold: a project of autonomy and the achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war.8 In other words, it is on the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason (passion, fantasy) that late modern criticism has been able to articulate a certain idea of the political, the community, the subject – or, more fundamentally, of what the good life is all about, how to achieve it, and, in the process, to become a fully moral agent. Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject and politics is the exercise of reason in



Politics, the work of death and the ‘becoming subject’

the public sphere. The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom, a key element for individual autonomy. The romance of sovereignty in this case rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation (fixing one’s own limits for oneself). The exercise of sovereignty in turn consists in society’s capacity for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary significations.9 This strongly normative reading of the politics of sovereignty has been the object of numerous critiques, which I will not rehearse here.10 My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalised instrumentalisation of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations. Such figures of sovereignty are far from a piece of prodigious insanity or an expression of a rupture between the impulses and interests of the body and those of the mind. Indeed, they, like the death camps, are what constitute the nomos of the political space in which we still live. Furthermore, contemporary experiences of human destruction suggest that it is possible to develop a reading of politics, sovereignty and the subject different from the one we inherited from the philosophical discourse of modernity. Instead of considering reason as the truth of the subject, we can look to other foundational categories that are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death. Significant for such a project is Hegel’s discussion of the relation between death and the ‘becoming subject’. Hegel’s account of death centres on a bipartite concept of negativity. First, the human negates nature (a negation exteriorised in the human’s effort to reduce nature to his or her own needs); and second, he or she transforms the negated element through work and struggle. In transforming nature, the human being creates a world, but in the process is exposed to his or her own negativity. Within the Hegelian paradigm, human death is essentially voluntary. It is the result of risks consciously assumed by the subject. According to Hegel, in these risks the ‘animal’ that constitutes the human subject’s natural being is defeated. In other words, the human being truly becomes a subject – that is, separated from the animal – in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death (understood as the violence of negativity). It is through this confrontation with death that he or she is cast into the incessant movement of history. Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work of death. To uphold the work of death is precisely how Hegel defines the life of the Spirit. The life of the Spirit, he says, is



154 Achille Mbembe

155

not that life which is frightened of death and spares itself destruction, but that life which assumes death and lives with it. Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment. 11 Politics is therefore death that lives a human life. Such, too, is the definition of absolute knowledge and sovereignty: risking the entirety of one’s life. Georges Bataille also offers critical insights into how death structures the idea of sovereignty, the political and the subject. He displaces Hegel’s conception of the linkages between death, sovereignty and the subject in at least three ways. First, he interprets death and sovereignty as the paroxysm of exchange and superabundance or, to use his own terminology, excess. For Bataille, life is defective only when death has taken it hostage. Life itself exists only in bursts and in exchange with death.12 He argues that death is the putrefaction of life, the stench that is at once the source and the repulsive condition of life. Therefore, although it destroys what was to be, obliterates what was supposed to continue being and reduces to nothing the individual who takes it, death does not come down to the pure annihilation of being. Rather, it is essentially selfconsciousness; moreover, it is the most luxurious form of life, that is, of effusion and exuberance: a power of proliferation. Even more radically, Bataille withdraws death from the horizon of meaning. This is in contrast to Hegel, for whom nothing is definitively lost in death; indeed, death is seen as holding great signification as a means to truth. Second, Bataille firmly anchors death in the realm of absolute expenditure (the other characteristic of sovereignty), whereas Hegel tries to keep death within the economy of absolute knowledge and meaning. Life beyond utility, says Bataille, is the domain of sovereignty. This being the case, death is the point at which destruction, suppression and sacrifice constitute so irreversible and radical an expenditure – an expenditure without reserve – that they can no longer be determined as negativity. Death is therefore the very principle of excess – an anti-economy. Hence the metaphor of luxury and of the luxurious character of death. Third, Bataille establishes a correlation among death, sovereignty and sexuality. Sexuality is inextricably linked to violence and to the dissolution of the boundaries of the body and self by way of orgiastic and excremental impulses. As such, sexuality concerns two major forms of polarised human impulses – excretion and appropriation – as well as the regime of the taboos surrounding them.13 The truth of sex and its deadly attributes reside in the experience of loss of the boundaries separating reality, events and fantasised objects. For Bataille, sovereignty therefore has many forms, but ultimately it is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have the



Necropolitics

subject respect. The sovereign world, Bataille argues, ‘is the world in which the limit of death is done away with. Death is present in it, its presence defines that world of violence, but while death is present it is always there only to be negated, never for anything but that. The sovereign,’ he concludes, ‘is he who is, as if death were not.. . . He has no more regard for the limits of identity than he does for limits of death, or rather these limits are the same; he is the transgression of all such limits.’ Since the natural domain of prohibitions includes death among others (e.g. sexuality, filth, excrement), sovereignty requires ‘the strength to violate the prohibition against killing, although it’s true this will be under the conditions that customs define’. And contrary to subordination that is always rooted in necessity and the alleged need to avoid death, sovereignty definitely calls for the risk of death.14 By treating sovereignty as the violation of prohibitions, Bataille reopens the question of the limits of the political. Politics in this case is not the forward dialectical movement of reason. It can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit. More specifically, politics is the difference put into play by the violation of a taboo.15

Biopower and the relation of enmity Having presented a reading of politics as the work of death, I turn now to sovereignty, expressed predominantly as the right to kill. For the purpose of my argument, I relate Foucault’s notion of biopower to two other concepts: the state of exception and the state of siege.16 I examine those trajectories by which the state of exception and the relation of enmity have become the normative basis of the right to kill. In such instances, power (not necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency and a fictionalised notion of the enemy. It also labours to produce that same exception, emergency and fictionalised enemy. In other words, the question is: What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency? In Foucault’s formulation, biopower appears to function through dividing people into those who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field – which it takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the



156 Achille Mbembe

157

others. This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism.17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever-present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this everpresence and the phantom-like world of race in general, Hannah Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.18 Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, ‘that old sovereign right of death’.19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, ‘the condition for the acceptability of putting to death’.20 Foucault states clearly that the sovereign’s right to kill (droit de glaive) and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function;21 indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity. According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This state, he claims, made the management, protection and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organising the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened the way to a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the Final Solution. In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state and the suicidal state. It has been argued that the complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one another, is unique to the Nazi state. The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security – this, I suggest, is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself. Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity, whether they are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-object of the human being; or the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of



Necropolitics

calculability and instrumental rationality.22 Indeed, from an anthropological perspective, what these critiques implicitly contest is a definition of politics as the warlike relation par excellence. They also challenge the idea that, of necessity, the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other; or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to kill in order to live. Taking an historical perspective, a number of analysts have argued that the material premises of Nazi extermination are to be found in colonial imperialism on the one hand and, on the other, in the serialisation of technical mechanisms for putting people to death – mechanisms developed between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War. According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and ovens were the culmin ation of a long process of dehumanising and industrialising death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army). Having become mechanised, serialised execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent and rapid procedure. This development was aided in part by racist stereotypes and the flourishing of a class-based racism that, in translating the social conflicts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the working classes and ‘stateless people’ of the industrial world to the ‘savages’ of the colonial world.23 In reality, the links between modernity and terror spring from multiple sources. Some are to be found in the political practices of the ancien régime. From this perspective, the tension between the public’s passion for blood and notions of justice and revenge is critical. Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish how the execution of the would-be regicide Damiens went on for hours, much to the satisfaction of the crowd.24 Well known is the long procession of the condemned through the streets prior to execution, the parade of body parts – a ritual that became a standard feature of popular violence – and the final display of a severed head mounted on a pike. In France, the advent of the guillotine marks a new phase in the ‘democratisation’ of the means of disposing of the enemies of the state. Indeed, this form of execution that had once been the prerogative of the nobility is extended to all citizens. In a context in which decapitation is viewed as less demeaning than hanging, innovations in the technologies of murder aim not only at ‘civilising’ the ways of killing, but at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time. At the same time, a new cultural sensibility emerges in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play. More intimate, lurid and leisurely forms of cruelty appear.



158 Achille Mbembe

159

But nowhere is the conflation of reason and terror so manifest as during the French Revolution25 when terror was construed as an almost necessary part of politics. An absolute transparency is claimed to exist between the state and the people. As a political category, ‘the people’ is gradually displaced from concrete reality to rhetorical figure. As David Bates has shown, the theorists of terror believe it possible to distinguish between authentic expressions of sovereignty and the actions of the enemy. They also believe it possible to distinguish between the ‘error’ of the citizen and the ‘crime’ of the counter-revolutionary in the political sphere. Terror thus becomes a way of marking aberration in the body politic, and politics is read as both the mobile force of reason and the errant attempt at creating a space where ‘error’ would be reduced, truth enhanced and the enemy disposed of.26 Finally, terror is not linked solely to the utopian belief in the unfettered power of human reason. It is also clearly related to various narratives of mastery and emancipation, most of which are underpinned by Enlightenment understandings of truth and error, the ‘real’ and the symbolic. Marx, for example, conflates labour (the endless cycle of production and consumption required for the maintenance of human life) with work (the creation of lasting artefacts that add to the world of things). Labour is viewed as the vehicle for the historical self-creation of humankind. The historical self-creation of humankind is itself a life-and-death conflict, that is, a conflict over what paths should lead to the truth of history: the overcoming of capitalism and the commodity form and the contradictions associated with both. According to Marx, with the advent of communism and the abolition of exchange relations, things will appear as they really are; the ‘real’ will present itself as it actually is, and the distinction between subject and object or being and consciousness will be transcended.27 But by making human emancipation dependent on the abolition of commodity production, Marx blurs the all-important divisions among the man-made realm of freedom, the nature-determined realm of necessity and the contingent in history. The commitment to the abolition of commodity production and the dream of direct and unmediated access to the ‘real’ make these processes – the fulfilment of the so-called logic of history and the fabrication of humankind – almost necessarily violent processes. As Stephen Louw shows, the central tenets of classical Marxism leave no choice but to ‘try to introduce communism by administrative fiat, which, in practice, means that social relations must be decommodified forcefully’.28 Historically, these attempts have taken such forms as labour militarisation, the collapse of the distinction between state and society, and



Necropolitics

revolutionary terror.29 It may be argued that they aimed at the eradication of the basic human condition of plurality. Indeed, the overcoming of class divisions, the withering away of the state, the flowering of a truly general will presuppose a view of human plurality as the chief obstacle to the eventual realisation of a predetermined telos of history. In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is fundamentally a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death. Just as with Hegel, the narrative of mastery and emancipation here is clearly linked to a narrative of truth and death. Terror and killing become the means of realising the already known telos of history. Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery, which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation. In many respects, the very structure of the plantation system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.30 This figure is paradoxical here for two reasons. First, in the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow. Indeed, the slave condition results from a triple loss: loss of a ‘home’, loss of rights over his or her body and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether). Undoubtedly, as a political-juridical structure the plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a community if only because, by definition, a community implies the exercise of the power of speech and thought. As Paul Gilroy says, The extreme patterns of communication defined by the institution of plantation slavery dictate that we recognise the anti-discursive and extralinguistic ramifications of power at work in shaping communicative acts. There may, after all, be no reciprocity on the plantation outside of the possibilities of rebellion and suicide, flight and silent mourning, and there is certainly no grammatical unity of speech to mediate communicative reason. In many respects, the plantation inhabitants live non-synchronously.31 As an instrument of labour, the slave has a price. As a property, he or she has a value. His or her labour is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive, but in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity. The violent tenor of the slave’s life is manifested through the overseer’s disposition to behave in a cruel and intemperate manner and in the spectacle of pain inflicted on the slave’s body.32 Violence here becomes an element in manners,33 like whipping



160 Achille Mbembe

161

or taking of the slave’s life itself: an act of caprice and pure destruction aimed at instilling terror.34 Slave life in many ways is a form of deathin-life. As Susan Buck-Morss has suggested, the slave condition produces a contradiction between freedom of property and freedom of person. An unequal relationship is established, along with the inequality of the power over life. This power over the life of another takes the form of commerce: a person’s humanity is dissolved to the point where it becomes possible to say that the slave’s life is possessed by the master.35 Because the slave’s life is like a ‘thing’, possessed by another, the slave existence appears as a perfect figure of a shadow. In spite of the terror and the symbolic sealing off of the slave, he or she maintains alternative perspectives towards time work, and self. This is the second paradoxical element of the plantation world as a manifestation of the state of exception. Treated as if he or she no longer existed except as a mere tool and instrument of production, the slave nevertheless is able to draw almost any object, instrument, language or gesture into a performance and then stylise it. Breaking with uprootedness and the pure world of things of which he or she is but a fragment, the slave is able to demonstrate the protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly possessed by another.36 If the relations between life and death, the politics of cruelty and the symbolics of profanity are blurred in the plantation system, it is notably in the colony and under the apartheid regime that there comes into being a peculiar terror formation I will now turn to.37 The most original feature of this terror formation is its concatenation of biopower, the state of exception and the state of siege. Crucial to this concatenation is, once again, race.38 In fact, in most instances the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilisation, even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world. Here we see the first syntheses between massacre and bureaucracy, that incarnation of Western rationality.39 Arendt develops the thesis that there is a link between National Socialism and traditional imperialism. According to her, the colonial conquest revealed a potential for violence previously unknown. What one witnesses in the Second World War is the extension to the ‘civilised’ peoples of Europe of the methods previously reserved for the ‘savages’. That the technologies which ended up producing Nazism should have originated in the plantation or in the colony or that, on the contrary – Foucault’s thesis – Nazism and Stalinism did no more than amplify a series of mechanisms that already existed in Western European social and political formations (subjugation of the body, health regulations,



Necropolitics

social Darwinism, eugenics, medico-legal theories on heredity, degeneration and race) is, in the end, irrelevant. A fact remains, though: in modern philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary, the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where ‘peace’ is more likely to take on the face of a ‘war without end’. Indeed, such a view corresponds to Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty at the beginning of the twentieth century, namely, the power to decide on the state of exception. To assess the efficacy of the colony as a formation of terror properly, we need to take a detour into the European imaginary itself as it relates to the critical issue of the domestication of war and the creation of a European juridical order ( jus publicum Europaeum). At the basis of this order were two key principles. The first postulated the juridical equality of all states. This equality was notably applied to the right to wage war (the taking of life). The right to war meant two things. On the one hand, to kill or to conclude peace was recognised as one of the pre-eminent functions of any state and went hand in hand with the recognition of the fact that no state could make claims to rule outside of its borders. But conversely, the state could recognise no authority above it within its own borders. On the other hand, the state, for its part, undertook to ‘civilise’ the ways of killing and to attribute rational objectives to the very act of killing. The second principle related to the territorialisation of the sovereign state, that is, to the determination of its frontiers within the context of a newly imposed global order. In this context, the jus publicum rapidly assumed the form of a distinction between, on the one hand, those parts of the globe available for colonial appropriation and, on the other, Europe itself where the jus publicum was to hold sway.40 This distinction, as we shall see, is crucial in terms of assessing the efficacy of the colony as a terror formation. Under jus publicum, a legitimate war is, to a large extent, a war conducted by one state against another or, more precisely, a war between ‘civilised’ states. The centrality of the state in the calculus of war derives from the fact that the state is the model of political unity, a principle of rational organisation, the embodiment of the idea of the universal and a moral sign. In the same context, colonies are similar to the frontiers. They are inhabited by ‘savages’. The colonies are not organised in a state form and have not created a human world. Their armies do not form a distinct entity and their wars are not wars between regular armies. They do not imply the mobilisation of sovereign subjects (citizens) who respect



162 Achille Mbembe

163

each other as enemies. They do not establish a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, or again between an ‘enemy’ and a ‘criminal’.41 It is thus impossible to conclude peace with them. In sum, colonies are zones in which war and disorder, internal and external figures of the political, stand side by side or alternate with each other. As such, the colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilisation.’ That colonies might be ruled over in absolute lawlessness stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native. In the eyes of the conqueror, savage life is just another form of animal life, a horrifying experience, something alien, beyond imagination or comprehension. In fact, according to Arendt, what makes the savages different from other human beings is less the colour of their skin than the fear that they behave like a part of nature, that they treat nature as their undisputed master. Nature thus remains, in all its majesty, an overwhelming reality compared to which they appear to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike. The savages are, as it were, ‘natural’ human beings who lack the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, ‘so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder’.42 For all the above reasons, the sovereign’s right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner. Colonial warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules. It is not a legally codified activity. Instead, colonial terror constantly intertwines with colonially generated fantasies of wilderness and death and fictions to create the effect of the real.43 Peace is not necessarily the natural outcome of a colonial war. In fact, the distinction between war and peace does not avail. Colonial wars are conceived of as the expression of an absolute hostility that sets the conqueror against an absolute enemy.44 All manifestations of war and hostility that had been marginalised by a European legal imaginary find a place to re-emerge in the colonies. Here, the fiction of a distinction between ‘the ends of war’ and the ‘means of war’ collapses, as does the fiction that war functions as a rule-governed contest as opposed to pure slaughter without risk or instrumental justification. It becomes futile, therefore, to attempt to resolve one of the intractable paradoxes of war well captured by Alexandre Kojève in his reinterpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit: its simultaneous idealism and apparent inhumanity.45



Necropolitics

164 Achille Mbembe

It might be thought that the ideas developed above relate to a distant past. In the past, indeed, imperial wars did have the objective of destroying local powers, installing troops and instituting new models of military control over civil populations. A group of local auxiliaries could assist in the management of conquered territories annexed to the empire. Within the empire, the vanquished populations were given a status that enshrined their despoilment. In these configurations, violence constituted the original form of the right and exception provided the structure of sovereignty. Each stage of imperialism also involved certain key technologies (the gunboat, quinine, steamship lines, submarine telegraph cables, colonial railroads).46 Colonial occupation itself was a matter of seizing, delimiting and asserting control over a physical geographical area – of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations. The writing of new spatial relations (territorialisation) was ultimately tantamount to the production of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subversion of existing property arrangements; the classification of people according to different categories; resource extraction; and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries gave meaning to the enactment of differential rights to differing categories of people for different purposes within the same space; in brief, the exercise of sovereignty. Space was therefore the raw material of sovereignty and the violence it carried with it. Sovereignty meant occupation, and occupation meant relegating the colonised into a third zone between subjecthood and objecthood. Such was the case of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Here, the township was the structural form and the homelands became the reserves (rural bases) whereby the flow of migrant labour could be regulated and African urbanisation held in check.47 As Belinda Bozzoli has shown, the township in particular was a place where ‘severe oppression and poverty were experienced on a racial and class basis’.48 A sociopolitical, cultural and economic formation, the township was a peculiar spatial institution scientifically planned for the purposes of control.49 The functioning of the homelands and townships entailed severe restrictions on production for the market by blacks in white areas, the terminating of land ownership by blacks except in reserved areas, the illegalisation of black residence on white farms (except as servants in the employment of whites), the control of urban influx and later, the denial of citizenship to Africans.50



Necropower and late modern colonial occupation

165

Fanon describes the spatialisation of colonial occupation in vivid terms. For him, colonial occupation entails first and foremost a division of space into compartments. It involves the setting of boundaries and internal frontiers epitomised by barracks and police stations; it is regulated by the language of pure force, immediate presence and frequent and direct action; and it is premised on the principle of reciprocal exclusivity.51 But more important, it is the very way in which necropower operates: The town belonging to the colonized people . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees.52 In this case, sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not. Late-modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early modern occupation, particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical and the necropolitical. The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine. Here, the colonial state derives its fundamental claim of sovereignty and legitimacy from the authority of its own particular narrative of history and identity. This narrative is itself underpinned by the idea that the state has a divine right to exist; the narrative competes with another for the same sacred space. Because the two narratives are incompatible and the two populations are inextricably intertwined, any demarcation of the territory on the basis of pure identity is quasi-impossible. Violence and sovereignty in this case claim a divine foundation: peoplehood itself is forged by the worship of one deity, and national identity is imagined as an identity against the Other, other deities.53 History, geography, cartography and archaeology are supposed to back these claims, thereby closely binding identity and topography. As a consequence, colonial violence and occupation are profoundly underwritten by the sacred terror of truth and exclusivity (mass expulsions, resettlement of ‘stateless’ people in refugee camps, settlement of new colonies). Lying beneath the terror of the sacred is the constant excavation of missing bones; the permanent remembrance of a torn body hewn in a thousand pieces and



Necropolitics

never self-same; the limits – better, the impossibility – of representing for oneself an ‘original crime,’ an unspeakable death: the terror of the Holocaust.54 To return to Fanon’s spatial reading of colonial occupation, the late modern colonial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank presents three major characteristics in relation to the working of the specific terror formation I have called necropower. First is the dynamics of territorial fragmentation, the sealing off and expansion of settlements. The objective of this process is twofold: to render any movement impossible and to implement separation along the model of the apartheid state. The occupied territories are therefore divided into a web of intricate internal borders and various isolated cells. According to Eyal Weizman, by departing from a planar division of a territory and embracing a principle of creation of three-dimensional boundaries across sovereign bulks, this dispersal and segmentation clearly redefine the relationship between sovereignty and space.55 For Weizman, these actions constitute ‘the politics of verticality’. The resultant form of sovereignty might be called ‘vertical sovereignty’. Under a regime of vertical sovereignty, colonial occupation operates through schemes of over- and underpasses, a separation of the airspace from the ground. The ground itself is divided between its crust and the subterrain. Colonial occupation is also dictated by the very nature of the terrain and its topographical variations (hilltops and valleys, mountains and bodies of water). Thus, high ground offers strategic assets not found in the valleys (effectiveness of sight, self-protection, panoptic fortification that generates gazes to many different ends). Says Weizman: ‘Settlements could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance and the exercise of power.’ Under conditions of late modern colonial occupation, surveillance is both inward- and outward-oriented, the eye acting as a weapon, and vice versa. Instead of the conclusive division between two nations across a boundary line, ‘the organization of the West Bank’s particular terrain has created multiple separations, provisional boundaries, which relate to each other through surveillance and control,’ according to Weizman. Under these circumstances, colonial occupation is not only akin to control, surveillance and separation, it is also tantamount to seclusion. It is a splintering occupation, along the lines of the splintering urbanism characteristic of late modernity (suburban enclaves or gated communities).56 From an infrastructural point of view, a splintering form of colonial occupation is characterised by a network of fast bypasses, bridges and tunnels that weave over and under one another in an attempt at



166 Achille Mbembe

Necropolitics

167

the bypass roads attempt to separate Israeli traffic networks from Palestinian ones, preferably without allowing them ever to cross. They therefore emphasise the overlapping of two separate geographies that inhabit the same landscape. At points where the networks do cross, a makeshift separation is created. Most often, small dust roads are dug out to allow Palestinians to cross under the fast, wide highways on which Israeli vans and military vehicles rush between settlements.57 Under conditions of vertical sovereignty and splintering colonial occupation, communities are separated across a y-axis. This leads to a proliferation of the sites of violence. The battlegrounds are not located solely on the surface of the earth. The underground as well as the airspace are transformed into conflict zones. There is no continuity between the ground and the sky. Even the boundaries in airspace are divided between lower and upper layers. Everywhere, the symbolics of the top (who is on top) is reiterated. Occupation of the skies therefore acquires a critical importance, since most of the policing is done from the air. Various other technologies are mobilised to this effect: sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles, aerial reconnaissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes, assault helicopters, an earth observation satellite, techniques of ‘hologrammatisation’. Killing becomes precisely targeted. Such precision is combined with the tactics of medieval siege warfare adapted to the networked sprawl of urban refugee camps. An orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemy’s societal and urban infrastructure network complements the appropriation of land, water and airspace resources. Critical to these techniques of disabling the enemy is bulldozing: demolishing houses and cities; uprooting olive trees; riddling water tanks with bullets; bombing and jamming electronic communications; digging up roads; destroying electricity transformers; tearing up airport runways; disabling television and radio transmitters; smashing computers; ransacking cultural and politico-bureaucratic symbols of the proto-Palestinian state; looting medical equipment. In other words, infrastructural warfare.58 While the Apache helicopter gunship is used to police the air and kill from above, the armoured bulldozer (the Caterpillar D-9) is used on the ground as a weapon of war and intimidation. In contrast to early modern colonial occupation, these two weapons establish the superiority of high-tech tools of late-modern terror.59



maintaining the Fanonian ‘principle of reciprocal exclusivity’. According to Weizman,

As the Palestinian case illustrates, late modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical. The combination of the three allocates to the colonial power an absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory. The state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire populations are the target of the sovereign. The besieged villages and towns are sealed off and cut off from the world. Daily life is militarised. Freedom is given to local military commanders to use their discretion as to when and whom to shoot. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits. Local civil institutions are systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived of its means of income. Invisible killing is added to outright executions.

War machines and heteronomy Having examined the workings of necropower under the conditions of late modern colonial occupation, I now turn to contemporary wars. Contemporary wars belong to a new moment and can hardly be understood through earlier theories of ‘contractual violence’ or typologies of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ wars or even Carl von Clausewitz’s instrumentalism.60 According to Zygmunt Bauman, wars of the globalisation era do not include the conquest, acquisition and takeover of a territory among their objectives. Ideally, they are hit-and-run affairs. The growing gap between high-tech and low-tech means of war has never been as evident as in the Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign. In both cases, the doctrine of ‘overwhelming or decisive force’ was implemented to its full effect thanks to a military-technological revolution that has multiplied the capacity for destruction in unprecedented ways.61 Air war as it relates to altitude, ordnance, visibility and intelligence is a case in point. During the Gulf War, the combined use of smart bombs and bombs coated with depleted uranium, high-tech stand-off weapons, electronic sensors, laser-guided missiles, cluster and asphyxiation bombs, stealth capabilities, unmanned aerial vehicles and cyber-intelligence quickly crippled the enemy’s capabilities. In Kosovo, the ‘degrading’ of Serbian capabilities took the form of an infrastructural war that targeted and destroyed bridges, railways, highways, communications networks, oil storage depots, heating plants, power stations and water treatment facilities. As can be surmised, the execution of such a military strategy, especially when combined with the imposition of sanctions, results in shutting down the enemy’s



168 Achille Mbembe

169

life-support system. The enduring damage to civilian life is particularly telling. For example, the destruction of the Pancevo petrochemical complex in the outskirts of Belgrade during the Kosovo campaign ‘left the vicinity so toxic with vinyl chloride, ammonia, mercury, naphtha and dioxin that pregnant women were directed to seek abortions, and all local women were advised to avoid pregnancy for two years’.62 Wars of the globalisation era therefore aim to force the enemy into submission regardless of the immediate consequences, side effects and ‘collateral damage’ of the military actions. In this sense, contemporary wars are more reminiscent of the warfare strategy of the nomads than of the sedentary nations or the ‘conquer-and-annex’ territorial wars of modernity. In Bauman’s words: They rest their superiority over the settled population on the speed of their own movement; their own ability to descend from nowhere without notice and vanish again without warning, their ability to travel light and not to bother with the kind of belongings which confine the mobility and the manoeuvring potential of the sedentary people.63 This new moment is one of global mobility. An important feature is that military operations and the exercise of the right to kill are no longer the sole monopoly of states and the ‘regular army’ is no longer the unique modality of carrying out these functions. The claim to ultimate or final authority in a particular political space is not easily made. Instead, a patchwork of overlapping and incomplete rights to rule emerges, inextricably superimposed and tangled, in which different de facto juridical instances are geographically interwoven and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties and enclaves abound.64 In this heteronymous organisation of territorial rights and claims, it makes little sense to insist on distinctions between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ political realms, separated by clearly demarcated boundaries. Let us take Africa as an example. Here, the political economy of statehood dramatically changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Many African states can no longer claim a monopoly on violence and on the means of coercion within their territory. Nor can they claim a monopoly on territorial boundaries. Coercion itself has become a market commodity. Military manpower is bought and sold on a market in which the identity of suppliers and purchasers means almost nothing. Urban militias, private armies, armies of regional lords, private security firms and state armies all claim the right to exercise violence or to kill.



Necropolitics

Neighbouring states or rebel movements lease armies to poor states. Nonstate deployers of violence supply two critical coercive resources: labour and minerals. Increasingly, the vast majority of armies are composed of citizen soldiers, child soldiers, mercenaries and privateers.65 Alongside armies have therefore emerged what, following Deleuze and Guattari, we could refer to as war machines.66 These are made up of segments of armed men that split up or merge with one another depending on the tasks to be carried out and the circumstances. Polymorphous and diffuse organisations, war machines are characterised by their capacity for metamorphosis. Their relation to space is mobile. Sometimes, they enjoy complex links with state forms (from autonomy to incorporation). The state may, of its own doing, transform itself into a war machine. It may moreover appropriate to itself an existing war machine or help to create one. War machines function by borrowing from regular armies while incorporating new elements well adapted to the principle of segmentation and deterritorialisation. Regular armies in turn may readily appropriate some of the characteristics of war machines. A war machine combines a plurality of functions. It has the features of a political organisation and a mercantile company. It operates through capture and depredations and can even coin its own money. In order to fuel the extraction and export of natural resources located in the territory they control, war machines forge direct connections with transnational networks. War machines emerged in Africa during the last quarter of the twentieth century in direct relation to the erosion of the postcolonial state’s capacity to build the economic underpinnings of political authority and order. This capacity involves raising revenue and commanding and regulating access to natural resources within a well-defined territory. In the mid-1970s, as the state’s ability to maintain this capacity began to erode, there emerged a clear link between monetary instability and spatial fragmentation. In the 1980s, the brutal experience of money suddenly losing its value became more commonplace, with various countries undergoing cycles of hyperinflation (which included such stunts as the sudden replacement of a currency). During the last decades of the twentieth century, monetary circulation has influenced state and society in at least two ways. First, we have seen a general drying-up of liquidities and their gradual concentration along certain channels, access to which has been subject to increasingly draconian conditions. As a result, the number of individuals endowed with the material means to control dependants through the creation of debts has abruptly decreased. Historically, capturing and fixing dependants through the mechanism of debt has always been a



170 Achille Mbembe

171

central aspect of both the production of people and the constitution of the political bond.67 Such bonds were crucial in determining the value of persons and gauging their value and utility. When their value and utility were not proven, they could be disposed of as slaves, pawns or clients. Second, the controlled inflow and the fixing of movements of money around zones in which specific resources are extracted have made possible the formation of enclave economies and shifted the old calculus between people and things. The concentration of activities connected with the extraction of valuable resources around these enclaves has, in turn, turned the enclaves into privileged spaces of war and death. War itself is fed by increased sales of the products extracted.68 New linkages have therefore emerged between war-making, war machines and resource extraction.69 War machines are implicated in the constitution of highly transnational local or regional economies. In most places, the collapse of formal political institutions under the strain of violence tends to lead to the formation of militia economies. War machines (in this case militias or rebel movements) rapidly become highly organised mechanisms of predation, taxing the territories and the population they occupy and drawing on a range of transnational networks and diasporas that provide both material and financial support. Correlated to the new geography of resource extraction is the emergence of an unprecedented form of governmentality that consists in the management of the multitudes. The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilise and spatially fix whole categories of people or, paradoxically, to unleash them, to force them to scatter over broad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state. As a political category, populations are then disaggregated into rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or simply massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices, while the ‘survivors’, after a horrific exodus, are confined in camps and zones of exception.70 This form of governmentality is different from the colonial commandement.71 The techniques of policing and discipline and the choice between obedience and simulation that characterised the colonial and postcolonial potentate are gradually being replaced by an alternative that is more tragic because more extreme. Technologies of destruction have become more tactile, more anatomical and sensorial, in a context in which the choice is between life and death.72 If power still depends on tight control over bodies (or on concentrating them in camps), the new technologies of destruction are less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time



Necropolitics

comes, within the order of the maximal economy now represented by the ‘massacre’. In turn, the generalisation of insecurity has deepened the societal distinction between those who bear weapons and those who do not (loi de repartition des armes). Increasingly, war is no longer waged between armies of two sovereign states. Instead it is waged by armed groups acting behind the mask of the state against armed groups that have no state, but control very distinct territories; both sides having as their main targets civilian populations that are unarmed or organised into militias. In cases where armed dissidents have not completely taken over state power, they have provoked territorial partitions and succeeded in controlling entire regions that they administer on the model of fiefdoms, especially where there are mineral deposits.73 The ways of killing do not themselves vary much. In the case of massacres in particular, lifeless bodies are quickly reduced to the status of simple skeletons. Their morphology henceforth inscribes them in the register of undifferentiated generality: simple relics of an unburied pain, empty, meaningless corporealities, strange deposits plunged into cruel stupor. In the case of the Rwandan genocide – in which a number of skeletons were at least preserved in a visible state, if not exhumed – what is striking is the tension between the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness on one hand, and on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something. In these impassive fragments of bone, there seems to be no ataraxia: nothing but the illusory rejection of a death that has already occurred. In other cases, in which physical amputation replaces immediate death, cutting off limbs opens the way to the deployment of techniques of incision, ablation and excision that also have bones as their target. The traces of this demiurgic surgery persist for a long time, in the form of human shapes that are alive, to be sure, but whose bodily integrity has been replaced by pieces, fragments, folds, even immense wounds that are difficult to close. Their function is to keep before the eyes of the victim – and of the people around him or her – the morbid spectacle of severing.

Of motion and metal Let us return to the example of Palestine where two apparently irreconcilable logics are confronting each other: the logic of martyrdom and the logic of survival. In examining them, I would like to reflect on the twin issues of death and terror on the one hand and terror and freedom on the other.



172 Achille Mbembe

173

In the confrontation between these two logics, terror is not on one side and death on the other. Terror and death are at the heart of each. As Elias Canetti reminds us, the survivor is the one who, having stood in the path of death, knowing of many deaths and standing in the midst of the fallen, is still alive. Or, more precisely, the survivor is the one who has taken on a whole pack of enemies and managed not only to escape alive, but to kill his or her attackers. This is why, to a large extent, the lowest form of survival is killing. Canetti points out that in the logic of survival, ‘each man is the enemy of every other’. Even more radically, in the logic of survival one’s horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead. It is the death of the other, his or her physical presence as a corpse, that makes the survivor feel unique. And each enemy killed makes the survivor feel more secure.74 The logic of martyrdom proceeds along different lines. It is epitomised by the figure of the ‘suicide bomber’, which itself raises a number of questions. What intrinsic difference is there between killing with a missile helicopter or a tank and killing with one’s own body? Does the distinction between the arms used to inflict death prevent the establishment of a system of general exchange between the manner of killing and the manner of dying? The ‘suicide bomber’ wears no ordinary soldier’s uniform and displays no weapon. The candidate for martyrdom chases his or her targets; the enemy is a prey for whom a trap is set. Significant in this respect is the location of the ambush laid: the bus stop, the café, the discotheque, the marketplace, the checkpoint, the road – in sum, the spaces of everyday life. The trapping of the body is added to the ambush location. The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the soon-to-be-detonated weapon. Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the weapon carried in the shape of the body is invisible. Thus concealed, it forms part of the body. It is so intimately part of the body that at the time of detonation it annihilates the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others when it does not reduce them to pieces. The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The body is transformed into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in the truly ballistic sense. In this instance, my death goes hand in hand with the death of the Other. Homicide and suicide are accomplished in the same act. And to a large extent, resistance and self-destruction are synonymous. To deal out death is therefore to reduce the other and oneself to the status of pieces of inert flesh, scattered everywhere and assembled with difficulty



Necropolitics

before burial. In this case, war is the war of body on body (guerre au corps-à-corps). To kill, one has to come as close as possible to the body of the enemy. To detonate the bomb necessitates resolving the question of distance, through the work of proximity and concealment. How are we to interpret this manner of spilling blood in which death is not simply that which is my own, but always goes hand in hand with the death of the other?75 How does it differ from death inflicted by a tank or a missile, in a context in which the cost of my survival is calculated in terms of my capacity and readiness to kill someone else? In the logic of ‘martyrdom’ the will to die is fused with the willingness to take the enemy with you, that is, with closing the door on the possibility of life for everyone. This logic seems contrary to another one, which consists in wishing to impose death on others while preserving one’s own life. Canetti describes this moment of survival as a moment of power. In such a case, triumph develops precisely from the possibility of being there when the others (in this case the enemy) are no longer there. Such is the logic of heroism as classically understood: to execute others while holding one’s own death at a distance. In the logic of martyrdom, a new semiosis of killing emerges. It is not necessarily based on a relationship between form and matter. As I have already indicated, the body here becomes the very uniform of the martyr. But the body as such is not only an object to protect against danger and death. The body in itself has neither power nor value. The power and value of the body result from a process of abstraction based on the desire for eternity. In that sense, the martyr, having established a moment of supremacy in which the subject overcomes his own mortality, can be seen as labouring under the sign of the future. In other words, in death the future is collapsed into the present. In its desire for eternity, the besieged body passes through two stages. First, it is transformed into a mere thing, malleable matter. Second, the manner in which it is put to death – suicide – affords it its ultimate signification. The matter of the body, or again the matter which is the body, is invested with properties that cannot be deduced from its character as a thing, but from a transcendental nomos outside it. The besieged body becomes a piece of metal whose function is, through sacrifice, to bring eternal life into being. The body duplicates itself and, in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation. Let me explore, in conclusion, the relation between terror, freedom and sacrifice. Martin Heidegger argues that the human’s ‘being towards death’ is the decisive condition of all true human freedom.76 In other words, one is free to live one’s own life only because one is free to die



174 Achille Mbembe

175

one’s own death. Whereas Heidegger grants an existential status to being towards death and considers it an event of freedom, Bataille suggests that ‘sacrifice in reality reveals nothing’. It is not simply the absolute manifestation of negativity. It is also a comedy. For Bataille, death reveals the human subject’s animal side, which he refers to moreover as the subject’s ‘natural being’. ‘For man to reveal himself in the end, he has to die, but he will have to do so while alive – by looking at himself ceasing to exist,’ he adds. In other words, the human subject has to be fully alive at the very moment of dying, to be aware of his or her death, to live with the impression of actually dying. Death itself must become awareness of the self at the very time that it does away with the conscious being. In a sense, this is what happens (what at least is on the point of taking place, or what takes place in an elusive, fugitive manner), by means of a subterfuge in the sacrifice. In the sacrifice, the sacrificed identifies himself with the animal on the point of death. Thus he dies seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, through his own will, at one with the weapon of sacrifice. But this is play! And for Bataille, play is more or less the means by which the human subject ‘voluntarily tricks himself’.77 How does the notion of play and trickery relate to the suicide bomber? There is no doubt that in the case of the suicide bomber the sacrifice consists of the spectacular putting to death of the self, of becoming his or her own victim (self-sacrifice). The self-sacrificed proceeds to take power over his or her death and to approach it head-on. This power may be derived from the belief that the destruction of one’s own body does not affect the continuity of the being. The idea is that the being exists outside us. The self-sacrifice consists, here, in the removal of a twofold prohibition: that of self-immolation (suicide) and that of murder. Unlike primitive sacrifices, however, there is no animal to serve as a substitute victim. Death here achieves the character of a transgression. But unlike crucifixion, it has no expiatory dimension. It is not related to the Hegelian paradigms of prestige or recognition. Indeed, a dead person cannot recognise his or her killer, who is also dead. Does this imply that death occurs here as pure annihilation and nothingness, excess and scandal? Whether read from the perspective of slavery or of colonial occupation, death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven. As we have seen, terror is a defining feature of both slave and late modern colonial regimes. Both regimes are also specific instances and experiences of unfreedom. To live under late modern occupation is to experience a permanent condition



Necropolitics

of ‘being in pain’: fortified structures, military posts and roadblocks everywhere; buildings that bring back painful memories of humiliation, interrogations and beatings; curfews that imprison hundreds of thousands in their cramped homes every night from dusk to dawn; soldiers patrolling the unlit streets, frightened by their own shadows; children blinded by rubber bullets; parents shamed and beaten in front of their families; soldiers urinating on fences, shooting at the rooftop water tanks just for fun, chanting loud, offensive slogans, pounding on fragile tin doors to frighten the children, confiscating papers or dumping garbage in the middle of a residential district; border guards kicking over a vegetable booth or closing borders at whim; bones broken; shootings and fatalities – a certain kind of madness.78 In such circumstances, the discipline of life and the necessities of hardship (trial by death) are marked by excess. What connects terror, death and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics. The future, here, can be authentically anticipated, but not in the present. The present itself is but a moment of vision – vision of the freedom not yet come. Death in the present is the mediator of redemption. Far from being an encounter with a limit, boundary or barrier, it is experienced as ‘a release from terror and bondage’.79 As Gilroy notes, this preference for death over continued servitude is a commentary on the nature of freedom itself (or its lack). If this lack is the very nature of what it means for the slave or the colonised to exist, the same lack is also precisely the way in which he or she takes account of his or her mortality. Referring to the practice of individual or mass suicide by slaves cornered by the slave catchers, Gilroy suggests that death, in this case, can be represented as agency. For death is precisely that from and over which I have power. But it is also that space where freedom and negation operate.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice and terror. I have demonstrated that the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death. Moreover, I have put forward the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring on them the status



176 Achille Mbembe

Necropolitics

177

Acknowledgements This chapter is the result of sustained conversations with Arjun Appadurai, Carol Breckenridge and Françoise Vergès. Excerpts were presented at seminars and workshops in Evanston, Chicago, New York, New Haven and Johannesburg. Useful criticisms were provided by Paul Gilroy, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Beth Povinelli, Ben Lee, Charles Taylor, Crawford Young, Abdoumaliq Simone, Luc Sindjoun, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Carlos Forment, Ato Quayson, Ulrike Kistner, David Theo Goldberg and Deborah Posel. Additional comments and insights as well as critical support and encouragement were offered by Rehana Ebr-Vally and Sarah Nuttall. The chapter is dedicated to my late friend Tshikala Kayembe Biaya.

Notes 1. The chapter distances itself from traditional accounts of sovereignty found in the discipline of political science and the subdiscipline of international relations. For the most part, these accounts locate sovereignty within the boundaries of the nation-state, within institutions empowered by the state or within supranational institutions and networks. See, for example, Sovereignty at the Millennium, special issue, Political Studies, 47 (1999). My own approach builds on Michel Foucault’s critique of the notion of sovereignty and its relation to war and biopower in Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1975–1976 (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 37–55, 75–100, 125–48, 213–44. English translation: Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 43–64, 87–114, 141– 66, 239–64. See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 23–80. English translation: Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2. Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 213–34. English translation: Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 239–64. 3. On the state of exception, see Carl Schmitt, La Dictature, trans. Mira Köller and Dominique Séglard (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 210–28, 235–6, 250–1, 255–6; La Notion de politique. Théorie du partisan, trans. Marie-Louise Steinhauser (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). English translation: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of



of living dead. I have also outlined some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and have suggested that under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred. Translated by Libby Meintjes

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976). Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1966), 444. Giorgio Agamben, Moyens sans fins. Notes sur la politique (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1995), 50–1. English translation: Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). On these debates, see Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and, more recently, Bertrand Ogilvie, ‘Comparer l’incomparable’, Multitudes, 7 (2001), 130–66. See James Bohman and William Rehg (eds.), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). Cornelius Castoriadis, L’Institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Seuil, 1975) and Figures du pensable (Paris: Seuil, 1999). English translation: Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). See in particular Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), especially ch. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, Phénoménologie de l’esprit, trans. J. P. Lefebvre (Paris: Aubier, 1991). See also the critique by Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), especially Appendix II, ‘L’idée de la mort dans la philosophie de Hegel’. English translation: Alexander Kojeve, ‘The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, trans. Joseph J. Carpino, Interpretation, 3, 2 (1973), 114–56; and Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes XII (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), especially ‘Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,’ 326–48. English translation: Georges Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’. Yale French Studies, 78 (1990), 9–28, and ‘Hegel, l’homme et l’histoire’, 349–69. See Jean Baudrillard, ‘Death in Bataille’, in Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), especially 139–41. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. A. Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 94–5. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds.), The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 318–19. See also Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1, Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988), and Erotism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986). Bataille, Accursed Share, vol. 2, The History of Eroticism; vol. 3, Sovereignty. On the state of siege, see Schmitt, La Dictature, ch. 6. See Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 57–74. English translation: Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 65–86. ‘Race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end . . . not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.’ Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 157.



178 Achille Mbembe

179

19. Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 214. English translation: Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 239–41. 20. Ibid., 228. English translation: ibid., 255–6. 21. Ibid., 227–32. English translation: ibid., 254–61. 22. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), especially chs. 3, 5 and 6. 23. Enzo Traverso, La Violence nazie: Une généalogie européenne (Paris: La Fabrique Editions, 2002). English translation: Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: New Press, 2003). 24. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). 25. See Robert Wokler, ‘Contextualizing Hegel’s Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror’, Political Theory, 26 (1998), 33–55. 26. David W. Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), ch. 6. 27. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), 817. See also Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 172. 28. Stephen Louw, ‘In the Shadow of the Pharaohs: The Militarization of Labour Debate and Classical Marxist Theory’, Economy and Society, 29 (2000), 240. 29. On labour militarisation and the transition to communism, see Nikolai Bukharin, The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period, trans. Oliver Field (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); and Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961). On the collapse of the distinction between state and society, see Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Moscow: Progress, 1972); and Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, Selected Works in Three Volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress, 1977). For a critique of ‘revolutionary terror’, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John O’Neill (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1969). For a more recent example of ‘revolutionary terror’, see Steve J. Stern (ed.), Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 30. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Manuel Moreno Fraginals, The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760–1860 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976). 31. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 57. 32. See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, ed. Houston A. Baker (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). 33. The term manners is used here to denote the links between social grace and social control. According to Norbert Elias, manners embody what is ‘considered socially acceptable behaviour’, the ‘precepts on conduct’ and the framework for ‘conviviality’. The History of Manners, vol. 1, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1978), ch. 2. 34. ‘The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran faster, there he whipped longest, says Douglass in his narration of the whipping of his aunt by Mr Plummer. He would whip her to make her scream,



Necropolitics

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. . . . It was a most terrible spectacle.’ Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 51. On the random killing of slaves, see 67–8. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry 26 (2000), 821–66. Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992). In what follows I am mindful of the fact that colonial forms of sovereignty were always fragmented. They were complex, ‘less concerned with legitimizing their own presence and more excessively violent than their European forms’. As importantly, ‘European states never aimed at governing the colonial territories with the same uniformity and intensity as was applied to their own populations’. T. B. Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World’ (paper, 2002). In The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), David Theo Goldberg argues that from the nineteenth century on, there are at least two historically competing traditions of racial rationalisation: naturism (based on an inferiority claim) and historicism (based on the claim of the historical ‘immaturity’ – and therefore ‘educability’ – of the natives). In a private communication (23 August 2002), he argues that these two traditions played out differently when it came to issues of sovereignty, states of exception and forms of necropower. In his view, necropower can take multiple forms: the terror of actual death; or a more ‘benevolent’ form – the result of which is the destruction of a culture in order to ‘save the people’ from themselves. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 185–221. Etienne Balibar, ‘Prolégomènes à la souveraineté: La frontière, l’Etat, le peuple’, Les temps modernes, 610 (2000), 54–5. Eugene Victor Walter, Terror and Resistance: A Study of Political Violence with Case Studies of Some Primitive African Communities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 192. For a powerful rendition of this process, see Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). On the ‘enemy’, see L’ennemi, special issue, Raisons politiques, 5 (2002). Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. See Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). On the township, see G. G. Maasdorp and A. S. B. Humphreys (eds.), From Shantytown to Township: An Economic Study of African Poverty and Rehousing in a South African City (Cape Town: Juta, 1975). Belinda Bozzoli, ‘Why Were the 1980s “Millenarian”? Style, Repertoire, Space and Authority in South Africa’s Black Cities’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 13 (2000), 79. Bozzoli, ‘Why Were the 1980s “Millenarian”?’ See Herman Giliomee (ed.), Up against the Fences: Poverty, Passes and Privileges in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1985); Francis Wilson, Migrant Labour in South Africa (Johannesburg: Christian Institute of Southern Africa, 1972).



180 Achille Mbembe

181

51. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 39. 52. Ibid., 37–9. 53. See Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 54. See Lydia Flem, L’Art et la mémoire des camps: Représenter exterminer, ed. JeanLuc Nancy (Paris: Seuil, 2001). 55. See Eyal Weizman, ‘The Politics of Verticality’, openDemocracy (web publication at www.openDemocracy.net), accessed 25 April 2002. 56. See Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobility and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001). 57. Weizman, ‘Politics of Verticality’. 58. See Stephen Graham, ‘ “Clean Territory”: Urbicide in the West Bank’, openDemocracy (web publication at www.openDemocracy.net), accessed 7 August 2002. 59. Compare with the panoply of new bombs the United States deployed during the Gulf War and the war in Kosovo, most aimed at raining down graphite crystals to disable comprehensively electrical power and distribution stations. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000). 60. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 61. Benjamin Ederington and Michael J. Mazarr (eds.), Turning Point: The Gulf War and U.S. Military Strategy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). 62. Thomas W. Smith, ‘The New Law of War: Legitimizing Hi-Tech and Infrastructural Violence’, International Studies Quarterly, 46 (2002): 367. On Iraq, see G. L. Simons, The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice, second edition (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998); see also A. Shehabaldin and W. M. Laughlin Jr., ‘Economic Sanctions against Iraq: Human and Economic Costs’, International Journal of Human Rights, 3, 4 (2000), 1–18. 63. Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Wars of the Globalization Era’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4, 1 (2001): 15. ‘Remote as they are from their “targets”, scurrying over those they hit too fast to witness the devastation they cause and the blood they spill, the pilots-turned-computer-operators hardly ever have a chance of looking their victims in the face and to survey the human misery they have sowed,’ adds Bauman. ‘Military professionals of our time see no corpses and no wounds. They may sleep well; no pangs of conscience will keep them awake’ (27). See also ‘Penser la guerre aujourd’hui’, Cahiers de la Villa Gillet, 16 (2002), 75–152. 64. Achille Mbembe, ‘At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa’, Public Culture, 12 (2000), 259–84. 65. In international law, ‘privateers’ are defined as ‘vessels belonging to private owners, and sailing under a commission of war empowering the person to whom it is granted to carry on all forms of hostility which are permissible at sea by the usages of war’. I use the term here to mean armed formations acting independently of any politically organised society, in the pursuit of private interests, whether under the mask of the state or not. See Janice Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).



Necropolitics

66. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1980), 434–527. English translation: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1987), 351–423. 67. Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), especially chs. 2 and 4. 68. See Jakkie Cilliers and Christian Dietrich (eds.), Angola’s War Economy: The Role of Oil and Diamonds (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2000). 69. See, for example, ‘Rapport du Groupe d’experts sur l’exploitation illégale des ressources naturelles et autres richesses de la République démocratique du Congo’, United Nations Report No. 2/2001/357, submitted by the SecretaryGeneral to the Security Council, 12 April 2001. See also Richard Snyder, ‘Does Lootable Wealth Breed Disorder? States, Regimes, and the Political Economy of Extraction’ (paper). 70. See Loren B. Landau, ‘The Humanitarian Hangover: Transnationalization of Governmental Practice in Tanzania’s Refugee-Populated Areas’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 21, 1 (2002), 260–99, especially 281–7. 71. On the commandement, see Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), chs. 1–3. 72. See Leisel Talley, Paul B. Spiegel and Mona Girgis, ‘An Investigation of Increasing Mortality among Congolese Refugees in Lugufu Camp, Tanzania, May–June 1999’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 14, 4 (2001), 412–27. 73. See Tony Hodges, Angola: From Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), ch. 7; Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (London: Hurst & Company, 1999). 74. See Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. C. Stewart (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), 227–80. 75. Martin Heidegger, Etre et temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 289–322. English translation: Martin Heidegger Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). 76. Ibid. 77. Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, 336. 78. For what precedes, see Amira Hass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). 79. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 63.



182 Achille Mbembe

9 Stephen Morton

In his short story entitled ‘The Martyr’ (1975), the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o describes the death of ‘the first European settlers to be killed in the increased wave of violence that spread over the country’1 during the Kenyan national liberation struggle. Ngugi attributes the causes of this violence to the dispossession of the Gikuyu people; to the 1923 Nairobi massacre, at which ‘police fired on a people peacefully demonstrating for their rights’;2 and to the European settlers’ use of corporal punishment to maintain political authority in colonial Kenya. This is epitomised in the European settler Mrs Hardy’s suggestion at the end of the story that ‘All of them should be whipped’.3 Ngugi’s story foregrounds the way in which physical violence underpins political sovereignty in the European colony. In doing so, he could be seen to anticipate some of Michel Foucault’s arguments about race, biopolitics and sovereign power in his 1976 lecture series Society Must Be Defended. For Foucault, racism is ‘primarily a way of introducing a break between the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (SMBD, 254). Racism, in other words, is part of Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics; it has a biological rationale, which is to eliminate the inferior race that is perceived as a threat to the species in general (SMBD, 255–6). Significantly, Foucault mentions in passing that ‘Racism first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide’ (SMBD, 257), before going on to discuss the connection between racism, sovereign power and biopower in Nazi Germany (SMBD, 259–60). This tantalising statement about the relationship between racism and colonising genocide is significant because it raises a question about the extent to which Foucault’s model of biopolitical power can account for the political foundation of the European colony. 183



Torture, Terrorism and Colonial Sovereignty

This chapter seeks to address this question further by focusing on the representation of torture and sovereign power in the work of Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Alex la Guma. By doing so, it will investigate the ways in which torture exposes the violent foundations of political sovereignty in the European colony. At the core of this chapter is the argument that practices such as torture reveal how terrorism – understood as political violence wielded by the state against it subjects – is central to the formation of the European colony. Moreover, by focusing on historical representations of counter-insurgency methods such as torture and indefinite detention in literature from Kenya and South Africa, this chapter argues that the so-called war on terror is really a defence of imperial sovereignty.

I In order to comprehend how terrorism became instituted as the political foundation of the European colony, it is crucial to consider how colonialism reconfigured the relationship between sovereign power and governance. In his essay ‘Necropolitics’ Mbembe reframes European critical theories of sovereignty and biopolitics in the work of Hegel, Bataille, Foucault and Agamben by tracing the history of biopolitics and sovereignty in the colonial context. Mbembe does this primarily through a rereading of Fanon’s essay ‘Concerning Violence’, in which Fanon examines the violent political formation of the European colony in more detail. One of the crucial points that he makes is that the political relationship between the coloniser and the colonised is based on a relationship of violence: The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. . . . In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counsellors and ‘bewilders’ are placed between the exploited and those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the colonized and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure violence.4 In Fanon’s argument, the colonial world lacks a civil society or any form of meaningful political relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Since the European colony was spatially defined in terms of an absolute racial division between the settlers and the natives, the settlers refused to



184 Stephen Morton

recognise the political sovereignty or humanity of the natives. Such an argument complicates the claims made by critics such as Hannah Arendt and Christopher Miller that Fanon equates politics and violence; for in the absence of a civil society the political would seem to be constituted by violence.5 In ‘Necropolitics’ Mbembe develops Fanon’s observations about the constitutive role of violence in the political formation of the European colony. Drawing on the work of Agamben and Foucault, Mbembe contends that the regime of biopolitical control operating in European bourgeois civil society does not hold in the European colony; instead biopolitical control is replaced with necropolitical control, or the threat of violence and ultimately death by the colonial ruler: ‘the sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner. Colonial warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules. It is not a legally codified activity.’6 Following Foucault’s argument in Society Must Be Defended that the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death, Mbembe argues that it is the right to violence and killing that defines relations of power in the European colony. In the light of this argument, his claim that death is a form of agency for people who live under colonial occupation helps to clarify the significance of violent, anti-colonial insurgency as an assertion of political sovereignty in the context of a colonial regime that defines politics in terms of the right to injure, torture and kill its subjects with impunity. What is crucial for Mbembe is that the use of sovereign political violence defined the horizon for political resistance within the European colony. This is clearly different from saying that violent, anti-colonial resistance is a causal response to particular acts of colonial terror or that counter-insurgency is a response to violent, anti-colonial insurgency. The problem with Mbembe’s theory is that it seems to suggest that a violent struggle to the death is the only available form of political resistance in the European colony. Mbembe’s essay provides an insightful analysis of the political logic of colonial sovereignty and resistance, but it cannot account for the singular experience of the body in pain, or value the experiences of those subjects who choose life over death under conditions of physical brutalisation or torture. As I will now suggest, the embodied experience of torture and detention by the colonial state to counter the emergence of a sovereign postcolonial subject complicates the heroic ideal of the revolutionary insurgent that is implicit in Fanon and Mbembe’s theories of political violence. To clarify this argument, the final section will consider how the embodied experience of violence,



Torture, Terrorism and Colonial Sovereignty 185

torture and indefinite detention in British-occupied Kenya and South Africa under apartheid has been articulated in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), Josiah Mwangi Kariuki’s prison memoir Mau Mau Detainee (1963) and Alex la Guma’s In the Fog of the Season’s End (1972). In so doing, I hope to consider how these texts articulate experiences and knowledges that complicate nationalist narratives of decolonisation. It is significant that European settlers used flogging and other forms of corporal punishment to assert colonial domination in Kenya before the armed rebellion against the white settlers and the Kenyan loyalists. In his study of the Mau Mau insurgency and the state of emergency in Kenya, David Anderson cites a passage from the memoirs of Henry Seaton, a former District Officer for the British colonial administration in East Africa, in which Seaton describes a scene where a European manager whipped the African driver of a rickshaw for accidentally knocking him over. In Anderson’s account, such examples of racial violence were not unusual. Yet it was during the Emergency period that the torture, violence and indefinite detention of suspected anti-colonial insurgents were officially sanctioned by the British colonial administration in Kenya. Such measures are consistent with the violence on which that colonial administration was founded. It is the violent subjugation of the life of the insurgent, anti-colonial subject that concerns the Kenyan writer Josiah Mwangi Kariuki in his prison memoir Mau Mau Detainee (1963). In the conclusion, Kariuki poses the following questions: What turns a weak creature into a sadistic bully behind a barbed-wire fence? What strange twists of thought made the security forces think they always had God and Right on their side whatever crimes against humanity they committed? What obstinate streak in their make-up forced experienced and hitherto reasonably righteous administrative officers to pursue policies of torture and brutality leading to the Hola Massacre?7 Implicit in these questions is the suggestion that the brutal acts of torture and killing carried out in many of the detention camps in Kenya during the Emergency in the 1950s were not exceptional acts of violence carried out by sadistic individuals. Moreover, by appealing to the discourse of human rights in his claim that the ‘security forces’ committed crimes against humanity, Kariuki highlights the false universality of human rights discourse from the colonial space of the detention camp. In posing these questions, Kariuki identifies the limitations of the argument that the deaths of eleven detainees in the Hola detention camp



186 Stephen Morton

during the Emergency period were exceptional and illegal. Such a questioning of the violence of colonialism is more explicitly addressed by Frantz Fanon in a polemical essay titled ‘Algeria Face to Face with the French Torturers’. In Fanon’s account, ‘Torture in Algeria is not an accident, or an error or a fault’; rather, he insists that ‘Colonialism cannot be understood without the possibility of torturing, of violating or of massacring’.8 Fanon’s essay was written in response to the use of torture by the French military to counter the Algerian national liberation struggle in Algeria during the 1950s. The essay was first published in the FLN newspaper El Moudjahid in 1957, the same year that the revelations about the atrocities and use of torture perpetrated by the French military started to become public. Fanon’s purpose in ‘Face to Face with the Algerian Torturers’ was not simply to expose the practice of torture as a scandalous or exceptional practice; rather, he sought to emphasise that torture is consistent with the political logic of colonial sovereignty and terror. It was for this reason that Fanon argued that torture is ‘inherent in the whole colonialist configuration’.9 In contrast to the moral opposition to the military’s use of torture in Algeria from the French Left, which opposed torture on the grounds that it undermined the democratic foundations of the modern French body politic, Fanon held that torture was part of the French colonial state. Such a view is echoed by Rita Maran’s observation that the French mission civilisatrice was invoked by the leaders of the French colonial military in Algeria to justify the use of torture during the Algerian liberation war.10 Significantly, Maran notes that many writers on the French Left criticised the use of torture in Algeria, but did not examine how the idea of colonialism as a civilising mission underpinned the rationalisation and justification of torture.11 It is precisely this connection between torture and the civilising mission that Fanon gestures towards in ‘Face to Face with the Algerian Torturers’. What both Fanon and Kariuki crucially identify is the way in which torture is a symptom of the colonial formation of violence in Algeria and Kenya rather than an exceptional instance of counter-insurgency methods carried out by the military during anti-colonial resistance. As I will argue, the embodied experience of torture in colonial Kenya also gives the lie to the rhetoric of colonialism’s civilising mission. Focusing on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel A Grain of Wheat and Alex la Guma’s In the Fog of the Season’s End, this chapter considers how the retroactive articulation of torture constructs a traumatic structure through which to track the political foundation of the European colony. In doing so, it will suggest that this traumatic structure complicates the heroic narrative of




188 Stephen Morton

the anti-colonial subject and raises questions about what a revolutionary subject could be under such conditions.

Towards the end of his study of the Emergency period in colonial Kenya, David Anderson invokes a speech delivered on 27 July 1959 by the Conservative backbench MP Enoch Powell, in which Powell denounced the British colonial administration in Kenya: the key speech was from a Tory backbencher, who got to his feet to declaim the immorality of an empire that could permit a prison regime of this kind [referring to the eleven deaths at the Hola detention camps] to exist. He went on to declare that Britain had no right to an empire if it could not show moral leadership of a higher order. Since Powell ‘was a man who could normally be relied upon to defend the interests of kith and kin in the empire’, Anderson concludes that the ‘game of empire was really up in Kenya’.12 In saying this, Anderson locates a legitimation crisis in the British empire’s civilising mission, which exposes the way in which British political sovereignty was predicated on a system of terror, or political rule by intimidation. Yet this legitimation crisis was clearly not identical with national liberation as such. Indeed, the structure of colonial violence in which torture plays itself out questions the very meaning of political commitment and national sovereignty. One way in which this structure of violence seems to undermine the promise of national liberation is through the embodied experience of torture and violence on the body of the colonised. Such a structure is explored in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s novel A Grain of Wheat (1967). The novel is set on the eve of Kenya’s independence, and the narrative is structured as a series of separate analeptic sequences that document the emergency period in Kenya from the multiple perspectives of different characters. This use of analepsis is significant because it formally registers the process of deferred action through which the traumatic experiences of torture, violence and betrayal are gradually known and articulated by many of the novel’s protagonists. From the start of the novel, for instance, the character Mugo is described as an enigmatic and reclusive figure who appears to be in a state of psychological distress: Mugo felt nervous. He was lying on his back and looking at the roof . . . A clear drop of water was delicately suspended above him. The drop fattened and grew dirtier as it absorbed grains of soot. Then it started drawing towards him. He tried to shut his eyes. They would not close.



II


The use of simple sentence construction immediately establishes a sense of tension. Mugo’s fixation on the drop of water and his apparent state of physical paralysis evokes a subject who appears to lack agency. Through the use of multiple focalisation, the narrator goes on to suggest that Mugo is a hero who supported the national independence struggle against the British colonial administration and the Kenyan loyalists. This is particularly apparent in a subsequent conversation between Gikonyo and Wambui: ‘He is a strange man,’ Wambui commented. ‘Who?’ Warui asked. ‘Mugo.’ ‘It is the suffering,’ Gikonyo said. Do you know what it was to live in detention? It was easier, perhaps, with those of us not labelled hardcore. But Mugo was. So he was beaten, and yet would not confess the oath.’ (27) The villagers’ construction of Mugo as a hero of the national liberation struggle who fought alongside Kihika and refused to confess the Kikuyu nationalist oath of unity in the detention camp is, of course, undermined by the revelation at the end of the novel that he voluntarily betrayed Kihika to the District Officer, John Thompson, during the early period of the nationalist insurgency. That Mugo informs on Kihika in order to distance himself from the violent, nationalist insurgency movement and is subsequently mistaken for a hero of the same revolutionary movement is significant because it seems to undermine the emancipatory claims of national independence. Indeed, many critics have argued that Mugo’s betrayal of Kihika not only undermines the narrative of national independence that the novel seems to establish, but also cautions against the transition from a period of European colonialism to neocolonialism, in which an elite, educated business class rules over the Kenyan working class. For Byron Caminero-Santangelo, A Grain of Wheat uses a betrayal plot to warn against neocolonialism: In the new ‘postcolonial’ Kenyan nation, the belief that the age of colonialism is over because the British have left becomes a threat to



He tried to move his head: it was firmly chained to the bed-frame. The drop grew larger and larger as it drew closer to his eyes. He wanted to cover his eyes with his palms; but his hands, his feet, everything refused to obey his will.13

190 Stephen Morton

In a more polemical critique of A Grain of Wheat, David MaughamBrown contends that ‘Ngugi’s general implication seems to be that once concepts like “the masses” and “collective consciousness” are subjected to the test of close-up scrutiny what emerges is a network of private, self-delusory, messianic identifications which testify to an underlying principle of competition as the mainspring of human conduct’.15 The problem with A Grain of Wheat for Maugham-Brown is that the novel falls back on an ideology of liberal individualism, which depoliticises the insurgency movement by transforming it into a loose aggregate of guilty consciences. In this reading, what is implicit in Mugo’s betrayal of Kihika and the nationalist movement is the view that there can be no such thing as ‘organised popular resistance, or principled collective action’.16 The problem with Maugham-Brown’s critique, however, is that it assumes a romanticised view of the revolutionary peasant insurgent prior to the State of Emergency in Kenya. A Grain of Wheat may not focus on the social and economic circumstances that underpinned the nationalist insurgency movement in the forest of the Rift Valley and the Eastlands district of Nairobi. Yet by articulating the embodied experiences of torture and violence, Ngugi complicates the assumption of a revolutionary subject constituted prior to the liberation struggle itself. Instead, the novel foregrounds the psychological effects of torture and the threat of violence against Mau Mau detainees during the Emergency in Kenya to counter the nationalist resistance movement. In chapter 4, the use of torture and violence to rehabilitate Mau Mau insurgents in the detention camps is registered from the perspective of the colonial administrator, John Thompson. ‘During the Emergency’, the narrator asserts that Thompson ‘was seconded to detention camps, to rehabilitate Mau Mau adherents to a normal life as British subjects’.17 In this extract, Ngugi’s use of psychotherapeutic terms such as ‘rehabilitate’ and ‘normal life’ to describe the use and justification of torture and violence to obtain confessions of oath-taking by Mau Mau adherents clearly evokes how the British and the white settlers defined Mau Mau insurgents as an illness rather than an organised political movement for land and freedom. As David Anderson observes, the Mau Mau were explained by the British colonial government as a mental illness that was innate to the African in a state of transition to modernity. In response to this mental



the interests of a majority of Kenyans since it will mask the need for resistance against neo-colonialism . . . the danger is that despite the departure of the British, colonial and capitalist structures and ideology will continue to shape Kenyans’ perceptions.14

illness, the rhetoric of rehabilitation served to justify the moral imperative of colonialism as a civilising mission and to conceal its sovereign power. Yet Ngugi encourages readers to question this moral imperative with the revelation that Thompson was responsible for the deaths of the prisoners held in the detention camps, ‘At Rira, the tragedy of his life occurred. A hunger strike, a little beating and eleven detainees died.’18 The use of deliberate understatement in this passage not only highlights Thompson’s complicity in the use of violence to rehabilitate the Mau Mau fighters held in the detention camps, but also implies that torture and violence are part of the political foundation of the British colonial administration. The subsequent government inquiries and scapegoating of Thompson by the House of Commons and the world press might suggest that the practice of torture in the detention camps was both illegal and exceptional. Yet the treatment of Gatu and Gikonyo in the detention camps reinforces Fanon’s claim that ‘torture and violence are inherent in the whole colonialist configuration’. Indeed, Gatu’s punishment and subsequent murder exceed the small acts of resistance he carries out at the detention camp. Gatu’s mimicry of the Yala detention camp guards stands as a ‘symbol’ of the detainees’ ‘collective resistance’: ‘No amount of beating could silence Gatu. He would come back to the others and re-enact the recent drama in the office, mimicking the English voices and miming their features.’19 The solitary confinement of Gatu and his subsequent murder serve to break the Mau Mau detainees’ spirit of resistance; indeed, it is partly Gatu’s murder in his cell that prompts Gikonyo to confess to taking the oath of unity at the Yala detention camp. By invoking Fanon’s argument that torture is inherent in the colonial configuration, I want to challenge the criticism made by David Maugham Brown that A Grain of Wheat disavows the social and economic reasons for the violent, anti-colonial insurgency movement by focusing on the complicity of many Kenyans who were detained by the home guard under the British colonial administration. For what this reading blatantly overlooks is the way in which the embodied experience of state terrorism – including detention, torture or the threat of violence – threatened to undermine the subject of revolutionary insurgency. In A Grain of Wheat, Mugo’s fear of Kihika’s fanatical devotion to the cause of violent anti-colonial insurgency is not simply a fear of Kihika’s fanaticism; rather, it is a more general recognition that terrorism – in the form of state torture as well as anti-colonial resistance – defined the horizons of the political in the European colony.




192 Stephen Morton

It is precisely this understanding of the political that Foucault articulates in his definition of racism as a ‘way of introducing a break between the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (SMBD, 254). What this distinction between the biopolitical and the necropolitical implies is that it is a sovereign who defines the break between these categories: not a monarch, but a colonial sovereign such as an administrator, judge, policeman or soldier. Indeed, Foucault’s observation that ‘Racism first develops with colonization, or . . . colonizing genocide’ (SMBD, 257) assumes the presence of sovereign power that presides over colonisation and genocide. Yet to represent the exercise of sovereign power that Foucault describes is perhaps to make a spectacle of suffering and to become complicit with state terrorism. As the South African writer J. M. Coetzee argues in ‘Into the Dark Chamber’, ‘there is something tawdry about following the state in this way, making its vile mysteries the occasion of fantasy’.20 Against this relationship of complicity, Coetzee asserts that the challenge facing the writer concerned with torture is ‘not to play the game by the rules of the state . . . to establish one’s own authority . . . and to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms’.21 Of the South African novels that Coetzee claims have aestheticised torture and violence, Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Season’s End is singled out for its ‘dark lyricism’:22 ‘It is as though, in avoiding the trap of ascribing an evil grandeur to the police, La Guma finds it necessary to displace that grandeur, in an equivalent but negative form, onto their surroundings, lending to the very flatness of their world hints of a metaphysical depth’.23 Coetzee’s critique of La Guma is illuminating in its ethical caution against the aestheticisation of violence, but it overlooks the way in which La Guma reveals the violent foundation of the colonial state in order to promote resistance to the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the prologue, for instance, La Guma reveals the violence of the colonial state through the detectives’ clipped address to the prisoner as they drive to the city limits: ‘ “No more lawyers. Those times are past . . . We even keep the magistrates away now” . . . “We’ll make you shit,” the driver said viciously’.24 In this minimal dialogue, La Guma not only registers the suspension of civil law and the threat of physical violence, but also the sovereign power of the police over the bodily life and functions of the colonised. In so doing, La Guma stresses how the political foundation of the South African state under apartheid is based on terror rather than democracy and the rule of law. As the prisoner asserts, ‘ “You are going to



III

torture me, maybe kill me. But that is the only way you and your people can rule us. You shoot and kill and torture because you cannot rule in any other way a people who reject you.” ’25 In this speech, the prisoner, who is later revealed to be Elias, demystifies the violent foundations of the colonial state. Yet this is not to suggest that In the Fog of the Season’s End is merely concerned with the sovereign power of the torturer and the pain and suffering of the tortured prisoner. For the majority of the novel details the organisation of resistance to the apartheid state, and the scenes of torture also work to promote disaffection with the colonial regime. As Abdul JanMohamed puts it in Manichean Aesthetics, ‘in this novel the self-as-an-individual discovers his being in his existence for others, in his existence as a social being’.26 For JanMohamed, Elias not only achieves consciousness of ‘the social conditions in South Africa, but also of the only way out of those oppressive circumstances’.27 Indeed, it is Elias’s resistance to the will of his torturers at the end of the novel that signals his commitment to his comrades and to the struggle against the regime. In this sense, Elias gains sovereignty over his life (and death) by refusing to cooperate with the security forces. In doing so, Elias not only refuses the sovereign power of the torturer, but also the colonial system that the torturer represents. To be sure, in making torture visible to a reading public, writers such as Ngugi and La Guma would seem to challenge the apparent ‘disappearance of torture as a public spectacle’ that Foucault diagnoses in Discipline and Punish.28 Yet this challenge does not simply make a spectacle out of suffering (as Coetzee suggests). If, as Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish, physical pain and inflicting pain on the body of the condemned is ‘no longer the constituent element of the penalty’ in various European legal systems,29 both Ngugi and La Guma foreground the persistence of sovereign forms of violence and resistance to that violence in the context of the European colony, even though the colonial state attempts to conceal that violence from public knowledge. It is perhaps a little surprising that Foucault, writing in the 1970s in Discipline and Punish, makes no reference to the debate about the use of torture in French-occupied Algeria between Sartre, Fanon and de Beauvoir that became a part of public discourse on the French Left in the 1950s and early 1960s; to the use of indefinite detention and torture in British-occupied Kenya during the 1950s; or to the routine use of state torture in South Africa in the aftermath of the pass laws and the Sharpeville massacre. Yet, if we re-read Foucault’s analysis of torture in Discipline and Punish in light of what he subsequently says about racism in Society Must Be Defended – as that which




introduces ‘a break between the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (SMBD, 254) – it becomes possible to find exceptions to the historical break between sovereign power and disciplinary power that Foucault posits in Discipline and Punish. Such exceptions not only complicate the charge that Foucault’s analytic of power overlooks the persistence of sovereign power in the European colony, but also demonstrates the way in which Foucault’s account of a race war helps to make sense of contemporary formations of biopolitical and necropolitical control.

Notes 1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ‘The Martyr’, in Secret Lives (London: Heinemann, 1975), 45. 2. Ibid., 43. 3. Ibid., 48. 4. Frantz Fanon, ‘Concerning Violence’, in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 86. 5. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (London: Allen Lane, 1970); Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 6. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15.1 (2003), 11–40. 7. Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, Mau Mau Detainee (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 182. 8. Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria Face to Face with the French Torturers’, in Towards the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 64. 9. Ibid., 64 10. Rita Maran, Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French–Algerian War (New York: Praeger, 1989), 21–2. 11. Ibid., 189. 12. David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005), 327. 13. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002), 1. 14. Byron Caminero-Santangelo, ‘Neocolonialism and the Betrayal Plot in A Grain of Wheat’, Research in African Literatures, 29 (1998), 144. 15. David Maugham-Brown, Land, Freedom and Fiction: History and Ideology in Kenya (London: Zed Books, 1985), 249. 16. Ibid., 250. 17. Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat, 46. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 105–6.



194 Stephen Morton

20. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State’, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 364. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 365. 23. Ibid. 24. Alex la Guma. In the Fog of the Season’s End (London: Heinemann, 1972), 2. 25. Ibid., 6. 26. Abdul JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), 258. 27. Ibid., 259. 28. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 7. 29. Ibid., 11.




‘Manual for a Raid’ and ‘Henslowe’s Diary’: Foucault and the Multiple Meanings of the Document Rebecca Fensome

Michel Foucault’s has recently been published in English under the title Society Must Be Defended.1 In the series of lectures given at the Collège de France between January and March 1976 Michel Foucault ‘quite specifically outlines the programme for a genealogy of the relations between power and knowledge’ in contrast to his earlier focus on ‘the archaeology of discursive formations that had previously been his dominant concern’.2 These lectures raise questions about race, history and biopolitics, and for this reason, thinkers such as Achille Mbembe and Julian Reid have argued that Society Must Be Defended is relevant to the post9/11 world. In this chapter I turn back from Society Must Be Defended to analyse, in the light of such a critical reassessment of Foucault’s thought, how his earlier work on the archive relates to the development of discourses of power that Foucault identifies. Specifically, I revisit Foucault’s discussion of the statement and the archive in Archaeology of Knowledge3 by examining two very different documents: ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ and the ‘Manual for a Raid’.4 At stake in such a comparison is both the nature of the continued use of Foucault in early modern studies and also what the legacy of readings of ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ can reveal about the problems of interpreting archives such as the ‘Manual for a Raid’. Three fragmentary documents of Arabic text written in ballpoint pen on lined paper have become critical material traces of the 9/11 hijackers. These copies of the ‘Manual for a Raid’, containing instructions for carrying out the attack were found in the aftermath of the disaster, one in a hire car left at Dulles Airport, one in the wreckage of United Airlines Flight 93 and the third in the luggage of Mohammed Atta, who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It appears that both Mohammed Atta and the owner of the document found at the site of the United Airlines 93 crash intended that 196



10

197

the document should accompany them to their death. Atta’s luggage (in which a copy of the document had been placed), unlike Atta himself, did not make the connecting flight, American Airlines Flight 11. The third copy, found in the hire car, was perhaps forgotten in haste. The title by which it has come to be known is of only limited use. As a ‘manual’ it gives few practical instructions on how to carry out the ‘raid’, and concentrates instead on providing direction on prayer and preparation through allusion to the deeds of the Prophet, impressing on its implied readers the need for repeated invocatory prayer to cast them into a quasi-historical parallel vision of the world that would supposedly remove them from the reality of the acts they had chosen to commit. In Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault provides a method of questioning the structure of the statement, the document, and the archive which can help the reader untangle the web of meanings and interpretative paths enjoined on a text when it forms part of multiple, pressing discourses. The function of the discourse in which the manual can be positioned can then be seen as driven by a particular desire to impose a world-view on its readers. The manual is ‘a phantasmic representation’, comprising ‘an element of symbolization, a form of the forbidden, an instrument of derived satisfaction’ (76). In the short life of the manual its use has been transformed. Despite its lack of practical instruction, it played a part, however small, in contributing to the deadly determination of the hijackers to carry out their attack. It has since been used as a guide for those analysing 9/11, becoming woven into the narratives that have been constructed to try to ground what happened into some sort of coherent narrative. It has been used to try to get into the minds of the nineteen men, part of the forensic jigsaw of statements and documents employed to picture what the beliefs of these men comprised. As this document will no doubt be read and reread in different contexts over the coming years for what it can contribute to the various discourses that have emerged through and out of the 9/11 attacks, using Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge as a way of reading this document and interrogating these readings may prove a useful exercise. To help illustrate this supposition, this chapter utilises for contrast a document that has been variously interpreted for over 400 years for the light it sheds on various discourses that have arisen through interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical culture. ‘Henslowe’s Diary’, as it has come to be known, the memorandum book left by a theatrical landlord of the 1590s, has become an important source for several branches of literary criticism and theatre history, for those looking at different ways of examining the theatre industry in early modern England and attempting to



The Multiple Meanings of the Document

ascertain what it can, and cannot, tell us about today’s big issues. Foucault provides a way of seeing the ‘Manual for a Raid’ and ‘Henslowe’s Diary’, so different in terms of their age and purpose, as instrumental in the reconstruction and recontextualisation of the events they are linked with. Both documents have been infused with significance on the premise that ideological traces can be gleaned from material remains. That premise and the methods used to practise are analysed here. The actor Geoffrey Rush appears in the 1999 film Shakespeare in Love as the flustered and harassed Philip Henslowe, a minor comic character in this likeable romantic comedy.5 This rather scrawny theatrical middleman spends his on-screen life juggling demands from ‘the money’ on one hand and the unreliability of artists on the other. He plays a small but significant part in the adventures of Joseph Fiennes’s Shakespeare, a part that reflects the role of Henslowe in countless scholarly narratives of Shakespeare and early modern drama. Henslowe was not a poet or a politician, and if it were not for the fact that his theatrical accounting material survives, detailing the receipts he took between February 1592 and November 1597 as landlord of the Rose theatre, he would have remained a peripheral figure. It is these accounts, and the manuscript book of business and personal transactions from which they are taken, which hold the codes to countless versions of the Shakespeare story. It is not without irony that this is despite the fact that Henslowe’s Rose theatre became the great rival of the nearby Globe theatre with which Shakespeare is most closely associated and that Shakespeare’s name never actually appears in ‘Henslowe’s Diary’. Traditionally, the Diary has been perceived as a storehouse of data concerning the theatre contemporary with Shakespeare, and many of the statements contained in it have been raided in an attempt to unlock the secrets of this beguiling world. In Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault tests alternative definitions of the ‘statement’ and explains that it is not limited to the grammatical structure of the sentence. He says ‘a genealogical tree, an accounts book, the calculations of a trade balance are statements . . . an equation of the nth degree, or the algebraic formula of the law of refraction must be regarded as statements’ (93). A statement can be transformed by a variant spelling, a comma, even a wormhole. Peter Blayney’s minutely detailed examination of another manuscript connected with the early modern theatre, the collaborative play The Booke of Sir Thomas More, enabled him to challenge previous scholarly orthodoxy relating to the order in which the pages were written by showing that they could be correctly placed by tracing the progress of a seventeenth-century worm as it munched its way through the sheets.



198 Rebecca Fensome

199

This had ramifications for the dating of the play and the identification of the various ‘hands’ that wrote it, thought to include Shakespeare’s. Where Shakespeare is concerned, any statement that can be linked to his world is of such value that archives are continuously raided in the hope that fresh documentary evidence will be found and new stories written. Considering the process of constructing Shakespeare discourse may be aided by Foucault’s description of the statement as ‘not in itself a unit, but a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contexts, in time and space’ (98). ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ has been used as a cache of information on a whole panoply of entertainment and culture in early modern England. Plays in the Diary appear as markers of the economic transactions that fed this scene. The working sets of theatre accounts include tallies that record Henslowe’s receipts for particular plays. They have the authority of a recognisable currency and there is no reason to suggest that Henslowe had any motive to falsify the figures. The appeal of seeing the document as a stable, transparent representation increases when the patterns of takings, and the attendance figures they indicate, can be matched to plays that Henslowe records – Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine plays or Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, which are still extant today. From Henslowe’s accounts, generations of literary critics and theatre historians have sought clues to the careers of the dramatists, the personal details about the functioning of their lives and the personalities involved. Nowhere does Henslowe offer us his own opinions of the plays or comment on their context. This absence of personal judgement or creative effort in the account leaves room for the insertion of that of the critics and historians who use him. Henslowe’s stance is a commercial one; the money a play took could depend on a number of factors, but the esteem in which it was held – its importance in the dramatic canon – is, effectively, a record of the opinions and judgements of others contemporary with Henslowe who were the original audience of his plays. The Diary records his capitalism – the sordid economic affairs that artists were supposed to rise above – and so his place in a context dominated by Shakespeare and his fellow writers has not always been a happy one. To generations of his readers, Henslowe was an obstacle to the creativity of the artists. In fact, some have even tried to take him out of Shakespeare’s biographical narrative and made him a muse in his dramatic life – in 1948 Norman Nathan asked, ‘Is Shylock Philip Henslowe?’6 This tradition of casting Henslowe as the money-grubbing villain of early modern theatre runs deep. Although extracts of the Diary were first published in Edmond Malone’s 1790 edition of Shakespeare,7 and John




200 Rebecca Fensome

an illiterate moneyed man . . . who regarded art as a subject for exploitation, and was alike ignorant of stage management and dramatic literature . . . He managed, by a policy well known to the tallymen and money-lenders of the present time, to keep his actors in subservience and his poets in constant need by one simple method, viz., by lending them money and never allowing their debts to be fully paid off.10 Fleay put the poets and players on one side and Henslowe the money manager on the other. Not surprisingly, the scholars who accepted this division were keen to side with the artists, or more specifically with Shakespeare, despite the fact that Shakespeare was not one of the playwrights with whom Henslowe recorded any commercial dealings. The anti-Henslowe rhetoric can be seen as a part of the appropriation of Shakespeare through discourse conducted posthumously on his behalf. The arguments over who was entitled to speak for him or who could most accurately represent him, increased in intensity as Shakespeare grew to become a principal representative of empire, patriarchal authority and class distinction. Analysis of the scholarly discourses in which statements from ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ are assimilated can therefore be aided by the use of Foucault’s formula for interrogation of the document: ‘Who . . . is accorded the right to use this sort of language (langage)? Who is qualified to do so? Who derives from it his own special quality, his prestige, and from whom, in return, does he receive if not the assurance, at least the presumption that what he says is true?’ (55). More recent theatre historians have swept away the perceived opposition between Henslowe and the players, seeing him instead as an important figure in the theatrical community, his fortune bound up with that of the players and his interest in them not merely financial but personal – his step-daughter Joan Woodward married Edward Alleyn, one of the leading players of the day. Bernard Beckerman and S. P. Cerasano in particular have highlighted how the theatrical, business and personal connections between Henslowe and Alleyn were intertwined.11 Beckerman describes Henslowe’s loan system as a developing one that can be traced through the Diary records. ‘In 1594 [Henslowe] began to make fairly frequent loans to individuals: first to friends, relatives



Payne Collier brought out his own edition in 1845,8 it was F. G. Fleay’s assessment of Henslowe in his 1890 Chronicle History of the London Stage which was to set the tone for much subsequent scholarship.9 Fleay, one of the leading Shakespearean scholars of his age, described Henslowe as

201

and business associates; later to a few select players. Only after 1596 did loans seem to become more widespread.’12 He adds that Henslowe charged little or no interest. As the official outlawed figure for usury was then 10 per cent and that the only firm evidence for Henslowe charging interest was one occasion where he charged 6¼ per cent, the portrayal of him as a Shylock-esque usurer or a money-lender who ruthlessly exploited artists cannot be grounded in documentary evidence. For late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholars then, Henslowe is modelled as a ‘reasonably able, reasonably decent businessman of the Elizabethan age’ whose practices are made familiar and understandable. Beckerman states that the advantage Henslowe gained from this benign and cooperative conduct was ‘stability. He was guaranteeing continuous use of his playhouse through his loans.’13 As the commercial aspects of Shakespeare and early modern theatre history have become important areas of critical debate, Henslowe’s role as source of actual facts and figures has become more crucial. Despite, perhaps even because of, the extremely varied use to which the Diary has been put by scholars, most would agree that it is an ‘extraordinary document’.14 Its connection with aspects of the economy, environment, social history and, of course, Shakespeare add intangible value to what, on the face of it, is no more than the documented commentary of a moderately successful businessman. The character of the Diary is appealingly interpreted in Shakespeare in Love, when Henslowe, confronted with a brooding Shakespeare quoting Hamlet at him, interrupts, ‘No, no we haven’t the time. Talk prose. Where is my play?!’ Similarly, in the Diary itself, receipts for famous, familiar, lost and forgotten plays jostle for space with spells, rent payments, descriptions of fantastical costume purchases and pitiful records of keepsakes pawned (for example, Henslowe, 40, 41 and 253). Payments to some of the most famous playwrights of the period are recorded in the same document that records the wages of carpenters, tilers and other labourers who built and modified the building in which their plays were performed. The limits of Shakespeare discourse are continually being pushed and in this space where something new to say, or additional transformative aspects to append to the old narrative are being sought, ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ offers an authoritative starting point. For example, William Ingram used the Diary to help construct the narratives of two relatively little known players – James Tunstall and John Garland.15 These narratives enrich the picture of early modern theatre life and add to the attractive and marketable multiplicity of Shakespeare discourse. As Shakespeare enhances the narratives of the protagonists in




his plays with minor parts that are portraits in miniature, purveyors of Shakespeare discourse can develop their own stories by creating cameo roles for Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Henslowe expert Neil Carson has utilised the Diary to build up a picture of the working processes of other early modern playwrights – Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood. His findings lead him to see ‘the playwright as a relatively independent agent who seems to have had considerable control over his own methods of work and to have used that freedom to market his skills, alone or associated with others, to his greatest advantage’.16 The Diary, then, proves a vital document for proving the independence and authority of the creative writers it mentions in contrast to the opinions of earlier scholars who sought to demonstrate how Henslowe had a stranglehold on them. Perhaps it is simply that the idea of a fight, whether it be a playwrights’ quarrel, a war of the theatres or a clash of egos, has always added to the attractiveness of a creative/critical narrative. Details that can be interpreted in such a way are not lacking in ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ – even a single word can make for dramatic speculation. Consider, for example, the meaning of the word ‘bricklayer’ in Henslowe’s famous description of the death of Gabriel Spencer at the hands of Ben Jonson: ‘I haue lost one of my company wch hurteth me greatly that is gabrell for he is slayen in hoges den fylldes by the hands of benge Jonson bricklayer’ (286) – a stinging statement when it is borne in mind that Henslowe had been making payments to Jonson for plays and alterations to plays for several years (73 and 182). Rosalyn Knutson gives another example of how entries in ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ can be particularly tantalising with regard to the protagonists of early modern drama: ‘Among the lost documents that might illuminate the personality of Ben Jonson is “Hot Anger Soon Cold”, a playscript for which the Admiral’s men paid £6 to Jonson, Henry Porter, and Henry Chettle on 18 August 1598’.17 Many jottings in the Diary, whether numbers or letters, have provided possibilities for the growth of a narrative. In 1948, J. M. Nosworthy devoted an article in Notes and Queries to the explication of two words that Henslowe used – dornackes’ and ‘colysenes’ – saying that ‘Philip Henslowe’s pawn accounts and records of domestic transactions are of comparatively little interest, but, since they form an integral part of an important diary, it is desirable that any obscurities in the existing editions should be clarified’.18 The slightest reference becomes important enough to be explained, expounded and mined for meanings that contribute to the story of individuals – to see how the playwrights went about their work, how much money they made or lost, their lifestyles, the dynamics of the theatres, the relationships within it, even that they



202 Rebecca Fensome

203

wore silver badges (colysenes) and were able to pawn tapestries made of French fabrics (dornicques). Henslowe can be expanded to be the source of a commentary on the whole of Elizabethan life, and links are being forged with issues and priorities of today. The Diary has been used as a springboard for analysing contemporary issues – for example, in ‘ “Beasts of Recreacion” ’: Henslowe’s White Bears’, Barbara Ravelhofer combines her analysis of polar bears and other creatures kept by Henslowe with accounts of current practices associated with performing animals and the cruelty that can be inflicted, an approach that demands an active response from the reader.19 The financing and management of bearbaiting was integral to Henslowe’s theatrical investments and concerns.20 In today’s society where the plays of Shakespeare and the goading of live animals would not normally share the same space, Henslowe’s connection to both enables those who specialise in early modern theatre to turn references in the documents they study into new documents, which draw the reader’s attention to current practices and enhance the relevance of historical studies to current issues. Gabriel Egan makes a powerful case for ecocriticism in relation to literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage and he too uses the example of the polar bear: The bears in Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon (performed 1 January 1611) and in the anonymous play Mucedorus performed at court by the King’s Men in 1610 or 1611 were white . . . As the polar bears start to make their exit from historical reality, we must consider the distinct possibility that humankind will shortly after follow them offstage.21 Henslowe’s bears matter because the narratives of their interaction with humans have a long history and the future looks to be similarly entwined. The depletion of the world’s resources has been the price paid for a commercial development that has been the focus, in microcosm, of recent studies dealing with the implications of the growth of the leisure and entertainment industry in early modern London. Ravelhofer reinforces the dual nature of Henslowe’s role as theatrical landlord and the affinity between the plays and the baitings as a money-making exercise: Just as the actor only suffered a stage death, the purpose of baiting was not the demise of dog and bear, which represented, after all, a financial investment – rather, efforts aimed at a diversified entertainment . . . Baiting was a scenic spectacle, a showpiece of controlled violence under the auspices of a master producer.22




Her inclusion of graphic description of early modern training and performance, combined with evidence of its continuance today, has a powerful effect. She does not allow the documents of the past to be read through the comfort of their historical distance. Foucault says that a statement ‘is endowed with a certain modifiable heaviness, a weight relative to the field in which it is placed, a constancy that allows of various uses, a temporal permanence that does not have the inertia of a mere trace or mark, and which does not sleep on its own past’ (117–18). Although this emphasises a statement’s structure rather than its content, both are relevant in this ecocritical discourse. The Henslowe documents that Ravelhofer utilises, remote in both time and purpose, help indict current practices as they reinforce their strangeness. Through inclusion in a journal about early modern English literature, the documents are placed in an historical era, and the reader is encouraged to urge that the real-life practices they are associated with are, too, consigned to the past. ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ also contains evidence that his family was involved in the businesses which contributed to the deforestation of parts of Ashdown Forest in Sussex and the resourcing of the developing arms trade.23 Although it is the theatrical accounts in the Diary that have been transcribed and published, the book itself formerly belonged to Philip Henslowe’s elder brother John, and his accounts that deal with woodcutting, colliery and mining found in the original manuscript have been investigated in more detail. An authority on ‘Henslowe’s Diary’, Cerasano has written a number of articles dealing with elements of ‘mapping’ that can be applied to the document. She plots the geographical narrative in the diary and elucidates the patronage networks that operated in the social and business spheres in which Henslowe and his Diary operated.24 As Master of the Game at Ashdown Forest and Broil Park, Philip and John Henslowe’s father, Edmond Henslowe (also known as Hensley) had a position of prestige and responsibility. Cerasano emphasises the elaborate personal and trade connections that this appointment was a part of, and how patron–client relationships affected the careers of Philip Henslowe and his son-in-law, Edward Alleyn. However, Cerasano also hints at the responsibilities of Henslowe’s father, which were closer to what we would recognise today as those of an estate manager or warden of a park, and that patron–client relationships may have compromised this. Lord Buckhurst was a prominent Sussex nobleman who owned several iron-producing furnaces in the vicinity of the forest. Cerasano relates ‘one notorious episode’ in which a large number of trees were stolen from



204 Rebecca Fensome

205

Ashdown Forest during Edmond Henslowe’s period of office, ‘obviously for use in fuelling the local iron mines’. Edmond denied responsibility for the theft and blamed a group of 23 men. Cerasano states that ‘Despite the magnitude of the loss . . . nothing more was made of the disappearing trees or Hensley’s potential role in the incident, probably because Lord Buckhurst was then overseer of the forest and Hensley his client.’25 The veracity of the detail of this incident is perhaps less significant than the connections it establishes. It was interest in Shakespeare that prompted investigation of Henslowe, and such investigation that has led to explorations of his family and political connections. Cerasano has shown that Philip’s success as a businessman was reflected in his success at court and that these two aspects of his life were tightly connected. The manuscript that contains the forestry and mining accounts of John Henslowe as well as the business dealings and at court of his younger brother Philip gathers the narratives of the commercial development of various industries, the demise of Sussex woodland and the social networks that linked the two with the fortunes of families, individuals and the Crown. Rather than marginalia attached to the theatrical documentation, John Henslowe’s accounts are evidence in the discourse of environmental despoilation in the area and regain their political relevance with regard to issues of how the world’s natural resources are distributed. ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ acquired significant contemporary impact on the discovery of the foundations of the Rose theatre and the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank of the Thames in 1989. C. C. Rutter’s introduction to the revised edition of Documents of the Rose Playhouse tells the dramatic story of the effort by campaigners, headed by leading actors and academics, to save the site from being built on by the property developers who had bought the land. The struggle for the Rose involved politicians at the highest level, with Margaret Thatcher herself stating that ‘everything must be done to preserve those remains so that one day they may be on public display’.26 As deadlines for development drew closer, household names from stage and screen – Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Dench, Peter Hall, Dustin Hoffman and Ralph Fiennes – joined the demonstrations, creating a media interest which showed how the theatre was dependent on the star quality associated with it. However, as Rutter points out, the Rose Campaign failed to raise the vast sum of money needed to ‘save’ this piece of highly valuable real estate from development. Sam Wanamaker, the man behind the development of Shakespeare’s Globe, was having more success, as the Globe was indubitably connected with Shakespeare, whereas ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ fails to




mention his name in connection with the Rose or with Henslowe personally. According to Rutter ‘Henslowe, the capitalist, would probably have appreciated the irony of Art rallying to defend his playhouse from Big Business; but also, once again of his Rose being eclipsed by the Globe.’27 He may well have drawn some comfort, though, from the publicity his Rose drew and from the contextual information that his Diary supplied to those involved in the Globe project. It is perhaps the transformation of the Diary, from its early purpose as a space to record business transactions, to its role as a valuable document in assisting the establishment of a new commercial theatre project that is most relevant to Foucault’s archaeological method of examining documents. Foucault speaks of the traditional function of history as that of questioning the document – finding meanings for it, establishing its authenticity and authorial intention. He says the aim of history traditionally was ‘the reconstitution, on the basis of what the documents say and sometimes merely hint at, of the past from which they emanate and which has now disappeared far behind them’ (Archaeology, 7). In relation to the Diary, then, this traditional approach to history might include using it as evidence in the study of commercial aspects of the early modern theatre and of how the theatre was placed as part of the early modern economy. However, Foucault’s vision for the analysis of documents is different: Instead of seeing, on the great mythical book of history, lines of words that translate in visible characters thoughts that were formed in some other time and place, we have in the density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive. (145) Foucault presents the archive as a space where history is not simply recorded but where it is created, a concept that various literary critics and theatre historians since the 1970s have embraced. Foucault is often referenced when power relations, the role of the state and the status of the marginalised or oppressed are discussed.28 By emphasising function instead of content, Foucault explains how diverse interpretative strands can extend through the statement and interconnect with others to create a discourse that can override categories such as the genre, the oeuvre and the historical period. A well as interrogating the classification of



206 Rebecca Fensome

207

statements that restrict the scope of their interpretation, Foucault argues that the rarity of statements, or the infinite mass of the unsaid, pressures people into increasing the proliferation of interpretations: ‘To interpret is a way of reacting to enunciate poverty, and to compensate for it by a multiplication of meaning’ (135–6). Foucault’s method of analysis releases readers from always judging a statement’s accuracy in providing the point of view of an author or the facts of an event. For Foucault, statements have ‘A value that is not defined by their truth, that is not gauged by the presence of a secret content; but which characterizes their place, their capacity for circulation and exchange, their possibility of transformation, not only in the economy of discourse, but, more generally, in the administration of scarce resources’ (136). ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ is one such asset and has proved to be a ‘node in a network’ (25–6) of many discourses, most overarched by the familiar theme of Shakespeare, a potent figurehead for the marketing of early modern cultural and socio-historical discourse. The status of the document increased with the number of scholars using it as a resource, fuelling a demand for new editions, and as accessibility to the Diary became easier, so did the uses to which it was put. Foucault provided literary criticism and theatre history with a model for exploring the mechanisms and apparatuses behind the early modern drama, resulting in the role of a facilitator like Henslowe becoming far more important that it was to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholars. People in similar roles – for example, Christopher Beeston (owner of the Cockpit theatre) and Francis Langley (who built the Swan theatre) – in the past marginal to the life and work of the playwrights and poets, have gained prominence in this field of study. After Foucault, critics and historians have had a methodology which enables them to shift their focus away from Shakespeare, the charismatic figurehead, to the construction of the early modern commercial theatre through the facilitators and administrators functioning within the interweaving networks of court and commerce. It has also enabled them to look back on the Shakespeare discourses which have accumulated and chart how the documents themselves have transformed histories. In comparison with ‘Henslowe’s Diary’, the ‘Manual for a Raid’ has only just commenced afterlives of transformation and multiple interpretation. Already the document, or sections of it, has appeared in several different contexts. On the FBI website, only pages 2–5 have been officially disclosed.29 The webpage displays it as a sequence of photographs, framing the manual as a macabre relic, a piece of evidence, to counter




conspiracy theories that were emerging in the aftermath of the attacks – to establish that the hijackers were suicide attackers and that their motivation could be found in a perversion of Islamic texts. No translation is offered for non-Arabic readers. The webpage also shows the document’s physical form – chilling in that it appears so ordinary. It is not anonymously typed, stamped or sealed; it is a piece of ephemera, whose relationship with its content tells a story of its own, the handwriting on the commonplace paper giving the document a sense of both intimacy and authenticity. Kanan Makiya and Hassan Mneimneh analyse the document and provide an English translation in their contribution to Striking Terror: America’s New War, a collection of essays written for the New York Review of Books in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Makiya and Mneimneh’s article is dated 19 December 2001 (the FBI published the document on 28 September 2001).30 They write: We don’t know who wrote this document. From everything in it, the author seems to have been an organizer of the attacks. But the text contains a valuable record of the ideas that the hijackers would have been expected to accept. One of its underlying assumptions is that all its intended readers were going to die. It seems clearly intended for the eyes of the hijackers and no one else, and reads as if it were written to stiffen their resolve. One would expect each person to have studied his copy very carefully beforehand, reading it over many times before the mission.31 Their account emphasises the value of the document imparted by its privacy, the hijackers being subject to instruction by the anonymous author of the document. The substitution of letters for locations adds to the sense that this is a coded document, a forbidden text that should not be read by those not party to the plot, even at the remove of translation. Makiya and Mneimneh explain the document’s placing of an attack within Islamic history, with particular reference to the Prophet’s actions between 622 and 632. They explain how ‘This period, stripped of all historical context, becomes the mythical environment in which the hijackers view their actions’.32 Along with the collapsing and selection of an historical context, the document attempts to imbue the action with spirituality and ritual by referring to the attack as a ‘raid’ or ghazwah. Makiya and Mneimneh explain how by using this term, the author deliberately places this attack alongside the actions of the Prophet. In response, Makiya and Mneimneh use quotation marks around the word



208 Rebecca Fensome

209

in their title, ‘Manual for a “Raid”’, stemming the continuance of the connection in their essay. The existence of the document allows Makiya and Mneimneh to deconstruct it, to unpick the ideology behind it. The absence of the first page, not released to the public, naturally leads readers to speculate about what it contains. Makiya and Mneimneh comment on how ‘Page two begins abruptly, without the traditional basmallah, or invocation of God’s name, and without any of the formulaic phrases which one would expect in a text permeated with references to the Koran and the Prophet’. Perhaps the first page of the document bears such invocations; perhaps the FBI wanted to avoid any more authenticity being added to ‘[t]he uses and distortions of Muslim sources in the hijackers’ document’.33 It is a motivation that can perhaps be discerned in the format of Hassan Mneimneh’s translation, appended to the article, where he notes that in his translation ‘[h]onorifics for God and the Prophet have been omitted’. The document interweaves episodes from the Koran with invocations and prayers to sustain and occupy the hijackers through the duration of their task, while maintaining references to the actual course of predicted events to aid them to construct their narrative over the deeds that they have committed themselves to. Emphasising that they are acting against Satan, the document dehumanises their fellow passengers and refers to the opportunity to kill anyone who resists them as a gift from God, to be committed as a ritual slaughter. Makiya and Mneimneh explain: ‘[b]etween God’s generosity in providing an occasion for slaughter and the obligation of filial devotion (greatly stressed in the Koran) is the act of slitting a passenger’s throat with a box cutter’.34 Makiya and Mneimneh’s reading of the document suggests that it was authored by someone in a position of authority, who was trying to bolster the determination of the hijackers and enforce the idea that what they were carrying out was a religious duty, to be compared with the actions of the Prophet’s companions. They state that there was ‘Powerful evidence that bin Laden was behind the September 11 attack, and is therefore the inspiration behind the document’.35 Michael Griffin, in his 2003 revised edition of Reaping the Whirlwind: Afghanistan, Al Qa’ida and the Holy War heads his chapter dealing with the 9/11 attacks ‘Manual of a raid’.36 He intersperses his account and analysis with selected passages from the document, in a similar translation to Makiya and Mneimneh’s. By interjecting lines from the document within a narrative of the last few years of Mohammed Atta’s life, the promises and injunctions of the document act as a force pulling the narrative towards its tragic conclusion.




210 Rebecca Fensome

five page document, taken down by a woman from dictation, according to handwriting experts, [which] gives the suicide bomber guidance on how to spend his last night on earth as it inches through the darkness into the measured but heightened reality of a martyrdom operation. Intended to stiffen the martyr’s resolve.37 As in Makiya and Mnemnieh’s account, Griffin’s analysis hints at the desire for the identification of an author – to see the document’s origin as being the same as or closely connected to the instigator of the attacks. Foucault’s scrutiny of the concepts of author and oeuvre is perhaps relevant here. He cautions against accepting these categories without analysis and suggests that the author ‘is not in fact the cause, origin, or starting-point of the phenomenon of the written or spoken articulation of a sentence’ (107) and observes that [d]ifferent oeuvres, dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive formation – and so many authors who do or do not know one another, meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea. (143) In Masterminds of Terror: The Truth behind the Most Devastating Terrorist Attack the World Has Ever Seen (2003), Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding handle analysis of the document slightly differently.38 They explain 9/11 in the context of an interview which the journalist Fouda conducted with two alleged senior al-Quaeda members, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, before they were arrested by Pakistani and American agents. In the narrative of Fouda’s interview, he mentions how the manual had previously been attributed to Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian leader of the group, because he was thought to be in charge of the attack and because one of the copies was found in his luggage. According to Fouda, Ramzi Binalshibh told him that Atta was not the author of the instructions and prayers found in his luggage. They had been written by Abdul Aziz al-Omari, Atta’s fellow hijacker who was with him during the last hours of his life. Al Omari, although one of the youngest of the hijackers, was recognised



Griffin puts forward a similar but more detailed idea for the origin of the document. He presents it as a


211

In this narrative then, al-Omari is ‘Advising himself and his “brothers” on their conduct during the hijacks’. From being interpreted as a guide from the top echelons of the organisation to its operatives on the front line, it now becomes a more intimate document, produced and circulated within a small group of men intent on killing themselves and thousands with them. Fouda and Fielding’s chapter ‘The Hour is Nigh, the Moon is Split’ interweaves sentences from the manual for a raid into the narrative in which his interview with Ramzi and the various other sources which gave information about the flights are also incorporated. The translation varies slightly though. What follows is a passage from the translations used in the three books.40 When the [plane] starts moving and heads towards [takeoff], recite the supplication of travel, because you are traveling to God, May you be blessed in this travel.41 When the airplane starts moving and heads towards [takeoff], recite the supplication of travel, because you are travelling to God. May you be blessed in this travel.42 Then, when (T) taxis and begins to ascend in the direction of (Q), recite the prayers of travel, for you are travelling to Almighty Allah. (And enjoy your travel.)43 Griffin’s translation is perhaps the most sombre. As in Makiya and Mneimneh’s translation, the last sentence is not in parentheses, but in addition, Griffin regularises the punctuation, which has the effect of making the rhythm of the words more measured. Fouda and Fielding’s use of the word ‘enjoy’ rather than ‘blessed’ adds an element of the sinister to the vocabulary as well as the content, which imparts more of an inevitability about the horrors that would follow. Whereas in Makiya and Mneimneh’s and Griffin’s book it is ‘God’ who is referred to, Fouda and Fielding explicitly use ‘Allah’. Through translation, multiplication of meaning accompanies multiplication of statements as the books containing them are distributed to a mass market of non-Arabic speakers. Terry McDermott’s book Perfect Soldiers has the eyes of Mohammed Atta, as seen in his passport photo, staring out from the front cover. He notes that Atta’s luggage, which failed to make it onto the connecting flight which Atta and al-Omari only just caught, contained ‘nearly every important document in his life – his will, the “Last Night” instructions



by the rest as having an exceptional knowledge of Islam – and a neat hand.39

[i.e. the manual for a raid], his high school diploma, his TUHH [Technical University of Hamburg – Harburg] diploma, his original visa for Germany from Egypt, a power of attorney, employee evaluations, even the certificate from the Goethe Institute in Cairo where he had learned German’, yet this archive provides only selective beacons for narratives of Atta’s life and death.44 Foucault’s archaeology discourages attempts to explain a statement/event through seeking the origin of the discourse in the narrative of single author or within the formula of a traditional categorisation. He stresses the limitations of reducing a discourse to a unity, offering instead his own method of analysis, which is ‘to describe a group of statements, not as the closed, plethoric totality of a meaning, but as an incomplete, fragmented figure’ (141). To acknowledge that a discursive formation ‘is not a rich, difficult germination, it is a distribution of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions’ (134) is not however to deny the potential of the statements which remain. This paucity of statements results in a plethora of meanings, which form the ongoing discourses in which the statements are located and through which they are understood. This has meant that the sixteenth-century manuscript ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ has enjoyed a diversity of discourses, some of which have sought to use the statements found in the Diary to enrich narratives of Shakespeare and his world, while others have, by denying the reader the security of historical distance, disrupted a discourse ostensibly about the past in order to link it to current issues requiring action. As the texts incorporating and interpreting the ‘Manual for a Raid’ increase in number over the coming years, this document too has the capacity to provide diverse meanings for those who create narratives.45 Revisiting Foucault’s method offers a timely reminder that the document is part of a complex web of statements, flawed and incomplete, which precludes the identification of a single author and insists on an interrogation of complacent classification.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 2. Ibid., xi–xii. 3. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002). Subsequently referred to as Archaeology. 4. Hassan Mneimneh’s translation of pp. 2–5 of the document are appended to Makiya and Mneimneh, ‘Manual for a “Raid”’, in Robert B. Silversand



212 Rebecca Fensome

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

213

and Barbara Epstein (eds.), Striking Terror: America’s New War (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002). All quotations from Henslowe’s Diary are taken from R. A. Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Subsequently referred to in the text as Henslowe. Shakespeare in Love, dir. John Madden, 1999. Norman Nathan, ‘Is Shylock Philip Henslowe?’ Notes & Queries, 193 (1948), 163–5. Edmond Malone, William Shakespeare: Plays and Poems (London, 1790). J. Payne Collier (ed.), The Diary of Philip Henslowe, from 1591 to 1609 (London: Shakespeare Society, 1845). F. G. Fleay, A Chronicle History of the London Stage, 1559–1642 (London: Reaves and Turner, 1890). Rutter provides an account of how Fleay’s view of Henslowe influenced subsequent interpretations of the diary: C. C. Rutter (ed.), Documents of the Rose Playhouse, revised edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 2. Fleay, A Chronicle, 117, quoted in ibid., 2–3. Bernard Beckerman, ‘Philip Henslowe’, in Joseph W. Donohue (ed.), The Theatrical Manager in England and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1971), 26; and S. P. Cerasano, ‘The Patronage Network of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 13 (2001), 82–92. Beckerman, ‘Henslowe’, 32. Ibid., 61 and 43. Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 35; but see S. P. Cerasano, ‘Henslowe’s “Curious” Diary’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17 (2005), 11–12, 72–85, for a different perspective. William Ingram, The Business of Playing: the Beginning of the Adult Professional Theatre in Elizabethan London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Neil Carson, ‘Collaborative Playwriting: the Chettle, Dekker, Heywood Syndicate’, Theater Research International, 14, 1 (1989), 22–3. Rosalyn Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 147. J. M. Nosworthy ‘Dornackes and Colysenes in Henslowe’s Diary’, Notes & Queries, 15 (1968), 247–8. He concludes that ‘dornicks’ was a reference to a fabric used in tapestries and hangings, and ‘colysenes’ were cognisances, or badges. Barbara Ravelhofer ‘ “Beasts of Recreacion”: Henslowe’s White Bears’, English Literary Renaissance, 32, 2 (2002), 287–323. Walter W. Greg (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 2 vols. (London: A. H. Bullen), II, 35–7. Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2006), 3. Ravelhofer, ‘ “Beasts of Recreacion” ’, 288. Cerasano, 2001, ‘The Patronage Network of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn’, 83–4. Ibid., and S. P. Cerasano, ‘The Geography of Henslowe’s Diary’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56, 3 (2005), 328–53 and 380. Cerasano, ‘The Patronage Network of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn’, 84.




26. At Prime Minister’s Question Time, 11 May 1989 (Rutter, Documents of the Rose Playhouse, xvi). 27. Ibid., xix. 28. For a seminal example, see Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1984). 29. www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/letter.htm provides photographs of four pages of the document, along with photographs of Mohammed Atta and Nawaf Alhazmi and of the location of the crash of United Airlines Flight 93. On the webpage www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01.htm the document is described as a ‘letter linked to the hijackers’. 30. Makiya and Mneimneh, ‘Manual for a “Raid”’, p. 303. 31. Ibid., 304. 32. Ibid., 306. 33. Ibid., 318. 34. Ibid., 311. 35. Ibid., 304. 36. Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: Afghanistan, Al Qa’ida and the Holy War, revised edition (London: Pluto Press, 2003). 37. Ibid., 259. 38. Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding, Masterminds of Terror: The Truth behind the Most Devastating Terrorist Attack the World Has Ever Seen (London: Arcade, 2003). 39. Ibid., 115. 40. Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 249–51, where McDermott includes a translation of another part of the document as an appendix. 41. Makiya and Mneimneh, ‘Manual for a “Raid”’, 324. 42. Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, 247. 43. Fouda and Fielding, Masterminds of Terror, 144. 44. McDermott, Perfect Soldiers, 306. 45. Perhaps especially filmmakers. The Hamburg Cell (2004) (TV), dir. Antonia Bird, The Path to 9/11 (2006) (TV), dir. David L. Cunningham and Countdown to Ground Zero (2004) (TV), dir. Carsten Oblanender, among others, all make use of dramatic portrayals of some or all of the hijackers.



214 Rebecca Fensome

11 Stephen Bygrave

For Foucault, discourses and practices exercise ‘disciplinary power’ over the life of the individual, while his later adumbration of ‘biopower’ suggests (among other things) that those individuals could be regarded – and could be disciplined – as populations rather than as bodies. Society Must Be Defended offers a reconception of ‘power’, tracing a movement from power ultimately deriving from the sovereign to war understood as a foundation not for institutions, discourses or practices, but rather for modern power relations. Power, then, needs to be understood as relational, as existing between actors rather than possessed by any one; and the enemies of society are reconstituted as internal to it in the form of race. Societies respond to what they perceive to be a biological threat posed by other races; individuals confronted by the power of institutions (of discourses, Foucault would say) are replaced by citizens who may be seen only in terms of their biological capacities (largely for birth, copulation and death) and so are more likely to be enumerated and managed than to have the capacities usually ascribed to the liberal subject. It is a logical move evident in Foucault’s other work of the 1970s: in an interview, for example, he writes that the development of private medicine and of systems of public health ‘cannot be divorced from the concurrent organisation of a politics of health, the consideration of disease as a political and economic problem for social collectivities which they must seek to resolve as a matter of overall policy’.1 In this second model especially, power is faceless, immanent and has to be understood apart from those who wield it or even those who represent it: ‘we must’, as Foucault writes in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, ‘conceive of power without the king’.2 Society Must Be Defended describes a new subject of history, in both senses of a ‘subject’: both the one who sees, judges, experiences, and so on, and the matter of historical knowledge, which is 215



Foucault, Auden and Two New York Septembers

now knowledge as ‘society’ rather than the administrative facts collected in the name of power (SMBD, 133–4). Several chapters in this book have addressed this new account and a few have focused on texts that may exemplify and problematise such an understanding. This chapter focuses on a specific instance of what Foucault calls ‘reactivation’, by which he means the revival of myths or stories that can justify power held in the present, such as the differing uses to which the Arthurian stories could be put in England (SMBD, 100) or the French Revolutionaries dignifying the incipient republic by reference to both the classics and Charlemagne: ‘reactivation . . . of a certain number of moments or historical forms that function as, if you like, the splendors of history. Their reappearance in the Revolution’s vocabulary, institutions, signs, manifestations, festivals made it possible to visualize it as a cycle and a return’ (SMBD, 210). Not the least of such splendid forms, as Simon Bainbridge’s essay reminds us, is war (SMBD, 268). W. H. Auden’s poem ‘September 1 1939’ was ‘reactivated’ in the weeks after 11 September 2001: it does not have the sort of justifying function those mythic or classical stories did, but should help in asking the question what the place of the aesthetic might have been at such critical moments and how a discourse of war relates to an individual subject.3 This chapter retraces the phenomenon of the ‘reactivation’ of the poem briefly and then uses Foucault’s writings of the 1970s to reflect on how that might help in understanding the present. It suggests that Foucault’s work, especially the arguments adumbrating the concept of biopower in the 1970s lectures, may also have a great deal to say about the formation of public opinion, that they could be fruitfully compared with the putatively opposed views of others such as Habermas, and that these questions too can be focused through the lens of Auden’s poem.

I First published in the journal The New Republic as early as 18 October 1939 then, in volume form, in Another Time in 1940, ‘September 1, 1939’ is a Yeatsian public poem set not among the ‘grey eighteenth-century houses’ of Dublin where Yeats sets ‘Easter 1916’, but rather among the dives and skyscrapers of Manhattan. The date in the title of Auden’s poem is that of the annexation of Danzig and the day Nazi troops marched into Poland. The date and its imagining death in that setting seemed to make the poem relevant to the later event, which was still not a war but which inaugurated more than one. And the poem rediscovered a context after 9/11. Like the faces of the missing fixed to railings, fences, walls and trees



216 Stephen Bygrave


217

At least a half-dozen major newspapers reprinted ‘September 1, 1939’ in its entirety. It was read on National Public Radio. It was introduced into hundreds of chat rooms on the Internet. In the Chicago area, the Great Books Foundation and The Chicago Tribune sponsored discussions of it. Students at Stuyvesant High School, four blocks from ground zero in Manhattan, produced a special issue of their school newspaper (which The New York Times distributed to its readers in the metropolitan area) prominently featuring one of the poem’s most familiar lines, ‘We must love one another or die’.4 Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker that the poem has been circulating in the city like a text by Nostradamus. It was quoted on the editorial page of the Post (in the same issue that offered readers a ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ poster of Osama bin Laden), posted in a forum on the Academy of American Poets website, and read aloud on NPR. (One writer says that he received it as an e-mail six times within the week.)5 Describing the Auden poem as ‘like a text by Nostradamus’ is to ascribe to it not only accord with a prominent mood but also privileged knowledge, prescience. How could it be seen to have anticipated that later terror? Were readers of the poem being consoled or admonished not to retaliate? To see how it was being read by all those people in New York and elsewhere, let us look briefly at two instances of the revival of the poem. The first is the ‘conversation’ referred to above that took place in Chicago bookshops and libraries in November 2001; the second a column by P. J. O’Rourke: A Conversation in Chicago: What Can a Poem Do? In times of crisis and uncertainty, people often turn to literature to gain perspective and seek solace. The individuality and intimacy of poetry is especially meaningful when people are struggling to understand the complexity of the world. Chicago area residents are encouraged to join the Great Books Foundation for free public discussions of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘September 1, 1939’ and the events of September 11, 2001. The thoughts and feelings in Auden’s powerful



and posted on the internet, it entered as a public, even demotic, discourse and performed functions not always associated with the phenomena of high culture. As Peter Steinfels reported in the New York Times:

218 Stephen Bygrave

The ‘gain in perspective’ that poetry is said to offer here is not seen as antithetical to the ‘individuality and intimacy’ that is also said to characterise it. This is not meant to sneer at the desire for solace that it was clearly felt that the poem might satisfy, but rather to show that the desire is necessarily contradictory, or at least that one of the things a poem can do – and that Auden’s does – is to oscillate between individual and universal poles, to embrace pronominal impossibilities. If there are contradictions in the way the poem was read, they are encouraged by the way the poem was written. Perhaps the speaker of the poem – by turns vatic and insistent on his commonplace failings and weaknesses – was the prompt for a backlash against the poem from some quarters. In a column in The Atlantic Monthly which records how the citizens of Washington reacted to the Pentagon being bombed on 9/11, and their sense that this event cancelled differences of race and class now ‘we’ were all under attack, P. J. O’Rourke wrote that lines from Auden’s poem came to his mind too, prompting him to ask ‘what’s that crap?’ and to dismiss the poet in public terms by reminding his readers of Auden’s change of citizenship: ‘Anyway, Auden was one of the few Englishmen who, when World War II loomed, acted as Hitler would have Englishmen act: he ran away. In Israel waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes, and gossip, and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.’7 The moral superiority of the United States to those who attacked it is equated with the parallel superiority of Israel to its enemies. O’Rourke approvingly quotes from CNN Ariel Sharon’s judgement that ‘This is a war between the good and the bad’ and compares Israel and the United States as beleaguered guardians of such ‘liberty’. Both the Great Books Foundation and O’Rourke in his column recognise the propinquity of Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’ to the events of 9/11 and, although they read the poem differently, both respond to its interpellation of a public. Auden’s is clearly a public poem in which the speaker feels he intersects with history, or is it at its mercy. The wellknown phenomenon of the ‘reactivation’ of Auden’s poem is the starting point for a fine essay by Stephen Burt which sees its revived celebrity as an instance of a desire on the part of readers of poetry that a poem should address a public on issues of obvious public importance, which Burt then goes on to criticise, seeing such a desire as evidence of a kind



poem, written after Germany invaded Poland, bear a striking resemblence [sic] to those experienced by many of us in the wake of our country’s recent tragedy. Click here to read Auden’s poem.6

219

of nostalgia for community and for social significance which may be at the cost sometimes of symbolically resolving real problems.8 In 2001, Burt writes, Auden’s poem ‘became (or became again) an idealtypical example of the kind of poetic object academic readers now seek: it described shared, urgent, clearly public concerns for a large body of people who, demonstrably, wanted to read it’ (535). Burt’s concerns are specifically canonical: he worries that the valorisation of the kind of poems that deal with events that clearly occurred in what he calls, after Habermas, the ‘political public sphere’ may lead to undervaluing or overlooking other kinds. He goes on to demonstrate that ‘the renewed popularity of “September 1, 1939” can shed light not just on that poem but on how readers (inside and outside the academy) want poems to be public, or to speak to a public, and on what sort of poems that desire occludes’ (551), ending with some examples of poems that may work in other terms (such as terms of modest particularity) and might allow their readers perspectives on political issues in less fraught (because less grandiose or more oblique) terms. Burt is on to something here, but in this quotation there has been a slippage from ‘academic readers’ to the (parenthetic) insistence that readers both inside and outside the academy have the same desires and this new claim bears a little questioning. Perhaps the academy is different. Unlike, say, the sentimentalising of culture in the United Kingdom after the death of Princess Diana, the academy was prepared for this response and participated in it in a way that (special issues of heavyweight journals such as New Formations aside) British academe had not. Actually, this is to make a point Burt himself makes elsewhere in his essay: that the responses already existed to be drawn on: the poem ‘represents one mind, and many minds, united by a civic emergency, by illimitable apprehension, by a newly evident international enemy, and by the sudden, urgent, and disquietingly general search for an explanation – not just any explanation, but one that uses data we already have’ (537; my emphasis). In other words, the poem’s declamations are so resonant partly because it can exploit the sonority and scope of the public poem: in this case Auden might be described as imitating Yeats’s assumption to speak for the moment of history which gives his poem its title.

II If it wasn’t before, ‘September 1, 1939’ is now certainly Auden’s single most famous poem. However, the irony in its revival after 9/11 is that Auden himself repudiated the poem: he began by disavowing its most




resounding statements, in 1944 abandoning the stanza in which the line ‘We must love one another or die’ occurs (partly because it reduced what ought to be an act of volition to an instinctual drive like hunger) and eventually ‘scrapped’ the poem altogether because he had come, as he put it in 1957, to ‘loathe’ it.9 By Auden’s own account, he arrived at the line ‘We must love one another or die’ and ‘I said to myself: “That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.” So, in the next edition, I altered it to “We must love one another and die.” This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty – and must be scrapped.’10 A particular impetus for its being scrapped is revealed by Auden’s biographers. In 1964 that line was misappropriated in an infamous advertisement for Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign. In the advertisement, a little girl counted the petals of a flower, until she was suddenly interrupted by a stern male voice counting down from ten to zero, at which point the girl was replaced by the flash of an explosion and a mushroom cloud. Then Johnson drew the moral in voiceover: ‘These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must love each other or we must die.’11 ‘I pray to God that I shall never be memorable like that again’, Auden responded, omitted the poem from his Collected Shorter Poems published the following year (1965), and later instructed that it not be republished in his lifetime. This history suggests that the poem’s author regarded it as contingent – and, as he said, dishonest. Actually, the dishonesty results from the contingency; in Auden’s account, it results from the very attempt to connect the private citizen to the public world. He proposes instead an ethical vocabulary which is seen as inescapable – in the poem commuters emerge ‘into the ethical life’ – and actually these moral questions ramify. Is there a difference between the purposeful misreading of Johnson’s advertising consultants, whose appropriation of the poem goes against the poet’s sense of his own work, and the recourse readers had to the poem in the weeks after 9/11? Is the poet’s ‘dishonesty’ morally equivalent to that of the advertisers, or is it absurd to think that the poet’s ‘dishonesty’ matters in the way the dishonesty of a US president (or presidential candidate) matters since the former is so obviously less effectual? (After all, Auden himself had written in his elegy for Yeats that year that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.) However, the poem that appeals to a crisis answers that particular crisis. Although Burt would argue that the desire for public significance remains, that interpretation might be exhausted within the context of



220 Stephen Bygrave

221

the immediate needs it served. The stress on dates might actually suggest an uncomfortable contingency to a poem that is ambitious to use terms such as ‘public’ and ‘universal’ in its own discourse. If Auden’s poem with its resonant date resonates again after 11 September 2001, its resonance is brief and there is not much subsequent history of the poem being used as an aid to what Foucault called ‘historical intelligibility’. It is likely that it was being used as a response to trauma, as a way of explaining and finding precedent for what otherwise seemed inexplicable and unprecedented. The poem no longer means what it was used to mean in 2001, partly because other responses to 9/11 won out. (As Stan Smith archly observes, the self-diagnosis implicit in the lines ‘Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return’ was not generally applied.)12 If the poem was used as a response to trauma, it was also only the first draft of what David Simpson calls a ‘culture of commemoration’, a longer process, of which the arguments over what should stand on the site of the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan and the argument over the subsequent foreign policy of the United States are alike part.13 The date, then, can stand not only for memorialising a significant moment, but also for the evanescence of that moment; it can even stand for the contingency of the famous imperative in the final line of the penultimate stanza, telling us what we must do. So the poem has intersected with history at different moments. At its publication, the poem purposely intervened in public discourse, and later, as public property, became incorporated into the conservative discourse of political institutions and the mass media (epitomised in the Lyndon Johnson advertisement). If the public sphere in the US in 2001 and after is dominated by the Samuel Huntingdon rhetoric of the ‘clash of civilisations’14 in order to manufacture consensus and garner support for a ‘war on terror’, the Auden poem may have been liable to being misappropriated once again to define a ‘we, the people’ (this time as the people of the United States and its allies). Of course, this depends on whether the collective love of which Auden speaks is taken to be a patriotic love or a new internationalism; whether, in other words, it was adopted as part of the culture of national commemoration and trauma, one outcome of which was a moratorium on dissent, or whether it might result in the kind of international solidarity or co-operation predicted by Kant in his essays ‘Perpetual Peace’ and ‘On Universal Cosmopolitan History’.15 These questions will be taken up in the final section, but first it will be worth dwelling a little longer on the poem itself, and in particular on the implications of the line ‘We must love one another or die’ and on the subject-position assumed by the poet from which he can utter it.




222 Stephen Bygrave

If a safe vantage-point for the public poem was not or was no longer available, the question remains whether it was used as consolation or as an admonition not to retaliate – as, in the terms other essays in this collection have quoted from Foucault, ‘history’ or ‘counter-history’. This question arises from the poem itself, not least in its most famous line. E. M. Forster said that because Auden had written the line ‘We must love one another or die’, ‘he can command me to follow him’.16 The emphatic metrical regularity of the line and its imperative mood seek to unify and transcend the hesitations and provisionalities of the rest of the poem. What I would like to draw attention to here, and the reason Foucault is relevant to the case, is, as it were, a contextual ambiguity in the line, a question about its provenance (its reference necessarily being vague), which can be put in the following way. Does it enjoin ‘love’ on its readers as an alternative to worldliness or does it rather describe a chain of cause and effect? Does it derive its resonance from eighteenth-century moral philosophy or from the Sermon on the Mount? Does it work, then, in rational or in sentimental terms? Is it, in other words, a modern or a pre-modern injunction? In striving to speak for a population as well as for a liberal subject, the poem finds space to see the public as formed by private desires and disappointments. As everybody recognises, ‘September 1, 1939’ is related also to Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, written earlier that year, but in this regard its procedures are similar to those of a slightly earlier love poem, which Auden’s editor dates from January 1937 and which was later named ‘Lullaby’: ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love/Human on my faithless arm’. The absurdity of telling someone who’s asleep to do things – which would make for a kind of dramatic failing in the poem, if you took it literally – is actually the point: to get the kind of ideal communication love leads you to expect – or you are led to expect of love – means that you are talking to yourself. The beloved is asleep and the lover is faithless, but that’s just the way these things go. The ‘I’ and ‘me’ of the poem are collective not individualised, and it strives for a classical orotundity: this moment will pass but these things are always and forever true. ‘September 1, 1939’ also moves from the particular to the general or even universal, where the universal ‘error’ it diagnoses is that of seeking ‘not universal love / But to be loved alone’. In that sense, ‘September 1, 1939’ behaves like ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love’ and, perhaps surprisingly, it too is a sort of love poem, or at least a poem that finds space (in its sixth stanza) to discuss ‘love’ in an unexpected context. The poem



III

223

sees the public as being made up of a collection of private desires and disappointments, chief among which are the desire for love and the failure to find it. This ‘love’ seems to be erotic rather than familial and also to have a different reference from the ‘love’ enjoined on readers of the poem in the famous line that ends its penultimate stanza. As such, the poem might seem to reduce history that might affect millions to the representations of a damaged individual: it questions Hitler as a psychoanalytic patient. There is apparently sympathy for, and even a querulous and provisional claim to understand, Nazi aggression. What cultural relationship does the United States retain to that maddened European culture? The poem doesn’t posit Hitler or Germany (even Nazi Germany) as the US was to posit Osama bin Laden – or Islam – as the ‘Other’, but wonders of the Germany Auden admired what it could have been from the Reformation onwards ‘that has driven a culture mad’ until it brings into being Hitler, ‘a psychopathic god’. These are the querulous questions of a first-person narrator whose questions, for all that they issue from the assumed position of the psychoanalyst at that point, are rhetorical. The first word of the poem is the first-person pronoun, ‘I’, which the poem is concerned to connect with the collective ‘we’, all of whom must suffer. In a poem which can still understand historical processes only by personifying them, Auden writes of ‘a low, dishonest decade’, just as, in parallel, individuals are made over into a collective synecdoche as ‘faces’ living and speaking the banalities of male, middle-class existence, before the poem reaches its qualified vatic conclusion. Some critics have made this speaking subject the central problem of the poem. Stan Smith’s reading, for instance, stresses the failure of its attempt to make ‘I’ over into ‘we’: ‘Its mixture of lyric plangency and attitudinising rhetoric . . . says much more than the guy inhabiting the poem knows about his historical posture and posturing’; John Fuller calls it ‘a parade of rhetoric designed to question the function of rhetoric’.17 This is perhaps the sign of the poem’s modernity: ‘I and the public know’, Auden writes, thereby insisting that separate identities have been conjoined. It is as if the poet is performing what Kant would have called his private obligations by writing the poem and, having written it, he can agree with the consensus of a public which he has by then joined. The poet possesses a voice which is no more and no less than its democratic functions – as though it were saying, ‘I and the rest of the public’. If this is to claim representative status (‘All that I have is a voice’) it is also rhetorically unsure: Foucault’s ‘universal’ subject becomes local and particular, his loyalties perhaps divided, his commitments to abstraction.




When asked to comment on Vietnam, Auden gave a well-informed liberal response, then qualified his comments by adding ‘which is just to say I’m a citizen who reads The New York Times’.18 Such a demurral is already incipient in his poem – the poet is not speaking for the drinkers in the bar making their ethical resolutions, rather he is one of them – and as such the liberal subject is consigned to a twin destiny. First, the poet or any individual may have no specialist knowledge and must be necessarily powerless, power being only when the individual is multiplied and translated into a collective – power for the individual, that is, lying only in her or his enfranchisement as part of the political public sphere. Second, there must be ultimately a default of responsibility as well as of power. The liberal subject’s consolation for impotence is that they can shrug and disclaim responsibility, a consolation explicitly addressed by Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7/7 bombers, whose videotaped will broadcast by al-Jazeera included the assertions that all Western citizens were complicit in an attack on Islam because all were represented by their democratically elected governments and all were therefore legitimate targets.19 The ineluctable consequences of membership (if not enfranchisement) in a liberal democratic society were intuited by Auden in 1939.

IV If what articulated itself by way of the fear, sympathetic desire to understand and wish to affirm universal ‘justice’ in the poem may be described as public opinion, that public opinion soon hardened into an apparent suspension of dissent as ‘we’ retaliated first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq. The moment for which the poem resonates is a moment before, as Foucault suggests in his 18 February 1976 lecture, ‘war has completely concealed right, to such an extent that right becomes no more than a useless abstraction’ (SMBD, 156). Rights are not disrupted by war but articulated by it. That is to say that, as elsewhere in Foucault, the limit may define: what is central to the discourse of law or medicine might be defined by its pathology. Power itself, the circulation of which was the concern of the ‘disciplinary’ Foucault, might be understood ‘by looking at its extremities, at its outer limits, at the point where it becomes capillary’: these are points ‘where its exercise became less and less juridical’ (SMBD, 27–8); they are also questions with which Foucault’s rhetoric can help (and by which it might itself be questioned for its continued commitment to a monolithic ‘power’). For Foucault, dates themselves establish the present not as a ‘moment of forgetfulness’ but a point at which ‘the universal makes its entry into



224 Stephen Bygrave

225

the real’ (SMBD, 227–8). What he calls ‘historical intelligibility’ is surely a popular need too – the rediscovery of Auden’s poem is a means of understanding by searching for precedent or parallel. The political situation Auden addresses is, of course, very different from the present: in some ways it is simpler – Nazism and the evident ‘madness’ of its expansionism is specifically disassociated from healthy German culture – and in others much more complicated: the imminence of a European war still mustered no imperatives for the United States until Pearl Harbor (an event that some were later to compare with 9/11). This has consequences for the poet too, still not a US citizen at the time he wrote the poem. Auden still spells ‘odour’ here in the English way – later after his naturalisation he’ll rhyme ‘work’ emphatically with ‘clerk’ and says in a letter that he left England partly so as to stop writing poems such as ‘September 1, 1939’.20 In 1939, however, Auden’s liberal spectatorship could also seem to be a position rather than the absence of one. This might allow us to reflect on two things in particular. The first is the position of the subject suddenly confronted by an historical emergency, being made to realise that politics has been war pursued by other means. (An inversion of von Clauzewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means is the recurrent theme of Foucault’s lecture series.) This is evident, not only from reflection on the procedures of the poem from outside, but a problem it sets up for itself. Second, perhaps less obviously related to the ways in which the poem was understood to be working, I suggest here that the public invoked in this poem also arises in the same epoch as Foucault posits the rise of both disciplinary power and biopower: that is, in the eighteenth century and in a newly normative discourse that Foucault calls, after Kant, ‘enlightenment’. Elsewhere Foucault characterised enlightenment precisely as modernity, that is, in which the present is always the problem,21 and here in Society Must Be Defended modernity is in turn characterised as revolution rather than sovereignty. One influential understanding of 9/11 was that it was evidence of a ‘clash of civilisations’, the 9/11 attackers having apparently rejected modernity and secularisation – ‘the enlightenment driven away’, as Auden writes of Nazi Germany in the poem – and this prompted many liberal spectators to invoke a post-Enlightenment tradition based on those movements in the name of a ‘we’ which had a cosmopolitan reference, and to trust in the efficacy of the international institutions built on such cosmopolitan foundations. Foucault speaks of enlightenment not as the triumph of knowledge over ignorance, of light over darkness, and so on, as its own publicity




would have us believe, but rather as clashes between knowledges (SMBD, 179). Of course, he writes this in the 1970s, at a time when two ‘superpowers’ were ideologically opposed and when ‘war’ was internal to their bodies politic as well as to their foreign relations. There were, of course, other conflicts, in some of which Foucault himself could see an alternative modernity. As has been revealed by the recent publication in English of articles he wrote about Iran for Il Corriere della Sera and for French newspapers between 1978 and 1980, Foucault celebrated Khomeini, Islam and the political logic of sacrifice as offering ways of thinking the limits of the human and being towards death as alternatives to Enlightenment narratives of discipline and control that dominated the West.22 The theoretical arguments Burt musters come from those professionally concerned with the canon and also from the great theorist of the public sphere, Jurgen Habermas, who from the time of his Habilitationschrift has been concerned with the formation of public opinion as a defining phenomenon of bourgeois society. Habermas, writes – employing a metaphor of considerable and self-conscious force, in postwar Frankfurt – of what the ‘disciplinary’ Foucault, confronting the failures of ‘reason’ fails himself to do in response: ‘to clamber about archaeologically among the debris of an objective reason that had been destroyed, from the mute testimony of which we might still retrospectively shape the perspective of a (long since revoked) hope for reconciliation’.23 Given this failure on the part of Foucault, as Habermas sees it, there would seem not much common ground between the two, not much that they could mutually contribute to discussion of the post-9/11 world which we have been using Auden’s poem to open. However, I have invoked Habermas because I think there is such common ground.24 In Philosophy in a Time of Terror Habermas explains even the events of 9/11 as an instance of thwarted communication that is still capable of being corrected: ‘if violence . . . begins with a distortion in communication, after it has erupted it is possible to know what has gone wrong and what needs to be repaired’.25 This is not beyond parody – we might be reminded of the sadistic overseer in the film Cool Hand Luke who says every time the Paul Newman character is hauled off to the cooler, ‘What we got here is a failure in communication’. However, for Habermas, what results in stand-offs or violence is rather communication with ‘systematic distortions’, which brings him closer to Foucault’s ambit (‘systematic’ here connoting not a well-intentioned failure to understand but fundamental disagreements over vocabulary); he is close to Foucault too in his insistence that Western societies contain mechanisms



226 Stephen Bygrave

227

of exploitation and marginalisation that amount to what he calls a ‘structural violence’ (35). To call such violence definitive of society would be for Habermas to confuse the pathology of, say, law with law itself, and this is what he accuses Foucault of doing. For Habermas, fundamentalism is a definitively modern phenomenon, since it is a reaction to modernity. To counter its irrationality, he retains faith in bodies that attempt normative definitions of human rights, war crimes or international law, suggesting even that the anti-terror coalition might prefigure the new ‘cosmopolitan order’ Kant anticipated.26 Habermas distinguishes between distortion in communication within Western societies and communication between cultures with different ways of life. He does not really develop this point, but it does raise a question about whether the idea of a translatable and transnational public sphere would be viable. The public sphere in the United States and the Arab public sphere made possible by al-Jazeera are quite separate. Perhaps the reactivation of Auden’s poem enables the possibility of rethinking a global public, which need not be constituted in America’s image. What might such a public look like? It would have to be, in Habermas’s terms, dialogic, perspective-taking, intersubjective. Foucault adds neither cultural pessimism or paranoia to balance Habermas’s optimism, nor a notion of the necessary passivity or victimhood of populations. Yet in a stage which is not only beyond Auden’s mobile spectatorship, but also might be a way to develop Habermas’s own idea of the ‘public’, the final lectures of SMBD seem to anticipate (what Hardt and Negri call) the biopolitical/necropolitical control of the multitude, and to help to get us out of it.27 This chapter has been concerned with three different times: the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in 1939, Foucault’s lectures of the mid-1970s, and 11 September 2001 and since. Commentators from Donald Rumsfeld to Martin Amis have tended to see 9/11 as marking a break with the past, as constituting a moment after which nothing could be the same again, but the first of these may remain the most epochal and might also be seen as continuous with the first. Assuredly, the question became not whether ‘we’ should intervene but what form intervention might take: that question, rather than the problematic affirmation of the poem, is what might have sustained its re-readings. Struggles over the signification and significance of a poem – especially one that its author disowned – may seem banal, but the reactivation of such an artwork is an element in ‘a history that continues the war by deciphering the war and the struggle that are going on within all the




institutions of right and peace’ (SMBD, 171). Earlier I raised the question of whether Auden’s claim that the sentiment expressed in the last line of the poem was dishonest might be paralleled in the desire to reactivate the poem for an American reading public post-9/11 and whether the universalism implicit in that desire was dishonest in its turn. Auden felt the poem to be a fraudulent evasion of difficult and even incompatible imperatives. He no longer felt that he could speak for the public in the sense that the Romantic poet could, feeling rather that the public came to speak for him. The chances of developing a public after 9/11 by way of both Foucault and Habermas depend on taking into account their own differing but not incompatible imperatives to understand the subjection wrought by power.

Notes 1. ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 166. 2. The History of Sexuality: Volume One, an Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 89. 3. ‘September 1, 1939’ is quoted from The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939 by W. H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), pp. 245–7. 4. Peter Steinfels, ‘Beliefs: Auden’s Poem is Drawing New Attention’, New York Times, 1 December 2001. http://www.johnharle.com/philosophy/articlesphilosophy/WHAuden.html. 5. http://www.donshewey.com/2001_zine/SEPTEMBER_11.html. 6. Calendar of Great Books National Events. A Conversation in Chicago: What Can a Poem Do? http://www.greatbooks.org/programs/gb/calendar/auden. shtml. 7. P. J. O’Rourke, ‘What Auden Didn’t Know: The Things that Stay in Place’, The Atlantic Monthly, 288, 4 (November 2001). http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/ prem/200111/o_rourke_nd. 8. ‘September 1, 1939 Revisited’, American Literary History, 15, 3 (Fall 2003), 533–59. 9. The iambic trimeter (with a final reversed foot) of ‘September 1, 1939’ is the metre of Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ and Burt has some good comments on the subsequent fate of that metre in Auden’s work. 10. Quoted from Auden’s foreword to B. C. Bloomfield’s 1964 bibliography of his work by Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1981), 326. 11. Details of the advertisement are from Richard Davenport-Hines’ biography, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1995). Ian Sansom reports the later appropriation of the phrase ‘points of light’ by speechwriters for George Bush Sr. in ‘Auden and Influence’, Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, ed. Stan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 235. 12. Smith, Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’, 1.



228 Stephen Bygrave

229

13. See David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 14. See Samuel Huntingdon, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Affairs, 72, 3 (1993), 22–49. 15. These questions might be put in relation to the Patriot act and the war that this collective love brings about. 16. Quoted by Mendelson, Early Auden, 326. 17. Stan Smith, W. H. Auden, Re-reading Literature (Oxford: Blackwell. 1985), 25; John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 293. Fuller points out on the same page that Auden’s account of the variation in and subsequent excision of the line ‘We must love one another or die’, quoted above, ‘does not seem supported by the bibliographical facts’. 18. Authors take Sides on Vietnam, ed. Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley (London: Peter Owen, 1967), 60. 19. See transcript at http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1186. 20. The poem is the 1947 ‘The Fall of Rome’, in W. H. Auden: Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 183. Auden’s comment is quoted from the introduction to The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939 by W. H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), xx; and in Early Auden, 330. 21. ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32–50 [42]. On the implications of this late essay – the text of a lecture that was never delivered because of Foucault’s death – see David R. Hiley, ‘Foucault and the Question of Enlightenment’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, IX (1985–6), 63–83; Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘Critique and Enlightenment: Michel Foucault on “Was ist Aufklärung?” ’, Manchester Papers in Politics (Manchester: Department of Government, University of Manchester, 1996); and J. Schmidt and T. E. Wartenberg, ‘Foucault’s Enlightenment’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994), 283–314. 22. See Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). 23. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 241. In fact, Foucault himself is more cautious and conciliatory about ‘reason’ when asked about it specifically in relation to Habermas in a 1982 interview, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’, The Foucault Reader, 248–9. 24. For example, Critique and Power, the collection of essays edited by Michael Kelly (see n. 20), is mostly written from the standpoint of sympathy for Foucault’s project and the conviction that Habermas misconstrued or misrepresented it. Several of the essays are concerned to show that Foucault’s interest in Kant’s critique was not a kind of deathbed conversion but a more explicit enlistment of Kantian procedures. 25. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 35. 26. Ibid., 27 and 35. 27. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).




Acker, Kathy 7, 8, 65, 78–85 Aesthetics 44, 64, 65, 84 Agamben, Giorgio 2, 3, 38, 153, 184, 185 Algeria 10, 12, 91, 124,128, 130, 187, 193 Alliez, Eric 64, 77, 84 Anderson, David 186, 188, 190 archive 12, 196, 197, 199, 206, 212 Arendt, Hannah 157, 161, 163, 185 Aristotle 8, 78, 79, 96 Asterix le Gaulois 118, 124, 125 Auden, W. H. 12, 216–228

Boltzmann, Ludwig Eduard 100 Bozzoli, Belinda 164 Boulainvilliers, Henri de 30, 91, 92, 93, 95, 126, 137, 139, 141 Buck-Morss, Susan 161 Burke, Edmund 47 Burroughs, William S. 79, 83 Burt, Stephen 218–19 Butler, Judith 3, 7, 8, 65, 74, 147, 148 Precarious Life 3, 147 Byron, George 7, 44, 45, 49, 50–5, 57, 59, 60, 61 Caminero-Santangelo, Byron 189 Canetti, Elias 173, 174 civil society 1, 6, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22, 24, 25, 30, 39, 43, 45, 46, 47, 49, 54, 55, 95, 135, 137, 138, 141, 143, 164, 168, 184, 185 civil war 45, 47, 49, 56, 58, 138 Clausewitz, Carl Philipp Gottlieb von 25, 30, 47, 88, 137, 168, 225 Coetzee, J. M. 192, 193 Colley, Linda 47 colonies 162, 163, 165, 185 colonial wars 163 community 11, 113, 121, 124, 131, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 153, 160, 200, 219 concentration camps 153 counter-history 50, 54, 222 Crabb Robinson, Henry 49 Cuvier, Georges 129

Balzac, Honoré de 128, Barbarian 48, 141, 144 bare life 2, 3, 11, 153 Bataille, Georges 11, 155, 156, 175, 184 Bauman, Zygmunt 168 de Beauvoir, Simone 193 biological life 3, 6, 15, 21, 22, 24, 27, 35, 37 biological racism 9, 108, 113–14 biology 9, 89, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 130, 139, 148 biopolitics 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 21, 24, 38, 39, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 106, 136, 138, 140, 147, 148, 183, 184, 196 biopower 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 21, 26, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 79, 83, 84, 89, 95, 96, 97, 101, 106, 107, 114, 116, 138, 148, 149, 152, 153, 156, 157, 161, 175, 176, 183, 215, 216, 225 body 4, 9, 16–24, 26–7, 31, 36, 44, 66, 75, 78, 79, 81, 83, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 101, 106, 126, 127, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 147, 148, 152, 154, 155, 158, 160, 161, 165, 173, 174, 175, 185, 187, 188, 193

Darwin, Charles 99, 100, 129, 139, 162 death camps 153, 154 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 2, 28, 29, 80, 170 democracy 69, 133, 135, 136, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153, 192 230



Index

Derrida, Jacques 124 detention 65, 73, 74, 76, 81, 82, 112, 121, 184 discipline 4, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 39, 63, 64, 78, 79, 89, 96, 97, 101, 138, 139, 171, 176, 215, 226 DNA 99 document 12, 17, 18, 120, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212 empire 2, 72, 133, 136, 147, 164, 188, 200 enclave economies 171 English Jacobin novelists 54 ethnicity 124 eugenics 101, 102, 103, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 129, 162 Eugenics Society 110, 111, 114 excess 155, 175, 176 Fanon, Frantz 10, 12, 34, 35, 39, 125, 129, 131, 132, 165, 166, 167, 184, 185, 187, 191, 193 Ferry, Jules 128 Foucault, Michel Abnormal 93, 98, 101, 121, 122, 127, Archaeology of Knowledge 12, 196, 197, 198 Discipline and Punish 1, 2, 3, 5, 11, 14–25, 26, 39, 63, 92, 93, 97, 106, 116, 126, 138, 158, 193, 194 History of Sexuality 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 14, 15, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 32, 34, 35, 39, 64, 96, 101, 106, 107, 138, 215 Society Must be Defended 1, 3–13, 14–16, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45, 46, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 80, 88, 89, 92, 93, 98, 101, 106, 107, 113, 118, 121, 126, 127, 136, 183, 185, 194, 196, 215, 225 Fox, Charles James 47 Fuller, John 223

231

genealogy 11, 32, 43, 48, 88, 89, 94, 127, 137, 196, 223 Gibbs, Josiah Willard 100 Gilroy, Paul 35, 160, 176 Gopnik, Adam 217 governmentality 2,3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 74, 78, 84, 89, 103, 133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 148, 171 Gros, Frédéric 123 Guantánamo Bay 7, 11, 65, 73, 74, 75, 76, 82, 147, Gulf War 168 Habermas, Jürgen 12, 219, 226–7 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri Empire 2, 7, 8, 13, 29, 64, 65, 72, 76, 77, 79, 80, 84, 227 Multitude 41, 133, 148, 149 Hazlitt, William 7, 44–9, 50, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61 Hegel, G. W. F. 11, 154, 155, 160 Phenomenology of Spirit 163 Heidegger, Martin 174, 175 Henslowe, Philip 12, 196–207, 212 ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ 196, 207, 212 Hereward the Wake 118 Hill, Christopher 4, 126 Hobbes, Thomas 137, 139, 5, 15, 31, 47, 66, 90, 107 Hola detention camp 186, 188 Hugo, Victor 128 imperialism 10, 69, 70, 71, 72, 158, 161, 164 infrastructural war 168 interest 5, 6, 15, 44, 64, 79, 84, 98, 108, 110, 137, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 176, 197, 200, 201, 202, 205 IQ 109, 110, 111 Jacob, François 98, 99, 100 JanMohamed, Abdul 193 Kantorowicz, Ernst 127 Kariuki, Josiah Mwangi 186, 187, 194 Kenya 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194



Index

232 Index

La Guma, Alex 184, 186, 187, 192, 193 In the Fog of the Season’s End 192, 193 life 3–6, 8, 9, 14–30, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 52, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 106, 116, 140, 141, 145, 147, 148, 152–4, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 167, 174, 176, 183, 192, 193, 194, 212, 215, 220 logic of martyrdom 172, 173, 174 logic of survival 172, 173 Louis XIV 44, 89, 91 Lukács, Gyorgy 44 Machiavelli, Niccolò 5, 15, 137, 151 ‘Manual for a Raid’ 12, 196, 198, 207, 211, 212 manuscript 50, 198, 204, 205, 212 Maugham Brown, David 190, 191, 194 May, Todd 92, 104 Mbembe, Achille 11, 12,152, 181, 182, 184, 185, 194, 196 Meaning 12, 35, 70, 75, 78, 124, 129, 135, 154, 155, 164, 188, 196, 197, 202, 206, 207, 211, 212 Mendel, Gregor Johann 100 mental deficiency 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119 mental illness 119, 190 militia economies 171 Miller, Christopher 185, 194 modernity 5, 14, 15, 22, 30, 38, 39, 40, 69, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160, 166, 169, 190, 223, 225, 226, 227 molecular biology 9, 98, 99, 101, 102

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 130 multiple body 9, 140, 107, 108, 147 Napoleon Bonaparte 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51 narrative 4, 5, 51, 80, 82, 83, 89, 118, 127, 149, 159, 160, 165, 186, 187, 188, 189, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 209, 210, 211, 212, 226, National Socialism 38, 153, 161, 225 Nazi state 70, 97, 98, 157 necropolitics 11, 176, 184, 185 New York 12, 128, 130, 147, 215, 224 New York Review of Books 208 New York Times 217, 224 New Yorker 217 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 12 A Grain of Wheat 186, 188, 190, 191, 193 ‘The Martyr’ 183 Nietzsche, Friedrich 92, 94, 123 Norman Conquest 90, 118, 131 Norman Yoke thesis 118, 125, 126, 127 norms 27, 34, 153 ode

6, 7, 43, 44, 49–52, 55, 61

Palestine 11, 147, 165, 172 Pasley, Captain C. W. 56 peace 10, 11, 14, 15, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 45, 46, 47, 56, 58, 59, 66, 69, 71, 77, 90, 133, 137, 138, 139, 162, 163, 221, 228 Peacock, Thomas Love Maid Marian 128 personality disorder 119, 120, 121, 122, 124 Peterloo Massacre 7, 45, 46, 56, 58, 60 population 1, 4, 8, 9, 21, 23, 24, 27, 36, 37, 39, 64, 68, 69, 70, 89, 96, 97, 98–101, 99, 102, 103, 107, 108–10, 111, 114, 116, 124, 131,



knowledge 6, 10, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 35, 78, 88, 91, 92, 93, 106, 127, 131, 137, 155, 193, 196, 197, 198, 211, 215, 216, 217, 224, 225 Kojève, Alexandre 163 Kosovo 168, 169

136, 139, 140, 156, 168, 169, 171, 222 postmodernism, postmodernity 71, 72, 123 post-war 45, 102, 103, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116 potential, potentialism 6, 16, 18, 34, 35, 36, 56, 60, 77, 79, 82, 83, 84121, 139, 142, 145, 157, 161, 169, 205, 212 Powell, Enoch 188 power 1–12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23–8, 30–1, 38, 39, 43–9, 51, 53, 55–61, 63–70, 77, 79, 83, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101, 104, 107, 116, 122, 126, 127, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 149, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 162, 166, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 183, 184, 185, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 206, 212, 215, 216, 224, 225, 228 psychotherapy 119, 122 race

4, 9, 11, 12, 23, 24, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 57, 69, 70, 75, 83, 91, 97, 98, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 137, 139, 142, 157, 161, 162, 178 n.18, 183, 194, 196, 215, 218 reactivation 216, 218 regularization 68 Renan, Ernest 128 Rivière, Pierre 121 Robin Hood 125, 128 Roman annalists 43, 90 Ruffié, Jacques 102 Sartre, Jean Paul 126, 193 savage 141, 144, 163 Schmitt, Carl 69–73 Scott, Sir Walter Ivanhoe 125–9 Seaton, Henry 186 self writing 65, 71, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84 ‘September 11’ 209, 217 sexuality 4, 14, 61, 99, 116, 119, 123, 155, 156

233

Shakespeare, William 198–207, 212 Coriolanus 48 Henry V 47 Sharpeville massacre 193 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 7, 44–6, 54–61 Siéyès, abbé Emmanuel Joseph 30, 36, 95, 127 Simpson, David 221 slavery 11, 160, 175 Smith, Stan 221, 223 social life 2, 63, 64, 72, 77, 82 society 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 12, 20, 22, 26, 27, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 45, 49, 60, 61, 69, 91, 93, 96, 98, 107, 110, 111, 122, 126, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 170, 184, 185, 224, 226, South Africa 164, 192, 193 sovereignty 2–3, 8, 10–12, 24, 31, 34–5, 63–77, 84, 88, 90–92, 96, 97, 100, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 148–9, 152–167, 183–5, 187, 188, 193, 225 vertical 166, 167 species 6, 15, 21–4, 27, 34–5, 37, 39, 70, 83, 100, 107–9, 129, 140, 156, 183 species life 6, 15, 21, 22, 24, 27, 35, 37 Stalinism 161 state 97–8, 101, 106–7, 111–12, 114–16, 133, 139, 141–2, 144–8, 156, 153, 157–9, 152–79 state of exception 11, 153, 156, 160, 161, 162 state of siege 156, 161, 168, 174 state racism 4, 34, 89, 95–8, 101, 139, 147 statement 12, 52, 196–212 Steinfels, Peter 217 suicide bomber 173, 175, 210 terror 1–3, 7–8, 10, 11, 30, 38, 46, 65, 71–2, 74, 76, 81, 92, 133–6, 141, 147, 152, 158–63, 165–7, 172–6, 184–5, 187–8, 192, 217, 221, 227 terrorism 8, 72–3, 76, 134–6, 147, 149, 184, 191–2



Index

Tocqueville, Alexis de 141–7 torture 184–8, 190–4 totalitarianism 153 township 11, 164 translation 208–9, 211 Traverso, Enzo 158 trickery 175 Wallace, Alfred Russel 100 war 1–8, 10–12, 14–40, 45–61, 63, 65–6, 68, 103, 109, 114–15, 126, 128, 131, 133–49, 152–3, 157,

162–3, 167–8, 170–4, 184, 187, 194, 202, 215–16, 218, 224–7 war on terror 1–3, 7–8, 10–11, 38, 71, 72, 74, 76, 81, 133–6, 141 147, 184, 221 war machines 168, 170, 171 Waterloo 6–7, 43–60 Weizman, Eyal 166, 167 Wordsworth, William 52, 55–6 work of death 154, 156 Yeats, W. B.

216, 219, 220, 222



234 Index

Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society

Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society

Intelligence for an Age of Terror

Restoring the Balance: War Powers in an Age of Terror

An Overview of the War on Terror

A Defence Of Poetry And Other Essays

The Defence of Passing On

Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento: Essays in Honour of Denis Mack Smith

Essays on Economics and Society

Terror and the War on Dissent: Freedom of Expression in the Age of Al-Qaeda

In defence of politics

In defence of politics

Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts

The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel

Times of Terror: Discourse, Temporality and the War on Terror

In Defence of Christianity

Talking and listening in the age of modernity : essays on the history of sound

Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century)

The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror

Birth of an Age

Birth of an Age

Birth of an Age

The philosophy of Foucault

Birth Of An Age

Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian

U.S. vs. Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror

States Of Terror: Essays (Occasional Papers)

In The Reign Of Terror

Foucault on Freedom and Truth

Searle and Foucault on Truth

Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society