Outlining and examining Foucault's philosophy of history, this article links Foucault's silence on the Holocaust death camps to other silences in his historical writings, arguing that the death camps represent a physical instantiation of a transition point in Foucault's idea of historical epistemes. The edition Power/Knowledge, containing a selection of interviews and writings by Foucault, was published in 1980 and included versions of the first two lectures of 1976. One should be mindful that this is primarily a representative unity: the Hobbesian sovereign is supposed to represent solely the body politic. 102Chloë Taylor, "Race and Racism in Foucault's Collège de France Lectures," Philosophy Compass 6, no. "80, While the English narratives of history asserted the persistence of a standing war against the Norman Yoke from below, the French historians Foucault discusses were concerned first, as with Hotman, that French monarchic authority not be identified with Rome. Introduction: Foucault’s The History of Sexuality 367 "97 This flexibility gives it much staying power, and as Stoler remarks, In both its bourgeois and aristocratic form, it is an instrument of political opposition and struggle against sovereign rule. "96 Foucault uses the middle lectures to trace and call attention to the descent of such discourses from the Franco-Gallia thesis. When it appeared on the scene, Kantorowicz' book was escaping and contorting known disciplinary boundaries. In the case of France, a narrative had circulated in the Middle Ages about French descent from the Franks, in which their origins were attributed to a mythical King Francus, son of Priam and (like Aeneas) a survivor of the Trojan War. In parallel ways, Foucault's view of the problematization of sexuality in the twentieth century identifies its object primarily as an epistemological rubric, regarded as a source of knowledge, even as a pattern in a systematization of knowledge. 24See Foucault, Society, 107–9, and Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. Administrative knowledge is regarded as a site of usurpation; but this is only part of a strategy "to get outside right; to get behind right and slip into its interstices"—that is, to work around the then-usual manner of determining and regarding who has the right to govern, and how law and justice are acknowledged.87 So Foucault's claim is that Boulainvilliers' report was not an account of the development of public right, but rather an "attempt to attack public right at the roots." François Guizot wrote the three-volume Histoire de la civilization en Europe (1828) and five-volume Histoire de la civilization en France (1829–32); he also served as foreign minister during the reign of Louis-Phillipe of France; in the 1840s he opposed initiatives to widen suffrage by eliminating a tax requirement for balloting. This was the appeal to the Norman Conquest of 1066, and to the fact of conquest more generally as a foundation of monarchy. The emergence in the sixteenth century of historical accounts that posited the capture of administrative power by one group from another group, via conquest or invasion, meant that, henceforth, and given this basic discontinuity, it is obvious that it is no longer possible to recite a lesson in public right whose function is to guarantee the uninterrupted nature of the genealogy of kings and their power.79. 49Foucault curiously credits Hobbes as becoming the "'father of political philosophy'" by his "rescuing the theory of the State." To the extent that this issue was perceived, it played a role in a juxtaposed relation to those theories of public right which problematized the King's (or Sovereign's) succession, including that of Hobbes in the following century. 2nd Vintage Books ed. 5 (2000): 127–47. […] The project of revolution and the counter-history of race in the nineteenth century do not coexist par hasard; their etymologies are one and the same, derived from the recovery of an earlier discourse on the war of races.103. Yet it is a knowledge pertaining to society, regarding which elements of society are relatively stronger or weaker. Thus, a renewed interest in Kantorowicz was propelled by Foucault into the 1980s and the translations of The King's Two Bodies, while Anglophone interest in that study of 'medieval political theology' or what Bernhard Jussen identifies as 'constitutional semantics' had waned. It could hardly be, since only within an epistemological field can there be standards of rationality. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on October 15, 1926. This article argues that Foucault's understanding of biopower and its emergence from such historical discourses sheds light on the history of nationalism, helping to understand the modern political experience of subjectivity as circumscribed by tensions operating within modern nation-states and also as mobilized towards national objectives. Hobbes, Thomas. (Crano, "Genealogy, Virtuality, War," 163, quoting Foucault, Society, 142, 145. It also implied that the French monarchy did not originate within Gaul. In order to elucidate the historical forces and discourses which Foucault believed led to biopower, we need first to identify and clarify Foucault's notions of the juridico-political and historico-political. "60 Yet Foucault's conclusions about their rhetoric (I would argue) are not so certain. 20Foucault adds that the historico-political discourse that arose in England by the 17th century also involved the view that, "Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. Any errors in this article are my own. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2009), 120. ), 97Stoler, Education of Desire, 65; see Foucault, Society, 58; Il faut defendre, 52. This is a fundamental advance, figured by Freud. Things Foucault traces the epistemic breaks with in the sciences of language- renaissance, classical and modern. The Order of Things (1966) is about the “cognitive status of the modern human sciences” in the production of knowledge — the ways of seeing that researchers apply to a subject under examination. The system of absolute monarchy would comfortably assume that the social body was homogenous, because in juridical terms there was little difference between it and the King himself. Skinner, Quentin. Michel Foucault was born Paul-Michel Foucault in 1926 in Poitiers in western France. As Stoler observes, this discourse could and did appear in both bourgeois and aristocratic forms, but later appeared in revolutionary texts (such as Sieyes and Thierry). "Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity." Following on that, this article traces Foucault's discernment of an epistemic sort of shift in the 'speaker of history' (i.e., a change in the use of history) with particular manifestations in mid-seventeenth century England (§3–4) and early-eighteenth- century France (§5). 11 (November 2011): 746–56. 62Crano, "Genealogy, Virtuality, War," 174. "93 A bit later on, eighteenth century historians (such as Augustin Thierry) would tend to consider war to be infused into the middle of society.94 By then, "the sovereign is no longer one with the city, the state, or the nation and thus emerges 'the possibility of a plurality of histories.'"95. The current English translation by David Macey reads "a twofold—popular and aristocratic—challenge to royal power.". This article will demonstrate how Foucault's lecture-course Society Must Be Defended is a crucial text for tracing the production of this movement from concern for sovereignty to concern for population, via a discussion of conquest or rather the 'right of conquest' in early modern political thought. Out of this belief or narrative, the Frankish invasion of Gaul could be rendered as something on the order of a war of liberation; and furthermore, the story supported the notion of a 'Germanic Constitution' or 'basic law' holding that the people's assemblies were sovereign, a principle then understood as violated by the establishment of absolutism in the French monarchy of the sixteenth century.78, Like with the English Revolutionaries' views of history and nation, Hotman raised "the problem of the two foreign nations that existed in France," but Foucault surmises that it was not his intention to dwell on this. The shift to life and the growth and health of populations was a discontinuity in political discourse and practice that still manifests in the subjectivity of modern and contemporary Western societies; it is historically dependent, Foucault suggests, on the use of the writing of history as a productive and controlling strategy constructing life as its object. Foucault’s mother, Anne, was likewise the daughter of a surgeon, and had longed to follow a medical career, but her wish had to wait until Foucault’s younger brother as such a career was not available for women at the time. 118It is to be noted that Foucault insists that such a heterogeneity within the body politic was not conceived prior to or even during the era of the Wars of Religion; in fact, the "thesis of the unity of the state was reinforced throughout the Wars of Religion; thus the idea and its tactics are is of relatively modern vintage (see Foucault, Society, 144–5). 1 (2002): 125–51. Subsequently, an optimization of procreation would justify the functions of government and its subjects.117. Indeed, it had been deployed earlier, by the economically radical factions in the English Civil War of the previous century.24 (Hence, this discourse is a tool whose function stands independent of its user.) The Order of Things (1966) is about the “cognitive status of the modern human sciences” in the production of knowledge — the ways of seeing that researchers apply to a subject under examination. Foucault, Michel. Things Foucault traces the epistemic breaks with in the sciences of language- renaissance, classical and modern. 1688. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: v.1 An Introduction (1978, Vintage Books ed., 1990), 9. As Foucault points out, "No author writing at the time of the Wars of Religion accepted the idea that there was a duality—of race, origin, or nations—within the Monarchy. From the 1970s on,Foucault was very active politically. "90, In short, Boulainvilliers' report expressed a counter-knowledge from the nobility in opposition to the administrative apparatus. On Foucault’s idea of an epistemic shift in the 17th century and its significance for Baroque scholarship. The latter is, according to Foucault, "absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty; disciplinary power is therefore a "nonsovereign power. 1st Picador ed. His lecture calls attention to the friction entailed by this arrangement, declaring that, the law was the stigmata of the foreign presence, the mark of another nation. Foucault maintains that the early nineteenth-century historians Augustin Thierry and François Guizot were following a discourse descended from Boulainvilliers' (Foucault, Society, 137, 142). 1 (2011): 35–45. The new 18th-century development in the discourse of the 'war of the races' effectively disrupted this assumption, in Foucault's view.89, Boulainvilliers' report identified a knowledge that was "manufactured by the administrative machine itself. I. Boston: Aldine, 1887. The other insight of Society Must Be Defended highlighted here concerns a subjectivity of nationality, whereby a discursive apparatus instills one (as a political subject) with the sense that one belongs to or within a nation, and is therewith a member of the social body while also part of the history or historical movement of a nation. While Crano is right to note that Foucault's research means to recover and 'resituate' the specific circumstances and context of Hobbes' political theory at the historical point of its emergence, we should not fully accept Crano's statement that Hobbes' analytical model is "obsolete. Race war discourse insists that the nation is not at peace even if it is not at war with other states: the monarch's power is not uncontested, but is violent and unstable.107. It is an attitude that challenged the juridico-political model by denying the significance (or effectiveness) of the unity of the sovereign power, and assuming that "a binary structure runs through society."21. While Kantorowicz's work describes the Medieval and Renaissance belief and legal doctrine that the sovereign had a natural body as well as an eternal, unchanging mystical body passed from monarch to monarch, Hobbes' Leviathan asserts the necessity of a unitary sovereign person. Michel Foucault: Ethics. 108Foucault, Society, 133–34; Il faut défendre, 116. The middle lectures of the Society Must Be Defended course are largely concerned with describing counter-discourses to this strategy of sovereign right, and their emergence in the early-modern era, and their representation of certain differential relations of power and social-political relations. 61Crano's essay appears sometimes to portray Winstanley (1649) with the Diggers and Levellers as reacting against a unified concept of a sovereign person and a consistent concept of "universality" of law "dreamt of by philosophico-political discourse and its blind faith in a common share… and its presupposition of recognizable victory and an end to war." 5 (Oct. 2000): 140. (PDF) Foucault and the Holocaust: Epistemic Shift, Liminality and the Death Camps | Samuel J Kessler - Academia.edu Michel Foucault, in his historical and theoretical works, often analyzed the Holocaust by applying his theories of carceral technology and biopower to the German system of concentration camps. So Foucault challenges overly simple readings of Leviathan, which would have Hobbes saying "that war is everywhere from start to finish." 19Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 98–99. Foucault's introduction to the epistemic origins of the human sciences is a forensic analysis of the painting Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-waiting, 1656), by Diego Velázquez, as an objet d’art. This raises the possibility of refuting "the implicit thesis that the social body is homogeneous (which was so widely accepted that it did not have to be formulated)." 2020. "64 A discourse of sovereign right, Foucault insists, preceded the emergence of disciplinary power. The epistemic change Foucault's understanding of the development of the clinique is primarily opposed to those histories of medicine and the body that consider the late 18th century to be the dawning of a new "supposed" empirical system, "based on the rediscovery of the absolute values of the visible". 1 (May 2009): 102–17. 11Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Why, Foucault asks, was it necessary or important even during the Renaissance, to circulate a legend that "completely elides both Rome and Gaul"? At stake in either case is the problematization of the question of whether a state can or should include more than one nation—a matter not normally at issue within juridico-political discourse. Rather, they show a tendency to replace one account of the historical causes of political realities with a different one. 50This success in separating the reality of sovereignty from its history is not, however, the entire story that Foucault wants to tell. 56Consider, for example, Foucault's discussion of Hobbes' "third form of sovereignty" and its constitution around a "radical will that makes us want to live," such that "Sovereignty is always shaped from below." And a conquest should end in an admission of defeat, which is at the same time a sort of consent to be governed. 45Hobbes refers to contemporary debates about representation in Chapter xix of Leviathan ("Of the Several Kinds of Commonwealth by Institution and of Succession to the Sovereign Power"). The epistemic change. Though it is true that Foucault wishes to grapple with the history of discourses of history which tend towards the "hidden renewal of violence and exclusion,"62 he does not suggest Hobbes eradicated the other discourse and its information or local knowledge. The first and greatest rupture may be placed around 1650 and — very indicatively only — be connected to Descartes, the … The goal was to show the prince the existence of the possibility for "usurpations of which he was unaware," that is, usurpations that might derive from the greffiers or administrative class, and to remind him of bonds with the nobility, "even though it was in his interest to forget them and to let them be forgotten. 14Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; repr., Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997). In Crano's interpretation, this Leveller concept of the Conquest is (or has now been) "forgotten […] masked by the social relations codified in legal apparatuses and political institutions that ward off the political usage of the past."54. In this sense, the Levellers and Diggers should be seen less as kindred spirits and more as alternative marks for self-dissension." This second aspect of the shift provides the history of "injustices" and "defeats" that are organized in terms of this new speaker who hails from below or outside of the institutional and administrative apparatus. Foucault and Kuhn also both hold that the adoption of a given episteme/paradigm is not rational. He continues, suggesting that this moment was a deep crisis for the philosophy of right: "When the State capitol was in danger, a goose woke up the sleeping philosophers. For this model, to act 'politically' is to legislate, to give law. Le Foucaldien 6 (1): 9. Foucault's concluding chapter on "The Right of Death and Power over Life" in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality indicated that prior to the (let us say) Romantic Era, juridical power had operated by deduction, not enhancement;116 it was enriched with levies rather than with growth. ), Unlike Hobbes and juridico-political thought, republicans and radical dissenters during the English civil war of the seventeenth century espoused a very different understanding of power, which Foucault identifies as historico-political discourse. It was not the case that there was a 'sovereign power' à la Leviathan to complain against. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Arendt, Hannah. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. 1979. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard. 89See Foucault, Society, 117–9, 126, 190. Exploring the formation of this crucial concept, Michel Foucault saw that historical discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was shaped by important changes in the conception of governmental power, and suggests how these contributed to the then-emerging notion of the nation-state.1 Accordingly, historical discourses highlighted by Foucault illuminate an important shift regarding the construction and exercise of governmental power, which can provide a greater understanding of how modern power operates: from a system of 'sovereignty,' via disciplinary power, to a biopolitical apparatus. In doing so, this article will argue that we can gain a richer understanding of the emergence of nation-state, biopolitics and our own political identities by exploring Foucault's research concerning the historical emergence of these phenomena. At one level, it is resolved by the notion of the war of every man against every man; at another, it is resolved by the wishes—the legally valid will—expressed by the frightened losers when the battle was over.44, The Hobbesian hypothesis of a general war of every one against every one entails that no particular war of a group against another matters to sovereignty and political legitimacy. This sort of rhetorical position of recounting history from outside the apparatus of political power (or legitimacy) could be employed by various parties challenging various relations, even as nothing prevents it from becoming the discourse employed by power and legislative authority itself. 67Foucault insists on placing Petrarch in the Middle Ages rather than the beginning of the Renaissance. Crano understands Hobbes as removing the discourse of the Norman Yoke and effectively suppressing its agonistic view of the monarchical authority: This discourse of race war is the revolutionary counter-history that Hobbes' book, by slyly suturing the nation back into the state, effectively eradicates. Ferrier, S.G., 2020. Politics is war.106, Foucault suggests that such 'perpetual war' discourses were a form of resistance to power; and the discourse was such that at various times its use could be shifted between the aristocracy, middle class, and working class, each of which would at various times use the discourse of 'perpetual war'—that is, the discourse of an insufficiently acknowledged fissure in the national society or the body politic, probably stemming from a historical injury, perpetuated by the law of the sovereign, or the rule of the monarch, or the laws formed by the administrative class. Foucault's introduction to the epistemic origins of the human sciences is a forensic analysis of the painting Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-waiting, 1656), by Diego Velázquez, as an objet d’art. These first two lectures (of 7th and 14th January) are concerned largely with methodological questions, ending with an introduction to the theory of sovereignty. What happens—and what becomes of public right and the power of kings—when States do not succeed one another as [a result of] a sort of continuity that nothing interrupts, but because they are born, go though a phase of might, then fall into decadence, and finally vanish completely? Nevertheless, the English Civil War era really marks the point of emergence of modern political society: it seems an inconsistency to regard the Diggers and Levellers as considering themselves or the political order they lived in as 'modern.' "73 This thesis was apparently reintroduced into France and popularized by François Hotman in 1573, but with a slight adjustment. 117Hannah Arendt (from a different angle than Foucault) gives another account of normalization, concluding that the development of mass society leads to a governmental situation where, "[s]ince the laws of statistics are perfectly valid where we deal with large numbers, it is obvious that every increase in population means an increased validity and a marked decrease of 'deviation.' The concern for Foucault is less on the question of who or what is the sovereign power, and more on the often-overlooked contextual and discursive question, who is Hobbes' adversary in Leviathan? Not least because Hobbes had made the innovation of defining the Sovereign as a purely artificial person, sovereignty operating within the new historico-political discourse could disconnect itself from the state (imagined as the King's body politic) and then connect itself with society.110 'Society,' the new locus of history, gets described as an association or body of individuals, governed in a certain way, that has "its own manners, customs, and even its own law." In what follows, we will sketch Foucault's move toward historiographical analysis in Society Must Be Defended and his discernment of a turn in the early modern period toward historico-political discourse, and therewith a 'counter-history' that carried with it certain implications for the concept of a nation and a state (§§2–3). https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-29-1-125, https://doi.org/10.14375/NP.9782070729685, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.106.1.102, https://doi.org/10.1177/02632760022051437, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8675.2010.00623.x, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2011.00443.x. As astudent he was brilliant but psychologically tormented. Disqus. The first and greatest rupture may be placed around 1650 and — very indicatively only — be connected to Descartes, the … During the Renaissance, the uses of history had begun to put this unity into question. I (1688; New ed., Boston: Aldine, 1887), 165–67, 328. With this comes a predilection for descriptions of the political in historical as well as conflictual terms. xix[3], 119.) Subjects of History: Foucault on the Emergence of Conflictual Nationhood and Biopolitics. Outlining and examining Foucault's philosophy of history, this article links Foucault's silence on the Holocaust death camps to other silences in his historical writings, arguing that the death camps represent a physical instantiation of a transition point in Foucault's idea of historical epistemes. 113Augustin Thierry was the author, among other works, of Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands: de ses causes et de ses suites jusqu'a nos jours (1851). Historico-political discourse of this sort emerged in the early modern period, and held implications for not only historiography, but also understandings of the concept of nation.

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