(유) Foucault and Soviet biopolitics 외

 

 

Sergei Prozorov, "Foucault and Soviet biopolitics", History of the Human Sciences December 2014   vol. 27  no. 5  6-25

 

Abstract

The article addresses the puzzling silence of the Foucaldian studies of biopolitics about Soviet socialism by revisiting Foucault’s own account of socialism in his 1970s work, particularly his 1975–6 course ‘Society Must Be Defended’. Foucault repeatedly denied the existence of an autonomous governmentality in socialism, demonstrating its dependence on the techniques of government developed in 19th-century western Europe. For Foucault Soviet socialism was fundamentally identical to its ideological antagonist in its biopolitical rationality, which he defined in terms of racism. This article challenges Foucault’s reading, demonstrating that his notion of racism is ill-suited to describe the governmental rationalities of Soviet socialism during both the formation and the consolidation of the Stalinist regime. While the Soviet project was paradigmatically biopolitical in its ambition to transform the forms of life of the population in line with the communist ideology, its biopolitics was fundamentally different from the security-oriented logic of racism, focusing instead on the exposure of the population to the violent transformation of their forms of life. Revisiting Foucault’s genealogy of racism, we argue that the point of descent of this biopolitics lies in the 19th-century split of the ‘counter-historical’ discourse of the struggle of the races into the discourses of state racism and class struggle. While Foucault’s genealogy focuses on the development of the former into liberal and totalitarian biopolitics as we know them, it leaves class struggle out of the history of biopolitics and is therefore unable to account for the biopolitical specificity of the Soviet project.

 

Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "Foucault and the Problem of Genealogy", The Medieval History Journal,  April 2001;  vol. 4, 1: pp. 1-14.

 

This essay explores the implications of Foucault’s use of genealogy as the basis of his philosophical investment in history. It contrasts Foucault’s reliance on genealogy as a solvent of historical continuity and linearity, and his view of genealogy as aleatory, contingent, potentially disruptive and delegitimising, with medieval concepts of lineage and genealogical legitimation and interrogates, on this basis, the utility of Foucault’s postmodern theories for the analysis of medieval genealogical phenomena. It suggests that the concepts derived from a Foucauldian analysis of genealogy are not applicable to premodern societies, given that Foucalt’s very notion of genealogy stipulates local genesis and definite contexts in which period-specific modalities of knowledge, power, thought, epistemologies and technologies are put into play in the societies analysed.

Tiziana Terranova, "Another Life: The Nature of Political Economy in Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics", Theory, Culture & Society,  November 2009;  vol. 26, 6: pp. 234-262.

Abstract
The article focuses on the relation established by Foucault in the two lecture courses Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics between life, nature and political economy. It explores the ways in which liberalism constructs a notion of economic nature as a phenomenon of circulation of aleatory series of events and poses the latter as an internal limit to sovereign power. It argues that the entwinement of vital and economic processes provides the means of internal redefinition of the raison d’État and uses such an explanation to understand the emergence of the network topos as a technology of regulation of the unstable co-causality of milieus of circulation. The article also follows Foucault’s argument that the neoliberal market is significantly different from the liberal market inasmuch as, unlike the latter, it is not defined as an abstract logic of exchange among equals
but as an ideal logic of competition between formal inequalities. Finally it asks whether new theories of social production and sympathetic cooperation, in the work of authors such as Yochai Benkler and Maurizio Lazzarato, can offer an alternative to the neoliberal logic of market-based competition as the basis for the production of new forms of life.

 

 Mika Ojakangas, "Michel Foucault and the enigmatic origins of bio-politics and governmentality", History of the Human Sciences,  February 2012;  vol. 25, 1: pp. 1-14.

Abstract
Even a superficial look at the classical ideas and practices of government of populations makes it immediately apparent that there is a peculiarity in Foucault’s genealogy of western bio-politics and governmentality. According to Foucault, western governmental rationality can be traced back to the Judeo-Christian tradition in
general and to the Christian ideology and practice of the pastorate in particular. In this article, my purpose is to show that Christianity was not the prelude to what Foucault calls governmentality but rather marked a rupture in the development that started in classical Greece and Rome and continued in early modern Europe. With the rise of Christianity, the majority of these classical practices, including negative eugenics and even family policies, either faded into the background or they were rejected outright.

 

Marcelo Hoffman, "Foucault's politics and bellicosity as a matrix for power relations", Philosophy & Social Criticism,  September 2007;  vol. 33, 6: pp. 756-778.

 

Abstract

From the early to mid-1970s, Michel Foucault posited that power consists of a relation rather than a substance and that this relation is comprised of unequal forces engaged in a warlike struggle against each other, resulting invariably in the domination of some forces over others. This understanding of power, which he retrospectively dubbed ‘Nietzsche’s hypothesis’ and ‘the model of war’, underpinned his well-known analyses of disciplinary power. Yet, Foucault in his Collège de France course from the academic year 1975–6, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, suddenly began to call into question this understanding and his doubts about it did not abate well into the late 1970s. In this article, we suggest that his militant politics
in the early 1970s sustained his adherence to the war model and that his more cautious political attitude later in the decade underpinned his suspicions about this model.